Evening Standard comment: Our campaign will help children Learn to Live; Contactless on the rails; Meghan's kitchen

The Evening Standard’s Learn to Live campaign to support the mental health and education of children affected by war draws to a close this week with a resounding success.

A day after our petition, signed by 12,000 people, was handed in to Downing Street calling for better support for young people caught up in conflict, the Government announced it would spend an extra £11 million on mental health and psychosocial support for Syrian refugee children and their carers living in Lebanon and to refugees and children in Jordan, where the programme will run until 2021.

This is in addition to the Government’s existing aid programme. It will make a huge difference to children who have experienced extraordinary trauma.

The International Development Secretary, Penny Mordaunt, writing for the Evening Standard today , pays tribute to the Learn to Live campaign.

As she says, “Along with food, shelter and education, these children need mental health and psychosocial support — such as safe spaces — to help rebuild their lives, receive the opportunities they deserve and help shape their countries’ futures.”

And that last point is important. These children have in many cases been living for years with war and displacement and the loss of family and home.

But one day, sooner rather than later, the situation in Syria will stabilise sufficiently for the children from that conflict to return home.

They are the generation on whom the future prosperity and stability of this and other countries depend. If their mental health problems are not addressed the prospects for the region are bleak.

But while our campaign has already achieved a great deal, we hope one element of it will continue: the links that have been forged between hundreds of schools here and their counterparts in war zones.

Understanding the challenges that other children face in these countries is beneficial for everyone involved. Funding is important, but so is human contact.

We thank everyone who has supported our campaign: its effects will be lasting.

Contactless on the rails

Where London leads, the nation should follow.

That’s the argument of Transport for London in making a case for contactless card payments to be extended to the entire rail network , and to national public transport generally.

In London contactless cards now account for a third of Tube fare income; their use has soared on buses as well as the Underground since they were introduced as a means of paying fares in 2014.

Over the past 15 years, Oyster pay as you go and contactless payments, extended from the Tube to overground services, have radically simplified public transport.

One reason why they’re so popular is obviously convenience. But they’re also fair; fares paid for in this way are always the cheapest available.

Compare and contrast this with the national rail system, where there are dozens of separate fares available and where passengers have to work out for themselves whether single or return journeys are better value and which category of ticket they should look for.

The rail system has utterly failed to take account of the rapid development of smartphone technology, let alone changing work patterns.

As TfL’s commissioner, Mike Brown, points out, there is no technological reason why contactless pay as you go should not be extended nationally.

If it works for us, it can work for the whole country.

Meghan’s kitchen

The Duchess of Sussex visited the Hubb Community Kitchen today, where she could see where the funds raised by the cookbook that she and Grenfell Tower survivors and supporters created are being spent.

The proceeds of the book, Together: Our Community Cookbook, have transformed the communal kitchen where women gather to cook and socialise.

It’s a wonderful project.

Buy your copy now.