On the first part of the hon. Lady’s intervention, I am delighted to work with her to try to take that forward. At the start of my remarks, I said consistently that I recognise that we have further to travel, and I am certainly not complacent when it comes to performance across the whole of Government. As has been touched on, some of the performance around my Department—the Department for Work and Pensions —is at the top of the charts, which shows the emphasis that my ministerial colleagues in the Department and I place on this issue. I am trying to lead by example by ensuring that I demonstrate a real commitment and willingness to set a standard that I want Ministers and Departments across the board to follow. It is in that spirit that we move forward with this work.
To delve further into the issue of communications across Government, I could not be clearer that people who use BSL as their native language should be able to access the same information as native English speakers, whether that information is about their rights and responsibilities, their ability to access support or the opportunity to have their say on Government policy development by participating in a consultation. In the last year alone, the Government have ensured that BSL communications have been available for deaf BSL users across diverse subjects: providing timely updates about cost of living payments, sharing important information about the Home Office’s tackling domestic abuse plan and ensuring that BSL users could join in the celebrations for the coronation of our new King.
Individual Departments have focused their BSL communications on areas of greatest importance to deaf BSL users: the Department for Education published its “Special Educational Needs and Disabilities and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan” with BSL interpretation, the Ministry of Justice published advice in BSL for victims of rape and sexual assault, and the Department for Transport included BSL interpretation in its “it’s everyone’s journey” campaign.
I want to provide updates on two specific areas that have been raised in relation to cross-Government work and different parts of Government communicating those messages. The first is around the use of BSL in health services. The Department of Health and Social Care is committed to supporting the use of BSL and has used it in communications, such as to support the Down Syndrome Act 2022 call for evidence. The Department continues to look for further ways to promote the requirements of the BSL Act, including by sharing lessons learned from the production of the DSA call for evidence BSL videos with a view to improving BSL usage, monitoring and reporting across the Department.
Under the Equality Act 2010, health and social care organisations must make reasonable adjustments to ensure that disabled people are not disadvantaged when it comes to interpreters for GP and medical appointments. NHS organisations and publicly funded social care providers must comply with the accessible information standard to meet the communication needs of patients and carers with a disability, an impairment or sensory
loss. NHS England has completed the review of the AIS, and the updates are now in the publication approval process.
Following Royal Assent for the British Sign Language Act and the legal recognition of British Sign Language as a language of England, Wales and Scotland, the Government Communication Service will promote and facilitate the use of British Sign Language in communication with the public where appropriate. Colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care keep those matters under review. Again, I want Departments to set a standard that we then ask our public services, communities and society as a whole to follow.
The other area that I want to provide a brief update on is the BSL GCSE, for which there is huge appetite in this House and beyond. The public consultation on it has now closed. The Government are analysing the results of the consultation and working up the course content, and we will publish that as soon as we can. I recognise that there is a real demand for that BSL qualification, not least because of all the opportunities it will provide. Educating the next generation to have such skills at an early stage will have knock-on benefits: more people in our society will communicate with BSL and then, we hope, go on to have successful careers, promote the language, encourage others to adopt those skills, and participate in our communities and society in that way. I know that we all want to see that, and that is welcome.
The variety of case studies in the first BSL report show pockets of good practice across the Departments named in the schedule to the BSL Act. Around half of policy Departments produced communications in BSL during the reporting period. But we know that we can go further, and produce more and better BSL content. It is important to note that different Departments will communicate with the public, whether in BSL or otherwise, in different ways, because of the fact that they have different responsibilities, different remits, different areas of interest and different communications, related to their specific areas of Government.
The Departments listed in the schedule to the BSL Act range from large operational Departments—like my own, the Department for Work and Pensions, which produces a large number of public communications every year—to much smaller Departments and offices that may not have had occasion to produce many public communications during the reporting period. Not all Departments are the same—one size does not fit all—but we know that there is room to improve and we have committed to doing so. With that in mind, there are four specific commitments that are recognised within the need to improve, which I will describe, because the Secretary of State has been clear about our determination to take greater action to drive forward progress, with four separate commitments to help us make progress.
First, although the BSL Act only requires for a BSL report to be published once every three years, I am pleased to confirm that the Secretary of State has made a commitment to publish a BSL report every year for at least the next five years. Again, that goes to the very point about transparency, and arguably is a tool to aid our conversations within Government around individual departmental performance, allowing us to continue to
drive improvement, highlight successes, learn from the case studies in the first BSL report and remain accountable to the deaf community.
Secondly, we are committed to discussing the findings of the report at the next meeting of the ministerial disability champions, who are Ministers appointed by the Prime Minister to provide a personal lead in championing accessibility and opportunity for disabled people within their Departments. We have already done that, and the ministerial disability champions will work with their Departments to increase the use of BSL in their communications. The ministerial disability champions are specifically appointed to lead the inclusion agenda within their Departments, but I want to explore what more we can do to drive greater accountability and ownership of those actions, making sure that this inclusion agenda is right at the forefront of our thinking—and that we are doing these things up front, rather than their happening as an afterthought—when it comes to policy development, legislative change or any other announcements that we might make.