Extract from Lords oral
question on Tourism
(Con): My Lords,
tourism is the third or fourth largest export earner for the UK.
Since we relaxed the tourism visa for the Chinese, we have more
than doubled the number of Chinese people coming to the UK. Are
we proposing to do the same thing for some of Africa and India?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department
for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde)
(Con): My noble friend makes a good point. We have
offered a two-year visa to the Chinese since 2016 for the same
price as a six-month visa. This is a pilot scheme that is
currently being evaluated, and we have no plans to stop that.
However, until the pilot scheme has been evaluated, there are no
plans to extend it.
(CB): My Lords, to
build on what the noble Lord, , just said, the precise
figure is £85 for a two-year multiple entry visa from China since
2016, whereas from India the figure is four times that, at nearly
£350. With India being one of the fastest-growing economies in
the world, and a huge number of tourists from India going abroad,
we are losing out on those tourist visitors. Would the Minister
agree with that? Secondly, the Government’s plan for Brexit is to
do free trade deals around the world. Free trade deals are about
movement of people. Without doing this, do the British Government
think they will have a free trade deal with India? Dream on!
: My
Lords, I have not seen any evidence that the cost of visas has
penalised tourism from India. Although visas are constantly being
looked at by the Home Office, the tourism industry overall has
gone from strength to strength, with year-on-year increases since
2012...
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Extract from short
debate (Lords) on Nursing
(LD):...The desire to search for excellence has resulted
in Nottingham University Hospital Trust and Oxford University
Hospital Trust being on the cusp of gaining Magnet status for
nursing excellence—a prospect which I was told was totally
unrealistic and impossible just a few years ago. Equally, the
emergence of Health Education England’s draft workforce strategy
with a full section on “the global healthcare workforce”,
demonstrates tentative but welcome steps away from viewing non-UK
staff as a commodity to fill vacancies and more as an opportunity
to enhance care by investing in a global healthcare team. The
“earn, learn and return” initiative is welcome; the global
nursing partnership with Jamaica and the recent agreement
with India will result in far stronger
reciprocal arrangements that can be repeated around the globe.
However, the emphasis of the Government remains far too
restrictive and the words in the strategy of recruiting staff,
“in a way that is consistent with wider Government policy on
reducing net migration”,
is a chilling factor, particularly on the 41,962—that is the
figure today—non-EEA nurses and midwives who are currently NMC
registered and who hail from 73 different countries,
from India and the Philippines, with the
largest numbers, to Nigeria and Zimbabwe, to Belarus and Myanmar.
There is somebody on the NMC register from every country in the
world. Imagine what results we would get if we invested in these
colleagues as part of our global campaign...
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