Tag: Wendy Chamberlain

The speech made by Wendy Chamberlain, the Liberal Democrat MP for North East Fife, in the House of Commons on 18 October 2022.

I rise today to speak in favour of the two amendments on the Order Paper in my name. I will confine my comments to those amendment, but first I want to echo the expressions of thanks to the Standards Committee and its Chair, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), for their work. I also offer my thanks to the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), the Chair of the Procedure Committee, who met me earlier this year in relation to this issue. I am grateful to her and her Clerks for giving me their time.

As has been highlighted by both the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House, my amendments make a straightforward change to what happens when the House votes on a motion to sanction a Member for their conduct. At the moment, a Member in that situation can vote on their own censure. Some of us might think that would never actually happen after an independent investigation has found a Member not only responsible for breaking the code of conduct but responsible for such an egregious breach that their privileges as a Member of this place should be curtailed as a result. We would like to think that there would be a sober reflection and making of amends in that situation but, sadly, we know that is not always the case.

It is less than a year since the censure of the former Member for North Shropshire. In those two votes, the former Member voted against his own suspension. As a result, I secured a Standing Order No. 24 emergency debate on standards, as an opportunity for the House to begin repairing the potential damage that affects us all in this place when such things happen.

It might be the former police officer in me—I have mentioned being a former police officer a few times today, as I spoke in the debate on the Public Order Bill—but it infuriates me that a Member can vote on their own suspension. It puzzles me, too. Surely, with the million rules and conventions in this place about what we can and cannot do, it should not have been allowed.

I had a look and spoke to the Clerks, who are much appreciated by all of us as a fount of knowledge. I found that, yes, there is a convention that, although Members can speak at the start of a debate on their conduct, the expectation is that they should subsequently withdraw, with the implication being that they should not return for the vote. There is a further convention that a Member can lodge a motion objecting to another Member’s participation in a vote in which they have a financial interest in the outcome, but I think you would agree, Madam Deputy Speaker, that this is cumbersome and basically impossible with the rate of business and the number of MPs that we now have in this House.

Importantly, they are both currently conventions, not rules. Simply put, conventions last only as long as people choose to adhere to them. When people do not, it reflects on all of us. The Conservative party potentially had the most mud stuck to them as a result of what happened last year, but this is House business and it reflects on all of us to ensure that we uphold standards in this place.

My two amendments amend the Standing Orders to make these two conventions a rule. Members will not be able to vote on sanctions relating to proven breaches of the code of conduct by themselves. It is worth noting that the vast majority of cases considered by the Standards Commissioner are either not upheld or are rectified without further action, but there are always MPs under investigation, and I suspect there always will be. Although it has nothing to do with those individuals, it is important that we as a House are seen to be acting accordingly.

Where cases are more serious and there is a report to the Standards Committee, and where all the appropriate procedures, including those set down in the motion itself, have been followed and the recommendations reach the Floor of the House, we must ensure that due process is done and, most importantly, seen to be done.

Ironically, it was during Parliament Week last year that we saw the situation that the shadow Leader of the House mentioned, and it is almost Parliament Week again. When I talk to my constituents, they ask me about working here, fairness and transparency, and I genuinely think this is the best job I have ever had. It is an enormous privilege, and I think the vast majority of Members agree and want to act accordingly.

I want to be able to tell my constituents, and I feel very encouraged that I will be able to do so, that we have taken a long, good look at ourselves and that the vast majority of us who want to maintain those high standards and hold the respect of the people we serve did something to make things better.

I am keen that this is not seen to be a party political issue, and the hon. Members for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater), for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), and the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), all put their names to the amendments. For that reason, I hope very much that I will not need to press them to a vote. If there is an objection, I intend to do so this evening.

The speech made by Wendy Chamberlain, the Liberal Democrat for North East Fife, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

We are here today because we have seen a real decline in our standards in public life, and in particular in the Prime Minister. We have heard many Government Members talk about the positive things in their constituencies, and they clearly want those to continue, but we are here because the Prime Minister was put out of office by those on the Government Benches two weeks ago.

The Government had the opportunity to do things very differently, and I would argue that the rot set in in November last year, when there was an attempt to keep Owen Paterson from censure. I had the emergency debate on standards after that and, dare I say it, that was a much more collegiate and positive debate than this one, because I think there was recognition on all sides of the House that a stop needed to be put to the direction of travel. A constituent said that Mr Paterson’s resignation was not the end, but must be the beginning of an uncompromising campaign to end the corruption in our politics. We are here, and we have been where we have been in the last couple of weeks, because that corruption has not been stopped.

If we look at partygate from a constituency perspective, other than trips to Barnard Castle, I have certainly had no higher volume of emails about anything from constituents, who told me some quite devastating stories. We know how that has gone; it has gone from “There were no parties” to “All rules were followed” to an admission that “There were parties, but we weren’t quite sure what the rules were.” The PM has indicated that he intends to remain as an MP if he remains sitting in this place. Therefore, I do hope that the Privileges Committee will continue with its investigation regardless of whether he is the Prime Minister. If the new Prime Minister, whoever they may be, fails to ensure this, we will know that there is no change to the approach to our standards in public life. Lord Evans believes there has been an erosion, and Lord Geidt clearly did so. Indeed, the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) made it clear in his resignation statement that standards have fallen.

To go back to what the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) said, the fact that we have ended up here because of a lack of candour about office appointments means that this place is not safe. We cannot with all confidence say that it is safe. That shames and should shame us all, and we should all be committed collectively to doing something about it. By failing to face up to this corrosion and failing to identify the battery acid at the core of their party, the Government have lost people’s confidence because they have lost confidence in their values, and our by-election victories over the last year demonstrate that.

Below is the text of the speech made by Wendy Chamberlain, the Liberal Democrat MP for North East Fife, in the House of Commons on 8 June 2020.

It seems that debates on potential electoral reform are a bit like buses: wait a long time for a chance to discuss it, and then, with the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill last week, two opportunities come along at once. I welcome the opportunity to engage with the Minister on this topic, as I indicated on Second Reading of the Bill last week. I believe that this is the first debate on positive reform to our electoral system in this Chamber since 2016. As we reflect on last year’s general election and the challenges that the UK faces in relation to the covid-19 pandemic, I believe that revisiting this topic and the impact that the current first-past-the-post system has on democracy is valid.

During that Second Reading debate last week, I mentioned a statistic: for every one vote it took to elect an SNP MP at the last election, it took 33 votes to elect a Green one. The Green party polled over 800,000 votes and ended up with only one Member of Parliament: the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). The Brexit Party, polling over 600,000 votes, got no MP at all. Its biggest impact as a party was in standing down in seats, effectively preventing those who wish to vote for it in those seats from being able to do so.

I do not want to drown Members in statistics—I know that the Government have been in trouble with the Office for National Statistics recently—but I do want to highlight the following. The Government have an 80-seat majority in this House, but they did not receive the majority of votes—far from it, in fact. They got 43.6% of the votes, but due to first past the post, they now hold 56% of the seats. I do not know what is more remarkable: the fact that the Government have a majority in Parliament, despite not having a majority of votes from this country, or the fact that we have grown so used to this disproportionality that we rarely comment on how remarkable it is.

If Government Members—were they here—to say, “Well, at least the largest party in the Commons is the one with the most votes,” I would agree. After all, in 1951 and 1974, the party with the most votes did not end up with the most seats. The electoral maths is very clear. First past the post does not do a good job at all of representing voters’ preferences or the will of the people, as some like to call it.

One of the arguments in support of first past the post is—to quote a previous Conservative general election slogan—that it provides strong and stable governance. The last 10 years have demonstrated that this is far from the case. We have a broken system. It is unfair, unrepresentative, and undermines the legitimacy of our democracy and, indeed, the UK itself. We often take pride in the fact that this Parliament is the mother of Parliaments, but we should not let our pride in our heritage blind us to the areas in which it needs improvements. We should not uphold tradition at all costs, particularly when it prevents us from making the progressive changes that will have a positive impact on people’s lives, or prevents Members from properly representing their constituents. Every election that we ​hold under first past the post runs the risk that we end up with a Government who did not win a majority of votes, impacting on the legitimacy of our whole democratic process. This is a scenario that should worry anyone and which we should be acting pre-emptively to avoid.

Although I take pride in our heritage, the reality is that the vast majority of democratic countries have chosen not to follow our system. Exactly the scenario that I have been talking about—the party with the most votes not becoming the Government—happened in New Zealand in 1978 and again in 1981, and it set that country on the road to changing first past the post in 1997. It was abandoned in Ireland, Australia, Malta, South Africa and Cyprus. Across Europe, 40 out of 43 countries carry out elections using some form of proportional representation.

The Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, and the Northern Ireland Assembly, use forms of proportional representation in their elections to those bodies. When we have the chance to start from scratch, first past the post is never anyone’s first choice. Surely now, following two divisive referendums in the past decade—again resulting in winner takes all—and with the challenges facing us going forward, we require a different kind of politics from the adversarial two-party politics that is the natural result of first past the post. Last week, the Prime Minister criticised the Leader of the Opposition for not working in a constructive way, but this is exactly the way in which our system forces politicians to operate—across the Dispatch Box, two sword lengths apart.

As the Scottish National party’s vote is concentrated in the 59 Scottish seats, the situation that first past the post creates there is even more serious. In December, 45% of the vote for the SNP equated to 80% of the seats. The adversarial nature of things becomes even more stark when two parties each claim to be the voice of their people, and I am pleased that the SNP is in agreement with me that we need a more proportional system and we need it to be found soon.

As we seek to recover from the impact of covid-19, other challenges—most crucially, our response to the climate emergency—remain. Such challenges will not be solved by one side or way of thinking. They require co-operation, mutual trust, welcoming a diversity of thinking, and an ability to set aside our differences and work together for the common good.

Some commentators have observed that states with the perceived best response to coronavirus so far are those with women leaders. The underlying factor is that these are countries with proportional systems and a focus on pluralistic decision making, such as New Zealand and Germany. Every single country with more than 40% of female representatives in its legislature has a proportional system. The current system is inhibiting the progress that both the Government and the official Opposition say they want to make.

It is not only our governance that is weakened by first past the post. Our voting system results in the permanent disenfranchisement of millions of voters, creating persistent minorities, and a real and legitimate sense of anger alongside the harm to the regions and the devolved nations. How depressing is it that, for a great number of people in this country, being represented here in this place by someone they actually voted for feels like a treat?​
In last week’s debate, many MPs spoke about how much they love their constituencies and the pride that they take in representing them. I have personally enjoyed the tradition of the maiden speech, referring to my constituency and its attractions as well as acknowledging the work of my predecessor. But as Members of Parliament, we do not actually represent our constituencies; we represent the people in it. In my constituency of North East Fife, the majority of people did not vote for me in December. Tactical voting probably played a part in the result, but my job now is to represent everyone in my constituency, and we must acknowledge that many feel unrepresented as a result of our system.

Surely we should all like to be elected on the basis of a positive voter choice, as opposed to being the least worst option on the ballot paper, as is often the case. Surely the proliferation of tactical voting websites and electoral pacts at the last general election suggests there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we elect people to this place. We talk about the collapse of Labour’s red wall without critically asking whether it is right for any party to believe it has the right to any seat or its electorate. We do however comment on the extra attention that these seats and their new Conservative representatives expect to get from the Government. That suggests that, as previously safe Labour seats, where the same party had won every election, people’s votes there were worth very little and the parties could therefore ignore them. Only when a seat becomes marginal does it seem to matter.

As I pointed out last week, it is strange that the Conservative manifesto recognised that votes mattering equally is a “cornerstone of democracy”, yet is blind to the huge disparities in our current system. It was pointed out to me by the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) that she has more than 20,000 more electors in her constituency than I have in mine, but this unfairness is because our system is based on defining boundaries and areas for a single Member to represent under first past the post. Some of the criteria being set out in relation to boundary changes undermine the arguments for single-Member constituencies by diluting the identified community links that many argue are the main benefit of first past the post and risking further disenfranchisement in an already broken system.

One other promise in the Conservative manifesto was to have a constitution, democracy and rights commission in the first year of the Government. Will the Minister update us on the plans for that commission, including its scope and potential membership? Fair votes are just one spoke on the wheel of reforming our broken politics and there is lots more to be done; I have not touched on the House of Lords or the fact that England needs to follow the reforms of the other devolved nations, including Wales, where, from last week, 16 and 17-year-olds are now eligible to vote. I find it strange that only in England are 16 and 17-year-olds felt to be incapable of exercising their democratic rights.

Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)

My hon. Friend is giving an incredibly powerful speech, at an important time in our democracy. I used to be a teacher and I can say from experience that 16 and 17-year-olds are just as capable of understanding the complexities of the political landscape as anyone else and quite often ask very insightful questions. From her ​experience as a Scottish MP, does she agree that it is time England followed suit and gave 16 and 17-year-olds the vote?

Wendy Chamberlain

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention and entirely agree with her. As I say, only one of our four nations seems to feel that its young people do not have that insight, and we should absolutely be giving them that opportunity.

Countries around the world are moving forward beyond fair votes, with democratic innovations such as citizens’ assemblies or participatory budgeting programmes. We need to look at participatory democracy better empowering local communities and groups. We have seen multiple marches and demonstrations in the past few years, including, most recently, this weekend. People protest when they feel they have no other option in terms of making their voices heard to demand change. It is tempting to be comfortable with the current system—after all, every Member here has benefited from first past the post—and I understand the reverence in which Members hold this place, but we best revere it when we acknowledge that its practices are letting down the very people who elected us to represent them. We should not let warm feelings get in the way of cold, hard reality.

Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)

Does my hon. Friend agree that we are creating a very divisive politics in this country, where we are persistently looking for argument, rather than consensus, and that that completely overshadows our political culture and we need to change it?

Wendy Chamberlain

Again, I entirely agree with what my hon. Friend says; this has created our two-party politics and divisiveness, and, as a result, there is not the opportunity to work in consensus.

Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)

In my political career, I have been a councillor on Ards Borough Council, elected under a proportional representation system; I was also in the Northern Ireland Assembly, to which I was again elected under a PR system; and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to come here in 2010, under a straight first-past-the-post system. I understand the benefits of both systems, and why in Northern Ireland we needed an Assembly that could bring the parties together. There is a reason for using the proportional system where it is used, but does the hon. Lady agree that the first-past-the-post system sits here as well?

Wendy Chamberlain

I cannot agree that first past the post has a place, because I believe that we can use other ways and methodologies to represent constituencies, such as the single transferrable vote, which would give us the same result but would be more representative of the way people voted. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.

We should not let warm feelings get in the way of cold hard reality. I urge Members and the Government to reflect on whether there is an unfairness here. Will a change benefit people’s lives across the UK and the devolved nations? Indeed, would what we are talking about actually work better across the four nations, when three of our four nations, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, actually have some ​form of proportional representation in how they elect Members to their Parliaments and Assemblies? I believe there is only one answer. Now really is time that we should consider electoral reform.

Below is the text of the speech made by Wendy Chamberlain, the Liberal Democrat MP for North East Fife, in the House of Commons on 19 May 2020.

I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues welcome this legislation, which will finally allow police restitution orders to be brought forward in Scotland. As other Members have said, this is long overdue.

As other Members have explained, restitution orders will make a fine payable if somebody is convicted of abusing or assaulting a police officer. The fines will finance an expansion of the support that officers receive, by helping to finance specialist non-NHS support for injured police officers. Today’s debate relates to the fact that Westminster approval is required to permit such restitution orders to be claimed from benefits payable. This is unequivocally a positive step forward for police officers and adds to the victim surcharge, which was finally introduced last year.

It is a sad fact that many police officers are injured on duty, and assaults on police officers are often the cause of those injuries. Members will know that I come from a family of police officers; I, my father and my husband have all served, and I have other family members currently serving in Police Scotland. All of us were assaulted during our police careers. My husband was knocked unconscious during the policing of a football match. My father was head-butted by a prisoner in the police cells and required stitches.

My own most vivid memory is from early in my police career—within months of leaving initial training at the police college in Tulliallan in fact. It relates to attending a call about a report of a domestic dispute in a high-rise block of flats in Edinburgh. On arrival at the landing in question, my tutor and I could hear a loud argument and decided to call for additional officers to make their way to support us in case they were required. I am glad we did so. The door was answered by a man who, after telling us where to go, was then attacked by his girlfriend, but from behind with a knife. A toddler was visible at the back of the flat hallway. My colleague managed to baton the knife from the women’s grasp, and in anger both of them then turned on us, and a violent struggle ensued.​

Luckily for us, colleagues came quickly, and both people were arrested. The man, in particular, struggled violently throughout the arrest and attempted to spit at all the officers, claiming that he was HIV-positive. It then transpired that he had been responsible for an assault and robbery nearby earlier that evening. Other than bruising, my colleague and I were unharmed, but it was a salutary lesson to me in being prepared for any eventuality and in being responsive to events.

Police officers, like other key workers during the current covid-19 pandemic, are leaving their homes and families every day to carry out vital work and without knowing what that day will bring them. Restitution orders are not simply about a financial penalty for those who assault officers in the course of their duties, but about showing police officers that the work they do for us on behalf of society is valued. Now more than ever, we are relying on the police, who are doing a very difficult job in strange times. They are enforcing new emergency laws and keeping us safe from coronavirus, alongside tackling other types of crime. Other crimes, such as domestic abuse, are now more difficult to prevent and detect, and the police are therefore working on more innovative ways to encourage reporting of offending.

I pay tribute to my former colleagues in the Police Service for doing so much to get us through this crisis. I welcome the positive impact that the restitution orders will have on support for police officers. However—I do not believe that this is politicising; it is asking legitimate questions—while the end result of restitution orders is indeed positive, I am incredibly disappointed that these measures are being introduced far later than was ever envisaged. It is a matter of regret that this order is being brought forward nearly seven years after it was initially announced by the Scottish Government. The Victims and Witnesses (Scotland) Act 2014 was passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2013 and received Royal Assent in January 2014. The legislation was brought forward by the then Cabinet Secretary for Justice in Scotland, now the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill), who has already spoken in the debate. The measures were welcomed at the time by the Scottish Police Federation, yet for a very long time two of the flagship features of the Act were missing.

All that was needed was a minor statutory instrument to be passed in the UK Parliament—in other words, what we are debating today—but for whatever reason the Scottish Government have chosen not to bring plans forward to make these features operational until this time.

The victim surcharge was finally established last year and now, almost seven years on, restitution orders are being brought before this Parliament. This is a flagship policy of the Scottish Government, yet, despite legislating, police officers are still waiting for support. There is clearly an unanswered question about why this has taken such a huge amount of time. As I mentioned, this proposal won the backing of the Scottish Parliament in the days of the tenure of the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill) as the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Justice. At that time, Police Scotland, the amalgamation of the previous eight Scottish forces, was just a few months old. Sir Stephen House was the chief constable and Vic Emery chair of the SPA. Since then, we have had another two Justice Secretaries in Scotland, two more chief constables and three more SPA chairs.​

Clearly, these have been challenging times, and I note the turmoil of the SPA in particular. When the most recent chair, Susan Deacon, resigned in 2019, she stated that governance and accountability arrangements for the police service in Scotland were fundamentally flawed. A permanent replacement for the role of chair has yet to be appointed. But that does not excuse the extraordinary length of this delay. Someone who was undertaking their initial training at the Scottish Police College when the then Justice Secretary was championing the scheme and heard the promises made will now be in the seventh year of their police service.

There are huge questions to be answered by the Scottish Government as to why this delay has occurred. Indeed, my Scottish Liberal Democrat colleagues at Holyrood have been asking this question consistently since the Victims and Witnesses (Scotland) Act 2014 was passed. Each time they were assured that preparatory work was ongoing. It gives a sense of an idea, very laudable, but with no thought or plan on how best to implement it and no real impetus to prioritise it, despite the complexities that other Members have referred to. I hope that the passing of this legislation will be swiftly followed by the introduction of the scheme.

Where will the money raised by the orders go to exactly? At the time, the then Justice Secretary said the Police Benevolent Fund as well as the Scottish police treatment centre, Auchterarder, which has previously benefited members of my own family—yes, I did contribute to it myself financially—were going to benefit. Is that still the case? How much are restitution orders estimated to raise every year, so that we can establish potentially how much money the police support services have missed out on over the past six years?

As other Members have referred to, there were more than 1,600 assaults on police officers between April and June 2019, a five-year high. These orders might go some way to acting as a deterrent, so we have to ask: how many officers would have benefited from additional special support if restitution orders had been in place? There has been a human cost, sadly, to this delay, but this is about not just individual officers, but the public as well. How many officers have been forced to retire due to ill health as a consequence of an assault on duty? We are losing good people from the police service. How can we quantify the effect of this lack of prioritisation on police wellbeing and morale? These are questions that I wholly expect my Scottish Parliament colleagues to be pressing the Scottish Government on.

The significance of the support that the orders will provide to injured police officers has been overshadowed, sadly, by the seven-year wait for the scheme. I hope the Minister will agree that it is imperative that the Scottish Government now implement the restitution orders as quickly as possible. I thank all Members for their positive contributions and say that police officers cannot afford to wait any longer.

Below is the text of the speech made by Wendy Chamberlain, the Liberal Democrat MP for North East Fife, in the House of Commons on 6 May 2020.

We live in a multicultural society that is full of self-expression, and a census provides a snapshot of that diversity. The questions in a census, therefore, are themselves important; if we do not ask the right ones, the picture of our country is distorted. Making sure that all people count is important.

On census night 1911, Emily Wilding Davison hid illegally in a broom cupboard in the Palace of Westminster, to ensure that a woman would be recorded as being in the House of Commons that night. Clearly, the contents of a census take on their own intrinsic value, which is another reason to ensure that we take care how the questions are worded and what responses they enable people to give. That is one of the reasons why the addition of questions about sexuality and gender identity are so important: it demonstrates that we regard sexual and gender identity as a core part of people’s lives. For LGBTQ people, who often suffer so much discrimination, recognition in itself can mean a great deal.​
Such care must also carry over to how members of the Government express themselves. I know that many Members were very concerned by the excluding comments of the Minister for Women and Equalities when she appeared before the Women and Equalities Committee. How politicians, as representatives of their constituents, use their language matters to the people they represent.

We should take care in how we word our questions. If different groups and people are not carefully consulted, we risk generating questions that people do not want to answer. For some communities, their religion is also how they express their ethnicity, and in order to be truly inclusive we must work to ensure that the census reflects that. If a large number of individuals from a particular community, such as the Sikh community, feel that filling in a free-text box is the only way to express their identity, then we have failed to be truly inclusive.

These questions of identity also matter practically. The census directly informs how Government go about delivering public services. One of the great benefits of the new questions on sexuality, gender identity and veterans is that, over the next decade, hopefully, we can ensure that those groups of people who have historically lacked support and provision can get the services they need. Having previously worked in military resettlement, I am pleased that the Government are recognising that community’s contribution. The census will help to ensure that the public services we provide meet the duties under the Equality Act 2010, one of which is to eliminate discrimination. I wholeheartedly support that.

However, it seems strange to me that, while public service delivery is determined by the number of people in the census, for constituency boundaries we seem interested only in the number of people on the electoral roll. MPs provide a public service too—I think that is very obvious at this time. We are often the people our constituents turn to when all other public services have failed. It is electors who determine boundaries, but it should be the number of people who require services.

It is not just about the questions on the census; it is also about who answers them. Looking forward to the next steps in the process, it will be the census regulations that will deal with the operational practicalities. Although 2021 will be the first time that the vast majority of responses will be made online, the census has to capture everyone in our society. We must ensure that the most vulnerable in particular are represented. I would welcome representations from the Minister on how the census will reach deprived and disadvantages communities and individuals, such as the homeless and rough sleepers.

It is good that the Office for National Statistics is considering British Sign Language support, alongside Braille, large-print and easy-read versions of the census. I would like to see such measures in the UK Government’s daily covid briefings too.

According to the White Paper on the census regulations, at least 17,000 census field officers are being recruited to support those who cannot complete the census online. Of course, with the census taking place in March 2021, the covid-19 outbreak might continue to pose a particular challenge. It is certainly not unforeseeable that we will still be in this state of social distancing by next March. Can the Government confirm what steps they and the ONS are taking now to ensure that, if social distancing is still in place, the census can still reach people who are not able to take part in it online?​
This census represents a huge commitment of resources. We must take every opportunity to ensure that the results returned are truly reflective of all corners of British society.