This week should have been one of celebration, as we marked International Women’s Day 2022, and highlighted the work of brilliant women across the world. I used it as an opportunity to celebrate female entrepreneurship, including Sarah Nelson at River Test Distillery who has built an award winning gin business from scratch over the last few years. If you haven’t tried their gin, made with botanicals picked from the banks of the River Test, you really should.
But IWD22 was overshadowed by war in Ukraine and the phenomenal efforts of the people of that brave country to fight back against Putin’s invasion. I have not held back in expressing the view that the Home Office has not acted fast enough to set up pop up visa centres to get Ukrainian refugees processed and into the UK. Not only have I had a number of constituents contact me asking how they can sponsor refugees, but there are family members who have discovered the most straightforward route in appears to be a visitor visa. So they will have arrived by an irregular route and then need to change their visa to one of the promised humanitarian ones which will give the right to work and access public services.
A number of constituents have made the point that they believe visas should be waived. But that runs the risk of women and children being trafficked or not having access to the help they will need when they arrive. I know it is a mammoth task for the Home Office, but there needs to be Ministerial direction to speed things up and be less risk averse about biometrics. Many Ukrainian nationals already have biometric passports, so why there is a requirement to duplicate the biometrics is beyond me. I have, of course, raised these issues in Parliament and I will continue to do so.
In better news I had a fantastic visit to St Edwards’ School in Sherfield English at the start of the week, to hear about their new environmentally friendly building, their ambition to be carbon neutral and the work they are doing to support the boys there. Having lived in Melchet Park for some years (albeit a while ago now) it was fascinating to see inside the building and to hear a little about the history of the place.
