Woman's Hour - Sian Berry, Liz Saville, Health

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

Sian Berry is co-leader of the Green Party. The Greens have seen a rise in support at local and European elections, and polling experts say they’ve had success in attracting younger women voters. How do they plan to win further seats at Westminster and promote green policies in their manifesto? We ask Sian Berry what the Greens are offering women that other parties aren't. Liz Saville Roberts is Plaid Cymru’s leader at Westminster. She's wants to stop a New Deal Brexit, and her party has formed an electoral pact with the Lib Dems and the Greens. That means they're not going to stand against each other in certain seats. She's a supporter of the Unite to Remain Pact saying that it would be the “easiest thing under the sun” for all parties to “go back to the comforts of tribalism”. She tells us what her party is offering women in Wales.How do you raise multilingual children? And what happens when your first language isn't very common where you live? Language is one of those things that help you stay connected to your heritage but raising a child to speak two or more languages can be harder than it sounds. We hear from two Nigerian mums: one who speaks Igala and the other Yoruba. Women are facing “unacceptable barriers” to essential healthcare services. That's according to a new report published by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Their survey of 3,000 plus women in the UK shows that many are struggling to access basic healthcare like contraception and menopause support. The Better for Women report says there needs to be a national strategy to meet the needs of girls and women throughout their life: from being a teenager, being middle-aged and then older. Professor Lesley Regan, President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, joins us in the studio.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Felicity Finch. Just before the Woman's Hour podcast, I'd like to tell you about the Radio 4 Christmas Appeal. Over its long history, Radio 4 listeners have supported St Martin in the Fields to help thousands of people away from homelessness and into a safe, secure place to live. All over the UK, emergency grants of up to £350 help people to pay a deposit on a flat or pay rent arrears to avoid eviction. Frontline workers offer encouragement and challenge, so people aren't alone while they get their lives together.

In London, the connection at St Martin's helps people off the streets and find a home. Thank you. Home starts here. Hello and welcome to Woman's Hour on Tuesday the 3rd of December. I'm Andrea Catherwood. Good morning. Political leaders are like buses on Woman's Hour today. We've been waiting to talk to them in the run-up to the election and now two have come along at once. I'll be talking to Sian Berry of the Green Party of England and Wales, and Plaid Cymru's Liz Saville-Roberts a little later. And we're also looking at the challenges and benefits of bringing up your children to be multi- or bilingual. I'm sure many of you will have thoughts on that. Perhaps you're doing it right now. Tips and frustrations, all welcome.

Do get in touch on Twitter or Instagram at BBC Women's Hour or email us via our website. But first, women are struggling to access basic health care and are facing unacceptable barriers to receiving contraception, abortion and menopause support. According to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. It's calling for a new and bold approach to transform women's health services. And its president, Professor Lesley Reagan, joins me now. Lesley, welcome. Thank you, Andrea. This report, it's a large survey that you did of over 3,000 women. And you've talked about unacceptable barriers.

Just tell me, what are these barriers? Well, most women are wanting to access services in the NHS for general body maintenance. They're not ill much of the time, and they're finding very, very difficult to get an appointment with the doctor. An appointment with their GP, a regular appointment. With a GP or with a local clinic to access contraception, which is so important. And what we discovered was that the unplanned pregnancy rate now in the UK is 45%. That is a stunningly high figure. It's a stunning

number. It's stunning, isn't it? And you know, it's not difficult contraception. It's very simple. It's been there for about 60 years, one of the best researched aspects of medical care. And yet it's so difficult for women to get hold of it. And I think you probably know of friends or members of your family who've found difficulties getting contraception or abortion care or menopause help. Just extraordinary. And the other big thing, of course, is cervical screening. We are justifiably proud of our cervical screening, reducing cervical cancer rates. But at the moment, only about two thirds of women are able to get their smear when it's due, because again,

shortage of appointments. I want to come on to that in just a moment. Let's just stick with contraception for a moment, because one of the proposals that you've come up with, which many people, I'm sure listening, many women will think this sounds very easy, is that you could buy the contraceptive pill and indeed the morning after pill at the front of a chemist I mean I know you can do this in lots of other countries but at the moment a woman normally has to go back to her GP every three months to get another prescription you think that this that could be done away with and you could just pick it up the way you can pick up condoms? Yes, it's quite simple because as I was saying earlier, very, very well researched, incredibly good safety track record

and I think that if you allow, give women the opportunity to look after themselves and give them the right information that they will treat this, you know, they will do this very well. And so without a consultation it means that if you are having any problems then you would go to your GP? Yes, but there's also lots of pharmacists in chemist shops, and they are also very well qualified to help with the problem. But certainly, you may want to have an initial consultation if you want a particular type of contraception or advice about another medical problem that you have,

but not going back every three months to waste everybody's time sitting there to get another repeat prescription. And maybe not being able to go back, and therefore having a danger of having an unplanned pregnancy because you've actually run out of your prescription. And we know that unplanned pregnancies have so many more complications. So if you can plan when you're going to become pregnant and how many times, then the outcome for you and for your baby is so much better. And our abortion rate is now the highest that it's ever been.

Yes, it is. And interestingly, not in young women. This is in women in their late 30s and early 40s, who I think, again, are falling through the cracks because they're not able to access contraception. Now, you mentioned cervical smear tests. And I did want to talk to you about this because one of the interesting things, I know the take up is very low. One in three women missed their last smear. I also noticed that it is much higher in women earning less than £15,000 a year. It's, I think, about 42%. Do you know why that is and what can we do about it? Well, I think, once again, it's about women falling through the cracks. And if you're on a low income or you're in a rather deprived area, it's much more difficult

for you to access those appointments. And if I ask you to come to three different doctors to get your contraception and your smear sorted out and an STI check, then it's likely that one of them is going to fall off the radar. And if you can't access it or you have an unpleasant experience while you're there, you're not likely to go back. And you're not going to miss a shift, are you? You know, a paid shift somewhere. Because you've got an appointment. It's not just as easy as being able to take time off. So you need to be able to go to somewhere, a one-stop shop, effectively, and do all those things quickly in your lunch hour or after work so that you can get on with the rest of your life. Now, let's talk about these one-stop shops, because this is what

you're proposing. And it does sound quite radical. And I'm sure for a lot of people listening, it sounds like a really simple idea, actually, which is that you can go to one place and maybe have an appointment with a nurse or a healthcare professional for say 15 minutes where you can talk about depending on what age you are whether you know if you're young you might be talking about heavy periods and contraception maybe getting STI advice you can talk about all these things at once if you're an older woman you might be talking about menopause symptoms along with contraception advice, etc. So you could do it all in one place and have it all done at once.

You've said it all and I really don't think it's difficult. As I keep saying, and we said at the launch yesterday at the House of Commons, this is not rocket science, this is just common sense and I'm sure that if we get all our stakeholders together, they will want to help us make this happen. It sounds like common sense. It hasn't happened. Obviously, setting up one-stop shops isn't cost free. Where are we going to get the resources to do this? Well, at the moment, I think we're wasting an enormous amount of resource. So commissioning of these basic healthcare services are in three tranches with NHS England, with local authorities and with clinical commissioning

groups. And of course, when you're only commissioning for a bit of it, or you've got the pot of money that basically services one type of care, you may not see the benefits of when you do that very well. So I think what's happening now is that we are falling through the, women are falling through the cracks, and what we've got

to do is try and get somebody in charge of this, preferably a single provider or perhaps we can co-commission. But we need to put women at the centre of the problem and cater for them, not cater for all the institutions and the silos. Women, I suppose, have often deprioritised their own health, partly perhaps because they're incredibly busy and very often the times when they need to be looking at their health are the times when they are the busiest. For example, women with very young children. You talk about the postnatal six week check as a missed opportunity.

I have to say, I've three kids and I don't actually ever remember having a six week check. I didn't. I mean, maybe I didn't have one. Maybe I had one and it just wasn't very memorable. There was a lot of other things going on. Why is that a missed opportunity? What should we be doing there? Well, I think it's absolutely crucial for many reasons. Firstly, because we know that when women are pregnant, they effectively go through sort of a road test for their future health. And we know that often things that happen to them during pregnancy, both physically and mentally, are, if you like, a taster of what they might have later on. So if you've had a bit of high blood pressure or you've got gestational diabetes,

it's almost like writing a certificate for yourself, I'm going to have this problem later. So the six-week check is such a great time for them to sit down with a healthcare professional and talk about what's happened to them, check that the baby's fine, check their physical and their mental health. And then if they've put on weight or they've had some other problem in pregnancy, talk to them about how they really need to tackle this so that they don't have problems in the future. And of course, number one in that check-up list

needs to be talking about contraception again. Because many, many women find that they are missing out on postnatal contraception. And we know the really good data to show that if you space your pregnancies by 18 to 24 months, the outcome for you and the outcome for your baby is enormously improved. So it's just a no-brainer. Long-term health outcomes for women can actually be affected quite greatly by this kind of intervention. Is that what this study really shows overall? I think so. And I think it's showing that what we can do is prevent ill health by empowering women to do what they need to do. I mean, we number 51% of the population, but we influence the healthcare behaviours of everybody else too.

And I think if we can educate and provide women with the information they need to look after themselves and look after their families, we'll have a vastly increased workforce in the NHS. We've actually seen some big banks, some city institutions who are really, let's face it, motivated by profit, putting money into menopause services for their staff, because they've been convinced that it actually is good for the bottom line. I mean, the simple fact is that money talks in these situations. Do you need to convince the government in the same way that these services that you're talking about are going to give better

outcomes to women, but actually they would be in the end more profitable for our whole society? I mean, I'm just trying to work out how we actually make sure this time that we make a change. Because although this report seems to be full of really good intentions, I can't help thinking that we've been here before. That's a fair point. And I think what we've got to do is ensure that all of those people at the NHS and in government really, really help us to implement this because it's not complicated, but we are going to have to do a little bit of service reorganisation to get the very best out of it. But I think it's possible, and you make the example of city firms that have found that it's incredibly beneficial for their productivity if they don't have women going off on sick leave or umpteen different hospital or doctor appointments,

that if they can provide them with these simple services in-house or close by or just at a fixed time when they can do everything, that productivity increases. And I think our leaders are listening. And after all, I think this is a fantastic opportunity for the NHS because 70% of the employees in the NHS are women. So let's make that really front and centre and show everybody how well it can be done. Well, President of the Gynaecological and Obstetrician Service, Professor Leslie Regan, thank you very much indeed for coming in and talking to us. I'm sure some eminently common sense approaches there. Thank you. Thank you. Now, Sian Berry is co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. And although the climate is top of many voters' agendas,

the party has got just one seat in Westminster. And they've been seeing increasing support in local and European elections. But can they actually turn that into any more parliamentary seats? And what difference can they make? Well, Sian Berry is here, so welcome, Sian. Welcome. And what a seat we've got there. It's Caroline Lucas. She's incredibly effective as an MP. She's very high profile. Tell me, though, what is distinctive about the Green Party's offer to women voters in this election? I think one thing that we're all

about is system change. And people often interpret that as just being about the climate. But it isn't. And one thing that we've got as a goal as part of our manifesto is the elimination of poverty. And that sounds really grandiose, but actually it's not that difficult to do. We're talking about providing a universal basic income to absolutely every person to replace the benefit system, to take away that conditionality.

And it's a really, really big idea. It goes along with our Green New Deal of investing in infrastructure, investing in energy in people's homes to transform the way things work in terms of energy. But this would transform society. And I'm so proud that we've actually, in this election, when so many parts of society are breaking down, we're putting forward the big system changes that all link together in a way that we've not really done before. In previous elections, we've tended to that all link together in a way that we've not really done before in previous elections. We've tended to put forward some bright ideas, things that we can justify that sort of make the case that green ideas can work, that the other parties might take up. But in this one, we've got so many enormous crises.

We've just gone the whole hog. We've gone system change. Here's the big change. Here's the universal basic income. So explain then to us exactly what universal basic income is. It's a flat rate of money that goes to everybody. It's an unconditional payment to every permanent resident and it replaces all the benefits that are not completely special. So just carers allowance and housing benefit are not included. So whether you're working or not,

no matter how much money you make, or if you make none at all, you get the same amount of money. It's that safety net that the welfare state sets out to provide. But at the moment, we have a welfare system that's a complete mess. It's full of conditions, it's full of tests. And the key thing about that is, when you've got tests, prejudices within society, structural ones, but also personal ones, tend to mean that those who are most discriminated against, those who face the most barriers, are the ones who slip through the net. And that's women and that's minorities. And so there's a reason why Martin Luther King was an advocate for basic income. He said it was the next step in the civil rights struggle, and it is that. It would absolutely transform the lives of many women, give them many more choices in their lives, as well as eliminating the horrible poverty that we're seeing

in the reports today, for example, from Shelter, that shows we've got record numbers of children living in temporary accommodation in homeless families. There's absolutely no need for that. We're a country who can eliminate poverty, and this is the way to do it. Now, you heard our last item. I was talking to Professor Leslie Regan.

What did you think of those policies in terms of health for women? That's absolutely music to my ears. You described it as common sense. And it is. We focus a lot on the problems that there are in acute care in the NHS, and they are very serious. But if we're going to be transforming the health service, we do need to focus on these more community-based, holistic, focused on the

person, not on the condition. And these smaller sort of preventive interventions that make people feel supported and cared for, they can make all the difference in terms of maintaining health. I love the way it was described as maintenance. That's mainly why I visit the doctor is to maintain my parts. Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about your seats, because in the European elections and the council elections, you actually have done quite well. We've more than doubled our councillors and our MEPs in 2019 already. A lot better, though, than in general elections where, you know, you have had one MP. A lot better, though, than in general elections where, you know, you have had one MP. A lot of people will look at their own constituencies when they come to vote and think they'll look at the numbers and think that a vote for the Green Party is a wasted vote.

What do you say to them? I mean, most constituencies, you are absolutely 100 percent free to vote Green. Most constituencies do not change hands. There's a lot of safe seats out there. And voting green in those constituencies sends a huge message that the transformation we want to see in society, the big changes, and importantly, tackling climate chaos are top of your priorities. OK, but say Nicola Sturgeon,

she's called for voters outside of Scotland to vote tactically to keep the Tories out. So do you agree in close seats, even if that means not voting green? In a small number of seats, these are the marginal seats, that we do have a problem. The first-past-the-post system doesn't make it easy for voters. And we've tried to work with other parties on that in this election.

We've made this agreement with Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats in seats where one or other of us, if we teamed up, could beat the Conservatives, could change the balance of Parliament towards a people's vote was our motivation. But also we've got an agreement based on climate action and rolling back austerity. So you talk about climate action there. There are a number of seats where you've stood aside for the Liberal Democrats. Are you convinced that their green credentials are good enough for a voter whose main concern is the environment to vote for?

No, and it's not an endorsement. We are not teaming up. We've not merged. Labour Party manifestos, decarbonisation policies are much closer to yours than the Lib Dems, aren't they? No party comes anywhere near our levels of investment or our goals in terms of transforming society and the economy away from carbon emissions. But in terms of changing the balance of Parliament, we've worked in a grown-up way with other parties. And now there are seats where the Green candidate is the candidate who will stand up for Remain

and all those things we stand for and can actually win. And that is very exciting for me. I mean, it's a small number of constituencies, but they are very significant for us. Now, you mentioned universal basic income. There are lots of other really eye-catching things in your manifesto. Things like starting school at the age of six, making misogyny a hate crime, things that a lot of our listeners will be interested in.

But you might get a couple of seats in this election. We don't know yet. Those seats, if you get them, might be crucial if we have a tight election, a hung parliament. So which bits of your huge and, you know, quite radical manifesto would you be asking a main party, presumably the Labour Party, to agree to in return for those crucial votes? Well, climate action is an absolute bottom line for us, as are changes to the austerity things that we have at the moment, the cuts that have been made to councils, for example. We're talking about restoring council funding by 10 billion. That's a lot more than the other parties. But when we launched our manifesto, we also put forwards 10 bills. And those are bills that in some cases Caroline Lucas has already tried to put through in Parliament, like the NHS reinstatement bill, for example,

but also bills to introduce basic income, bills for a Green New Deal. These are the bills that we take to the table if anyone needed our votes in Parliament. Are these red lines for you to support Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister? That's our starting point. Our red lines are climate action, obviously, and the transformation of the economy away from carbon into more productive things. And working on the problems that led to Brexit, investment all around the country, moving away from fossil fuels. These are things where the other parties are still doing things like supporting airport expansion, supporting road building.

They're not going far enough. There are some very big things that they want to do, like HS2, renewing Trident. We'd be putting those in as big conditions as well. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The voters in constituencies where we can win need to do their bit now. And they can make history.

We can double our MEPs just the way we've doubled our other representation across the country in this election. OK, well, Sian Berry of the Green Party of England and Wales, thank you very much indeed. Now, I'm going to be talking to Liz Saville-Roberts from Plaid Cymru in just a minute. And we're also going to be looking at bringing up multilingual children a bit later on. But each year, an act is crowned Introducing Artist of the Year by BBC Music. Now, previous winners include Catfish and the Bottlemen, Izzy Bizu and Jack Garrett.

And this year's winner is Celeste. And we spoke to Celeste just a couple of weeks ago on the programme. So here she is talking to Jane about the importance of having people behind you when you're starting out. Annie Mack has been supporting and DJ Target from One Extra has been one of my biggest champions too. And you need champions, don't you? Because you can't kickstart a career in music unless you've got people who are on your side.

100% it helps a great deal to have people who are respected to say, I like this and this is something I actually listen to. And also once you get that encouragement, that must bore you up and give you much more confidence to keep going. 100%. I think the acknowledgement just kind of encourages you and motivates you to carry on. And yeah, something I really appreciate. Well, if you head to the Women's Hour website now that you can see a brand new film that we made with Celeste. She's talking about starting

out in music and her musical influences. And she also actually shares some great advice. If you listen to Thursday's Front Row, it will have artists from the recent BBC Music introducing live weekend, including the band Ferris and Sylvester. And there's also an interview there with Stormzy's music director, Kojo Samuel. Now, Plaid Cymru is standing in almost all seats in Wales, although in some it has stepped aside because of their Unite to Remain pact with the Lib Dems and the Greens. Liz Saville Roberts is Plaid's leader in Westminster and was instrumental in the last parliament in trying to block Brexit, even though Wales overall voted to leave the EU. Well, Liz is joining us now from Bangor in northwest Wales. Liz, welcome to Woman's Hour. Hello, Boreda. Good morning. Good morning. Now, we will come on to Brexit, I'm sure, in just a moment. But first of all, let me ask you about

Clyde Cymru's distinctive offer to women voters in Wales. I think our offer with this general election is to address the reality of poverty35 per week to families living on the poverty line, and one in three children in Wales are living in the poverty line. And in all honesty, if we don't address those children and give them greater aspirations and the means to have greater ambitions, I would be concerned that we're looking at the rolling on of these same conditions into the future. So we're looking at 40 hours of free childcare from the age of one onwards,

this Welsh child payment to address particular poverty with families who are living on the poverty line, and also further investment in schooling. And also, of course, and we were listening to Professor Regan from the College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology earlier on, that health is very

much an issue in Wales. But at the same time, and this has to be said of course, that education and very much an issue in Wales. But at the same time, and this has to be said, of course, that education and health are both devolved matters. Although we need therefore, and we would be calling for this, for benefits and welfare matters to be devolved for Wales, so that we could use them as we need for our particular communities. You actually only have a quarter of the candidates standing in this election are women. Are you disappointed with that when actually have a quarter of our candidates. Why is that then? I think in part, although I'm not letting the party off the hook with this, it's down to the fact that this is a snap election and that we've been living from hand to mouth and trying to get things ready for this election.

At the same time, though, with our elected representatives in the Senedd and Cardiff in the Welsh National Assembly, we have 60% representation there. We've had a female leader at the Assembly. I myself am the first female member of Parliament for my area, for my party, and also to be leading in Westminster as well. But at the same time, I very much agree with the need for all parties,

and particularly women within parties, to enable other women in and particularly at this time because we see women leaving. Do you need all women shortlist then to do that? I think we are looking at all women arrangements for some of our assembly seats which we hope to do very well in the election in 2021. At the same time what I have seen is good young female politicians coming forward taking the traditional route of going through as councillors, as county councillors. And then the experience they have, the abuse that they have on social media. Actually, they make the common sense decision for themselves and their families and they back out.

And we have a society within our political systems and our political structures within parties, obviously. But we also have a society at this time when you've got Trump and Boris Johnson using dismissing women as some way of dog-whistling popularity. It's actually, is this the sort of society that we want? Do we want to shut out half of the population? Surely many listeners would think that that is a better reason to make sure that you do have more women candidates. Well, yes, indeed it is. But we've also seen, of course, very strong female politicians like Amber Rudd and Nicky Morgan standing back from politics because they don't want this in their lives. I'd like to get on to some of your policies. You did mention, or I mentioned rather, that despite your name being the party of Wales in Welsh, you actually aren't fielding candidates in every constituency because of the cross-party Remain alliance.

Is Brexit, therefore, more important than giving every Welsh voter a full choice? Can we just take a step back from that? What we're looking at, and I think partly this is the curse of politics in the United Kingdom, as things stand, what comes first, party interests and behaving in the same old adversarial way or actually addressing the point of politics,

which are the issues of the day? And the outstanding issue, the outstanding crisis of our day is Brexit. It doesn't really matter whether the parties are putting themselves first. I mean, this is why we've got ourselves in the position of the Tory party and David Cameron trying to become leader of the Tory party, playing out his problems with the rest of us as the pawn in their big party game. OK, well, your manifesto front and centre, of course, is another referendum on Brexit in which you would campaign to remain. Now, many voters in the constituencies that you, that Plaid Cymru represented in the last Parliament, and indeed lots of voters in the seats that you are targeting, women and men

listening today, did vote to leave. How do you justify your position to them? If, as individuals who got into politics to do the best for our communities, we identify Brexit as being the clearest and greatest threat to the well-being of those communities. How can we behave in any other way? This is a matter of principle. Now, going back to 1979, when the first vote on devolution was held, and Wales voted against having our own parliament. But Plaid Cymru believed in that parliament for Wales, and we carried on campaigning for that. We're not just bellwether politicians.

We are politicians of issues and beliefs. And in that respect, and this I sadly find Jeremy Corbyn lacking, you can't just stand neutral. Either you offer leadership or you're just a bellwether. Okay. Now, in the Welsh Assembly, you are in opposition to Labour. In Westminster, in the event of a hung parliament, you may have four seats, you may have less, you may have more, but around that number, if Labour were to need your help to form a government, would you give them that help under Jeremy Corbyn? We are there to make a difference. Does that mean yes or no? If we can bring about a second referendum for Brexit in which we will campaign to remain against a credible deal, if we can bring about from Labour,

who of course have had the means over many decades to make a difference to the funding in Wales, if we can bring about the means to bring in the funding that we would have for our patients and spend, which would make a difference to poverty, which would make a difference to health in Wales, which would make a difference to the green economy in Wales. But just to be clear. With those conditions, we will be prepared to talk going forward. But we have our conditions as a party to do that. There's one thing that I could say. I cannot imagine any scenario in which we can work with Boris Johnson because, frankly, two months ago I was trying to impeach him. OK, well, yes, we do remember that.

We know that Nicola Sturgeon's price is that she says she wants a referendum on Scottish independence. Plaid Cymru's price is a second referendum. Is that clear? And the policies with which we have aspirations, which we have ambitions to address, the gross injustice of poverty in Wales, the injustice that Welsh Labour

has been overseeing for the last 20 years. We have ambitions to address that and to improve the conditions of people's lives. OK. Liz Saville-Roberts from Plaid Cymru, thank you very much indeed for joining us. Te chwa. Well, Ms Port, tomorrow Jane is here to present the Women's Hour debate.

It is a full hour. Senior women politicians will be here. And of course, we want your questions. So please email us through the website. You can call tomorrow morning from 8.30 in the morning. The number is 03 700 100 444. Now, we're going to be joined by Victoria Atkins for the Conservatives, Diane Abbott for Labour, Dr Sarah Wollaston for the Liberal Democrats, Deirdre Brock of the SNP and from the Brexit Party, the MEP Belinda De Lucy. So the number again, it's 0300 700 100 444 Now if you were listening to

Liz Saville Roberts in Wales you may well be bringing up your children to speak two languages or even more. And if you're lucky you'll have plenty of resources and family and friends around you who speak those languages. But what if you're trying to bring up your kids

to be multilingual when you are the only person from your background living in the area and your language isn't even taught in schools? Well, two women who are coping with these challenges are Mercy Haruna, who is presenter of podcast Parentland, and Bimi Isimi, who is founder of Culture Tree, and we'll explain a little bit about what that is in just a moment. They're both in the studio with me now. I welcome both of you. Marisi, you're from a Nigerian background and you speak Igala as well as English. And you grew up speaking that, right? Yes.

Both of the languages. Now, you've got two small children, I think. And at what point did you decide that you wanted them to grow up speaking both those languages? Well, I didn't have to decide English, clearly. Of course. You live in Kent, so that's a given, right? And with Igala, it's just something that I wanted them to do because it's the language that I speak with my family in Nigeria. Yeah, it's their heritage.

Of course. I mean, I think most people would understand that you want your kids to speak essentially your mother tongue, right? Bimi, you're also Nigerian, and you actually grew up speaking a different Nigerian language. Did you always assume that your kids would speak it as well? No, I didn't because we live in London. So I knew that there would be a challenge to get them to speak Yoruba, which is the language that I speak. It's a West African language from Nigeria. So I always knew that being in London, it would be a challenge to do that.

And that's why I set up Cultratree. So tell me a little bit about it, because of course, you know, in order for your child to grow up speaking that language, you need to be speaking Yoruba at home, I guess, all the time. How hard is that to do? The challenge is that, as you said previously, that you're not in an environment where it's spoken. So as for me, it's a case of i'm the only person my husband and i are the only people who my child will learn yoruba from so i need to create an environment where she hears other people speak in that language and a lot of parents find have the same issue with trying to pass on a

language that they themselves don't actually speak so what you find is in london a lot of second generation nigerians weren't encouraged or weren't taught to speak Yoruba. So growing up, they didn't speak it themselves. Mercy, there's a lot of this, because I know this a lot amongst quite a lot of friends of mine who've come from different places. So your parents arrived, say, from Pakistan or from China or from Nigeria, and they had a desire for you to fit in, right? And they sort of thought the best thing they could do for their kids was not teach them the language of their background. Is that still a problem? I think it's still a problem. I think more and more, though, people are realising that

teaching their children these languages will keep them rooted and connected to their heritage. And so it's changing slowly. But yeah, it's still an issue, I believe. Bimi, you took a really proactive approach. Tell us what you did. I set up Culture Tree. So what I did for my younger child is I started doing animations. So we did your nursery rhymes and we put those on YouTube.

And it was really, did you find that they weren't there already? No, they weren't. That's why I set up, because I looked for resources and content to teach my child, and I couldn't find any content. And that's where we started doing the nursery rhymes, and we started doing stories, and then we set up the classes as well for parents. I was just echoing what Mercy said. There is a change and a shift. A lot of parents do want their kids to speak their mother tongue

and have that connection to their roots, because there is things about identity as well. Even though you're British, you are Nigerian as well. It's not just about the language, it's about the food, the way we're dressed, the way we show respect to elders. Different things that you can identify to show who you are, really. You live, Mercy, in Kent, as I said, as opposed to living in London, which at least has got, you know, it's so multicultural.

There's people in London who can speak almost every language. I'm sure if you can have access to them and find them, a little bit more difficult where you are. How hard have you found it to actually get your kids to speak a gala all the time? Honestly, it's been really difficult. And I think for me, the harder, why it's harder is because my partner doesn't speak the language and so it's literally just me speaking by myself and I find it very unnatural

to just speak the language alone so we do try to speak with my parents on FaceTime and things like that but it's not enough to get them to master the language. And your parents aren't here? No, they're in Nigeria. No, because a lot of people say that the very best way to get their kids to speak another language is actually the grandparents. Absolutely, that's how I learned.

Exactly. And if you've got a German granny who doesn't speak any English and you really want to speak to your grandmother, you know, you've got to learn, don't you? That's how I learned Igala as well. I mean, my mom was speaking English and Igala simultaneously, but then my grandma would come over and she'd spend a lot of time with us and she didn't speak a word of English. So I had no choice but to learn. But they don't have that. My kids don't have that now. And I'm finding it actually very hard to speak as much as I thought I would.

It's just not coming as naturally as I thought it would. And so, unfortunately, they're not benefiting as much as I would love them to. And I suppose some people do wonder or worry that if they're being taught, if they're kind of immersed in another language at home, that they will have problems perhaps when they go to school speaking English. That just doesn't happen, right? No, it's a misconception. I mean, the child's brain is amazing.

It's a sponge. You can learn. I don't remember exactly how many languages, but a child definitely has the capacity to learn more languages than two. So it won't be an issue if at home they're speaking one language and everywhere else they're speaking English. They'll have it. They'll have English.

And schools do actively actually promote that now. Before, it used to be in the past where they would tell you that you shouldn't mix the languages. But now schools actively promote you being bilingual at home. Yeah, I think that was ignorance. They just didn't know. Yeah, Bimmy, do you think

that there was a thing, I mean, another thing that perhaps it's a myth, so I'm just going to put it out there and you can tell me, is that when children are growing up speaking one or two or more languages, they actually start to speak later.

Is that another myth? No, that's not true at all. Right. That's not true at all. And it's actually been proven as well that that's not true. See, I'm just going to read out an email that we've had in here. It is from Tamara who says, my children were brought up bilingual with Spanish and English.

My son's children are now trilingual as his wife is Chinese. The children speak Mandarin at home with their mother and amongst themselves and Spanish to their dad. And at school and with me, it's English. She says that their reading and writing are excellent, well above average. And she feels that there's an advantage in having more than one language. Well, of course there is. Because when you think about it, you're using a lot of your brain.

We don't really use a lot of our brain. But when you're speaking a different language to somebody else and you have to like have the intuition to speak to another person a different language you're actually very intelligent to be able to do that yeah and are you struggling uh you know um mercy you were talking about the fact that uh it's very difficult at home do you do you feel like oh god maybe i should just give up i mean there are i know quite a few parents who have tried very hard at the beginning and who it hasn't worked for long term? I haven't given up yet. Like Gwemi, I'm actually trying. I think I'm going to start making some materials just because it just doesn't exist.

And Gwemi speaks a bigger language than I speak. And so there's actually more resources. She has more of a community in London. That doesn't exist for me because my tribe is a lot smaller. I don't know any other people around unfortunately so I'm gonna have to be more conscious about um how I do and I think I'm gonna have to teach them the way I would they would learn it at school which is to you know print out flashcards and like you know take a real good hour in the day and say okay this is what

we're gonna do right now just have to be a little bit more it's very difficult especially when it's a minority language and like it's not a lot of people are speaking it but you have to be proactive they have you have to be proactive about it really so bimi tell me about that you set up culture tree and actually you ever ended up with you started off by just putting these resources onto youtube what happened after that after that it went on tv um it was on the channel on t on sky tv and then i had a lot of requests from parents who wanted me to do classes. So we started doing classes, face-to-face classes. We now have online classes.

And these were the adults learning as well as the kids? Yeah, so the adults wanted to learn as well as their kids. So we do adult classes for young, like I said, second generation, between the age of 20 upwards. We have parents who come to our toddler classes with their kids. And we have a centre in Peckham as well, a culture tree centre, where we do the classes and we do arts and crafts. It's not just about language, centre in Peckham as well, a culture tree centre, where we do the classes and we do arts and crafts. It's not just about language,

it's about the culture as well, as I said. So, yeah, we do a lot of, and we do Skype classes because it's a lot of demand from international, like all around the world, really, globally. That's correct, yeah. And are these quite a lot of people who didn't learn to speak their own language

when they were growing up and are now kind of regretting that they didn't? Yes, yes, yes. As you said, our parents, when they emigrated, when you're in a different country, you just want to assimilate and you want to, you know, so they were advised, as you said, not to speak two languages because they might speak later or they might have a Nigerian accent.

So a lot of people didn't do that. But this generation have realised that, actually, no, there is an advantage to being bilingual or multilingual. So a lot of people are making the effort to teach their kids now. Because the kind of cultural heritage and identity issues come when you go back to Nigeria, but then find that you actually can't communicate with maybe wider friends and family.

Yeah. There is an identity issue as well. And it's a deeper issue here, especially here in London, where we have a lot of young people who don't feel like they belong they're not quite British and they're not quite Nigerian because they don't speak the language and they're not quite British because they they feel like they're obviously at home they're not in the way that we the food we eat the way you talk to your parents the things that we do um so there is an identity issue there and I think that can be solved with just having more done I don't I think it's a personal thing for parents but also maybe the government can encourage it a little bit more as well,

especially in schools. Mercy, you brought this up on your podcast, Parentland, and you got a huge response to it, I know, and not just from Nigerian families, but from people all over the world and actually as well from a lot of people who are living in England. What were some of the concerns that they brought up when they were trying to teach their kids to be multilingual? Well, it was always an issue of getting them to have other people

that they speak with and not just the parents at home. So it's things like having access to classes, materials online, books. It's always very challenging, especially for minority languages. I think it's easier with languages like French or maybe Spanish. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we've had an email here from Anika

who says it's really simple. I don't know if it is really simple or not, but they say just get one partner to speak one language and the other one to speak English. And their son is fluent in Greek with no effort. So that's always good. but they say just get one partner to speak one language and the other one to speak English and their son is fluent in Greek with no effort so that's always good when you haven't had to make an effort but I do think that again that's another something else that we've heard quite a lot that one parent should only speak one language. Is that a good idea? No no some people do practice

that it's called OPOL, one person, one language. And there's a lot of different methods that you could use. And that is one of them. But then that presumes that that parent is fluent in that language. What we find with non-European languages or people who are from the African descent is that we didn't actually learn the language because we were born here in England. So we only learned English growing up. So you can't teach something that you don't know yourself, really. Right.

So our challenge is different. I just like to say that even when you were born in Nigeria, you still had that challenge. I have lots of cousins who grew up in the cities like Lagos or Abuja who don't speak the languages just because they weren't immersed as much as us. And, you know, because, for example, in Nigeria, the lingua franca, the official language is English. Most people will just speak English because that's the way you communicate with the wider community. There's a lot of languages in Nigeria as well. There's so many, there's 500 different dialects or more. So how do you communicate?

Well, we've had a big response on this, a lot of people getting in touch. Corina says that she's a German mum in Scotland and we read a lot in German, but that she agrees with both of you. Sometimes it feels a little bit out of your daily context to speak German throughout the day. So bedtime reading is really important. So I think a lot of people getting in touch to say, look, they'd really love to do this, but it is always a bit of a struggle.

But Mercy and Beamy, thank you very much indeed. And do keep it up. I've never heard anybody, I think, say that they wish they hadn't learned to speak their parents' language, only that they wish they had. Of course, I'm sure there may be some people who feel differently. And if so, I'm sure that we'll hear on Twitter.

Well, Mercy Haruna from the Parentland podcast and Bime Isimi from Culture Tree, thank you both very much indeed for joining us. We had lots more thoughts from you on the subject of bringing your children up to be multilingual or bilingual. Coriander emailed us to say, to add to this discussion my son was born and brought up in Spain

until he was five. I'm English and my husband's French so he had three languages. He struggled hugely and never fully got to grips with any of the languages until we moved to the UK where his English shot up and he promptly lost almost all of his French and Spanish within two months. So it's just not quite as easy for some people as it is for others.

It did turn out that he was dyslexic and he did have slow processing, which massively impacts our ability to learn languages. She also says there were no resources available on multilingualism, only bilingualism, and find it a real struggle. Now, Augusta has emailed to say that I am Icelandic and I've lived in the UK for 16 years. I'm married to a British man and I've got two children. I've really struggled to keep the Icelandic alive. And I do have people, family and friends in Iceland.

And they've been very judgmental. And this has caused me tremendous guilt. And Molly has emailed to say, My father was a Welsh speaker. My mother wasn't. I was brought up in Liverpool. I married a Scot. And I've lived in Scotland for many years. I met my only remaining Welsh-speaking cousin yesterday, and I feel so sad and angry that my parents did not bring me,

my brother and my sister up to speak Welsh as well as English. It's interesting, this subject really does bring up a lot of feelings and emotions as well as some tips on how to try and bring your children up with more than one language. Lots of you also got in touch following our discussion with Leslie Regan at the beginning of the programme. Anna tweeted, a 15-minute chat, are you joking? I'm lucky to get 10 minutes to discuss major issues with my GP, usually not the same one I saw before. And I have to start from the very beginning. Plus, she spends most of the appointment looking at a screen or the clock on the wall. Now, I know a lot of people feel like that. The 15 minute chat is

actually the new one that Leslie Regan is proposing that would happen underneath the one, on the one-stop shop basis. Elizabeth has tweeted to say, my small practice held a smear open day yesterday. My nurse did 21 smears. Three cheers for your nurse. That's a big day's work, isn't it? Nine were first timers and several were overdue ones that we caught up on.

We encourage nervous ladies to bring a friend or hold our healthcare assistant's hand. It was a great achievement all round. Well, Elizabeth, it certainly sounds like it was. And Avril has emailed to say, why did this morning's discussion not include the fact that there are local sexual health centres offering free contraception and gynae screening?

That's a fair point. Women who don't know about this are none the wiser from listening to this discussion, thinking that they have to go to their GP instead of the local specialist clinic. I would say, though, that the details in this report show that there weren't specialist clinics everywhere, but I totally take your point that there are some across the country. And Catherine emailed to say these clinics would be a godsend to women. My daughter lives in Oxford and had a baby six months ago. She went to the GP for a smear test.

She couldn't get the coil fitted because no GP is trained. She has to go to a coil help centre. It's got limited opening times with no appointments as it's a drop-in. And she said that she couldn't wait because she had to have the feeding times, obviously, with the baby. She's had one pregnancy scare due to an inadequate condom and if she could have had the coil fitted at the time of the smear it would have been a good common sense process and that would have been great for a new mum. There are lots of stories like that that we're hearing and thank you all very much indeed for

sharing those with us. Here's a question. A man escapes from one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. He's risked everything to do it. But once he's free, he digs a hole and he tunnels straight back in again. Why? Find out in Tunnel 29, a new 10-part podcast series from BBC Radio 4 with me, Helena Merriman. To subscribe, search for Intrigue Tunnel 29 on BBC Sounds. out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.