Grand Committee
Israel and Palestine
(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we are extremely tight on time. In view of the great interest in this debate, I ask all noble Lords to watch the clock and ideally to come in just below two minutes rather than above.
Lord Luce (CB)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for replying to this debate, and to all noble Lords, who will no doubt make distinctive contributions despite the time constraint.
A few months after I was born in 1936, a royal commission on Palestine set up by the Government concluded:
“An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.”
Some 78 years later, following interminable cycles of war, occupation and violence, the Israelis and Palestinians are still locked in a desperate and dangerous impasse out of which they seem unable to escape.
All this is against an even more ominous background where much of the Middle East has sunk into a dark age of wars of religion and ethnic conflict. In these circumstances, the most dangerous thing of all would be to continue with the status quo and to assume that there is no hope of progress on Palestine. On both sides, the insecurity, fear, frustration and anger can be a recipe only for an endless cycle of violence—a time bomb that threatens continually the peace and security of the Middle East and of the international community.
This area is and will remain vital to Britain’s security and economic well-being. Both are at great risk without a solution to the Palestinian problem. Beyond that, Britain, responsible for the Balfour Declaration, still has a moral obligation to play an active role in seeking a just settlement. Today we have a State of Israel—though it is not yet secure—while Palestinians have been driven out of much of the land of Palestine. Many now live as refugees elsewhere in the West Bank, surrounded by Jewish settlements, or in the most desperate conditions in Gaza—all this despite a British Government mandate as long ago as 1920 to guide Palestine to independence.
Since then, on the Palestinian side, there have been repeated failures of leadership, internal divisions, missed opportunities and appalling acts of terrorism. As to Israel, I draw a sharp distinction between the Jewish people and the policy of certain Israeli leaders and extreme religious groups. I condemn utterly the re- emergence of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere. The Holocaust was an unimaginable crime against humanity. The Jews deserve and need a secure home in Israel for those who want to live there. They have created a remarkable nation in a short time. But I have to say in no uncertain terms that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which amount to more than 500,000 people, have emerged as the gravest impediment to a peaceful settlement. They also contravene the Geneva Convention and conflict with Article 2 of the UN charter, which prohibits the acquisition of territory by the use of force. As the late Mr Sharon once said:
“It is impossible to have a Jewish democratic state and at the same time control to all of Eretz Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all”.
It is worth reminding our Israeli friends that we in Britain have extensive experience of occupying other people’s territories on different continents, of taking other people’s land and of discriminating between religious communities in Northern Ireland. We know from experience that this can be the recipe for anger, despair and violence. It is striking that so many Israeli intelligence, armed forces and security leaders have said in recent times that war will not solve the problem, and that occupation of the West Bank and, in effect, Gaza undermines Israel. But the determination of some Israeli politicians, egged on by extreme religious groups intent on the occupation of Judea and Samaria, to go on ignoring this advice can only inflame the problem and provide a powerful argument for Islamist recruiters. The international community has been regularly supine in confronting the issue of settlements, partly perhaps from a reluctance to counter Israel’s democratically elected politicians, however extreme their views.
Against this background, the prospects for a two-state solution are receding. Secretary of State Kerry’s sterling efforts have produced regrettably few results, perhaps because he addressed only part of the problem. But the international community cannot give up. Credible polls show that the majority of both Israelis and Palestinians still want a two-state solution. The only alternatives are the status quo or a binational state of some kind. Both are a dead end. The status quo means drift, more settlements, Gaza imprisoned and isolated with more extremism, and Israel retreating to another Masada fortress. Growing international support for recognition of Palestine as a state and as a member of UN bodies and of the ICC will be complemented by growing international isolation of Israel as a pariah state, with the prospect of intensified sanctions, particularly on those in Israel who do business with the settlements. There is no secure future in the status quo for Israelis or Palestinians.
As to the binational state or one-state solution, Kerry’s withdrawn public reference to apartheid was in fact right. The population trends show that there are at present 6 million Israeli Jews, with a similar and rapidly growing population of Palestinians living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. If this is to be a Jewish nation, it would, in all likelihood, lead to an apartheid nation of Bantustans, where democracy would be undermined by the treatment of Palestinians as second-class citizens. Israel would be at serious risk of no longer providing a permanent home for the Jews, but of destroying itself through civil strife and international condemnation.
However, time and events are rapidly eroding the prospect of a two-state solution and it is imperative that international efforts should not lose momentum. As Israelis go to the polls, the international community, not least the European Union, needs to get the message across that, given leadership and determination, Israelis and Palestinians can still reach a two-state solution and that the dangers for all parties in the alternatives still outweigh the challenges of reaching a peace settlement.
The elements are well known, as has been restated so many times since Resolution 242 nearly 50 years ago. The Israelis for their part must show readiness to end their occupation of the West Bank and the imprisonment of Gaza and to remove settlements in return for firm security guarantees. The biggest problem on both sides remains lack of political leadership and trust. The international community has to do yet more to find ways to encourage a climate for renewed discussion. That includes an unequivocal stand on the issue of settlements and the condemnation of all violence.
At the same time, the Palestinians must be brought to demonstrate their unified determination to construct a viable state: a state which links Gaza and the West Bank, both of which must be the focus of negotiations. Jordan and Egypt in particular should be invited to contribute to this process. It requires imagination and fresh thinking. Any political agreement must be supported by the equivalent of an economic Marshall Plan to rescue Gaza and to rejuvenate the Palestinian economy.
Against this background, I now believe that if we are to remain a serious international player, HMG must give impetus to the peace process by recognising a Palestinian state without delay. Two factors persuade me of this. Negotiations will have a better chance if some equivalence of status is created between the two parties, and the Palestinians need such a spur to work hard to construct a viable state. It is worth noting that Israel was not a fully viable state when the British Government recognised her in 1948—and nor today do we recognise some of her borders or Jerusalem as her capital. On Palestinian recognition, we are lagging behind not only opinion in Europe but that in Israel itself, where there are open calls and petitions from senior and credible figures for Israeli recognition of Palestine on the basis that Israel’s safety and security depend on the two states existing side by side.
The inclination by Israeli and Palestinian leaders to wait for something to happen must be replaced by a will to succeed in reaching a comprehensive settlement. That will must be supported rigorously and robustly by Britain, the EU and the wider international community. I look forward to hearing from the Minister the position that HMG take on this vital issue.
Lord Cope of Berkeley (Con)
My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for initiating this debate and for an excellent speech. If I may say so, if I do that on behalf of all of us, we need not repeat that phrase at the beginning of every speech.
I have explained before my interests and my belief that the biggest enemy of the peace process is the occupation and the so-called settlements—in reality, massive towns and vast agricultural estates. Today, I want to encourage reconciliation work between the different religious leaders in Jerusalem of the three faiths to whom it is especially sacred, and also between the many strands within each faith, which are particularly obvious in that part of the world.
The faith leaders have a duty to reach out to each other and to work to recognise and respect the religious sensibilities of the others. That is easier said than done, I fully realise, but that only emphasises its importance. The conflict is primarily about land and ethnicity, but faith is a key expression of the differences, and all the faith leaders have, after all, a commitment to peace in their own way. The Holy Land has been scarred by religious wars throughout history. If organised religion could now contribute to the peace, progress would be easier.
Lord Judd (Lab)
My Lords, in congratulating the noble Lord on having introduced this important debate and having given such a clear analysis of the situation, I simply say that if we are thinking about the men, women and children in Palestine and the men, women and children in Israel, we have to look to long-term, sustainable solutions. We must beware of attempts at short-term fixes; we need to find something that will last. By definition, if something is going to last it has to have the support of the maximum number of people on all sides. With our special moral and historical responsibilities, which the noble Lord rightly underlined, we have to think of that principle all the time. The solution in the end will be with the people and their leaders in the region.
If there is one thing that I think that we should say as friends of the Israeli people and friends of the Palestinian people, it is that counterproductivity is the real enemy. Just as it was totally counterproductive of those within Gaza to fire their rockets into Israel and led to great grief on the part of many of us who see ourselves as close friends of the people of Gaza, one must remember that there had been years of provocation, with the ruthless blockade which was systematically destroying the economy and the social welfare structure of Gaza. One has to think of the West Bank checkpoints, the daily humiliation of the people of the West Bank, farmers separated from their land, and the rest. One has to think of the recent proposal by the Cabinet in Israel to make it a Jewish state.
From that standpoint, it seems to me that we must back to the hilt the principle of a two-state solution, which will give both sides the confidence of international respect as they go about trying to find a long-term solution.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, the time has come for the active involvement of the regional Arab states in reaching a solution for the whole area. I fear that Israel probably does not take the UK or Europe seriously as impartial fixers, because of their fixation on Israel while they remain relatively silent on terrible situations in, for example, North Korea, Russia and China. Israel sees the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe and this country, connected with intransigence by Palestinians of violence, and that makes Israel more intransigent.
The Kerry proposals are as good as any, but, in addition, Hamas and Gaza must be disarmed, there must be no more tunnels and disarmament must be covered by UN inspectors. We should call on the Palestinians to renounce their arms, recognise their neighbour state and get on with creating a homeland for Palestinians wherever they may be, and not set up another rogue, extremist state. There must be two states. That means that Palestine must recognise Israel. Palestinians have been unwilling ever to accept a Jewish presence and that is more of a problem in the area than the settlements, remembering how Gaza was evacuated. One state, we know, is impossible and has never worked where there is a Muslim majority around the world.
The Palestinians have turned down a two-state solution many a time, while we know that Israel accepts it. The Palestinians need a democratic leader, a man of peace. They must make the citizens of the new Palestine be existing residents and not continue to call them refugees. They must gather in their refugees from the diaspora. If they do not do that, I have to believe that their intention is to overrun Israel. They say that, “Palestine should stretch from the river to the sea”—a Judenrein state—whereas Israel has 1.8 million Arabs.
The solution depends on normalisation. There are many partition states, such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but in the end there must be normalisation.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)
My Lords, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Luce, said, there will be a two-state solution, which I passionately want, only if the Israelis and Palestinians sit down and negotiate. I worry that nothing much has moved on since it was said about President Arafat that he missed no opportunity to miss an opportunity. There can be no quick, misguided fix of recognition of the state by the United Nations.
Let us be clear. Many noble Lords have talked, or will talk, about the requirements of Israel towards that peace negotiation. I would like to use the short time I have to talk about the requirements of the Palestinians as well as of the Israelis. There has to be a cessation of rockets and mortars from Gaza. There were 4,036 rockets in 2014 landing on Israel. Just think—if rockets were being fired at the Peers’ Entrance of this place there would soon be a militia acting in response. There has to be a cessation of tunnels. These are attack tunnels; they are not just for goods and supplies. It is people going down these tunnels to come out at the other end and attack civilians within the State of Israel. These tunnels are being built with concrete and building materials which should go to the building and restoring of the houses, hospitals and schools within Gaza.
As has been said by noble Lords, one of the requirements would be the granting of citizenship of the new state of Palestine to all who live in the West Bank and Gaza. On the subject of those refugees who live in UNRWA refugee camps, I was appalled by the way they live and the fact that there is no barbed wire between those camps and the Palestinian mansions of those people who lived in Gaza and the West Bank before the refugees came. Then there are the divisions between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas needs to change its vocabulary if there is to be peace in the Middle East.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, in the few moments available to me I will focus on just two issues. The first is the question of recognition. In his very powerful speech, much of which I agreed with, my noble friend Lord Luce argued that we should recognise the state of Palestine immediately. My concern is that it seems to assume that the only obstruction to the peace process is the Israeli political position. Of course, it is a massive obstruction, and, of course, settlements are an enormously controversial and difficult issue—I find that my Israeli friends have great difficulty in explaining to me the rationale behind this policy—but there are also problems on the Palestinian side, including their unwillingness, for internal political reasons, to address the key question of right of return, for example, and their unwillingness to address seriously the key question of security on the West Bank. The last thing that the Jordanians, let alone the Israelis, need is a fragile and insecure state on their border. These questions have to be addressed and we have to be sure, before we go through a process of formal recognition, that there are sufficient levers on the Palestinian side as well as the Israeli side to force the two sides to the appropriate compromises.
My second point is on the two-state solution itself. I think that pretty much everyone agrees that this is still the only reasonable and viable way forward. However, in considering the two-state solution, I ask that there be a degree of flexibility in the application of the Clinton parameters. Clearly, in broad terms these must be right, but the post-1918 settlement in the Middle East has unravelled almost totally, and borders in so many parts of that region are in question. We should look at a broader approach to this whole question of the two-state solution and in particular we should seek to draw Egypt and Jordan into a four-way negotiation so that the borders can be created in a way that produces a viable Palestinian state and will meet the needs of the Israelis, the Palestinians and their nearest neighbours who are most closely concerned—Egypt and Jordan.
The Lord Bishop of Southwark
My Lords, the flourishing of the freedom to practise religion is essential to the viability of a two-state solution. This freedom is under increasing pressure. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cope, that faith leaders have a duty to act together—but there are other factors. On 17 February, without notice, the Israeli police entered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, blocked the entry of worshippers and pilgrims, and closed the church for four hours. This sort of action represents the all too frequent disruption that the Christian community experiences—action that often increases around Easter. Muslims suffer, too. All West Bank Muslim males aged 16 to 45 are routinely banned from praying at the al-Aqsa mosque on security grounds.
Freedom to practise religion is further exacerbated when it strikes at the work of the church in cross-community support. The Cremisan situation is a particular example here. The Israeli plan to site the separation barrier through land which supports the livelihoods of more than 50 Christian families and the two religious communities which run a school and a vineyard puts at risk a delicate infrastructure. The school, which educates people from across the Palestinian community, will be separated from its pupils. The land—a vital source of income—will be annexed and what remains will be separated from the community’s buildings. Israel asserts that the separation barrier is necessary for its security; that is a legitimate concern. Whatever the outcome, the route of the barrier will be illegal unless it divides the settlement of Har Gilo on the Green Line. This does not appear to be the current intention of the Israeli Government.
The problem with interference in the practice of religion and the frustration of Palestinian Christians’ attempts to serve the whole community is that it actively undermines the position of moderate voices in the Holy Land. We must remember the call for the recognition of Palestine, made by the Christian leaders in Jerusalem and endorsed in a joint statement on 13 October last year by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Clifton and the Bishop of Coventry. I would be grateful to hear from the Minister what particular steps are being taken in regard to the situation in the Cremisan valley and, more generally, to the supporting of communities of faith in the practice of their religion, which must be an essential element in the securing of a long-term, viable and stable peace.
Baroness Morris of Bolton (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. We must never forget that this is not simply a question of one people seeking autonomy from another. As Max Blumenthal said in his book Goliath, this is about,
“people living under a regime of separation, grappling with the consequences of ethnic division in a land with no defined borders”.
To that I would add that it is also about people living under the daily grind of occupation.
Last year Laurence Brass, the former treasurer of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, spoke out about the miserable conditions he witnessed when he visited the West Bank. Following criticism of his statements he was supported by former Israeli ambassadors and a former Israeli Attorney-General, who praised his willingness to see the grim reality on the ground in the West Bank—and to that we must add the appalling situation in Gaza.
Time is running out and I fear that the resilience and amazing good humour of the Palestinian people is at breaking point. With the help of British aid, the Palestinian Authority has built the necessary structures for statehood and, despite the longest occupation in modern history, the Palestinians are highly educated and have universities, hospitals, a rich cultural life and leaders who believe in peace.
I would love to see the Government recognise Palestine as a first step towards breathing new life into the peace process. It is in the interests of all who love Israel, Palestine and the wider Middle East that we, as a Government, and our international partners do all that we can to support the moderate, secular Palestinian authority.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I shall necessarily speak in telegraph-ese in this absurdly truncated but remarkably timely debate, for which I thank my noble friend Lord Luce. I will make four salient points.
First, it is frequently asserted that the two-state solution is dead or dying. I disagree. No one has yet put forward a viable alternative to it that has any chance of assuring Israel’s future security, the rights of the Palestinian people and the peace of Israel’s Arab neighbours. The international community needs to persevere with that approach, however unpropitious the circumstances.
Secondly, over many decades I have in good faith argued with my Arab friends that they should give absolute priority to the peace process and not pursue status issues which might damage the prospects for such negotiations. I no longer hold that view. The Netanyahu Government have tested it to destruction by their policy of expanding settlements and by their abuse of their undoubted right to self-defence through disproportionate use of force in Gaza. I believe that Britain should support, not just abstain on, the recognition of Palestine’s status. It is the only viable way of promoting the legal, practical and political case for a two-state solution.
Thirdly, Mr Netanyahu has, with the help of Republicans who should know better, ridden roughshod over every convention of international diplomacy by pursuing his election campaign in an overseas legislature. I shall reciprocate and say that I hope that the Israeli people, in their wisdom, in this month’s election will choose a new Prime Minister and a new Government who will be ready to revive the negotiating process.
Fourthly, I trust that whatever the outcome of those elections, and whatever the outcome of our elections, our Government will work tirelessly with our European partners and the US to revive the peace process and will not be discouraged by all the difficulties which will inevitably arise. To neglect this issue or to relegate it to the “too difficult” slot would be to court a subsequent painful reminder that the Middle East will never be at peace without a solution to the problem of Palestine.
Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Luce, in introducing this debate, said a number of very wise things, but I thought that he was less than balanced and less than fair in ignoring entirely the many attempts over the years by Israel to establish a dialogue leading to peace. Just to take the most recent examples—because the problem has existed since the beginning of the Jewish-Palestinian relationship in that area—there was the rejection of Ehud Barak’s proposals at Camp David and the consequences of the Israelis withdrawing from Gaza, which, far from leading to peace and stability, actually created a nest of terrorism and constant missile attacks on Israel. Naturally, that has left Israeli public opinion with the idea that, far from there being a necessarily positive relationship between sacrificing land for peace, there is probably an inverse relationship between the two, which is a major factor in the present situation. There was also the period when Israel declared a unilateral suspension of all activities related to building settlements. For nine months, the Palestinians did not respond at all; they let the opportunity go completely.
Nevertheless, I share some of the concerns that have been expressed about the policies of the present Government and of Mr Netanyahu. It was a profound mistake, last year, to suspend peace talks because of the formation of the Palestinian unity Government. If there is going to be peace, it obviously has to include Gaza as well as the West Bank and it has to include Hamas as well as Fatah. The Israelis themselves would set no value whatever on a deal with Fatah if Hamas could go on exercising violence and threatening the existence of Israel.
What is more, clearly there can be no settlement unless there is unity in the Palestinian camp, or at least a consensus between the major parties in it, for the simple reason that, otherwise, anything that was agreed by Fatah or by Mahmoud Abbas would be denounced by Hamas as treason to the Palestinian cause, and there would be no possibility of a settlement. Therefore, it seems to me a positive, not a negative, feature that the two Palestinian groups have come together. That should have been welcomed rather than treated as a reason for suspending all contact with the other side.
Lord Dannatt (CB)
My Lords, I am sure we all agree that this is a timely debate because it would seem that, elsewhere, energy has gone out of the Middle East peace process.
I recall that in the aftermath of 9/11, there was much talk of not taking any significant action as a consequence until there was some measureable progress in the Middle East peace process. Nevertheless, despite no progress at the time, much action was taken. That action has provoked the reaction across the Muslim and Arab world with which we are all too familiar, with the unfortunate shifting of the focus away from the Middle East peace process to the fight within Islam between Shia and Sunni states and groups. The Iran nuclear threat has also now gained a higher profile than the Middle East peace process.
The downside of this diversion of focus has allowed the Israelis to continue their settlement programme, making the ambition of a two-state solution that much more difficult to achieve. I wonder now whether a two-state solution is still viable or whether, when compared to a one-state solution, it remains the least unattractive of a series of unattractive options.
If one comes to the conclusion that a two-state solution is still the best—or the least worst—option, I hope that Her Majesty’s Government, notwithstanding other distractions, will continue to discharge our historic and moral obligation to promote vigorously their pursuit of a peaceful two-state solution in the best interests of the Israelis, the Palestinians, the region and our own wider security.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Luce, said that settlements were the biggest impediment to peace. I do not agree. However, that does not mean that I approve of settlement-building—far from it. I am a declared friend of Israel, although certainly not a fan of the present Government. I believe that occupation is toxic to Israeli polity and society, as well as miserable for Palestinians. However, the lack of progress in peace negotiations cannot be blamed solely on Israel. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, the Palestinians have rejected many opportunities.
I was unable to participate in the debate on 29 January. However, reading it afterwards, I was struck by the number of speakers who talked about how unilateral recognition of a state of Palestine would send a message or a signal, or be a symbol—of what I was not quite clear. A sustainable long-term settlement can be achieved only through bilateral negotiations involving difficult compromises on both sides. Unilateral recognition of Palestine is a cul-de-sac, not a catalyst for progress. It might satisfy an urge among some of us for “something to be done” but it does not achieve movement.
Israel set no preconditions for the resumption of direct talks in 2013. It is broadly assumed that it would give up all but about 3% of the West Bank through land swaps. Israel needs recognition and security, and the confidence of having a predominantly Jewish, democratic state. Former UK chief negotiator Dennis Ross recently wrote:
“It’s fair to ask the Israelis to accept the basic elements that make peace possible—1967 lines as well as land swaps and settlement building limited to the blocks. But isn’t it time to demand the equivalent from the Palestinians on two states for two peoples, and on Israeli security? Isn’t it time to ask the Palestinians to respond to proposals and accept resolutions that address Israeli needs and not just their own?”.
I agree with those remarks.
Lord Green of Deddington (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a former chairman of Medical Aid for Palestinians.
First, I strongly endorse the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Luce, and indeed those of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. I was very interested to hear his support for the recognition of Palestine. That is something which I, too, support, as I made clear in the debate on 29 January. I will not repeat it today. Nor do I underestimate the political problems that the Israeli Government face. None the less, I think that it is a sensible way forward.
Instead, I would like to support the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, in drawing attention to conditions on the ground in Gaza. The chief executive of Medical Aid for Palestinians has just returned from there. He has reported that he has never seen the place more depressed. Only 5% of the money pledged last summer to rebuild has actually arrived. As for health, he reported that there were, again, severe shortages of drugs and consumables. Many of the medical staff have been unpaid or getting only 60% of their salaries, and there are 8,000 unexploded munitions around the place, which are a terrible danger to children, several of whom underwent surgery while he was there.
Lastly, I draw attention to an article in Haaretz on 26 February by Gideon Levy. He reported that “Gaza’s disaster is dreadful” and cited the case of a baby girl in Beit Hanoun who froze to death in the makeshift shelter in which she and her family had been living,
“since their house was bombed. ‘She was frozen like ice cream,’ her mother said”,
of the last night of her baby’s life. These are the realities on the ground behind the endless diplomacy. A two-state solution cannot come too soon.
Baroness Tonge (Ind LD)
My Lords, one would have thought, with our Government’s promotion of democracy worldwide, that when Hamas won the election in Palestine in 2006, which was monitored by the European Union, we would then have talked with Hamas leaders to find out their agenda for the future of their country. Instead of taking that opportunity, the election result was not accepted and Hamas retreated to run the Gaza enclave, as we know, where the people have been held in an open prison and attacked viciously by Israel ever since. The Gazan people stand guilty of defending themselves.
Another opportunity was missed when the European court ruled last December that Hamas was no longer to be categorised as a terrorist organisation—a ruling which has been appealed by the European Union and ourselves.
When I and other parliamentarians have met Khaled Meshaal and other Hamas leaders over the past few years, they have been quite clear in their position, which is that while Hamas cannot bring itself to recognise the right of Israel to exist, it recognises, however, the existence of Israel within the 1967 borders. It offers an indefinite truce—a hudna—with the State of Israel within those borders and demands the release of prisoners, including those parliamentarians who were arrested after the elections in 2006. They do not mention the right of return for all the refugees spread all over the Middle East.
They are very clear about these messages. I have heard them on two occasions; others have heard them, too. I heard them transmitted again yesterday evening at a meeting in this place—not by members of Hamas, in case your Lordships all want to duck under the desks. They want the opportunity to give these three messages face-to-face to European and American negotiators. Will the Minister tell us why this cannot happen?
Lord Finkelstein (Con)
My Lords, in this Room there is a surprising degree of consensus. We all support a two-state solution; we regard the status quo as tragic and unsustainable; we oppose the settlement policy; and we all broadly know what the boundaries of the two states will be. That leaves us with two big unanswered questions, which are linked. First, what sort of state do noble Lords believe that the proposed Palestinian state will be as things now stand, realistically, and what will be its model—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Bahrain, Lebanon, Egypt or Qatar? It is not shaping up to be Sweden, nor is it shaping up to be Israel. This may be controversial, but it is simply a realistic view of what is happening.
Who, then, would wish to live next door to a neighbour likely to prove violent? That is the second question. For 40 years, Israel has been asked by well meaning noble Lords to surrender strategic defence positions to Syria as an act of trust in the Assad family. Who would volunteer to have the Assads running the next-door borough council or to have Hamas there—except in the fantasy version of the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge—or Hezbollah, or ISIS? Noble Lords urging unilateral recognition step around this problem by the extraordinary feat of neglecting to mention Hamas at all, or pretending that it is something it is not. The failure to grapple with this is astonishing.
There cannot be peace in the Middle East until we can imagine a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state, willing to let the Jews live in peace. It is just nonsense to say that there would be peace without settlements, because there was no peace before settlements. Why do we talk of a 1967 border? It is because there was a war in 1967 that created it. We are often told that the Jews should learn the lesson of the Holocaust. That is quite right, and one of the key lessons is not to trust the security of the Jewish people to compassionate, liberal people who cannot recognise murderous extremists when they are staring in our faces and pointing guns.
Lord Hylton (CB)
My Lords, the politics of humanity demand the ending of the blockade of Gaza, the phasing out of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and fair access for all the world to the holy places of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Of course, Israel’s security is critical, but it cannot trump the interests of peace. Security can be handled by many techniques and by disarmament, but above all by local and regional agreements. Funds pledged for Gaza must be paid up. This is urgent to prevent children dying from a poor diet and cold and wet conditions. Life-saving repairs must be done now.
We have the right to demand that Israel ceases collective punishments and all illegal acts. Keeping international law will earn respect for Israel, and build confidence for two-state and wider agreements. This would benefit the whole of the Middle East and the Islamic world. Recognising the notional Palestinian state would be a step towards two full states before it is too late. Peace must prevail. Our Government should stop balancing interests and help all sides to behave humanely. Palestine deserves the complete self-determination that Israel has enjoyed for so long.
Lord Bach (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Luce, and congratulate him on obtaining the debate and all speakers for their much too short but expert contributions. The Opposition of course support what has been British foreign policy now under Governments of all colours for many years: namely, a two-state solution to the tragic impasse—I use the same word as the noble Lord, Lord Luce—that has existed for far too long. The impasse has resulted in so many lives being lost, so much agony for Israelis and Palestinians alike and so much danger to the rest of the world.
As good a symbol as any of this long-standing tragedy is Gaza today, and all those killed and injured, so many children among them, in last summer’s events. The human cost of the failure to negotiate a lasting and sustainable agreement is all too apparent in the continued trauma, destruction and insecurity, not just in Gaza but in the West Bank and in Israel itself. We of course support Her Majesty’s Government in their contribution to the reconstruction effort in Gaza, but we are concerned that too much of the money pledged by international donors has not translated into actual disbursements. I wonder if the Minister could comment on that.
It is one of the concerns of the donors that there has been a failure so far of the technocrat unity Government agreed by Hamas and Fatah in April last year to take control of Gaza. We believe that it is important, if we are not to see some ghastly repeat of last summer, that the international community remains focused on efforts to stop Hamas building up its arsenal and rebuilding tunnels or firing thousands of rockets into Israel itself. We want to see the blockade of Gaza ending. The cycle that we have seen in recent years of rocket attacks, periodic incursions and permanent blockades has not brought the lasting peace and security that Israeli citizens deserve and the justice that Palestinians have long waited for.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Anelay of St Johns) (Con)
My Lords, at the risk of disobeying my former Chief Whip, my noble friend Lord Cope, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for tabling today’s debate. It is indeed timely. It is a subject on which all noble Lords have made significant contributions, despite the narrow limit of two minutes for most of those taking part in this debate. In response, given my own time limit of 12 minutes, I shall address the main themes that have been raised today: the UK Government’s position on the Middle East peace process; what the parties must do; what the regions should do; and Gaza.
I start by saying that I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for making clear the Opposition’s position in continuing their support. I am clear that the way in which the British Government can play a constructive part and speak with a strong voice is by speaking as a united Government and Opposition.
I turn first to the Government’s position on the Middle East peace process, and how we see the prospects for a two state-solution for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The UK’s long-standing position on the Middle East peace process is well known; we support a negotiated settlement leading to a safe and secure Israel living alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state. Such a vision is based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps, with Jerusalem as the shared capital, and a just, fair and agreed settlement for refugees. We share the deep frustration felt in this Room today at the lack of progress towards achieving this vision. We will continue to push for progress towards peace and lead the way in supporting Palestinian state-building and measures to address Israel’s security concerns.
The noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, asked why we do not talk to Hamas. Our policy on Hamas remains clear: it must renounce violence, recognise Israel and accept previously signed agreements. Hamas must make credible movement towards these conditions, which remain the benchmark against which its intentions should be judged. We call on those in the region with influence over Hamas to encourage it to take those steps. Further, the noble Baroness asked a specific question about the European court decision to annul the Hamas EU designation. The court judgment is procedural and does not mean that the EU and UK have changed their positions on Hamas. The effects of the EU Hamas listing, including asset freezes, remain in place. We will work with partners to ensure that the Hamas listing at the EU is maintained. Hamas’s military wing has been proscribed in the UK since 2001 under separate UK legislation, which is not affected by December’s EU General Court judgment.
While the UK has not yet recognised a Palestinian state, the Government have long said that they would like to see a sovereign, independent, democratic, contiguous and viable Palestinian state living in peace and security, side by side with Israel. We reserve the right to recognise a Palestinian state bilaterally at a moment of our choosing and when we judge that it can best help bring about peace. We remain convinced that only negotiations can deliver a solution that ends the conflict once and for all, and that they are the most effective way for Palestinian aspirations of statehood to be met on the ground. That is what we are continuing to work towards. Either we move towards peace, as noble Lords have said today, with the strong support of the region and the wider international community, or we face an uncertain and dangerous future.
Several noble Lords referred specifically to the peace process itself and strongly commended Secretary Kerry for his tireless efforts to deliver a final status deal. We strongly support his work. Whatever the disappointments of 2014, Secretary Kerry has made it clear that progress was made. But it is vital that Israel and the Palestinians take advantage of any momentum gathered; it is vital that they commit to restarting the process, and focus once again on finding common ground.
So what must the parties do? They must take steps to build an environment conducive to peace, and they must avoid actions which undermine the viability of a two-state solution. In this regard, I am as one with noble Lords who are deeply concerned by Israel’s decision to freeze the transfer of tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority. This is contrary to Israel’s obligations as an occupying power. We urge Israel to fulfil its legal obligations under the 1994 Paris protocol, transfer the revenues without delay and refrain from taking any further punitive action, including announcing new settlements.
We have repeatedly condemned Israel’s announcements to expand settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including east Jerusalem. As the noble Lord, Lord Luce, pointed out, as well as being illegal under international law, settlements undermine the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and those working for a sustainable peace.
The Palestinian Authority must also show leadership. It must recommit to dialogue with Israel and to making progress on governance and security for Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the West Bank. We note the Palestinian Authority’s recent decisions to sign a number of conventions, including the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court. While we understand that the Palestinian Authority is seeking alternate ways to deliver the state that the Palestinian people deserve, there can be no substitute for negotiations with Israel. Negotiations must remain the focus.
What should the region do? I agree with all noble Lords who made the strong point that the international community can and must do more to support US-led efforts to find a viable, permanent solution to the conflict. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Luce, that regional players have a significant role to play. Through the Arab peace initiative, Arab states have offered Israel the normalisation of relations in the event of a comprehensive peace agreement. This opportunity must be seized upon as part of a relaunched negotiation process. It signals the benefits that peace would bring for the entire region.
We also agree on the need to promote economic development for the Palestinians to support the political process. That is why we are supporting the Office of the Quartet Representative, whose economic initiative aspires to grow rapidly the Palestinian economy over a three-year period. We are aware of the Israeli peace initiative and the work on the important role that civil society has in generating ideas to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Europe must also remain a key partner in the peace process. In December 2013, we led EU efforts to set out an unprecedented package of political, economic and security support that Europe would offer to both parties in the event of a final status agreement. That package remains on the table, should the parties return to negotiations—but much more needs to be done, and we will continue to work closely with our EU partners to support both sides in taking bold, necessary steps.
My noble friend Lord Cope and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark referred in particular to the duty of the faith communities in their varied forms. I agree with my noble friend Lord Cope that there is a duty on religious leaders to play their part on the route to finding peace. It is vital that Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan work together to maintain the long-standing status quo at Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif and other historic sites. Freedom of religion must be protected. I know that the Government have worked strongly to support the position of those of all faiths in the area and that these matters are discussed at the Human Rights Council and in the United Nations. All those of faith have a role to play.
There must also be progress for Palestinians in Gaza. Noble Lords, in particular my noble friend Lady Morris and the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, described the terrible situation there. At the Cairo reconstruction conference, we pledged a further £20 million to kick-start Gaza’s recovery. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, asked about disbursal. We have disbursed a quarter of our funding, but we agree that other donors have not come up to scratch and we call on all donors to fulfil their financial pledges to aid the reconstruction efforts in Gaza without delay. I should point out that our pledge of £20 million was in addition to our earlier provision of £19.1 million in UK aid in response to the crisis. That relates to Gaza itself, not the wider area of reconstruction.
There is a problem with money, but there is also a physical problem with being able to get materials into Gaza to enable the works to make progress. This is partly caused by the security situation in Sinai and the Egyptian response to that, and partly by the situation between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. There are limits to what donors can achieve without a political solution. As a priority, we continue to urge both parties to ensure that the ceasefire is durable. It must address Israel’s security concerns and ensure that movement and access restrictions are lifted. We therefore urge the parties to resume serious negotiations to reach a durable ceasefire and tackle the underlying causes of the conflict.
We strongly believe that dialogue is the only way to ensure a lasting solution to the Middle East peace process. We will continue to work closely with the US, the EU and the wider international community to re-energise the process. Once a new Israeli Government are formed following elections on 17 March, the international community must take note to redouble its efforts working with the new Government to move the process forwards. Ultimately, Israeli and Palestinian leaders must show the courage, determination and creative leadership to make the compromises that a deal will require. When they show such leadership, we and our partners will be ready to show our full support.
Sport: Women in Rowing
Lord Thomas of Gresford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to encourage women to participate in the sport of rowing at every level of ability.
Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)
My Lords, on 11 April, Oxford and Cambridge women’s crews will race over the Putney/Mortlake 6.8 kilometre course for the first time ever. When in 1927 the first women’s race between the universities took place at Oxford, large and hostile crowds gathered on the towpath to protest. It was conceded that it was unladylike to row side by side, so the crews competed on time and style. Oxford were quicker but some of the umpires thought that Cambridge were more stylish.
Prejudice persisted. In the 1960s, a Cambridge college captain—male, of course—objected to women racing altogether. He complained:
“It is a ghastly sight, an anatomical impossibility and physiologically dangerous”.
By 1973, male attitudes had not improved. In the race that took place on the Cam, the boats nearly collided when a male spectator trumpeted the “Last Post” at the start. Talking about press coverage, the Times correspondent in 1973 thought it right to refer to the fact that the rowers had ankles, thighs, biceps and, most shockingly of all, padded seats, and that the winning crew had celebrated on beer and sang bawdy songs in a Cambridge curry house afterwards.
The times of patronising women’s rowing have long gone. It is a sport that has earned the right in this country to be treated with equality and parity. At Sydney in the 2000 Olympics, the GB women’s four gained silver medals for the first time, and they repeated that success at Athens and Beijing with rowers of the calibre of Katherine Grainger and Debbie Flood. Bronze medals were also won in the double sculls. In London in 2012, Helen Glover and Heather Stanning, both graduates of British rowing’s Start programme, unforgettably began a haul of gold medals in the coxless pairs. Katherine Grainger with Anna Watkins won gold for the first time in the double sculls, and Katherine Copeland and Sophie Hosking romped home in the lightweight pairs. In the Paralympics, golds were won by Pamela Relph, Naomi Riches and Lily van den Broecke. What those outstanding athletes did was to inspire women of all ages and abilities to take up the sport.
It is not all about the Olympics or university sport. In 1927 the very first Women’s Eights Head of the River Race took place over the tideway course, with just two clubs competing. As late as the 1980s, the event attracted only 50 crews—but in 2013, following the Olympics, the 73rd race attracted 320 entries and some 2,880 active women participants. A week on Saturday next, for the 75th race, there will again be in excess of 300 crews on the river. The competitors range in age from 15 to 70-plus—from beginners to international competitors.
Last weekend, I was able to talk to the captain of the Grosvenor Rowing Club of Chester, Louise Tobias. She epitomises the women who are now attracted to the sport. Louise was a hockey player, but, in her mid-30s, at the time of the Beijing Olympics, she was inspired by the British women rowers in action and decided to have a go herself. She joined a Learn to Row course and was soon into competitive rowing. She enjoys the elation in winning and the devastation of losing. She and her family revel in the strong social side of the sport. Last June, Grosvenor Ladies won the Leicester cup for coxed fours at the Henley Women’s Regatta, with two of the crew coming to rowing for the first time through Learn to Row courses on the River Dee.
However, if there is a drive for more participation, it has to be backed up with support both in the clubs and by funding. It is not expensive for the individual but it does collectively require expensive equipment—although boats and oars can be used over and over again with proper timetabling.
I turn to access. Of the 43,000 miles of inland river and canal waterways, 2,800 miles are currently in use for rowing. The potential for shared water use is considerable. Chester Royals, founded in 1838 and one of the oldest clubs in the country, have initiated a proposal for the development of a new water sports hub at their boathouse on the Dee, in conjunction with West Cheshire and Chester councils. Incidentally, like nearby Grosvenor, their captain is a lady, Jane Sweeney, the first to be club captain in the Royals’ 177-year history. I declare an interest as president of Rex Rowing Club, which rows nearby.
I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm the Government’s commitment to initiatives of this nature. However, last November, as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Rowing Group, I wrote to the Secretary of State, Mr Javid, and I regret that I have not, as yet, had a reply. I drew attention to the plight of the Hillingdon Rowing Club, which was set up in 2012 with post-Olympic enthusiasm and is the only rowing club with many women novices in the area to the north-west of London. Hillingdon Outdoor Activity Centre caters for a number of water sports and accommodates rowing on a course of about 700 metres. Unhappily, it is on the route of the HS2 railway. The club’s proposal to relocate to nearby Broadwater Lake, where there is a stretch of some 1,200 metres, has been met by opposition from Natural England because of the number of waterfowl on the water. Rowing ought to be accepted as a natural and beneficial use of our waterways.
Volunteering is crucial to successful rowing. Coaching is key, and regrettably there is a dearth of women coaches. I am grateful to Lisa Taylor, an experienced coach who has written a thesis on the subject, who pointed out to me that lack of coaching may put off underconfident women. It may also have an impact on the retention of newcomers, because more ambitious athletes may feel unable to progress without a higher coaching input. Coaching is like lining up eight golfers on an expanded golf tee and requiring each to swing in time and in harmony so as to hit the sweet spot on the ball at exactly the same moment, and then to repeat the stroke up to 30 times a minute for 20 minutes. Those who want to see poetry in motion will no doubt watch the House of Lords crew next July as they shoot under Lambeth Bridge. There are no stars. Teamwork is about getting the best out of every member of the crew. To meet the demand for coaches, I invite the Minister to consider whether employers should allow volunteers one or two paid days off a year to attend accredited coaching courses.
I turn to identifying talent. British rowing has honed its talent identification process of the past 15 years or so. It has had immense success with the women’s squad. British rowing in 2013 implemented a new programme led by England Talent Pathway coaches, whereby a performance coach in a particular area trawls local clubs and schools for juniors with potential and develops them along GB best practice lines. They educate the clubs and coaches so that they can keep nurturing talent when they have it—a sustainable pathway rather than a stop-gap. This scheme is in its infancy, but it should be extended to adults for the benefit of women who take up the sport at a later stage in their lives.
The Government’s Women and Sport Advisory Board is tackling the emotional capability and opportunity barriers preventing women taking part in sport generally. I hope to hear more of its work in this debate.
On 11 April, thanks very much to the investment and support of Newton Investments and BNY Mellon, women’s rowing will gain a massive new television audience for their Putney to Mortlake race. I wish both crews as much enjoyment out of the event as no doubt those pioneers of 1927 achieved in the teeth of male chauvinist opposition. I hope that the raised profile of the sport will attract many more women to find the camaraderie and companionship of a crew in this country’s leading Olympic sport.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)
My Lords, I remind noble Lords that this is a time-limited debate and that speeches are limited to 5 minutes. When five minutes shows on the screen, those minutes have elapsed.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford for securing this significant and timely debate. As a swimmer, I have always had more than a passing admiration for rowers. As we splash around in the pool, they seem to be able to glide gracefully on top of the water, clearly as a more evolved species.
It was women’s rowing, as already mentioned, that started the gold rush in London 2012. I was lucky enough to be at Eton Dorney that day and what a moment it was. How significant it was for Glover and Stanning and for the sport of rowing—but it was even more significant for Team GB. There is nothing more important than the first gold medal for a host nation at their home Games. It was followed by tremendous performances on the water and demonstrated that rowing is now not just a sport for the boys; it is very much for the girls.
There is no question that Sir Steve Redgrave is Britain’s most successful and prolific Olympian of all time—five Games and five gold medals. But ever since the late 90s, it is the girls who have come through and shown, in tremendous gold, silver and bronze performances, that this is a sport that everybody can participate in, perform in and excel at. When rowing was introduced to the Paralympic programme—an excellent sport to be added to the programme—for the Beijing Games in 2008, it was Britain’s Helene Raynsford who steamed through to win gold, the first Paralympic gold on the water, in the single sculls by over 12 seconds. That is a sporting performance. That is impressive rowing.
It matters what happens at the high end—at the Olympic and Paralympic Games—not just for those performances, for the nation and for elite sport. It matters because role models are so important to driving participation and opportunities for people throughout sport. There are so many impressive programmes from British rowing, not least the Sportivate programme inspired by London 2012—female participants now make up 49% of its rowing element. It is a similar situation with the Start programme—the talent ID programme already mentioned by my noble friend. Before London 2012, the ratio of men to women was 4:1 on the talent programme. Now it is almost equal. That is impressive progress.
The great thing about rowing is that it is not just about the athletes and participants. It is a great sport because it has developed and believes in an inclusive culture right through the sport—whether you are an athlete, a volunteer, coach, official or an administrator, there are opportunities for anybody, whatever your background and wherever you want to go in the sport. That is because it has been led right from the top. The chair of British rowing for 20 years was Di Ellis: a tremendous performance. She has now been succeeded by Annamarie Phelps, who is doing a phenomenal job. She comes from a rowing family that is so tied to the Thames. I would not say that they have webbed feet, but I can imagine that their semi in Chiswick could certainly be called The Boathouse.
Such leadership is required in sport if you are truly to develop an inclusive culture. Electing Debbie Flood as the first female captain of Leander and Sophie Hosking as the first female captain of the London Rowing Club is groundbreaking stuff. This is a great time for girls and women in sport, including across the sport of rowing, from the boat to the boardroom. To anyone who has children who are girls, I say, “Get them into sport”. There is no better time—and rowing is a pretty good place to start, with fantastic opportunities right across the water. To those at the higher level looking to the world championships and to Rio 2016, I say, “Good luck, we support you, we salute you and we look forward to celebrating your future successes”.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, I would like to focus my remarks on both ends of the age scale. Perhaps I should start with older women. I started rowing at the age of 60 and still do it occasionally. I would probably do it more often if it did not entail getting up so early in the morning. I have also been a member for several years of your Lordships’ House’s mixed-gender eight for the Lords and Commons boat race on the Thames. This has been a mixed experience since the Thames can be like the North Sea in a storm when the wind is against the tide. However, on the whole it has been an enjoyable and certainly a sociable experience.
Rowing, I am told, is very good for me because it helps to strengthen the core muscles, which get weaker as you get older. I know of an all-women crew in Australia called the Ancient Mariners, two of whom are over 80. I relate these facts in order to emphasise the fact that you do not need to be either young or an elite athlete to enjoy rowing and benefit from it. It is one of those sports that you can take up at any age and do either for enjoyment or take it right to the top level. What is important is that we make provision for girls and women of all ages to row.
The Olympic legacy has brought about a tremendous increase in interest in women’s rowing, to the extent that some adult clubs simply cannot cope with the demand for Learn to Row courses. It is a great pity if women are put off by having to wait many months for such a course and find a different sport where participation is easier. If we are going to develop the Olympians of tomorrow, we must nurture the grass roots of today. Is there anything the Government can do to help here?
At the other end of the scale there are girls who would like to take up rowing at school. Many independent schools offer this facility, with boats, coaches and accessible water, but what about young people at maintained schools? Apart from the excellent Westminster Boating Base which caters for many disadvantaged young rowers, it is often difficult for schools to find coaches and the money for boats. I therefore endorse the call of my noble kinsman Lord Thomas of Gresford for employers to consider giving volunteers time off to train as rowing coaches as part of their community service programme.
Whatever the reality, there is a perception among pupils and others that schools care more about, and spend more money on, sport for boys than for girls. I would not want to add to bureaucracy, but the decline in girls’ participation in sport is sufficiently serious for there to be a need to ask schools to focus more attention on girls’ sport. It has been suggested that this might most easily be done by an amendment to the public sector equality duty for schools. In the United States there is a thing called Title IX legislation, which makes it an offence for publicly funded institutions to discriminate in funding between boys and girls or men and women. That may not be appropriate here but we need to find a way of achieving the same result.
I was very interested in the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee report on girls and sport. It is concerned about the lack of communication and co-operation between government departments, which it thinks presents a serious obstacle to delivering the Olympic legacy. It recommends that the DCMS, Department for Education and Department of Health publish a joint annual report to Parliament on school sport, focusing on participation levels, the availability of different types of sport, partnerships with clubs and charities, and training for teachers. Perhaps such an annual review would force departments to work together and pool funding to achieve better value.
Sport England is doing a lot, in particular with its This Girl Can initiative, though I am delighted to see that many participants were girls many years ago. Also its place-based pilot launched in Bury is an imaginative initiative, involving local authorities and many partners in taking account of women’s real lives and bringing sport to them. I did not notice rowing in the list of sports but, if the scheme is rolled out across the country, does the Minister know whether rowing will be included wherever there is a suitable body of water? Can he tell us whether the initiative has yet been analysed and what plans there are to roll it out? Will women’s rowing benefit?
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, has been able to secure this debate today. Rowing is a fantastic sport with many fans. I am one of them. Apart from the Olympic and Paralympic Games and the Boat Race, there have been limited opportunities to watch this sport on TV. We should be very proud of the institution that is the Boat Race. It has a very special place in the hearts of the British public.
I found the opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, quite amusing when he explained how it was considered unladylike to race side by side. I am very glad that in my own sporting career I was never marked on the skill and grace of my performance. I looked far more like somebody from the This Girl Can campaign: red, sweaty and snotty. I would definitely have been considered unladylike, and I am very pleased about that.
Having the women’s Boat Race on the same day as the men’s is a major step forward, but we must not forget that the women’s race has its own very proud history. Many casual fans might not know that the women’s race exists, but it is not a new invention. We should thank all those who got the race to where it is now. Many women, and men, campaigned for it. Credit should be given to Helene Morrissey, CEO of the sponsor and a Cambridge graduate, but not a rower. She is well known for her work on encouraging women. Money makes a difference to what we are trying to do. Annie Vernon wrote about Miss Morrissey and said:
“She refused to listen to excuses that women could not cope with negotiating the tides and bends of the men’s 7000m course”—
so in many ways it is remarkable how far we have come.
However, it is important that young women know a bit of the history—and are slightly horrified by it. In the Chamber this morning, the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, said in the International Women’s Day debate that she did not want still to be talking about how far we have come in 20 years’ time, and that is very important.
If we look back at the history of the Boat Race, in 1927 there was much discussion about whether the women should be allowed to wear shorts or more demure gym tunics. One of the Cambridge rowers had to sit on a stool in front of university staff, simulating the action of rowing, to ascertain which clothes best preserved her modesty. Even in 1985, there was a picture in one of the papers, which is shown on the BBC website, of the women’s team in their gowns and fishnet tights, showing their legs. I hope that we have moved on a little from that.
For a bit of context, while we may consider some of these views slightly idiosyncratic, in my sport of athletics, it was only in 1984 that women were allowed to compete in the marathon and a very few distance races. Even in Moscow, the longest race women were allowed to do was the 1,500 metres, which was introduced only in 1972. Before 1960, it was considered safe for women to run only 200 metres. It took until the 2000 Games in Sydney for women to be able to compete in the pole vault. The excuse given each time was that it would have a detrimental effect on their ability to bear children. Tell that to Paula Radcliffe or Yelena Isinbayeva.
Looking back at 2012, it is hard to imagine anybody being hostile towards our amazing Olympic and Paralympic athletes. I cried when Katherine Grainger won—actually before she started. Ten strokes in, I knew that she was going to be fine, and it was good. I am very proud that Kat Copeland, who is also a gold medallist, lives in Ingleby Barwick, very close to where I live in the north-east of England. I drive past her gold postbox most weeks. That is an amazing inspiration for women who live around the River Tees, who can see rowing as an option for them going forward.
There are questions we still need to answer. As rowing is a sport which is deeply entrenched in the university structure, this is perhaps a place for Title IX to make the most impact. At Oxford this year, not only are the men’s and women’s races being held together for the first time but the men’s and women’s teams will be together at the post-race dinner. Well done, Oxford; I hope that Cambridge will follow next year.
We should also be very proud of Helene Rainsford, who other noble Lords have mentioned. She put women’s para-rowing on the map. In the interests of equality, in the mixed coxed team of Pam Relph, Naomi Riches and Lily van den Broecke, I will mention the two men in the team, David Smith and James Roe. I wonder how they feel—is it how women feel most of the time, being mentioned last? It is a little bit of a change around.
There are many challenges along the way for Paralympic rowing, including accessibility. Rivers are not the most accessible places for wheelchair users to be, but when I watch my daughter kayaking along the River Tees I am frequently asked by members of the rowing club whether I would like to join in. I very politely refuse, because I do not like moving water—but perhaps I could offer my services as a cheerleader for the Lords team. I will very happily sit and cheer from the terrace; I hope that that is an appropriate place to be.
There are also challenges with sponsorship. Women’s sport is an excellent opportunity to get involved in terms of branding, return on investment and encouraging people to think differently. Within our celebration, we must not forget that, back in 2013, British rowing carried out some research that was presented by Dr Alison Maitland, which showed that the traditional clubs value men’s events and achievements above women’s. For example, the Henley Women’s Regatta, which includes para-rowing, is not as valued by clubs as Henley Royal Regatta, which has no women’s club events, only open and elite events for men. So perhaps investment by clubs and schools in women’s equipment, programmes and coaching does not have a high enough priority. I hope that having the men’s and women’s Boat Race on the same day will change this.
Baroness Brady (Con)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, on securing this debate. Indeed, I am delighted to participate. Sports governance is an issue very close to my heart, especially when we are talking about celebrating women’s participation and trying to raise awareness of how we can improve it. I stress that I am not a rower myself but, according to the British Rowing Association, rowing,
“is a low-impact sport, suitable for all ages and abilities and with strong female representation across all types”.
So I will just say at this point, “Never say never”—I may join the team at some point.
Despite not participating myself, the exploits of British rowing have by no means passed me by. One of my abiding memories of watching Britain compete in the Olympics has been our extraordinary exploits in rowing. I first remember Sir Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent winning gold after gold in their amazing partnership, which almost ended prematurely with the final gold at the Atlanta Games in 1996, when a seemingly exhausted Sir Steve gave his interviewer, and indeed anyone else watching, permission to “shoot” him if he went anywhere near a boat again—only for him to return four years later, thankfully unscathed, and sporting another gold medal in Sydney.
But at London 2012 it was the women who stole the show, from Heather Stanning and Helen Glover in the coxless pairs winning our first gold of the Games, to the looks of utter surprise, bewilderment and joy on the faces of Katherine Copeland and Sophie Hosking in the lightweight skull. Finally, there was Katherine Grainger—what a story. In her fourth Games after three successive silver medals, she persisted, with the kind of grit and determination that I so admire. She came back again, redoubled her efforts, and this time it was gold for her and teammate Anna Watkins in the double skull—Britain's ninth medal in women’s rowing since 2000. Nine medals since 2000, with three golds coming in 2012, cannot be a coincidence. This unprecedented success has been underpinned by a club network with impressive stats on women’s participation.
In a nutshell, we want that success to be made permanent. So how does it look for women’s rowing? Numbers from the British Rowing Association make for excellent reading, and it sounds as if success in the London Games is being translated into more women getting involved. Noble Lords before me have mentioned various impressive statistics. A point very well made is that not only are more women getting involved in the sport but leadership positions in rowing are increasingly being held by women. As has been said, there has been a female chairman for the past 27 years, Dame Di Ellis, and now we have chairman Annamarie Phelps, making a great impact. But we must keep pushing.
I commend a piece of research by Dr Alison Maitland of Brunel University, which concluded, among other things, that barriers to increased participation include a lack of opportunity at suitable times of the day and a lack of female coaches. As someone who is committed to empowering women, particularly working mothers such as myself, to achieve their business goals, I can see that some of the same challenges might apply to rowing. Providing weekday time slots is key to allowing for greater participation, but this is when only paid coaches are likely to be available, rather than volunteers. British Rowing could look at repeating what it did at Walton Rowing Club. It provided a paid coach to run an adult improver programme, which attracted more women to row.
Just as in business, so in sport; we need to encourage more women to have confidence to come forward and volunteer in an environment they may not be familiar with. With the help of British Rowing, clubs should provide more support and training to get women into volunteering and coaching roles, which in turn will lead to more female rowers. As has been said, we must also praise schemes such as Women on Water and This Girl Can, which encourage all women to get involved in sport.
I am delighted to say that the future looks bright for women’s rowing. We must ensure that the governance arrangements, the volunteer network, the facilities and, yes, the funding, continue to be there to deliver the pipeline of talent needed to build on the success of 2012. Just as they were at Eton Dorney, I want to see more women atop podiums in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Tokyo in 2020 and beyond. Let us do everything we can to make that happen again.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I must declare one interest. I am the third member of the House of Lords boat to be here. I am afraid I have to say to my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford that it is his fault, because I could not row before I got in there. I can now row badly. My other sporting claim to fame is that I am what is left of a rugby player.
In talking about the esteem that women’s sport has to be held in, the Boat Race is important. It has become something that conveys esteem. Until very recently, it was probably the only rowing that anybody had ever heard of. It was the time when the Thames became full of people having a pint and occasionally seeing a boat go past. Now, as we know, it is part of a huge international sport built upon the success of the Olympics. I hope that we will put this to use and make sure that the esteem of the sport is seen, worked into government and supported.
To take a slight diversion into my original sport of rugby, I hope that my noble friend the Minister can point out that esteem has to be carried in a message. I have given him notice of this point. When England’s men won the Rugby World Cup, they all got honours. When England’s women won the Rugby World Cup, which they did as amateurs and not as part of their professional lives, only two got honours. It is not the same sport but the message of esteem has to be there. There may be a good reason but it does not smell good. I hope that we will hear why that occurred and have it put it into context. I will leave that one where it falls.
As has been said, general congratulation to rowing has to go forward, given that rowing now has to turn away people from its clubs because it cannot deal with the great demand to take part. At the bedrock of any sport is the participation level. We have already heard from numerous people that you have to build capacity. We will be able to continue to build that capacity only if we make sure that people can open new rowing clubs. At all amateur clubs, somebody goes out as the missionary and says, “Let’s do something new”, inspired by a great vision that this sport should be played—or having fallen out with the people at the club they were at in the first place. It does not matter; they are still doing it. That is what is required to build capacity. Every time somebody does this, they have to take on a series of bureaucracies that are national, local and internal to the sport. I hope that my noble friend will be able to tell us what the Government are doing centrally, and encouraging locally, to make sure that those people go out and form a club. All political parties should look to this.
Do we remember the idea of the big society? I know that is an election ago now, but amateur clubs in sport are probably the epitome of that. If you take on a public good, you make sure that you can do it properly. You bring in bigger organisations and build a social background to it. Making sure that this can happen is incredibly important, and what the Government do is vital. I spoke to new rowing clubs in Oxford, Leeds and the Lake District. All said that their relationship with government was slightly patchy. Going north, they were Cheney Falcon Rowing Club, Leeds Rowing Club—there had been no rowing club in a city of that size—and Lakeland Rowing Club. All had a mixed bag when it came to dealing with local bureaucracy—and, indeed, the bureaucracy with such things as universities and centres. Clubs with people who knew how to fill in forms did better. That is a lesson which all sports can carry forward.
Trying to address this in order to allow people who are doing a good thing to do it better is something that we should expect of government. Doing this—not just funding but making sure that people can access and get the best out of systems—is something which those of us in power should be encouraging. I hope that this will be a central thrust of everything we are doing here.
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)
My Lords, it is most unusual for anyone in this House to hear me say anything derogatory about the Member of Parliament for West Worthing—but on this occasion I feel a need to do so. There are magnificent rowing clubs in Worthing and I salute and pay tribute to them, but my condition for getting married was that my husband would come to Henley, because I come from a rowing family. My son is a member of Leander, my father was a member of Leander, my great-uncle rowed in the Blue Boat, my nephew rowed in the Blue Boat. This was a very important matter and his rowing is quite appalling— shameful. He swims well, he has joined British Canoeing, but rowing is not him. When I was first in the other place I rowed once in the parliamentary eight, but had to abandon it because there was no way I could row in the boat which would not encourage him to do so—and then there would be more ignominy on the way.
I am an oarswoman. Coastal rowing is me; the Seaview regatta on the Isle of Wight. I have won skulling races, particularly randan races. That is a very exciting form of rowing, with three of you in a clinker-built boat. I have even rowed in the Great River Race, which is an incredibly long distance. I fear that we have a stranger in the Room who should not have been here. I have identified a very poor rower in this Room. Nevertheless, be that as it may, I then discovered recently, preparing for this critical debate, that my cousin rowed in the women’s Blue Boat in 1941. When I put this to my male relations, they all denied all knowledge of it. There is a long-standing problem in the relationship of male oarsmen to very distinguished female oarswomen. Penelope Poulton, now aged 92, is delighted that she is being mentioned here today. Similarly, my wonderful colleague, Clare Glackin, won in the Cambridge Blue Boat on two occasions in 1992. So this year is a triumph. It is quite a dilemma as to why it has taken so long for the women’s Boat Race to row on the tideway.
With others here I pay the warmest tribute to Helena Morrissey. She has been such a force. In the Chamber we have been debating female empowerment. I have already spoken there, as has my noble friend Lady Brady, and we paid tribute to the voluntary movement—not quotas—that has resulted in the quite extraordinary increase of women on boards, so that we are now in a very good place indeed. Helena Morrissey is entitled to a great deal of that credit. She founded the 30% Club and she said the other day, very interestingly, that,
“the relatively low proportion of girls participating particularly in team sports at school has a bearing on many aspects of how women’s lives develop—not just our health but our careers, too, and in business. It’s all part of a continuum that starts very early in life, leading to different experiences and expectations for women compared with men … the importance of learning to be part of a team, depended upon and depending on others, playing to personal strengths and respecting the complementary skills of others”.
Sport teaches people,
“to deal with performance nerves, to overcome disappointments, to have the strength of character to carry on when losing—and to enjoy victories. If girls have less opportunity to develop these skills, that surely puts them at a disadvantage in many other situations”.
From my perspective, rowing, of all sports, is the ultimate team game. There is no space for a prima donna at all. However good your stroke is, if it is not in time with the next person’s stroke, you are out of the boat. The other reason why I particularly enjoy rowing is that it is the one very competitive, very intense activity where you spend all of your time going backwards—totally trusting your future to the cox at the other end.
Good points have been made about the importance of coaches. I am particularly pleased that my local rowing club at Guildford has done a lot of work on encouraging volunteers to have more knowledge and information. People who do not feel that they understand the sport do not know how to be a volunteer, but the club has shown some wonderful examples.
I will quickly speak about Hull—because rowing is not just a southern, elite sport. As chancellor of the university, I pay tribute to Matt Evans, who is on British Rowing’s Young Person’s Panel. He is very involved in the Hull University Boat Club, where there is a great deal of enthusiasm and a growing participation by women. Similarly, community rowing in Hull is equally important. Of course, they could do more and I shall be writing about them getting a lottery award in the near future.
April 11 will be a wonderful day. The best person in my family at the moment is our son who has bought a house exactly on the finishing post at Mortlake. He is having a tremendous party to celebrate the women rowing down the tideway—and no male rowing supporters will be admitted at all.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I cannot pretend to be either an expert or an enthusiastic rower. The extent of my involvement has been to use the machine in the gym. I seem to have more things in common with the noble Baroness’s husband—apart from being in the same trade union branch, which I was very proud of. Clearly, we need to balance this debate in terms of the sides. I suggest that the rowing team contact my noble friend Lady Hayter, who was a rowing blue. She could be another recruit to the team.
Compared with many other sports, rowing has an impressive record in both changing attitudes to, and increasing the participation level of, women. The Olympic effect on rowing was enormous in 2011 to 2013, and I suspect that it will still be evident. As a direct consequence of UK Sport and National Lottery funding, women rowers have won, as we have heard in the debate, nine Olympic medals since 2000, including three golds. That Olympic and Paralympic success has inspired girls to take part in rowing. Prior to London 2012, uptake for the Start programme had a ratio of 4:1 male to female participants. Since 2012, the ratio is almost equal.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, clubs were delighted that the profile was so high—but, sadly, the majority were unable to cope with such a huge influx of beginners. I know this first-hand from my niece and nephew who live in Chertsey, an area where you would expect to be able to row. But local Learn to Row courses were massively oversubscribed even before the Olympics. Clearly, if you drive up participation, you need to back it up with support in the clubs. British Rowing is doing some of this, but clubs need to make it a priority.
British Rowing now has 31,000 members, of whom 43% are female, compared with 38% in 2009. In the year following London 2012, 50% of new members were under 18 and 48% were female. As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said, British Rowing is committed to promoting equality within the sport, setting an example for other national governing bodies, from grass roots to Olympic and Paralympic rowers. I read in the briefing provided by the noble Lord that the Lea Rowing Club is a great example of where attitude change produces results. The focus on men’s and women’s rowing there has shifted in the past few years to the point where they have an entirely equal focus. The women’s eight won the intermediate level competition for clubs at women’s Henley in 2013. That result demonstrated that a club could achieve results on a national level with women who were recruited as beginners.
British Rowing and Sport England research suggests that barriers to women’s participation include a lack of local access, a lack of opportunities at appropriate times of day, a lack of daytime rowing and a lack of female coaches. Again, that is an issue that can be replicated in other sports.
British Rowing works with other water-based sports for joint use of facilities. That is important, but the support of local authorities is critical. Will the Minister assure the Committee that this will be further encouraged? British Rowing staff deliver and support indoor rowing competitions at schools and universities. I have heard what has been said about universities, but for me, it is also fundamental to start early—and that means starting in schools, which is why I very much welcome British Rowing’s work.
Many clubs are supported through British Rowing with leadership and coaching support, and more clubs and centres are now offering Learn to Row courses, and adult and youth recreational rowing activities. The results of the programmes will be measured after 10 years in 2019, which is the time BR believes it will take to change the culture of rowing clubs. I hope that it will be faster than that. The programme is clearly something that other governing bodies could emulate. I, too, look forward to seeing the final report of the Women and Sport advisory committee, of which the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, is a member. I would like to hear from the Minister about his plans to ensure its final implementation.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con)
My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend for securing this debate. The Government are absolutely committed to increasing women’s participation in all sport, including rowing, at every level of ability and age. I was very struck by my noble friend Lady Walmsley’s expression of the great enjoyment that rowing provides. My noble friend Lady Bottomley spoke about teamwork. The essence of what we all try to do in different parts of our lives is so much more positive when we work in a team. I have to say to my noble friend Lady Bottomley that my sympathies may lie with the honourable Member for Worthing when it comes to prowess in rowing ability, although I think that this debate has produced some enthusiastic volunteers for my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford’s team.
This country has an outstanding reputation for being at the forefront of rowing at the elite level. Over the last 20 years, Great Britain has won 23 Olympic rowing medals, 39% of which have been won in women’s events. Since para-rowing was introduced in 2008 in Beijing, Great Britain has won four medals, 50% of which have been won by women. My noble friend Lady Brady and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson—I would like to call her my noble friend—both spoke of the great national pride there has been and will continue to be in these exceptional achievements.
UK Sport is investing £36 million in rowing and para-rowing through this Olympic cycle. It is the highest-funded Olympic programme and it continues to yield success. Some 41% of rowers and 31% of para-rowers on the World Class Performance Programme are women. This great sport has given us some outstanding role models—your Lordships have highlighted a number of them. We all remember those huge successes of 2012. It would be invidious to seek to name-check them all but we are fortunate to have them. My noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond spoke of the emotions of being there and of the inspiration that those extraordinary and exceptional rowers provided. They were not only an inspiration for rowing but for our country as well.
Sport England is providing more than £8 million of funding to British Rowing during the 2013-17 whole sport plan period to do exactly that: to increase participation. As part of that funding, Sport England is working with British Rowing to encourage innovative ways of delivering rowing which might appeal to new participants, particularly women.
We know that there are various obstacles, both perceived and real—the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, spoke of them. They may be emotional barriers such as low body image and self-esteem, capability barriers such as fear of not having the right skills, and practical barriers such as cost or lack of time. We need to break down those barriers. It is why, pan sport: This Girl Can. I say in answer to my noble friend Lady Walmsley that, at this early stage, the sports that have been chosen are on demand and those which have come forward from the demand do not as yet include rowing, but I encourage rowing to seek that demand. However, the situation is constantly evaluated. We want to engage with 14 to 18 year-olds and lower socioeconomic groups who, so far, we think need the most encouragement.
Sport England is working with the national bodies to help design and market sports in a way that overcomes these barriers and taps into what women want from sport. It may be about rethinking and redesigning sport to appeal to women and to fit in with their lives. In the case of rowing, joining a boat club and committing to training every week might not be feasible for all women. Alternative formats of rowing, located in different environments, may appeal. That is why 5% of British Rowing’s funding has recently been redeployed to initiatives that promote indoor rowing, in the hope that this will do for rowing what spinning has done for cycling.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, spoke of participants. Almost half the participants in the School Games indoor rowing programme are girls.
Sport England is also investing more than £300,000 in the Rowability programme. This aims to get more disabled people rowing and includes beginners’ rowing right through to those who aspire to compete at the top level. At this high level, UK Sport is investing almost £4 million in para-rowing during this Olympic cycle. Additionally, through its Get Equipped fund, Sport England is investing more than £120,000 in adaptive rowing equipment to help disabled people get on the water.
British Rowing has also recognised the value of networks for sharing information and supporting others. Women on Water is an online community that aims to bring together women rowers to connect with each other and activate the rowing community.
As my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford and other noble friends have already highlighted, the profile of women’s rowing will be raised even further next month, when for the first time the women’s Boat Race will take place on the same day as the men’s Boat Race on the tideway. Additionally, the BBC will broadcast the women’s race live, as it does the men’s race, putting the women on an equal footing with men for the first time in history. Frankly, I am amazed that this has not been done before, because the Boat Race is watched by more than a quarter of a million people live, while television audiences in the UK are upwards of 7 million people and more than 100 countries request rights to screen the race live or as a highlights package.
A key factor in achieving this success has been the investment in the women’s team by Newton Investment Management. I am so glad that my noble friend Lady Bottomley spoke of the CEO of Newton, Helena Morrissey, who sits on the Government’s Women and Sport Advisory Board. She is personally committed to women’s sport and recognises the commercial opportunity that it offers. I want to acknowledge some of the other high-profile sponsorship deals for women’s sport; for example, Investec sponsors women’s hockey, while Kia Motors sponsors women’s cricket. We want other brands to capitalise on the commercial opportunities in women’s sport in the same way.
As well as through sponsorship and media, it is important that sportswomen are recognised in other ways, too, and I was glad that my noble friend Lord Addington spoke about honours. I am pleased to report that one of the five key factors on which the Women and Sport Advisory Board focuses is recognition and honours. The board has pushed for more women to be nominated in the honours process. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport writes to sports bodies twice a year urging them to nominate more women for honours. Since London 2012, at least 30% of sports honours have gone to women each year.
My noble friends Lord Thomas of Gresford and Lady Brady were right to emphasise the importance of volunteers in sport. Last month, Sport England launched Club Matters, a £3.6 million programme to support community sport and volunteers at grass-roots level. Club Matters also supports people to set up new clubs, which my noble friend Lord Addington was absolutely right to raise. There is a whole range of resources available online to help those at the very start of the journey—for amateur clubs, as well as for more established clubs. As part of the Olympic legacy, Join In has continued to increase its pool of volunteers. It now has more than 250 local leaders trained, enabling more people than ever to become involved with grass-roots sports clubs through the 30 established local networks.
At the other end of the scale, UK Sport encourages all its funded athletes to give five days a year to volunteering. Through that programme, those world-class athletes have given back more than 10,000 days to schools and communities since London 2012. Many organisations already allow their staff days off for volunteering as part of their corporate social responsibility strategy, and I encourage that. For example, many departments in the Civil Service offer up to five days a year for volunteering, recognising the benefits for employees and recipients of their time.
My noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford raised a number of issues regarding specific boat clubs. I know that Sport England is familiar with the proposal from Chester Royals and is supporting the club as it develops the idea for a water sports hub on the Dee. I was very sorry to hear that my noble friend has not received a reply about Hillingdon Rowing Club. I will of course look into the matter and report back to him.
The Minister for Sport has done something extremely important in establishing a Women and Sport Advisory Board. The noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, mentioned that. It will be focusing on increasing women’s participation in sport, improving the media profile of women’s sport, increasing commercial investment in women’s sport, improving women’s representation in leadership—my noble friend Lady Brady mentioned that in particular—as well as representation in the workforce, and a greater recognition for women’s sporting achievements. A final report will be published this month and will give suggestions for future action on women’s sport, which I believe we will all welcome.
British Rowing, with the support of Sport England, is initiating innovative ideas to increase participation. We wish to encourage sport, including rowing, to be enjoyed at all levels and by all abilities. I think that we all wish rowing every success, and may it continue to flourish.
Employment Levels of Older People
(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Greengross
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the effect on the youth unemployed of a potential increase in the employment levels of older people.
Baroness Greengross (CB)
My Lords, I have tabled this debate largely to illuminate the employment challenges faced by the over-50s in our society. I am privileged to head up a think tank, the ILC-UK, or International Longevity Centre, one of 17 around the world. Through it, we try to help people plan for the future in the light of demographic change and look at the challenges, as well as some of the advantages, of our increased longevity.
Recently, the ILC published two new reports called The Missing Million. These illuminate the employment challenges of people who are over 50, demonstrating that, of the 3.3 million economically inactive people aged 50 to 64, approximately 1 million have been made “involuntarily workless”. We know that the plight of people aged 50-plus is worse than that of those aged 60-plus in a country where there has been very important legislation to ban age discrimination for some years. This really is bad and economically stupid.
The ILC research also shows that if people aged 50 and above are helped back into employment, it does not mean that younger people are crowded out of the labour market. Helping older people into the labour market, or back into it, could also lead to a potential £88 billion boost to UK GDP. As we know, these people create jobs in the consumer sector if they are working because they create the need for more things for other people to buy as those people have more money to spend. If they work and are caring for older relatives, grandchildren or even their own children, then other people are employed in caring. They are a boost to the economy, not a drain on it. This is creating more wealth.
We also know that people who are denied access into the labour market through discrimination, or for whatever reason, will tend to disappear into the black market and the black economy. They will do that because very often they need the money and they have some skills. That is the rather sad result of inadequate policies and safeguards to ensure that they can get work.
The Government created a business champion for older workers, Dr Ros Altmann, who argued recently that if everybody retired one year later, it would add 1% to this nation’s GDP. We know that chronological age has now become rather irrelevant; what we are talking about is capacity and the will to work and to contribute to society and in most cases—because we do not force people into scaffolding or something at the age of 50-plus—people who are in work have a better health record, a better social life with mates or friends and feel that they have more self-worth because they are contributing to the nation’s economy and to society at large. I share Ros Altmann’s belief that retirement should be a journey rather than a one-off event. No employer should make an assumption that employees should be on the work scrapheap because they have reached an arbitrary milestone in their lives.
One common argument against greater labour market participation in older age is that it will prevent younger people entering or staying in paid employment because it takes the jobs away from them. We know, however, that that argument is built on the false assumption that there is a fixed number of jobs in an economy—the lump of labour argument. It has been demonstrated over and over again that that is a fallacy: there is no lump of labour. Creating jobs for people creates a market for more jobs. It is nonsense to assume the opposite, but that assumption goes on.
An increasing number of older people in employment can also support employment across all ages. Older and younger people in a job in a firm can work together. You have the experience of someone who knows the history of the company and young people who may have more vibrant or new ideas to introduce. Together, they are stronger than if there is just one age group. That is a good sign in an economy, and it needs to be encouraged.
Saga carried out some research on that, which showed that the extension of people’s working lives has enhanced employment opportunities for people of all age groups, in particular for younger people. Using data spanning about 50 years from 22 countries, some very good OECD research in 2010 found that old and young workers complement each other rather than substitute for one another, so encouraging later retirement will not have an adverse effect on youth employment. At an individual level, there are also potential benefits—earnings gains, pensions saved and improved financial well-being—but there are also benefits to individuals’ health and well-being. There is a reason to get up in the morning. There is a reason to meet your friends, social interaction, having a part in society and feeling that you have self-worth. Those are all excellent things.
It is encouraging that as part of the DWP’s Age Positive initiative, the Government announced in December an older workers’ champion scheme to combat age discrimination offering targeted support for older jobseekers. I welcome that and hope that the Minister will tell us how well it is doing and how we can all encourage it to do more.
Looking at other good examples, everybody in this field has heard of B&Q, because it led the way in employing older people. Barclays recently launched a new apprenticeship scheme for the over-50s who want a career in the City. We know of the success of Teach First. I have been promoting the idea of “mentor later”. We are looking at how we can do something on those lines with older people.
There are many things that one can do. Paid employment is one thing, but there are other opportunities for older people to play a full role in society. As for stimulating youth employment, the best way to achieve that is through targeted measures that will make young people better prospects for employers, such as improved training and supporting the growth agenda. Young people often benefit from mentoring at work from their older colleagues.
The employment of older people does not keep younger people out of the job market. Rather, by the means outlined above, all our adult citizens, irrespective of their age, who want to work should and could be helped not only to fulfil their aspirations but to contribute to the economy at large, our economy, our society and the benefit of us all.
Lord Bhattacharyya (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for securing this important debate. She is a superb advocate for the elderly, and this debate demonstrates her sharp concern for old and young alike. It is appropriate that we are having this debate in the Moses Room. The Bible tells us that Moses lived for 120 years, and even at that age, his eyes were clear and his vigour unabated. Sadly, history is silent on the effect on the Old Testament labour market. British life spans have not reached biblical levels, but many Britons are now working well into their 60s, and 1.1 million workers are now over 65. That is a quarter of a million more than when default retirement was abolished four years ago. That has had a major effect, but broader social trends are also at work. The number of older people working has increased throughout the past two decades. The decline of heavy manual work, improved health and the rise of part-time working are all making a contribution. We cannot turn back these trends, nor should we try to. For one thing, the earnings of older workers create demand and jobs. For another, the impact on full-time workers is smaller than it appears. Fewer than 20% of over-65s have a traditional full-time job. Most are part-time or self-employed. The vast majority of young people want full-time jobs, so they will not feel direct competition.
However, the ability to retain skilled workers will impact on companies’ decisions to hire new people. For higher-paid workers, this can be partly dealt with by employers offering lower wages as workers learn their trade. However, at lower levels of pay, the minimum wage rightly limits this approach. This should not change. We have the minimum wage in order to prevent exploitation of all workers.
We must find another way to help younger workers, especially those on the edges of the labour market. The key is to improve the skills of those young people who struggle to find full-time work. We offer significant support to university students, but our offer to those who do not take that route is much less effective. The crucial group is the NEETs: young people not in work, school or vocational education. For all the media stereotypes, what sets NEETs apart is that they do not have good GCSEs. This means they often pursue low-level qualifications which lead only to casual work and frequent unemployment. Bluntly, the Government are failing these teenagers, at school, after school and in the job centre.
How can we do better? First, we must offer all young people the chance to advance their careers while still at school, not just those destined for higher education. This requires a greater variety of educational provision, which could be delivered through vocational courses, specialist schools, university technical colleges or even by industrial partners—provision by industrial partners is growing. Next, we need every young person to get maths and English qualifications, even well after they finish school. All the evidence shows that these core qualifications are vital to finding work. The Government have made the right choice by insisting students who do not get good maths and English GCSEs take these courses as part of vocational education or apprenticeships, yet many drop out or do not pass. Data from the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion show that more than a quarter of apprentices do not successfully complete their course, a far higher rate than for A-level students. That is a disturbing figure, as those young people are precisely those likely to struggle in the labour market.
Our aim should be that every single 21 year-old has maths and English qualifications. We should not stop educating them until they do, whatever it takes. For example, that might mean paying employers to support failed apprentices studying for an extra year and at the same time having some mentoring by older people who are beyond retirement age. This will mean working unconventionally, whether with employers or with health and social work teams that pick up the hardest-to-reach young people.
Finally, we must expose young people to the world of work much earlier, so that they can build links with employers and understand what is required to hold down a good job. To do that, we need local employers, councils and colleges to work together to improve education and training courses. This will help employers anticipate the problems some young people have in adapting to work, such as with the structure of the working day. This is not an impossible challenge. In most cities, just a few hundred young people need this kind of focused support each year. Each worker over retirement age could be a mentor, providing early work experience and career support, and putting young people on the right course to get a good job.
In an age when the competition for work is greater than ever, our challenge lies with the neglected young people who deserve better from us. We cannot prevent older workers earning, and we should not race to the bottom on wages. That means that we must resolve to do better for those at the margins of the labour market.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss this issue and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for initiating this debate. I share her concerns and conclusions. There is an assumption that apprenticeships should be for younger people, but there are advantages in apprenticeships for older people—I think of the example of Barclays, as well as others in the construction industry, which are particularly welcome. The noble Baroness is absolutely right, too, to draw our attention to the needs of the over-50s. Those who, for whatever reason, lose their jobs in their late 40s or early 50s can find it quite difficult to return to the world of work.
It is true that more older people work than used to be the case. There are now more than 1.1 million people aged over 65 who work—an increase in the last year of more than 50,000. I welcome the opportunity for older people to be in work if they wish to be, and I accept entirely that we have to do more to ensure that every individual is enabled to work if they want to be in work. It is also true that younger people can face difficulties in securing employment, in securing employment that pays enough and in securing employment that can lead to career development. However, it does not follow—I am entirely with the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, on this—that there needs to be an adverse effect on youth employment arising from older people staying in employment for longer.
There are two reasons for that. The first is the growth in the economy that we are now experiencing, together with the huge growth in vocational apprenticeships for young people, both of which will make a big difference. Secondly, older people will still be retiring at some point, so the growth need not be a long-term upwards trend, even if it continues for a few years.
Given the growth in the number of jobs that has taken place in the last five years, with almost 31 million people now in work in the United Kingdom, older people are needed, not least to train the next generation and transfer their skills to them. It is interesting to note that around two-thirds of the growth in employment over the past five years seems to be in higher-skilled jobs. Older people have tended to fill those jobs, and one consequence is that fewer young people get promoted and so start to earn more. As I said, before long that trend should cease.
Not everyone wants to continue working when they are older. Over the next few years, despite the growth in the number of older people staying in work for longer, some 200,000 people are expected to retire from manufacturing and engineering jobs. They will have to be replaced at a time when more are needed anyway. This country has a skills gap. All over the United Kingdom, in manufacturing, engineering and the process industries, there are shortages at level 3 and above. That is why apprenticeships matter—apprenticeships driven by the needs of businesses. We should welcome the huge growth in apprenticeship starts. There have been more than 2 million under this Government, which is twice as high as the figure achieved by the previous Government. That is contributing so much to vocational training and equipping many more young people to undertake skilled work.
Apprenticeships can be of different kinds, and older workers can transfer their skills to younger workers through them. I am impressed by the commitment of businesses all over the country to them—for example, the shared apprenticeship scheme of the Construction Industry Training Board, which enables more young people to be trained because they can be with more than one employer over the three-year period of an apprenticeship. There have been successful pilots in Lancashire, Merseyside and Wales, with several more schemes now offering three-year apprenticeships. Importantly, more than 90% of those who complete their three-year shared apprenticeship by this means secure full-time jobs, which is higher than the average.
As we achieve higher growth, we need to reflect on the fact that just over 16% of young people aged 16 to 24 are still unemployed. That is around three-quarters of a million. Of those, some 40% are in some form of education or training, but that figure is simply too high, despite the significant achievements of this Government. We need much better careers advice for young people when they choose courses at school, to ensure that the courses they take enable them to take up the apprenticeships at a later date. We need careers advice in schools to broker better relationships with employers. Some very interesting research has been undertaken, not least that by IPPR North in January 2014 which explained how that might be done to the advantage of both employers and young people. The reason why all this matters is that the nature of employment is changing and the level of skills needed is higher than it used to be.
It is a welcome fact that unemployment is going down, and has been doing so for some time, but it needs to go down faster for young people, and the pay rates for young people need to rise. None of this needs have an effect on the potential for additional employment opportunities for older people. This week I noticed on Tuesday a report on the front page of the Financial Times and then later comments from the Institute for Fiscal Studies about movements in pay reported by HMRC from the PAYE system over the past six years. It is interesting to see that the regions outside London cut the pay gap with London in the six years from 2008 to 2014, with cash growth in median pay in London half the rate in the United Kingdom as a whole. Interestingly, the rate in London is a quarter of the rate in the north-east of England, where I live. Regionally, from the perspective of the north-east, I strongly welcome that. However, that is a geographical test of course, and we need to go a bit further. By age, the IFS said that median pay for young people between the ages of 22 and 29 is down 9% in real terms in those six years, so growth in median pay is lower in London and it is much worse for younger people. Those two facts relate to each other because in London young people make up a much higher proportion of the workforce: the average age of workers is 34 in London but 40 in the rest of the United Kingdom.
In one sense, this confirms what we already know in terms of intergenerational differences, but we need to be more alert to it because younger people cannot be expected to manage high personal debt as well as cover future debt from government borrowing today. They need secure jobs and jobs that pay enough to meet their essential expenditure. We need to ensure that the overall gains of economic growth resulting from the work that this Government have undertaken so effectively, particularly in the past two or three years, are spread and shared by all—both the older and the younger.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, this has been an interesting short debate. I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for enabling us to reflect on this issue today and for her many years of championing older people in our society. I also thank my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya for pointing out that we have Moses presiding over us today. I remind him that we also have a very young Daniel presiding over us. Perhaps that tells us something about the importance of both young and older people and the wisdom that they both have to offer to us in our judgments.
The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, have done a fine job of debunking the lump of labour fallacy, thereby saving the Minister and me the need to do that. However, it is worth dwelling on it briefly. I am amazed by just how hard it is to persuade most people that something that seems as obvious as the idea that if more older people work, younger people will not be able to may not in fact be true. That is something for the Government to think about. How does one go about trying to make sure that everybody understands that things are a bit more complicated than that?
In the pack that the House of Lords Library made to help us with this debate, which was very helpful, they kindly included a very interesting report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies from 2008 called Releasing jobs for the young? Early retirement and youth unemployment in the United Kingdom. It could almost have been written for today. Of course, the IFS evaluated the job release scheme, which was designed precisely to release jobs for younger people, but also looked at the measures that Governments took between the late 1960s and 2005. Its findings precisely backed up the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. On the job release scheme, it found,
“some evidence that it reduced employment of the old but no positive effect can be found on youth employment”.
It went on to say:
“When looking at the entire 1968-2005 period, labor force participation of the old is positively associated with employment of the young … Overall we find no evidence of long-term crowding-out of younger individuals from the labor market by older workers. The evidence, according to a variety of methods, points always in the direction of an absence of such a relationship”.
So the evidence is really very strong, and I hope that we can all agree with that.
That said, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that there is an issue about youth unemployment, which needs quick and careful attention. I agree with my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya about the importance of focusing on NEETs and the importance of skills, a point also made by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. However, despite the welcome improvement in employment rates generally, young people are now almost three times as likely to be unemployed as the rest of the population. The youth unemployment proportion is 13%, whereas it is only 4% for 25 to 64 year-olds. So something is going on there. Young people are now faring, comparatively speaking, worse than at any point since 1992, which means that the UK is now towards the bottom of the league table internationally when it comes to giving young people a fair chance, with the gap between the youth unemployment rate and the overall rate higher in the UK than in all but five out of 39 OECD countries for which data are available.
We need to see some good help being given to young people, but only 35% of young people find a job after two years on the Work Programme. Indeed, more people return to the jobcentre than find a job as a result of the Work Programme. Last summer, the Government announced that they had decided to scrap the Youth Contract ahead of its planned closure. The latest figures published by the DWP showed that two-thirds of the way through the scheme’s three-year duration, the Youth Contract had delivered less than 13% of the promised job placements, with 20,030 wage incentives paid rather than the target of 160,000. So there is reason to be concerned and need for action.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya about the importance of careers and mentoring and getting education right, but we need more direct intervention, too. Labour would tackle this problem by bringing in a compulsory job guarantee for anyone under 25 who has been on JSA for a year or more, as well as reforming the Work Programme and introducing a new youth allowance to ensure that unemployed 18 to 21 year-olds who do not have the skills they need to get a decent job are training as well as looking for work. We simply cannot afford to have young people scarred by damaging periods of unemployment, which can carry on having effects throughout their working lives.
Then there is the position of older workers, described very movingly by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. If you want to see the effects on older people of being able to turn up every day for work, to feel that they have a sense of worth and something to contribute and to mix with friends and colleagues, we do not have to look very far from this Room. The House of Lords shows just what a positive effect having a role to play in society can have on some people at quite a considerable age.
However, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, pointed out, there are still too many older people who would like to work but cannot get a job or who lose their job in their 50s and then struggle to get back in, despite having great skills and experience. If the state pension age is to continue to rise, we need to ensure that older people can stay in employment on the kind of wages that enable them to carry on saving for a pension. Otherwise, not only will they end up struggling to get by on benefits designed for those who are temporarily unemployed, they will not be able to build up the kind of pension provision that they will need to have a comfortable retirement when they get there.
The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, mentioned that the DWP will be giving more tailored support, and I will be very interested to hear what the Minister has to say. At the moment, it is not working. In fact, the Work Programme works even less well for older workers than for younger workers. In the latest figures available, 30% of 18 to 24 year-olds achieved a job outcome, but of 50 to 54 year-olds it was just 17% and it fell to 13% of 55 to 59 year-olds and of those who were 60-plus fewer than 7% achieved a job outcome. Whatever is happening now is simply not working for older people who want to get back into the workforce.
Labour would reform the Work Programme, devolving it to make it more responsive to the needs of older people in different areas of the country. We would also introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee to ensure that older jobseekers who have been unemployed for more than two years are guaranteed the offer of a paid job, and we would look to help more older workers save for a pension. With the latest figures showing that less than a third of self-employed workers are currently saving into a pension—older workers are more likely to be self-employed—we would act to find ways to help older self-employed workers to save for a pension. We would cut red tape for older workers. The new universal credit rules threaten 600,000 self-employed workers with a huge increase in red tape, and that is something that Labour is committed to addressing. We would also introduce a higher rate of jobseeker’s allowance for those who have contributed for longer, funded by extending the length of time for which people need to have worked to qualify.
I will be very interested to hear from the Minister what the Government’s strategy is to address that very serious problem. I have two other specific questions for him. First, what thought are the Government giving to ways in which employers as a whole can think about the way workers move into retirement? We have known for a long time that it is not always the most healthy thing for someone to go from a full-time, very high-stress job into nothing at all. It is not good for their physical or mental health and is certainly not good for their spouse or partner in many cases. Have the Government given some thought as to how strategically as a country we might approach that? Secondly, have the Government considered what impact, if any, the new pension freedoms might have on the pattern of labour market participation by older workers?
There is a challenge for us as a country to ensure that neither older nor younger workers are left behind as the economy slowly recovers. Fortunately, I do not believe that the people of our country will warm to a public debate that divides generation from generation. After all, many older people are deeply concerned about the opportunities and prospects for their children and grandchildren, and conversely the young do not want to see their parents and grandparents thrown on the scrapheap at 50 when they have so much to contribute. Apart from the individual costs, our country can ill afford to lose the talents and energies of either our younger or our older workers. If we do not tackle those challenges, we will all be the poorer.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
My Lords, like other speakers in this debate, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for bringing this question to the Committee. I am really pleased to acknowledge the work she has done in this area. She has been director general of Age Concern and is now chief executive of the International Longevity Centre. I am also very pleased to be able to respond to as many of the points made by colleagues in the Committee as I can.
We are today talking not about a potential increase in the employment of older people but about a very real and sustained improvement. The past year has seen the number of over-50s in work exceed 9 million for the first time. It has risen by nearly 250,000 in the past 12 months and by more than 1 million since 2010. That is not just about the number of older people rising. The proportion of over-50s in work has also reached the highest on record.
The question of whether the increase in the number of old people in work has an impact on other groups is one that I think we are all in violent agreement on—the lump of labour fallacy. The figures that we have just seen demonstrate that it is a fallacy. If we exclude young people who are in full-time education, the employment of under-25s has risen by nearly 70,000 in the past year alone and by 140,000 since 2010.
I will pick up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, that 16% of young people are still unemployed. The actual figure, if students are excluded, is 6.8% of young people unemployed at that level. So we should not worry about a rise in employment in one group damaging the chances of another. We are not in a zero-sum game. A recent report for the European Parliament which looked at employment trends for older and younger workers across the EU found no trade-off between rates of employment. The IFS study which the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, quoted looked specifically at the UK. It concluded:
“When looking at the entire 1968 to 2005 period … we find no evidence of long-term crowding-out of younger individuals from the labour market by older workers”.
It is interesting how Governments used to think like this. The 1970s and 1980s programmes such as the Job Release Scheme, which positively encouraged older people to leave the market so that it would free up jobs for the young, had their origins in that thinking. It is interesting that the IFS concluded that that particular programme did achieve one of its aims. It reduced employment among older workers but there was no evidence of a corresponding effective employment of young people.
The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, raised the Saga report on how over-50s make an important and growing contribution to society. It made the point that she was making that encouraging people to leave the labour force early reduces spending power and demand in the economy.
Evidence from research goes in the entirely opposite way to the lump of labour fallacy, because older and younger workers are likely to complement each other. A study by the RAND organisation in 2009, using data from 22 OECD countries, suggested that there was a positive effect. In other words, for every one additional older person in work, the overall effect was nearly 1.1 more people in work. Far from the substitution effect, firms may choose to hire both because this brings a healthy mix of skills, qualities and experiences.
I want to outline briefly what the Government are doing for older workers. We abolished the default retirement age in 2011; we extended the right to request flexible working for all; and we have introduced Fit for Work, which helps with sickness absence and provides an occupational health assessment and health and work advice to employees, employers and GPs. In Jobcentres, work coaches have the flexibility to offer all claimants a comprehensive menu of support. In addition, in last year’s Autumn Statement we announced two pilots, which will support 3,000 people who need help to move back into work or start a new career in a different sector. These will be based on our current sector-based work academies and work experience programmes—currently more orientated at youngsters—but tailored to the needs of older people.
We are planning two further trials that will explore what may provide effective support for these older claimants. The first will look at support through a career review-based approach and the second will look at providing IT and digital support. We will also introduce regional champions in Jobcentre Plus, as referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. That champion role will start later this month. I want these roles to work with local employers and share good practice so that we can promote activity for older claimants in the regions.
The noble Baroness raised the issue of those made involuntarily workless and talked about there being 1 million of them. We published Fuller Working Lives to set out what the Government and others are doing to tackle this. We are making good progress on the commitments in respect of it.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked about the Work Programme. That treats everyone as an individual rather than looking at this on the basis of age. Up to September 2014, there had been 300,000 referrals of people aged 50 and over, which resulted in more than 42,000 job outcomes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, made a point about flexibility in pension schemes. That is key, in that it enables more flexible retirement options. We are bringing in new flexibilities in April for people with defined contribution pension arrangements by introducing new freedoms in terms of how and when they access their pension payments.
As for policies for younger workers, sector-based work academies are available in England and Scotland. That has been a very successful programme, with a combination of pre-employment training, work experience and guaranteed interviews. They are local and demand-led, so you have different sectors depending on where you are running those schemes. There have been more than 88,000 sector-based work academy starts for 18 to 24 year-olds since the scheme began in August 2011. We have had 247,000 work experience placements for 18 to 24 year-olds, and various healthy outcomes, with half of work experience participants off benefits 21 weeks after starting their placements. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, raised the issue of the success of apprenticeships. There have been more than 2 million since the election.
This is more of a theoretical debate than a political one, but I will just pick up very gently the description given by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, of some of the Labour policies, such as the jobs guarantee. I am in despair about all that, because that is the kind of top-down approach of saying, “We can produce the jobs for the people and put them into them”, which is exactly the wrong way to go about creating a dynamic economy. You want to have people put into real jobs that will last. I just express my despair and move on.
To pick up the point about apprenticeships again, we clearly need to see how that works for older people. It has worked really well for younger people and is something that Ros Altmann has been championing for older people. As noble Lords have pointed out, there are schemes now, from Barclays for example, to do that. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, they have been successful: 89% of employers report that that process has helped their business and improved their quality and standards. Last year the Education Secretary announced a new careers and enterprise company for schools to transform the provision of careers education and advice for young people. I repeat my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for bringing this Question to the House. Today’s contributions have been interesting and I think we are all fundamentally in agreement, apart from my one point of despair.
Youth unemployment is a really serious matter and this debate has been another opportunity for us to emphasise that increasing the number of older workers does not have an adverse effect on youth employment.
HIV/AIDS
(9 years, 8 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Fowler
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to meet the continuing challenge of HIV and AIDS.
Lord Fowler (Con)
My Lords, we are nearing the end of a Parliament, which is, perhaps, a good time to assess what progress has been made in this important area, where we are and where we want to be. I start by congratulating the Government on two measures of immense importance. The first was their decision to enable equal marriage, which did a vast amount not only to encourage equality but at the same time to fight prejudice against gay people, which stands against progress in fighting HIV and AIDS literally around the world. The second was to double their contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which brings invaluable help to areas where the death toll has been immense. AIDS alone has been responsible for 35 million deaths around the world since the epidemic began. Frankly, the criticism of the National Audit Office that this was an example of a last-minute decision was about as far from the mark as it was possible to get. It was first promised not by the current Secretary of State but by her predecessor, Andrew Mitchell, and it was, as I say, extraordinarily welcome.
However, in this short debate I want to concentrate on this country and ask whether we are making the progress that we should. In bare statistics, last year there were almost 6,500 new HIV diagnoses. I have just come back from Russia, where I looked at the position there. Indeed, they were kind enough to present me with a medal for 25 years service. It is a damn sight more than I ever get from the Department of Health, I can tell noble Lords, but I fear that it makes me no more sympathetic to their policies, which last year resulted in 85,000 new HIV diagnoses. The figure goes up remorselessly each year.
The temptation is, against that background, to say about Britain, with fewer than 6,500 new HIV diagnoses, what are you worried about and what is the problem? The problem, basically, is that today in Britain there are 100,000 men, women and children living with HIV. That is almost double the number accessing care a decade ago. The National Health Service now spends £860 million a year on treatment and care: almost £1 billion a year. Worst of all, of those 100,000 with HIV, about a quarter are undiagnosed. They do not know that they have the virus and, of course, other things being equal, they spread HIV further. In other words we have, in my view, an undoubted public health crisis and, although we now have antiretroviral drugs which prolong life, we still face the situation which we faced, frankly, in the 1980s, with no cure and no vaccine.
Against such figures, what can we do and what are we doing? The obvious step is to put the maximum effort into prevention. We save £320,000 in lifetime costs for every infection which is prevented. Top of the list in prevention policy is to persuade ever more people to be tested. We are not going to win when we have around 25,000 people untested and undiagnosed in the community. Second to that is that we also need to persuade people to continue with their treatment once they are on it. Too many drop off. The point to recognise, generally, here is that persuasion can work, provided that sufficient imagination is put into the messages and it is backed by sufficient resources. We established that back in 1986-87 with the promotion of condom use and the warnings against shared needles.
The Select Committee that I chaired in 2011—I am glad to see that one of its members, my noble friend Lord Gardiner, is sitting very near me—raised this point with the Government. We said that publicity was inadequate and should be increased, so what did the department do? It cut it further. Today, the department spends about £2.4 million a year nationally on promoting prevention. I repeat that the cost of treatment and care is £860 million a year. It is, frankly, a ludicrous position. We spend hundreds of millions on treating the casualties but next to nothing on trying to prevent those casualties coming about. The defence for this is that, in addition to the national campaign, another £10 million or £11 million is spent by local authorities, although the figures suggest that some of the most affected local authorities are spending next to nothing, if anything at all.
Frankly, making every allowance in the book, the amount we spend on trying to prevent infection is seriously inadequate. Prevention is simply not being given the priority that it deserves. If it were not for the NGOs and the volunteers, our overall national policy would, in my view, be not only in trouble but in tatters.
Therefore, I say to the Government that we need a new campaign to encourage testing, which is the obvious glaring gap in our policy. A few weeks ago, I proposed to the Minister on the Floor of the House that a task force should be set up to explore how to take that forward. The Minister, as is his custom, was courteous—even encouraging—but, frankly, I have heard no more, doubtless because he was planning the detail of the campaign that I set out. Perhaps this afternoon he might come forward with those proposals.
I would like to make two further points. The first is on drugs and harm reduction policy generally. We introduced clean needles and then methadone as a policy back in the 1980s. Methadone is not injected and therefore has an obvious use in reducing transmission. It has been demonstrably successful as a policy. For the last 25 years the number contracting HIV in this country through shared needles has been around 1% of the total—almost imperceptible. Therefore, it is vastly important that that policy is maintained and that there is no lurching away from it. Why do I say, “lurching away from it”? In recent weeks there has been a suggestion that policy is changing. There has been a hint that drug users should be forced into taking treatment—taken not only off injecting drugs but off methadone as well. I say to the Minister that my only advice on this is to go very cautiously indeed.
Of course, we all want to see as many people as possible living a drug-free life, but we should not underestimate the difficulties, which are not going to be reconciled by a speedy review of a few weeks. If you want to see the alternative, again, go to Russia: see the treatment centres there and the attempt at rehabilitation, and look at the figures. They show that after 12 months of treatment and rehabilitation 80% or 90% go back to injecting drugs, and after five years virtually everyone does.
Given that drug users have never really been able to be forced off drugs in the way that seems to be imagined, I think we might also remember that methadone can lead to a recovered life. I remember visiting a clinic in Ukraine, where the doctor in charge basically said just that—that, although some of them had been on methadone for six, seven or eight years, they had at least been restored to society: they held down jobs and were relating to their families again. Basically, I would like an assurance that there is no intention on the part of the Government to turn their back on sensible harm reduction policies.
My last point I make in précis. The latest research shows that the drug Truvada can very substantially cut HIV for men who have sex with men. It prevents HIV infection. Given that men who have sex with men are the group most affected by HIV in this country, it seems obvious that we should develop that policy as quickly as we can. Of course, there are costs to the policy, but there are even greater costs in doing nothing.
My conclusion is this. On a number of issues, such as the increased contribution to the Global Fund, this country has been among the leaders in the world, but I fear that nationally, inside Britain, there are too many gaps in our policy to say that we lead the world. What we can say is that we have some of the finest and most devoted clinicians, NGOs, voluntary organisations and officials. If I had one word of advice for the Government, it would be that Ministers should raise their general policy game to the level of those doctors and volunteers who work so tirelessly in this country to eliminate HIV and AIDS.
Lord Cashman (Lab)
My Lords, I begin with what is a normal courtesy but I really mean it. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for securing this debate and for his dedication and overwhelming commitment to the issues of HIV/AIDS and non-discrimination. I also want to develop the theme which he outlined. There has been a massive expansion globally of HIV interventions, which has transformed the HIV epidemic and the broader public health landscape, demonstrating that the right to health can be realised even in the most trying circumstances. I remember well the 1980s when, as a gay man, I saw AIDS and HIV portrayed in the media as the gay plague. We have moved further, and onwards, since then. I welcome that move and I welcome this Government’s commitment and their increased funding, particularly for the Global Fund.
There has been much progress in the developing world but I must express my concern at our view, now taken, that we should pull back in those so-called middle-income countries such as South Africa, where there is a high and increasing prevalence of HIV infection. To pull back in those middle-income countries, with this Government leading on asking the Global Fund to pull back in them, will reverse all the good that has been done.
I turn now specifically to the United Kingdom. People with HIV who receive appropriate treatment, as we know, have a near-normal life expectancy and are very unlikely to transmit the virus. Yet the proportion of people receiving a late diagnosis, according to Library statistics, was 47% in 2012. An estimated 22% of people living with HIV in the United Kingdom are unaware of their infection or status. Increasing HIV testing is therefore important so that treatment can be given and onward transmission prevented. Successful prevention depends on a combination of testing, treating and behavioural change. Giving antiretroviral drugs to those at risk could reduce infections. We know that that work is being rolled out in the United States. Work is also being done here on that. I have to express concerns at some parts of the media comparing the cost of this treatment to that of cancer care. When it comes to the health of an individual, comparisons are odious. There are concerns that the separation of commissioning HIV treatment and prevention has negatively impacted patients.
I have specific questions for the Minister but I will come to those shortly. First, let me refer to the National AIDS Trust and its press release of 20 February 2015. In its report, HIV Prevention—Underfunded and Deprioritised, the charity states:
“Not enough money is being spent on HIV prevention to have any impact on the … new HIV infections”—
as was outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. The trust estimates that,
“in 2014/15 £15 million was spent nationally on HIV prevention compared with £55 million allocated in 2001/02 … In this time the number of people living with HIV has trebled whilst the amount spent on prevention has decreased to less than a third of the original budget”.
This makes no sense whatever. The report continues:
“This estimate is based on information provided to NAT from local authorities in England with a high prevalence of HIV. £10 million was spent in 2014/15 on HIV prevention in these areas—this works out at only 70p per person. The report found that in local authorities with high prevalence of HIV less than 1% of local authority public health allocation is spent on HIV prevention. In 2013 the NHS spent 55 times more on HIV treatment and care in these areas than local authorities spent on HIV prevention”.
According to the chief executive of the NAT:
“Our research found, shockingly, in the 58 areas of highest prevalence of HIV in England, seven local authorities weren’t spending anything on primary HIV prevention or on additional testing services. Worryingly we also found no correlation between level of HIV prevalence in an area and how much was being spent on prevention”.
The report continues:
“The HIV charity is also concerned that more problems are on the horizon when the ring-fencing for the public health budget is removed. Currently, local authorities are given money to provide basic services such as sexual health clinics. In April 2016 they will be able to spend this money on anything”.
To quote the chief executive:
“In the current climate of cuts and pressure on budgets we are extremely worried this money will be used to shore up other areas of council spend. This would be a disaster for public health in this country”.
I now come to my questions. Will the Government address this funding gap, maintain public health ring-fencing and prioritise HIV prevention and testing services? It is three weeks to purdah and the new financial year. The people who are supposed to be managing the national HIV prevention programme, which has been cut in half, have still had no instruction on how the money should be reallocated, let alone spent. They are dependent on getting approval for this from the Department of Health, which means that the charities involved will not even get the four weeks’ notice they need to give notice, in turn, to staff who may lose their jobs. How do the Government intend to ensure continuity of service?
We also need a nationally co-ordinated approach to ensure that we use ever-decreasing resources effectively to reduce undiagnosed HIV and forward transmission. How will the Government ensure a co-ordinated approach when they are not planning and consulting on it? We have a situation where reducing duplication and using money wisely is paramount, yet I am reliably informed that there is a total abdication of any national responsibility for this. Both the Department of Health and Public Health England say they can only advise. It is deeply worrying and I look to the Minister for his replies.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for his leadership on this issue. It was needed right at the beginning of the epidemic, and he gave it, and it is needed again very strongly now and over the next few years. I am going to talk about the situation outside the UK. I have told the Minister that I am not expecting instant replies to the two questions I have, but I hope that they can be passed on to the Department for International Development.
This is, of course a global epidemic and it is in our interest to see that it is contained and managed globally as well as locally. As the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Cashman, both said, the UK is very influential in this regard. Globally, there has been amazing progress. The epidemic is coming under control in the sense that more people are going on to treatment than there are new infections each year. That is true even in South Africa, thanks to changes in the political leadership there. But it is still devastating and it will be for years to come, so there is much more to do.
In 2013, 35 million people were estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS, of whom less than half had been diagnosed; 13 million were in treatment; 2.3 million more received treatment; 2.1 million more became infected and 1.5 million died. This is an awful picture. In those countries that are particularly badly affected, HIV/AIDS affects everything about health and health services. In South Africa, there is 5% prevalence and there are huge costs to its health system. It will grow and be more costly over the next few years because the WHO has changed its guidelines about when to put people on treatment, and still many people are not yet receiving treatment. This is a big problem. Nevertheless, UNAIDS aims to see what it describes as the end of the epidemic by 2030. That will require increased funding until 2020, and it will decline thereafter.
There are economic issues as well. This is not just about human devastation, illness and death; it is also about the economy. Conservative estimates suggest that the gross national product of South Africa has decreased by at least 1% per year because of the illness of its people. I shall sum up this quick summary of the situation with the South African Government’s vision for 2030—in 15 years’ time—which reflects this reality. They aim to have life expectancy reaching 70 and a generation of under-20s largely free of HIV. That is a great vision from where they are, but it is also rather sad that is what we are talking about. This is a long march. It is a very long-term issue which needs, as I said, champions like the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, to keep the momentum up globally as well as nationally.
What are the key issues? The first is funding. The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, has already pulled out one extremely important point, which is that most people who are affected are now in middle-income countries, and the development agencies of the world, particularly DfID, do not give money to middle-income countries. Even the Global Fund, which is cash strapped, is having to prioritise the poorest countries. This is a wider issue about development because most poor people now live in middle-income countries. Therefore, we cannot think about this as being aid to poor countries; it is much more targeted.
The response of groups such as the International HIV/AIDS Alliance is to try to raise money locally. This is very difficult. I am proud to be the chair of Sightsavers, which works, for example, in India, where we can raise money because you can raise money for elderly people with cataracts or children going blind relatively easily in any society. It is much harder when you are talking about intravenous drug users or men who have sex with men. It is even harder in those countries than it is in our own country. That is the second big point about prejudice and discrimination against the groups that are most at risk. In purely health terms, this affects treatment and prevention and is very counterproductive economically and in health terms—but, of course, there are other profound ethical and human rights issues here that ought to be addressed.
The third issue that people who work in this area tell me about is the loss of priority that is coming to HIV/AIDS because, at the end of this year, we will move on from the millennium development goals to the sustainable development goals, which I support. Let me be very clear: I think that the sustainable development goals, which put an emphasis on the whole of the health system, are exactly what is needed for the future in low and middle-income countries, particularly in the light of things such as Ebola. I think the case is made by Ebola. However, it raises a very serious issue of transition from HIV/AIDS being central to international development to it not being in quite the same position, and how that transition will be managed. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on HIV/AIDS has just published an excellent report, Access Denied, which identifies these and other more detailed issues about problems in the supply chain, monitoring, pricing, R&D and so on.
What should Her Majesty’s Government do? There are many recommendations from that All-Party Parliamentary Group, but I shall draw out three. In asking questions, I want to congratulate the UK on its global leadership on this issue and, indeed, on development in global health generally. It is because DfID is so influential globally that the signals it gives on aid are fundamental. It is supporting the Global Fund. Indeed, it increased its support, and it needs to use its influence to make sure that there is continuing support from other countries. However, its recent decision to stop funding work on an AIDS vaccine is counterproductive. Will Her Majesty’s Government reassess the decision to stop funding an AIDS vaccine, as was proposed by the All-Party Parliamentary Group?
The second issue is that as the needs move to middle-income countries from low-income countries, the funding gap needs to be addressed. It is important not just that external parties such as DfID do something about this but that the countries themselves are encouraged to take up the slack. There were, after all, the Abuja agreements of 2003 and 2001, whereby every African Government committed themselves to spend 15% of their expenditure on health. Only six have yet hit that target. So there is a great challenge that should be put to the middle-income countries.
My second question is: what are Her Majesty’s Government doing to help facilitate continued access to funding for countries moving to middle-income status? That includes encouraging national Governments to play an increased part. My final point is not in the form of a question. The UK is also very influential on civil liberties, and it needs to argue the case about discrimination louder than it has. I know that that is difficult. I have spent a lot of time in Africa. I was recently in Uganda, where I came across a situation where Ugandan doctors were extremely annoyed—with the Americans, I am happy to say, rather than the Brits—because on the one hand Americans from various gay groups were arguing their case and on the other, Americans from various church groups were arguing their case. They said: “The last thing that we need is an American war on our territory”. They likened that to some other things that had happened earlier in their history.
It is difficult to intervene in any other country, but we need to take a stance as a nation about who we are as well as who our friends are and how we work with other people. There is a vital health case to be made here, because this is about health and the economy as well as people’s beliefs about society. The right to health is fundamental. It is also ultimately an economic case. Healthy populations can be productive and prosperous.
Finally, I support the call made by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, at the end of his excellent book, where he says that there should be some sort of international convention based here in London—something that this Government or a Government formed after May should take up—on protecting the rights of people who are discriminated against in that way.
Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)
My Lords, like other noble Lords, I am indebted to my noble friend Lord Fowler for securing this debate today and for giving us, as he said, what is probably the last opportunity before Dissolution to discuss the issue of HIV and AIDS.
It is therefore a fitting moment to pay him the warmest of tributes, as other noble Lords have done, for everything that he has done throughout this Parliament to keep this subject right up at the top of the political agenda, focusing on not just the impact of HIV and AIDS in the United Kingdom but on the terrible scourge of the epidemic in so much of the developing world, which the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, spoke about so eloquently just now. I only hope that at the end of the next Parliament in five years’ time, we will have seen more progress at home but also some of the incredibly important changes that need to take place in the developing world as a prerequisite to tackling HIV and AIDS. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord that the most crucial is the rapid decriminalisation of homosexuality in many Commonwealth countries. Criminalisation is not just a moral outrage; it is a public health disaster, and we must do everything that we can to stop it. I do not want to dwell on that subject today, but it would be good to hear from the Minister that the Government are continuing to put pressure on Commonwealth institutions to live up to their obligations under the Commonwealth charter.
I do not know whether it is a coincidence or whether my noble friend has engineered it this way, but this very week is the 30th anniversary of the approval of the first commercial HIV blood test on 2 March 1985. That was a seminal moment in the battle against what was then an unstoppable horror. Testing meant that the blood supply could essentially be freed of HIV. It also helped scientists and other public health officials to determine the extent of the epidemic. For the first time, it empowered individuals by allowing them to know their status and to protect their partners if they had been infected. What a change 30 years have made. Today, HIV testing is at an all-time high. As I understand it, in the United States, 86% of people who are infected know their status, although that means that an eye-watering 186,000 people in the United States of America do not know that they are infected.
Despite that success, however, rates of infection are still disturbingly high, as we have heard, with 6,000 people in the UK diagnosed in 2013. That figure crosses every age group. I am grateful to the Minister for providing information on that point in a Written Answer to me in the past few weeks. While the majority of people diagnosed in 2013 were in the 35 to 50 age group, 462 new cases of HIV among gay men were in those aged under 24 and 308 were in those aged over 50. Among heterosexuals, 105 women and 47 men were aged between 15 and 24 and 439 were over 50. This is still a virus that respects no boundary of age or background.
Despite the fact that an HIV diagnosis is no longer, as it was 30 years ago, a death sentence—indeed, those infected and properly treated will probably have a normal, healthy lifespan—problems, as we heard during the debate, remain. One is prevention, as my noble friend pointed out, and the other is ensuring ever-higher levels of testing. On prevention, there is a great deal of hope and optimism with the development of pre-exposure prophylaxis presenting incredibly exciting opportunities. Although it has been available in the US for some time, it is not yet here, but should, I believe, be available to all those at risk in the UK as soon as possible. As Yusef Azad at the National AIDS Trust—and I pay tribute to its work—put it to me, the very recent PROUD trial looking at the impact of pre-exposure prophylaxis here,
“is a prevention game-changer which we cannot afford to ignore. As a much needed addition to—not substitute for—condom use, its costs are modest when compared with the lifelong costs of treating someone with HIV if we fail to prevent their infection”.
He is absolutely right, and I hope that NHS England will heed those wise words. Action sooner rather than later will save not just lives, but money too. I support everything that my noble friend said. It must be Mickey Mouse economics to spend so much on treatment and so little on prevention.
Similarly, there has been much progress on testing, as we have heard, but the figures for late diagnosis—still above 40%—are shockingly high. To tackle that, I hope that, among other things, the NICE public health guidance recommending that high-prevalence local authorities commission HIV testing to be offered to all those admitted to a hospital and all those registering with a GP is implemented soon. The Government and Public Health England can play a powerful leadership role, and I would be grateful if the Minister could take the lead today in calling for such important initiatives to be implemented.
Of course, key to both testing and prevention is the ongoing problem of stigma. The National AIDS Trust survey on public attitudes published in December last year still makes very depressing reading. If anything, public knowledge and attitudes seem to be deteriorating, and we need to take action to reverse that, otherwise, all the good work on testing and prevention could be in vain. This is, of course, a matter that goes well beyond central government, but local government, the NHS and schools all have a role to play. The Government can, again, take a lead, and I know that the Minister, who has done so much to help in this area in the past, will take up that challenge and this afternoon energise all those involved to redouble their efforts to tackle stigma.
I am conscious that there are no noble Baronesses speaking this afternoon, undoubtedly because of the clash with the debate on International Women’s Day, but I want to say a word or two about the special issues still faced by women with HIV and to cast a quick glance beyond our own shores to where the situation for people with HIV is still incredibly difficult and in some cases horrific. I commend an excellent report published in the past few months by the Salamander Trust, which last summer conducted a global survey on the sexual and reproductive health and human rights of women living with HIV. Of those who responded in a survey that took place in 94 countries, a shocking 89% reported that they had experienced violence or fear of violence since or because of their diagnosis— in their homes, in their communities and even, most appallingly of all, in healthcare settings. Only 50% of respondents found their healthcare service providers to be well trained and knowledgeable about their condition. A significant number emphasised the challenges of poverty and the resulting strain that it places on mental as well as physical and sexual health. It is little wonder that 80% of respondents reported experiences of depression, shame, loneliness and feelings of rejection.
The report contains a wealth of recommendations about how to improve the specific condition of many women across the globe living with HIV. I hope that the Government will be prepared to support such recommendations. It is an initiative that the Commonwealth in particular could pursue. Progress may be slow—I think that we all understand that—but this is a tangible way in which we could help improve the lot of thousands of lonely, frightened and vulnerable people across the globe.
As so often in debates on this subject, there is much significant progress to applaud and great hope and optimism, but there are problems, too: in tackling stigma in particular. There are serious challenges beyond our shores in tackling the criminalisation of homosexuality, which is turbo-charging the HIV epidemic in much of the world, in dealing with the special problems faced by women with HIV and in ensuring access to healthcare for all who need it. As I said earlier, some of those issues will take time to tackle, but I hope that this debate will again spur us to redouble our efforts both here in the UK and in the wider world one day to bring to an end a horrific epidemic which has already claimed too many lives and will yet claim many more.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for his outstanding work on HIV and AIDS both here and globally, advocating action on prevention, treatment and care while attacking discrimination and stigma. As we have heard in this debate, it is estimated that 35 million people are living with HIV worldwide, with 1.5 million AIDS-related deaths in 2013. Here, 6,000 people were diagnosed as carrying the HIV infection in 2013, and 320 people were reported as having AIDS. An estimated 107,800 people are now living with HIV.
As we have heard in the debate, the UK is one of the world’s leading funders of global health. If we are to move beyond investments to control HIV and towards eradication, we desperately need new tools. Where there is an affluent market, as is the case with adult HIV drugs, we can see significant private investment. By contrast, there are very few formulations of paediatric HIV drugs, where the market is smaller and more heavily based in developing countries. UNAIDS highlights the fact that only 24% of children living with HIV currently have access to HIV treatment. Will the Minister support within government the recommendation from the HIV/AIDS APPG that the UK commissions an economic paper to contrast the total costs of developing and purchasing medical tools using the current R&D model with the costs of a delinked model?
As was asked by other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, can the Minister explain how the Government will address the growing problem in middle-income countries whereby funding is being pulled out from all directions, including from the Global Fund, while the pharmaceutical industry continues to expect MIC Governments to afford higher prices for ARV treatment?
In England, the Health and Social Care Act changed the commissioning and monitoring of HIV prevention, testing, treatment and care services. Conditions that require specialist expertise and medication are the responsibility of NHS England, including HIV treatment. In its Five Year Forward View, NHS England states that it plans to let local commissioners share responsibility for commissioning specialised services, incentivising them to direct funding towards local priorities.
Naturally, many patient groups are concerned about the impact on service standards leading to a possible postcode lottery. Their concern is heightened by the fact that there are so many outstanding questions about what co-commissioning will look like and no specific announcements related to HIV. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that the overall responsibility for the provision of services is clearly defined? It is also vital that standards of care are maintained across the country.
As we have heard in this debate, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, the Government have funded national HIV prevention programmes since 1996. In recent years, funding for these programmes has been progressively reduced. The current English national prevention programme HIV Prevention England—HPE—has been funded for three years until the end of March 2015. Funding for HPE is £2.4 million per year, which is less than the combined funding received by the previous prevention programmes in 2011 and 2012. In December 2014, the Government indicated that they intended to reduce funding for HPE by 50% to £1.2 million for 2015-16.
That decision was criticised by many organisations, who led a public campaign seeking reconsideration, and shortly afterwards it was reversed and a commitment made to fund the programme at current levels for a further year. Will the reallocated budget support a new programme of work or existing activities that are currently paid for with other budgets?
In addition to the national HPE programme, local authorities should be investing in complementary prevention initiatives as part of their public health responsibilities. However, National Aids Trust research shows that less than 0.1% of local funding allocated to public health in high HIV-prevalence areas is being spent on primary HIV prevention. A total of about 1.2 million men have sex with men and black African adults living in England. A budget of £1.2 million means that the national programme has only £l to spend a year for each person in its target audience. Does the Minister believe that that is enough to achieve the programme’s objectives? The estimated lifetime cost of treating someone with HIV is £360,777. That means that even if a £2.4 million programme prevented only seven new transmissions a year, it would save the NHS money. Is there not a strong case for increasing the funding rather than cutting it?
Finally, I raise the issue of pre-exposure prophylaxis—PrEP—to which the noble Lord, Lord Black, referred. Really impressive research from England was released last week. I read it at the international retrovirus conference in Seattle. The study recruited men who have sex with men and trans women who were at elevated risk of acquiring HIV. They had multiple partners; condom use was inconsistent or irregular; rates of sexually transmitted infections were high; many participants had needed post-exposure prophylaxis before and recreational drug use was common. Participants were generally well-educated and in full-time employment. The fact that the study has demonstrated such a high and statistically significant level of efficacy with a few hundred participants tells us both about how effective PrEP is and how high the rate of infection is in some groups of gay men.
What is being done to ensure that this highly effective HIV-prevention intervention is made available to those who need it without delay? What work is being done to ensure that prescribing of PrEP is appropriately targeted to those who are most likely to benefit from it?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe) (Con)
My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend for today’s debate on this important issue. All of us know how much he personally has done to ensure that HIV and AIDS remain firmly on agendas, both at home and abroad. I may not be able to give him a medal, but I congratulate him on his book AIDS: Don’t Die of Prejudice, which is very timely and draws on his great experience. It is most welcome given that there is still, as we have heard today, much to do around the world to reduce the stigma and prejudice associated with HIV. I welcome, too, his appointment as a member of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.
Compared with many other countries, HIV prevalence in the UK remains relatively low: just under three per 1,000 of the adult population were living with HIV in 2013. Thanks to the Government’s early efforts and the leadership of my noble friend back in the 1980s, we have been spared the higher prevalence rates seen by other European countries and countries in other continents. Our confidential sexual health clinics are doing more and more HIV tests—more than a million in 2013, up 5% from 2012. The NHS continues to provide excellent, high-quality HIV treatment and care for everyone, with 90% having an undetectable viral load. Diagnosed early, the outlook for people with HIV in the UK is very good and most people can expect a near normal life expectancy. We also benefit from government’s sustained investment in Public Health England’s comprehensive HIV surveillance systems.
A 2014 report for the National AIDS Trust by Ipsos MORI reported that overall public support for people with HIV is higher than ever, with 79% of adults agreeing that people with HIV deserve the same level of support as people with cancer. Today, it is much easier to get an HIV test, with virtually all NHS sexual health clinics providing the option of same-day testing results. Like many other countries, we have virtually eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
However, we are acutely aware that challenges remain in how we tackle HIV. Although overall HIV prevalence in the UK is very low, there are marked variations. In London, HIV prevalence in men who have sex with men—MSM—is much higher, and in 2013 one in eight men were living with HIV, compared to one in 26 outside London. In 2013, the prevalence rate of HIV was approximately 30 times higher for MSM and black African men and women compared to the general population in England. New diagnoses in MSM continue to increase, with 3,250 MSM diagnosed in 2013. Some of this increase will be due to increased testing but there is evidence of increasing risk-taking behaviours, which prevention services and community groups must address, taking into account the latest research and evidence. Achieving sustained changes in risk-taking is challenging for all.
Today, HIV prevention is just as important as it was in the 1980s. Investment in prevention also makes good economic sense, as noble Lords have argued, given that each new HIV infection represents between £280,000 and £360,000 in lifetime treatment costs alone. I will pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cashman. Although we have excellent NHS HIV treatment and care services, and antiretroviral treatment is highly effective, we are still seeing too many people diagnosed late, after treatment is recommended. This means they are unable to benefit from that treatment and risk transmitting HIV to their partners. Although we have seen improvements, HIV still attracts stigma, which is unacceptable and can deter people from getting tested and, if positive, taking their medication. I listened with care to my noble friend Lord Black on that theme.
In 2013, the department published A Framework for Sexual Health Improvement in England, setting out our ambitions to improve sexual health and well-being for all. These include reducing the rate of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, using evidence-based prevention and treatment initiatives; tackling HIV through prevention, including increasing access to testing to enable earlier diagnosis and treatment; and tackling the stigma, discrimination and prejudice often associated with sexual health and HIV.
Late diagnosis is included as an indicator in the public health outcomes framework and progress is being monitored. Since we published the framework, we know that HIV testing services are changing and becoming more innovative and focused around the needs of people. A good example of that is self-sampling HIV tests to reduce undiagnosed and late diagnosis of HIV.
Self-sampling HIV test schemes, such as those provided through the HIV Prevention England programme and the 56 Dean Street clinic in Soho, show that new types of tests are acceptable. Importantly, they appeal to people who choose not to use traditional services, and they are picking up undiagnosed HIV. An assessment of more than 4,000 people using self-sampling HIV testing services in November 2013 indicated that the majority had never had an HIV test, yet were reporting high-risk behaviour. It is encouraging that the rates of late diagnosis are improving, albeit slowly—down from 57% in 2004 to 42% in 2013. However, I agree that we need to do more to reduce this. Last year, we removed the ban on the sale of self-testing kits, which will eventually provide further options for testing.
Healthcare services, including general practice, especially in high-prevalence areas, have a key role in offering HIV testing. We were pleased to fund the Medical Foundation for HIV & Sexual Health to produce a web-based interactive tool to make testing easier in primary care. That was launched by MEDFASH last November.
Finally, my noble friend Lord Fowler referred to the prevention budget. We are committed to protecting the national HIV prevention budget for next year. I agree with him that we will need to be more ambitious and innovative in our plans to prevent the spread of HIV. We will be announcing our plans very shortly and these are likely to include a contract with the Terrence Higgins Trust for the HIV Prevention England programme, but we are also keen to be more innovative and ambitious in our response. At that time, the answer to one of the questions posed by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, will become clearer.
I will endeavour to answer as many questions as I can in the time available but I will of course write to noble Lords whose questions I cannot answer today. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, referred to a lack of clarity, as he perceives it, in the overall responsibility for commissioning these services. We recognise that the public health and NHS reforms have presented some challenges for sexual health services, and a number of actions have been taken or are planned. Public Health England has worked with partners, including the Local Government Association, and last summer published Making it Work: A Guide to Whole System Commissioning for Sexual Health, Reproductive Health and HIV. It is planning to undertake a review of commissioning arrangements for sexual health and HIV, similar to the one just published for drugs and alcohol.
My noble friend Lord Fowler called for a new campaign to promote testing. As I mentioned, the level of testing in sexual health clinics is increasing, which is encouraging. More than 1 million tests were carried out in 2013, which was an increase on the previous year. I agree that that level needs to increase, with action by local authorities, especially in high-prevalence areas. We need to offer new ways of testing, as I mentioned—for example, home sampling.
The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, rightly said that engagement with HIV charities was vital in determining the way forward. We see 2015-16 as a transition year towards a longer-term plan for sexual health promotion and HIV prevention. Public Health England will engage with key stakeholders on their new strategy, and my department has been discussing 2015-16 contracts since last November.
My noble friend Lord Black mentioned stigma. I remind us all that it is not just the NHS or the Government who have a role to play here, it is everybody. Community and faith groups, the media and individuals all have a part to play in eliminating HIV-related stigma. We should not forget some of the good news, part of which is that people with HIV are now protected by UK equalities legislation. The department’s framework for sexual health improvement is clear that there is a need to build an honest and open culture, where everyone can make informed decisions and responsible choices about relationships and sex.
The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, referred to the role of local authorities. We believe that local authorities are best placed to make decisions on investment in HIV health promotion services and primary prevention services. Reducing the late diagnosis of HIV is included in the public health outcomes framework, as I mentioned. We have provided local authorities with £8.2 billion of ring-fenced funding for public health, including HIV prevention. I completely understand the arguments in favour of the ring-fence; it has played an important part in ensuring a smooth transition of services and will continue to apply through the next financial year. We have always intended to review the need for it after that. We will do that during discussion on the next spending round, but of course it is for the next Government under the ensuing comprehensive spending review to decide on the continuation of the ring-fence.
In primary care, there is evidence that HIV testing is acceptable to patients and healthcare professionals. My department was pleased to fund the Medical Foundation for HIV & Sexual Health for its HIV testing in primary care project, launched last November.
I just mention the issue of PrEP and Truvada, referred to by my noble friends Lord Fowler and Lord Black and the noble Lord, Lord Collins. The recent results from the trial are encouraging. Further work is needed, and NHS England has set up an expert committee to consider the results of the PROUD study and whether PrEP should be provided by the NHS. Some outstanding issues are being considered in that process which prevent us forging ahead immediately with any action. For example, there is the evidence supporting use in other higher-risk groups, such as black African groups, and whether the recommendation should be for daily treatment, as in the study, or only to protect individuals for a certain high-risk event. The service model is also important here. I can write further on that to noble Lords.
I hope that I can reassure my noble friend Lord Fowler on the continuation of methadone and reducing the harm that drug-taking can cause. Again, I shall write to him on that subject, as I shall to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and all those who have spoken about global issues. For now, my time is up. I thank all contributors for their expert speeches, to which I shall respond.
Women: Domestic and Mental Abuse
Baroness King of Bow
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the role that women’s refuge centres play in protecting victims of domestic and mental abuse.
Baroness King of Bow (Lab)
My Lords, I want to open this debate by considering the fundamental importance of housing. I always remember that when I first became an MP, I received a leaflet called “Don’t Make Me Laugh”. Because of very poor-quality housing three of the children living in a particular house in my constituency, which had dripping wet damp on all the walls, had bad respiratory and asthmatic conditions. The doctor had said to the mother, “You must make sure that your children don’t laugh”. The importance of housing should be seen as a fundamental public service, in the same way as education or health, because a successful housing policy is never just about bricks or mortar. This is particularly true when you add domestic violence to the mix.
As we all know, domestic violence accounts for one in four murders in British society—murders of a woman by her partner or ex-partner—and costs our economy an extraordinary £15.7 billion per annum. Just think of the waste, never mind the human misery, which is unquantifiable. I spoke at an event last night for Housing for Women. Its domestic violence helpline received 2,000 calls last year. It is just one small charity working in the area. Across the country, the police receive a call from a survivor of domestic violence every 30 seconds.
I initiated this debate because I have been particularly struck by the work of Women’s Aid, an incredible organisation which works to help women and children survivors of domestic violence. It is expert in the matter and it understands—and would like us and those in Government to understand—that we need a needs-led intervention for this issue. Critically, we need to help women and children achieve long-term independence. I want to say how much I welcome the Government’s announcement of new money, which I will come back to. The problem is that it is a short-term stop-gap measure. It is none the less clearly very welcome and I genuinely thank the Government for what they have done there.
The Women’s Aid annual survey found in 2014 that a third of all referrals to refuges were turned away. A third of those women who arrive looking for shelter and seeking refuge from violence, and sometimes despicable torture as well, were turned away. Women’s Aid would like to see a national network of specialist domestic violence refuges that are protected and have a new model of sustainable funding.
I begin with an example of a survivor case study because quite often when we talk about the human misery, the statistics do not quite capture the experience. I will give only one example; I have given many others in many other speeches on many other occasions. Mandy experienced 18 years of domestic violence at the hands of her partner, which included severe physical abuse, rape and humiliation in front of her children. Every element of her life was controlled by her partner. He made her leave her job when she got a promotion. She tried to escape on numerous occasions but he would track her down. He hacked into her medical files, broke into her property and repeatedly attacked and threatened the whole family until she went back.
Mandy’s eldest son witnessed a particularly horrific attack in which Mandy nearly lost her life. Her son was so traumatised when his father was let out of prison that he committed suicide rather than live in constant fear of his father coming back to get them. Without specialist refuges for Mandy to go to and services which understood the level of danger they were in, she does not think that she would be alive now. They provided not only a roof over the heads of her and her children, but specialist knowledge to help protect her from a dangerous perpetrator. They helped her to rebuild her life and gave her the ongoing support she needed.
That is what Mandy needed then. What we need now is a new model of funding and commissioning that promotes a sustainable service and high-quality care. Going back to what the Government have done, in November 2014 the Government responded to the SOS campaign by announcing a £10 million fund for specialist domestic violence refuges. The fund will seek to deal with some of the problems that I and others, including Women’s Aid, have pointed out, very vocally, around the need to keep refuges open, first and foremost, to ensure that non-local women are not restricted from accessing services and to improve what provision there is. As I have said, this £10 million fund is extremely welcome; however it will end in March 2016. This will impact Women’s Aid and the other incredible organisations up and down the country that seek to protect women in such terrible circumstances. These will be left in the same position that they were in last October: they have no long-term, sustainable funding.
This debate also touches on the issue of mental abuse and I want to flag up some of the issues there. Clearly, domestic violence has an enormous effect on one’s mental health. A third of all female suicide attempts and half of those by ethnic minority women are attributed to past or current experiences of domestic violence. Some 70% of women psychiatric in-patients and 80% of women held in secure psychiatric facilities have a history of physical or sexual abuse. That is an incredible figure. If we are to deal with those women who have the biggest problems, we need to deal with the issue facing 80% of them, which is a history of physical or sexual abuse. Clearly, the impact on children is devastating.
My noble friend Lady Thornton has previously highlighted cases in the south-west of England and in Chester West and Chester, where vulnerable women fleeing domestic violence no longer have access to specialist accommodation, or where numbers of women and children from outside local authorities are being capped. I know that the Government are aware of this issue. What will happen when this funding round ends? The Minister will also know that there are still authorities where services are not available to women from outside the area. Obviously, if one is fleeing a psychotic, violent perpetrator, one wants to get as far away as possible, not to be in the same authority.
In Northamptonshire, the county council planned to cut all its support for domestic violence refuges. After a successful campaign with Labour colleagues and the refuges themselves, the council backed down. However, the funding has been reduced, especially for Nene Valley Christian Family Refuge, one of the few organisations in the area to support women. It helps women who have been brought over for arranged or forced marriages and who are especially vulnerable. I trust that the Minister shares my concern that such vital services are being put at risk. What advice does he have for refuges that are seeking long-term funding beyond 2016? Does he agree that we need a new, sustainable model? Does he agree, in particular, that if we focus only on high-risk victims, we fail to appreciate the fluid nature of risk? We need to look at need as well as risk or we will not get a full picture.
Finally, in the time remaining, will the Minister make a statement on the Government’s understanding of the gendered nature and impact of abuse? Too often, the professionals charged with dealing with this subject, as we saw in the Statements to Parliament this week on child abuse in Oxfordshire, are simply not aware of how their decisions endanger vulnerable people, often young women. Those experiences lead to a lifetime of catastrophe. I truly thank the Government for averting catastrophe for some women like Mandy, but should we not do more to avert catastrophe for all women like Mandy?
Baroness Newlove (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady King, for drawing the Committee’s attention to the plight of women and men who experience domestic abuse, and the availability of refuges for them. In my role as Victims Commissioner for England and Wales, I have met many women who have suffered almost unimaginable abuse at the hands of their partners and have been faced with homelessness as a result. The Government’s commitment to assist women, and in some cases men, to escape the abuse that they are suffering is admirable. However, it is clear that more needs to be done.
We hear a lot about statistics relating to the prevalence of domestic abuse. We know for example that: one in four women will experience domestic violence or abuse at some point in their lives; that almost 100 women are killed every year as a result of an act of domestic abuse; and that on average a domestic abuse victim will attempt to flee the perpetrator several times before they successfully manage to do so. Local housing authorities have a clear duty towards victims of abuse. Housing and accommodation provide a pivotal role in making sure that victims can be made to feel safe by providing them with a refuge from the abuse they are suffering.
There is a real problem in the availability of accommodation for women escaping abusive partners. While there are many refuges undertaking commendable work, they are buckling under the pressures of being able to provide a place of safety for all victims who need it. The lack of availability at refuges across England and Wales tells a sad story. Knowing that a victim can access such services might help them to feel more able to escape their abuser. However, where victims are continually being told that there is insufficient space for them at refuges, or where housing authorities are unable to provide appropriate accommodation, this important lifeline presents an increased risk that the victim will remain where she is and possibly risk her life by continuing to stay with the perpetrator.
I commend the Government’s recent funding of £10 million and I was heartened to see that the bidders had to demonstrate how they could develop sustainable services for victims, together in partnership with other authorities and sector specialists. In all the work that I do with communities and victims of crime, I have always said that valuable partnerships need to be sustainable partnerships. While domestic abuse victims need to know that they have a safe place through the provision of a refuge space or alternative housing accommodation, they must also be able to have access to other support services that are needed as a result of being in the refuge. I am not suggesting that specialist and support services need necessarily to be co-located at refuges or local housing centres, but the wide range of services and support that a victim will need when they have left the perpetrator are properly recognised. This will also include financial support and legal advice. In addition, it is likely that some women may also need help and support to manage or treat mental health issues as a result of any mental abuse they have also experienced during an abusive relationship.
We are all aware of the different forms that domestic abuse can take. Some victims will experience mental health issues as a result of the abuse they are suffering and some victims may in fact be abused because they have a mental health condition. Abuse can also very often worsen an existing condition. It is so important that any refuge provision or alternative housing solution recognises this and can facilitate intervention from mental health professionals where needed. The noble Baroness, Lady King, highlighted the outstanding work of Women’s Aid. Figures from Women’s Aid reports show that domestic abuse is the most prevalent cause of depression, anxiety and other mental health difficulties in women. It is so sad to hear that 70% of women psychiatric in-patients and 80% of those in secure settings have a history of physical or sexual abuse. It is all well and good for there to be an increase in the quality of refuge and alternative accommodation provision, but what really needs to be in place is a recognition of what specialist support women need to help them when they leave an abusive partner.
Staff at refuges should be required to complete training on mental health awareness so that these issues can be identified and victims assisted in accessing the right services for their specific needs. I do not wish to criticise the few services that do exist to help women accessing mental health support when they are placed in refuges or alternative accommodation. Rather, what I am trying to say is that we must not lose sight of the fact that some women are so traumatised they may not realise that they need specialist support in addition to a housing solution.
I do not consider myself to be a professional politician or a policymaker. My experience comes from being a victim of crime and seeing how agencies do not work together. In fact, I stand here today in this debate still going through those issues. I do not pretend to have all the answers, but from meeting and speaking to many victims of domestic abuse, I know that it is a complex and emotional issue which cannot be resolved by a one-size-fits-all response. This is why it is important that the Government consider how such support can be provided across the board so that victims of domestic abuse can be kept safe from further harm and further traumatisation through providing quality practical support. The biggest obstacle to this is that government departments, such as those responsible for homelessness, health and social services issues, do not seem to join together to address this issue. This simply is not good enough. There needs to be joined-up support across all the agencies, and women must be supported to grab the whole of their problems in the order that makes most sense to them.
The fact that we are having this debate today shows how we and society have moved forward in speaking about and recognising the nature and prevalence of domestic abuse, more so perhaps than previous generations. However, I know we can often become desensitised and be made complacent by facts and figures. We must remember that there is a real person behind each of these figures who has suffered, and continues to suffer, dreadful abuse despite the very best intentions of government and policymakers.
I am sickened and saddened by the numbers of domestic abuse victims suffering from mental health issues, more so when I hear that there is little funding available for those who can provide the services and specialist help to support these victims. I know the feeling of not feeling safe outside your home, and for these victims to not feel safe inside their homes because of the horrific abuse received by their partners must be hell on earth. These victims need to be listened to, and their experiences understood, to ensure that the most appropriate support can be identified for them. In doing so, we will provide a co-ordinated, accessible response which genuinely makes a difference to their lives.
The Lord Bishop of Derby
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady King, on securing this debate. I shall offer a brief case study and try to highlight some of the issues that we need to consider together. The contributions of the noble Baronesses, Lady King and Lady Newlove, and the briefing pack graphically show the scale and challenge of this issue.
To escape from domestic violence and mental abuse, people need safe space, because that is what they do not have, which is what is so destabilising. I shall explore what safe space looks like and how we might try to provide it securely so that it is genuinely safe. In Derby, where I work, an excellent organisation, Refuge, won a contract in November 2013 to provide a women’s refuge in the city. There are 25 spaces available and it is always full. There are probably 40 or 50 children as well as the women involved. There is a very high turnover because the contract states that the accommodation can be provided for 12 weeks only. That is the deal, so you create a bit of safe space, but as soon as you start feeling safe, you have to move. It offers a resettlement service for up to three months, which is good, but all the research shows that women need at least five or six months to begin to feel safe and settled. The aspiration for safe space is being frustrated by the 12-week turnover and the three-month limit on resettlement. The further graphic statistic that Refuge has shared with me is that 50% of the women it deals with have experienced death threats. That is the degree of unsafeness which we are trying to create an alternative to and a refuge from.
Of course, there is an issue about resourcing and models of provision. The February 2015 APPG report states:
“The current model for funding specialist domestic and sexual violence services is not fit for purpose”.
Since 2011, Refuge has had funding reductions in 80% of its service contracts, with some contracts cut by up to 50%. That is the background of our case study on some of the issues. People desperately need safe space and the struggle is to provide it and to fund it.
What might safe space look like, and where are we failing? Because of the lack of resources and of stable provision, there are fewer specialist services, especially for minority-ethnic communities and disabled women, so they are not being offered a safe enough space because there is not special provision for people in those categories. Similarly, Refuge reports that in some local commissioning the tenders specify mixed-bedroom provision. That may be an economic factor if you are short of money, but one of the things women are trying to get into a safe space for is to step away from a strong male environment. They need to be protected from that. To have tenders that specify that is rather alarming. That is not safe space either. As the noble Baroness, Lady King, said, there is a tendency to spend our money in our space and therefore to say that we will support local women only. As she said, women need to cross the boundary to feel safe, so if the space is going to be genuinely safe it needs to be shaped across boundaries, which requires more imagination about funding streams and how they can be deployed.
Another issue is the short contracts for commissioning. Refuge and others win one or two-year contracts. That is a start, but if you are going to build a reputation in a community for a safe and stable place, it needs to be there, because people learn about these things through gossip. It is only if it is there and stable that it feels safe to potential consumers. If every couple of years there is a new provider, a new image and all those new things that anybody has to put in to get established, the very people we are trying to help are going to wonder whether the new provider is up to it and what it is about. To construct a safe space requires stability, so that is a challenge for how we use limited funds. The danger is that if we do not get the provision of safe space right then, as we all know, women in vulnerable situations flee to the streets, which are the most unsafe spaces in our society.
I understand this very difficult problem of limited resources, but there are two issues that I want to raise. If we are serious about safe space being constructed and maintained, how can we marshal our funds so that there is stable provision, proper recognition of specialist needs and proper fluidity across local authority boundaries? We also have to encourage the statutory agencies that hold and administer funds to be proactive in working with the voluntary and faith sectors about the added value that we can bring along with the other forms of stability and safe space. As we found in considering the Modern Slavery Bill, in which I was involved, faith and voluntary groups can provide space alongside statutory providers. We are just there to love people, really, which helps people to feel safe, alongside all the proper provision of a bed and room of a certain size.
When the Minister replies, I encourage him to look at the limits of resources, how best to create a safe space that is stable, dependable and flexible for the right specialisms—that is a pretty big ask—and how faith and voluntary groups can be challenged to put their resources alongside the statutory ones to make the provisions as stable and effective as possible.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady King, for securing another debate on this important and, sadly, prevalent issue of domestic abuse. I hope that the Government are aware of the encouraging paradigm shift that is happening right now in domestic abuse services, such that many are now intervening early to prevent many women ending up in refuges. I must, however, stress at the beginning that I understand that the women and children who need the safety that refuges provide have typically somehow survived the most terrifying and sustained attacks on their bodies and personhood imaginable. Until we see the elimination of domestic violence—thankfully, many organisations are working towards that ambition—those safe havens will be needed.
Former hedge fund manager Diana Barran set up the greatly respected organisation Co-ordinated Action against Domestic Abuse, or CAADA. Diana’s starting point then and now is, “What would you want for your best friend?”. Being safe in her own home rather than living in secrecy in a refuge, possibly at the other end of the country, must be the goal if at all possible. CAADA, renamed as Safe Lives, recently concluded that it needs a fresh approach if it is to provide the best help, and it is strongly endorsing a paradigm shift towards early intervention, prevention and a family-based emphasis in domestic abuse work—all without in any way deprioritising safety, hence the new name.
I want to use my time today to draw your Lordships’ attention to how the best available practice in the country is seeking to achieve that shift and how policy can and must support it. My simple point is that intervening early is vital to break the cycle of domestic abuse that so many men and women are caught up in.
Although nothing excuses violence and it is by no means inevitable, childhood exposure to domestic abuse is one of the most powerful predictors of becoming both a perpetrator and a victim as an adult. However, organisations are increasingly grasping the urgency of working across the whole family, with victim, perpetrator and children being helped with all that they are contending with so that they can move on, but with safety of course the top consideration.
Atal Y Fro, for instance, Welsh for Safety in the Vale, was formerly known as the Vale of Glamorgan Women’s Aid. The name change reflects its broader base of working. It has become convinced over years of practice that if it works only with the mother and children, it is just putting a sticking plaster on the problem. It also refers to those using their service as men, women and children, rather than perpetrators and victims, not least to reflect the complexity of what is going on in many households where there is violence.
Many of your Lordships will know that research has revealed a typology of abuse, and that different forms require different solutions. Coercive and controlling abuse, or intimate terrorism, is not the same as situational couple violence, violent resistance or separation-instigated violence. In addition, Professor Murray Straus’s research has made it clear that a surprisingly similar proportion of women and men use violence against their partner, and one in seven men reports being abused by his partner or ex-partner. However, as men are usually stronger than women, they tend to inflict far greater physical harm.
I want to lay out four ways in which we can intervene early and how policy can support this paradigm shift. First, it is imperative that families are helped to build strong parent and child relationships in the early years to lay the foundations for secure relationships throughout life. Children who know that they are loved and cared for and who have learnt valuable interpersonal skills are far less likely to grow up feeling that they need to use violence in relationships or that they will inevitably be on the receiving end. Recent YouGov polling for the Centre for Social Justice found that 73% of the public think that tackling abuse requires acknowledging that perpetrators were often themselves young victims.
Secondly, it is essential that we encourage positive relationships in schools by building supportive school cultures, ensuring that students who need it can access counselling and mentoring services—great examples being Place2Be and Chance UK—and providing effective relationship education. The Government have acknowledged the very high prevalence of adolescents in abusive dating relationships by including 16 and 17 year-olds in the new definition of domestic abuse. Worryingly, patterns set in adolescence can define relationships in adulthood. Voluntary sector programmes such as those run by Love4Life in Loughborough aim to help adolescents develop the skills to enjoy non-violent, equal relationships, increase understanding of domestic abuse, encourage appropriate attitudes and reduce abusive behaviours. The Government should make relationship education mandatory and call it that, and teach the biology of sex, which is already mandatory, separately. Teachers often find relationship education very hard to deliver, so schools should draw in the voluntary sector as its outsider status means it can add real value.
Thirdly, there should also be help for high-conflict and otherwise risky couples going through key transitions such as pregnancy or early years of parenting, or when parents decide to separate. Couple relationship education programmes, as well as the help for parents mentioned earlier, needs to be offered in the community, ideally in family hubs. In its recent report, Fully Committed, the Centre for Social Justice extensively describes how Sure Start children’s centres should be evolved into one-stop shops in every community. These would offer a much wider range of help to parents to tackle the root causes of family breakdown and disadvantage.
Fourthly, prevention of ongoing and future abuse is also taking place where couples are being helped to explore staying together. Increasingly, and very carefully, mainstream service providers are no longer taking the break-up of the abusive relationship as their starting point of help for victims in cases of situational couple violence. However, couple counselling can be positively dangerous in cases of intimate terrorism.
Many people on the receiving end of domestic abuse desperately want to keep the family together but know that that can happen only if the abuse stops. If both partners have a strong desire to work the issues through, and whoever is being violent is taking full responsibility for their actions, therapeutic support can help end that abusive behaviour. It is very important to acknowledge that that may not mean that the couple stay together. Troubled families programmes must include this help for couples, where appropriate, as part of their drive to equip parents to provide safe, stable and nurturing relationships. Again, CSJ/YouGov polling found that three-quarters of the public agreed that services should be available, if they wanted them, to help couples stay together.
Returning to Safety in the Vale, there is much to learn from how to work with a range of organisations in a one-stop shop to help families with medium to low-risk abuse to reshape and restore their lives. Current evidence suggests that it has helped two-thirds of families to stay together safely through a strategy of education, prevention and intervention in the community—EPIC. This involves different evidence-based perpetrator programmes for men and women, a healthy relationships programme in every school in the Vale of Glamorgan, and couples work. The current pilot is largely being paid for through charitable foundations, but once it has proven its effectiveness, the aim is that local authorities can commission it with confidence. Its annual cost is around £83,000 with a conservative estimate of cost savings of around £1.4 million.
Finally, Safety in the Vale is still running a refuge, but it is straining with every sinew to drain away all need for it. Can the Minister please inform me where and how government policy is keeping in step with this promising shift towards early intervention?
Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)
My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady King, for initiating this debate, and for the other very interesting contributions on this important subject. I have no experience of women’s refuges, but I live in an all-female household with a wife, four daughters and two female dogs, so I have a strong interest in the opportunities available to women in the UK today and the terrible effects of domestic abuse when it occurs.
I want to make it clear that the Government believe that high-quality refuge provision plays a vital role in protecting victims of domestic abuse who find themselves in a situation so difficult that they are forced to flee their own homes. Being able to access a specialist domestic abuse refuge at the point a victim chooses to leave home can make the difference between life and death. The right reverend Prelate talked interestingly about safe space in this regard.
The Government’s approach to strengthening refuge provision is underpinned by clear legal duties to homeless victims, robust standards and significant investment. We are strongly committed to maintaining a resilient national network. That is why on 25 November last year in this House, my noble friend announced a £10 million fund to strengthen and boost refuge provision for vulnerable victims, as referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady King. That funding was put in place to respond to the concerns expressed by the sector. We will shortly announce the successful areas which will receive funding—unfortunately not in time for this debate. A significant number of local housing authorities will benefit from a share of the £10 million.
That funding will see local authorities working closely with some of the 400 specialist domestic abuse support providers, such as Refuge or My Sisters Place, which was advocated by the right reverend Prelate. Not only will it stop refuges closing but it will increase the number of bed spaces, improve services in existing refuges and place local refuges on a more sustainable footing. That is not all that we have done to ensure the long-term quality of provision in England. In November 2014, we used powers in the Housing Act 1996 to publish strengthened statutory homelessness guidance. This was developed with help from Women’s Aid, Imkaan and SafeLives, and it sets out clear standards of support that victims of domestic abuse can expect to receive.
Those standards cover a broad range of service areas including safety, health and well-being, children and young people and prevention. All those who will receive funding have signed up to these exacting standards and we expect others to follow suit now that they are under the statutory guidance. We know that these standards are effective as they were developed, as I said, with help from Women’s Aid and were derived from the national quality standards.
Although I think that the whole Committee agrees that refuges can play such an important role protecting victims at their most vulnerable, we must do all we can to prevent a situation from reaching crisis point. That begins to address the question that my noble friend Lord Farmer put at the end of his speech about early intervention. We are determined to continue to reach out to young people to encourage them to challenge unacceptable attitudes and behaviours. For example, the Home Office’s This is Abuse campaign is helping to reach young people. Only by preventing violence and abuse in the first place can we hope to make a sustainable change over the long term. Education has a very important role to play in encouraging young people to build healthy relationships. That is why we are committed to working with schools and other experts to ensure that young people are receiving age-appropriate information that allows them to make informed choices and stay safe.
Baroness King of Bow
While the Minister is on the subject of a sustainable future, is there anything he can do within government to assure Women’s Aid that a sustainable, long-term funding solution might be found?
Lord Ashton of Hyde
I will come to that. As I was saying, education in schools is very important. Maintained secondary schools are already legally required to teach sex and relationship education, and we expect academies to do so, but I take my noble friend’s point about separating those two key areas. I will come to the measures that the Government are taking later.
Rather than waiting for a crisis to happen, one of the strengths of today’s homelessness services is that local housing authorities are reaching out proactively to those in need and helping them to avoid a crisis in the first place. Since 2010, more than 20,000 households experiencing domestic abuse have had their homelessness prevented by sanctuary schemes installed by local authorities working with the domestic abuse support sector. Of course, they have to have victim approval.
Supported by an investment of £6.5 billion over this spending review period, interventions such as family mediation, resolving rent arrears and sanctuary schemes all help to prevent problems escalating out of control. Frequently, it is the local authority working hand in hand with the voluntary and community sector which helps get the lives of victims and their families back on track. The Troubled Families programme, for example, will target an extra 400,000 troubled families, thanks to the investment of an additional £200 million. Our research shows that 29% of families on the current programme have experienced domestic abuse in the past six months and that is why the expanded programme will use domestic abuse as a specific indicator of eligibility.
We have a strong record on tackling domestic violence and abuse. For the first time ever, this Government provided £40 million for specialist local domestic and sexual violence support services. Our approach is set out in our Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls strategy published in 2010 and updated each year. We will be publishing a further update shortly. It has put in place a tough legislative framework and strong protections to support victims of domestic abuse, which is overseen by the Home Secretary through an inter-ministerial group.
I now come to some of the questions I was asked. The noble Baroness, Lady King, generously acknowledged that the £10 million was welcome and that it is a stop-gap. It is a limited amount of money. She has just asked me what advice I will give to the Government and what commitment I can make on behalf of the Government about future funding. She knows how government works. I am unable to give total government commitment at the moment, particularly six weeks before an election. We have put that £10 million funding in place for two years in response to concerns and we have made clear that that funding is a priority. I expect that to continue and we will prioritise this matter when we are thinking about future spending after the election, if we are in a position to do that.
The noble Baroness also asked for advice for refuges which are seeking to survive past 2016, which is a similar point. The duties to vulnerable women in homelessness legislation will remain. New standards will ensure that the standards are maintained and meet the needs of victims. In fact, we prioritised funding in response to the issues that Women’s Aid and Refuge raised. I would expect that we would prioritise this matter and continue to do so when we think about future spending plans after the election.
There was mention, too, of the fact that women are being turned away from refuges. The Government fund UKRefugesOnline, so that victims and those who work to support them can find appropriate accommodation. Also, the new strengthened statutory guidance places clear expectations on how local authorities commission and organise their refuge provision. The guidance makes it clear that available bed spaces or support should not be restricted to local people only. The homelessness legislation also protects victims of domestic abuse by placing a duty on local authorities to provide accommodation to those vulnerable people who find themselves homeless as a result of fleeing domestic violence.
The noble Baroness also asked about the impact of local authority cuts on refuge services. The DCLG’s statutory best value guidance to local authorities makes it clear that councils need to avoid making disproportionate cuts to the voluntary and community sector. They have un-ring-fenced many of these funds, so that the local authorities have flexibility in their use of funds. This duty will make it clear to them that they are not allowed disproportionately to cut the voluntary and community sector. There is some good news. Local authorities’ own estimates show that 91% expect a growth in their business rates income, which would equal about £400 million.
My noble friend Lady Newlove complained that we do not join up government support enough. I absolutely acknowledge that it is difficult to co-ordinate service delivery across government. We recognise this, and recognise that one size does not fit all. The Government’s commitment to tackling these dreadful crimes is set out in the call to end violence against women, as I said, which is driven by the Home Secretary. The Public Services Transformation Network funding, which is backed by the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, is also enabling local areas better to fit services to victims’ needs. For example, Essex has developed a strategic approach to commissioning a wide range of wrap-around services, including refuges, outreach, support for children, survivor support groups and an enhanced perpetrator strategy, and they are all included so that victims can get the help that they need.
The right reverend Prelate asked about women being moved on before they are ready. They should not be being moved on in that way; it is right that victims, when they are given the chance, move on when they are ready so that others can find a place of safety, but they should not be moved before then. As I mentioned, the Public Services Transformation Network helps local areas better to fit services to victims. We are clear that services must meet the needs of victims, and our guidance says that.
The right reverend Prelate also mentioned getting the faith and voluntary sector to work alongside government. The guidance is clear that, when commissioning services to help to support homeless victims, authorities should not exclude any sector. In fact, our experience shows that those sectors often know the best, do the best jobs and are better able to relate to and thus support victims—so I completely agree with him.
As for commissioning guidance, decisions on how best to find services for victims of domestic abuse are local matters, and we think that it is right that they should be handled at local level.
To support effective local commissioning, the Government held a series of local road shows with local commissioners last year to share best practice in effective commissioning. New standards published by the DCLG make it clear that the needs of those with a protected characteristic must be met in refuges.
I think that I have answered most of the questions that I was asked. If not, I shall be very happy to write later.
Finally, I thank all noble Lords for participating in this hugely important and varied debate, which rightly has the attention of the Committee. I wish all noble Lords a very good weekend, including Sunday of course, which will be International Women’s Day.
House of Lords
Gender Equality: Developing Nations
(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Loomba
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to promote the education of girls and young women and gender equality in developing nations.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for International Development (Baroness Northover)
My Lords, the United Kingdom has prioritised girls’ education as one of the four pillars of our strategic vision for women and girls. Since 2010 the UK has supported more than 10 million girls and boys in primary and lower secondary schools. We are working to ensure that gender equality is central to the post-2015 development framework, with a dedicated gender goal, targets throughout the framework and data broken down by sex and age.
Lord Loomba (LD)
I thank my noble friend for that Answer. The education of girls and young women and their equality is linked in one way or another to the welfare of widows and how societies around the world treat them. I declare an interest as founder and chairman of the Loomba Foundation.
An estimated 245 million widows and 500 million children around the world suffer injustice in silence. More than 100 million widows live in poverty, struggling to survive, and 1.5 million widows’ children die before their fifth birthday.
Due to conflict, war, poverty, lack of adequate living standards, nutritious food, clean drinking water and healthcare, the number of widows is increasing in the developing world. How will the Minister ensure that the importance of the plight of widows is included in the framework of the UN millennium development goals for 2015-30?
Baroness Northover
My Lords, I commend my noble friend for his work in this extremely important area. DfID supports a range of projects to assist widows—for example in Bangladesh and Pakistan. We recognise how especially vulnerable widows can be. As my noble friend knows, we place great importance on gender equality and on the principle of leaving no one behind in the new framework which it is hoped will be agreed at the UN in September. This is clearly vital in seeking to eradicate extreme poverty.
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead (Lab)
My Lords, as the Minister knows, millions of marginalised girls are literally risking their lives to get a safe, high-quality education. In Pakistan, the schooling of girls has been outlawed by the Taliban. In Afghanistan, girls have been attacked in their classroom and a schoolgirls’ bus was bombed. In Congo, girls have been raped by soldiers on their way to school and, as we know, 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria were abducted by Boko Haram.
Will the Minister tell the House how DfID is supporting the efforts of UNESCO and UNICEF to focus more effectively on marginalised girls, in line with the aim that she just mentioned of leaving no one behind?
Baroness Northover
My Lords, the noble Baroness is quite right about the risks girls often take in seeking an education. I hope that I can reassure her by saying that one of our focuses now is to try to ensure that the most vulnerable girls and boys are able to get into school safely, and not only to primary school but to progress on to secondary school. The very fact that they can get there is an indication that they have actually succeeded in primary school.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, I have recently returned from Sierra Leone where all the schools have been closed for almost nine months. This has had a devastating effect on the education of girls in particular, many of whom will never return to school now and among whom there are very disturbing reports of increased rates of sexual exploitation, early marriage and teenage pregnancy. Can the Minister assure me that Her Majesty’s Government will continue to support the outstanding efforts on the part of both UK government bodies and NGOs, which I was privileged to witness in that country, not only right until the end of the Ebola outbreak, which is far from finished, but also in the longer term for rebuilding education and health in that very needy country?
Baroness Northover
I thank the noble Baroness for her tribute to the work that we are doing in Sierra Leone, and I also pay tribute to that work, which has been outstanding. We are trying to get Ebola down to zero cases because that is crucial. We want to see the schools reopen, and at the moment we are focused on how to rebuild within Sierra Leone. However, she is quite right to talk about the special vulnerability of women and girls. We are seeking to protect them and ensure that the risks that she has talked about do not come to fruition.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, perhaps I may take this opportunity to congratulate the Government on getting these 5 million girls educated. Andrew Mitchell was the first Secretary of State to focus on it, along with Justine Greening and the rest of the DfID team, and it has been so effective. What are the Government doing on early and forced marriage, one of the related topics here and which came up at the very successful Girl Summit that took place in London last year?
Baroness Northover
Again, I thank my noble friend for her tribute to the work that has been done within DfID. As she has said, last year we had the Girl Summit which focused on both FGM and early and forced marriage. These are clear abuses of girls’ rights. We have already invested significantly in both areas and I trust that that will continue in the future.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister confirm that in the forthcoming negotiations on the SDGs in New York, the UK will resist attempts to weaken the draft standalone goal on gender equality? Does she share the view that it is vital that it should include strong language on women’s rights and be underpinned by progressive targets that tackle discriminatory social norms?
Baroness Manzoor (LD)
My Lords, the law is unequally applied in Bahrain between Sunni women and Shia women in areas such as inheritance, divorce, child custody and domestic disputes. What are the Government doing to address these issues with the Bahraini Government, and if they have had any discussions, what are the timescales for addressing these terrible injustices and inequalities?
Baroness Northover
There is inequality for women everywhere. The Foreign Office, as part of its work particularly on International Women’s Day, is engaging with those countries where these problems are particularly acute. In the case of Bahrain, the ambassador is holding a round table with a number of Bahraini women from all walks of life to discuss these issues.
Sexual Violence against Girls and Women
(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Hussein-Ece
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to foster greater public understanding about the prevention of sexual violence against girls and women in the light of the publication of the What is Consent? toolkit by the Crown Prosecution Service.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Bates) (Con)
My Lords, the new consent guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service supports the Government’s aims that every report of rape be taken seriously, every investigation conducted professionally and every victim given access to the support they need. It complements the Home Office’s teenage relationship abuse and prevention campaign, “This is Abuse”, and the materials developed to support better teaching of sex and relationship education in schools.
Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)
My Lords, I commend the Government for introducing these new guidelines, on the back of some very high-profile and unpleasant cases. Does the Minister agree with me that there are some very depressing surveys that show that one in three boys still think it is okay to hit a girl and to force her to have sex? Even more revealingly, a student survey in the colleges of Cambridge showed that 77% of students there had experienced sexual harassment and violence. Is it not time to have a consistent approach to educating boys and girls in what the law is and what is acceptable behaviour, and to try to combat sexual violence against women and girls in this country?
Lord Bates
My noble friend is absolutely right in that regard. Of course, that is the purpose of the website, “This is Abuse”, which is targeted at young people. It has been viewed by some 2 million young people. That is the purpose behind the new campaign, What is Consent?, which sets out what is involved: the capacity to consent, the freedom to consent and the steps taken to obtain consent, which must be present in all relations of a sexual nature. The noble Baroness is also absolutely right that more needs to be done.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, part of the problem is that young girls who are manipulated and sexually abused have been groomed to believe that they are in a consensual relationship. While there can be legal arguments about what consent is when a case gets to court, surely it is even more important to protect those young girls before any such abuse takes place. Let me press the Government again: given that the value of sex and relationship education is widely understood and known to be effective, why are the Government refusing to ensure that it is compulsory in all schools?
Lord Bates
I think that best practice is happening in most schools. It is certainly compulsory in all state schools. There was a case related to certain freedoms being given to academies, which covered this. However, the expectation is not that academies can somehow disregard this, but that they will use their freedom to improve on the minimum standards for the teaching of sex and relationship education that were set out by the Secretary of State in 2001.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)
My Lords, what are the Government doing to develop programmes for parents? One issue I have come across in my work in this area is that parents are very confused about what their children can and cannot do and what kind of advice they themselves should be giving. Do the Government want, or does the Minister know of any, support programmes from which parents can get help and education in this area?
Lord Bates
There is a range of helplines and support services, as well as rape help centres, but I totally accept that the role for parents is very strong and profound and that parents need to be aware. As the noble Baroness said earlier, much of this grooming takes place online. That is something that parents need to be especially vigilant about, not just in the context of rape but of all kinds of child sexual exploitation.
Lord Avebury (LD)
My Lords, will my noble friend accept on behalf of the Government the recommendation made by two all-party groups on refugees and migration, under the chairmanship of Sarah Teather MP, that women who are victims of rape and sexual violence should not be held in immigration detention?
Lord Bates
The Home Secretary is looking very closely at that very important report, which came out just two days ago, particularly in the context of the very disturbing allegations made about Yarl’s Wood. We take that very seriously and will be responding.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister undertake to talk to his noble friend Lord Nash about what I believe is a widespread concern that this is treated as a freedom in some schools? Does he not agree that the time has come to ensure that all girls are protected and all boys receive the proper education to help prevent violence?
Lord Bates
That is something that should be done. Of course, the quality of that education is monitored by Ofsted as well. It is something that should happen in all schools. It is a crucial part of this, and schools, along with parents and the wider community, have a vital role to play in making sure that young boys in particular are educated about the limits and the need to obtain consent.
Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)
My Lords, perhaps I might raise a matter that is, in many respects, a background to this Question. Will the Minister tell the House, with regard to the last available period for which data are kept, first, what percentage of complaints of rape actually led to trial in court and, secondly, what percentage of those trials ended in conviction?
Lord Bates
I am very happy to set those details out. Up to September 2014, there were 72,977 recorded criminal offences. The number of rape prosecutions was 3,891 in the same period. There is a lot of detail behind that. I do not have the time to go into it at this point but I am happy to write to the noble Lord.
Lord Elton (Con)
My Lords, several of your Lordships have drawn attention to the importance of early education in sex. Will my noble friend tell us what the arrangements are for the initial training of teachers in this subject, how consensus on what is appropriate at different ages is identified, and what INSET—in-service training—is also available in this?
Lord Bates
The guidance issued by the Secretary of State for Education sets out that age-appropriate education must be provided to young people. There are steps that could be taken to improve on that. There are a lot of examples of best practice around the country, which schools have to draw on.
Women in Sport
Baroness Parminter
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they are taking to encourage women to participate in sports on a professional basis.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con)
My Lords, the Minister for Sport has made the participation of women in sport one of her top priorities, along with raising its profile. Last year the Government hosted their first national women’s sport conference, where Sport England launched the campaign This Girl Can. We wish to inspire women at all levels of ability and we seek increased media coverage, sponsorship and participation at professional level.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
I thank my noble friend for that reply and celebrate the fact that the Royal and Ancient Golf Club and Royal St George’s Golf Club have at last opened their doors to women members. What are the Government doing to encourage more participation in women’s golf so that we can have more 18 year-old women like Charley Hull competing for the world’s biggest prizes in women’s golf?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, at grass-roots level Sport England is investing £13 million in the England Golf Partnership to get more people playing golf. The partnership has also launched specific programmes to attract new participants, such as Get into golf, and the reports are that 45% of participants in the starter programme are women. There has just been a BBC documentary about Charley Hull, the extraordinary golf player.
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, it is wonderful to see in the modern era of sport that governing bodies such as cricket’s have finally issued real contracts to women, but in other sports such as football there is huge disparity between the men’s and the women’s game. We only have to see the recent England v Germany match at Wembley to see that the public embrace women’s football. I pay tribute to the tireless work of Kelly Simmons at the FA. In the USA some of this inequality has been tackled by the Title IX legislation. Is it not time that we had our own version in Britain?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, first I think that the noble Baroness has been an extraordinary inspiration for sport and women in sport. The Americans have had that experience in the higher education sector. In this country, participation rates for men and women in higher education are 61% and 53% respectively, so the gap is less than in other sectors. We wish to concentrate our efforts on ensuring that a much broader cross-section is able to enjoy sport.
Baroness Nye (Lab)
Following on from the noble Baroness’s previous question, I am sure that the whole House will join me in wishing the England football team well as they prepare for the World Cup in Canada in July. However, have the Government made any representations to FIFA about the fact that they will play on artificial pitches? That would never be contemplated for their male counterparts. In this instance, it is not a case of wanting a level playing field, but the same playing field.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, I will certainly take up the point. I am not aware of the different playing pitches. I think grass is a very good surface to play on. I wish the football team extremely well. They are currently ranked sixth in the world. I hope that they win.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
Will my noble friend bear in mind that the Commonwealth Games gives enormous encouragement worldwide to the full participation of women professionally in all sports? Of course, that is a reflection of the wider fact that the Commonwealth, as a total system covering almost a third of humankind, places absolute gender equality at the very top of its priorities.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, I thoroughly endorse that. The Commonwealth Games is a great celebration of countries and sport. Interestingly, at the last Winter Olympics, 58% of medallists were women, and 66% of the Sochi Paralympic medallists were women. I have not got the figures for the Commonwealth Games, but I hope that they were equally encouraging.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister join me in congratulating the Birmingham City Ladies professional football team on their great exploits, in contrast, perhaps, to the men’s team? Coming back to my noble friend’s comments about a level playing field, the Minister will note that the Premier League has concluded an extraordinarily lucrative agreement with the TV companies for the next period of agreement. The Premier League has shown great reluctance in, shall we say, helping other parts of football from that largesse. Would he meet the Premier League to encourage it to give more resources to women’s professional teams?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, I would be very pleased to arrange such a meeting. But it is important to say that the Chancellor announced a new £50 million package of government money for improvements in grass-roots football. That will include, for instance, further money for new coach educators, which will be important for women. As part of what the government investment is doing, Premier League and Football League clubs are also sharing an ambition for about £200 million of total funding. But I do think that, across a range of subjects, professional football could do a lot better for women and some spectators.
Baroness Seccombe (Con)
My Lords, does my noble friend agree with me that it is probably the right day to congratulate the England women’s cricket team? It is probably best not to mention the men’s cricket team, save only to wish them well on Monday.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, I certainly wish them extremely well. The women’s cricket team are currently ranked second; they won the last two Ashes, so they are a great team. Increasing sponsorship is also an important part of how we raise the profile of women’s sport. Kia Motors has sponsored women’s cricket, which is an example of what we need to do. Newton Investment Management is going to sponsor the women’s boat race. Some very important innovations are coming forward.
Lord Storey (LD)
My noble friend the Minister will know that the English women’s football team beat Finland 3-1 last night, yet if you look at the sports pages of our national newspapers, you will find no mention of it in the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail, the Express or the Mirror. There was a tiny piece in the Guardian and a tiny piece in the Independent. If you look at the sports pages on a daily basis, hardly ever will you find a mention of women’s sport. For women to be empowered in sport, they need to have coverage. Will the Minister agree perhaps either to write to or meet our newspaper editors to suggest that they cover women’s sports?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My noble friend makes a very important point. Improving the media profile of women’s sports is one of the five key goals of the Women and Sport Advisory Board, set up by the Government. The broadcasting companies—BT Sport, BBC Sport and Sky Sport—are getting much better, but I certainly think that the broadsheet newspapers need to up their game.
Lake District National Park Authority
(9 years, 8 months ago)
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The Earl of Clancarty
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the intention of the Lake District National Park Authority to sell areas of land in the Lake District.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord De Mauley) (Con)
My Lords, national park authorities are independent bodies and, as part of their responsibilities to review their services and assets, it is right that they consider the sale of land, enabling the proceeds to be reinvested to enhance the national park. The Lake District National Park Authority owns less than 4% of land within the national park. As with all our national parks, who owns the land is not the determining factor in its beauty or value to the public.
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, Stickle Tarn, Coniston Water, the River Derwent. Are we really selling off treasured public spaces—some of the most beautiful land in Britain—to fund the building of visitors’ centres? Will not the Government intervene to stop this?
Lord De Mauley
As the noble Earl knows, the Government have no powers to direct national park authorities to dispose or not to dispose of a particular piece of land. Furthermore, it would not be right to intervene, because they must be allowed—and, indeed, encouraged—to take responsibility for their own affairs. To put it in context, the eight sites offered for sale total 59 hectares, equivalent to 0.6% of the Lake District National Park Authority’s land holdings.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, it is the turn of this side; I live there. Is it not shocking that parts of the national park—one of the most beautiful national parks—have to be sold off as a result of government cuts? Is there not a problem that, in a further sale of the land, the Lake District planning people might well give a more relaxed permission in order to get half the money? Is it not rather unhappy that we are doing this at all? Surely we should adamantly say that the Lake District is not for sale to the highest bidder.
Lord De Mauley
I agree with much of the sentiment behind the noble Lord’s point, but the national park has assured me that this is not about cuts. It routinely reviews its assets and makes disposals where appropriate so that the proceeds can be reinvested into the acquisition, improvement or maintenance of other properties. It is worth saying that between 2007 and 2010—three years during which the noble Lord’s party was in government—it made sales totalling £1.9 million. In the five years from then, sales have totalled £1.8 million.
Lord Cormack
My Lords, I am sure that we all wish the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, many more happy years in one of the most glorious parts of England. However, is not what really matters here the integrity of the landscape and that there are no further incursions into its tranquillity? Can my noble friend assure us that whatever transactions take place, both the integrity of the landscape and its tranquillity will be preserved?
Lord De Mauley
Yes, my Lords, I absolutely agree with my noble friend. I can confirm that none of the protections afforded to the land by virtue of being in a national park is affected by a sale.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, there has not been a very satisfactory process here. The national park authority made the decision to sell these pieces of land in secret. People discovered it only when an advertisement appeared in the Westmoreland Gazette, giving them precisely one month to make bids. Surely there should be public debate about which of the 168 pieces of land owned by the national park authority should be sold if it has to sell any. Once it decides to put some forward, there should be consultation of a sufficient length of time to allow community groups—such as the Langdale Valley Association, which wants to register Stickle Tarn as a community asset—to be consulted. This takes time. Will the Minister have words with the national park authority to ask it to withdraw these proposals for the moment, to give time for public consultation and for the Langdale Valley Association to prepare its bid?
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I know that my noble friend is intimately involved in these matters. I assure him that I have obtained confirmation from the Lake District National Park Authority that it recognises the legitimate interests of stakeholders. It has consulted and continues to consult widely in a number of ways ahead of any final decisions. That includes liaison with parish councils, public notices advertising its intention to invite offers for some of the properties, direct consultation with a number of neighbouring landowners and so on.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, I have spent most of my life living in the Lake District National Park, which formed the greater part of my former constituency. Can we have an assurance that there will be no interference at all with existing rights of way? What is the position on the maintenance of those rights of way and bridleways which the national park carried out previously? Can we be assured that the new private owners will maintain them to the previous standards?
Lord De Mauley
I can absolutely assure the noble Lord that there will be no lessening of rights of way. Indeed, in one instance, there will be an improvement in rights of way as a result of these sales.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
My Lords, I find this whole process and practice deeply shocking. I was not aware until quite recently that this could be done. As has been said, the Lake District is a glorious part of our country. These public spaces are for all the people of our country. I understand that the Lake District National Park has cash-flow problems but I baulk at the idea that this land can be sold, notwithstanding what has happened in the past. What would happen in the case of this land being sold, then resold at a profit? Would the Lake District National Park get any of the benefit? Secondly, I again ask the noble Lord for an assurance to this House that this plan will not—indeed, cannot—lead to any change in the planning restrictions on the land. Such a special area must be protected.
Lord De Mauley
I can assure the noble Baroness on her latter point that there will be no change to the planning restrictions on that land. On her former point, I hope that noble Lords heard what I said earlier. The Government have no powers to intervene over disposal or otherwise of land. It is not for central government to know about retained rights over the land going forward.
Women: Economic Empowerment
Baroness Jolly
That this House takes note of women’s economic empowerment and the progress in achieving it that has been made in the United Kingdom and internationally.
Baroness Jolly (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to address the House today in celebration of International Women’s Day. My noble friend Lady Garden and I started the day at a reception for British businesswomen at the British Library. The list of speakers today is really impressive, with a fine record in women’s rights and achievement over the years, following the record of many Members of this House—too many to mention —who have campaigned hard and achieved so much for the rights of women.
Today we should remember two noble Lords who died over the past year. They both, in their time and in their fields, played a key role in women’s rights. Baroness Miller of Hendon was a stalwart member of this House who received an honour for her services to women’s rights. She was an entrepreneur and a campaigner for more women MPs. Baroness Platt of Writtle was a trailblazing aviation engineer. I read that when she completed her engineering studies at Cambridge in 1943, women did not receive the same honours as their male counterparts. As such, she was not awarded a degree, only a “title of degree”. I am in no doubt that it was this injustice that propelled the noble Baroness to dedicate her life to the advancement of women in science and technology careers.
These two women fought in the hope that their work could be the spark for the aspirations of women and girls today and future generations. It is because of women like them that the journey of gender equality in this country has ultimately been one of progress. Nowhere is this journey of progress more evident than in the theme of today’s debate—women’s economic empowerment, at home and abroad.
The breakthroughs that we have achieved since International Women’s Day first came into being over a century ago are nothing short of remarkable, but the coalition has also made quite a few significant breakthroughs in recent years as well. On coming into office five years ago, one of the first commitments that we made as a Government was to put women at the heart of our economic recovery and long-term plan for growth. We made this our priority because promoting equality of opportunity and equal treatment is not just the right thing to do—it is the key to promoting growth. Five years later, our plan is working. Today there are more women in work than ever before. There are more women running their own businesses than ever before. There are record numbers of women at higher levels of management. Indeed, thanks to the tremendous work of my noble friend Lord Davies, for the first time in the history of our country we have a woman on every single FTSE 100 board. On top of this, the latest ONS statistics show that, for both full-time workers and overall, the gender pay gap is at its lowest point in history. All around the UK, women are breaking new ground and succeeding in careers previous generations could only dream about.
There is a consensus in the country which certainly was not there when I was growing up; and if you should ask any number of men and women whether they believe that their daughters should have the same opportunities as their sons, the resounding answer you would get is “of course”. These parents will be the gender equality ambassadors for a whole new generation of girls and their impact should be seen right across the economy. Our challenge today is that, in spite of the progress I have talked about, this consensus is still yet to be fully grounded in the running and practices of our economy and places of work. As a result, many women continue to face barriers at every stage and at all levels of their economic life—barriers around pay, promotion, choice, and work-life balance.
It is particularly fitting that we are having this debate as the 59th UN Commission on the Status of Women is about to get underway in New York and as we mark the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action. Written in 1995 at the historic UN Fourth World Conference on Women, it was signed by 189 Governments from across the world, all pledging to end gender inequality across 15 different areas, including economic empowerment. While we have much to celebrate, we cannot ignore the fact that there is not one country in the world that can say that it has achieved this ambition. It is a reminder of how pertinent it is that we push for real change so that we do not find ourselves uttering that infamous phrase “We’ve made progress, but” in 20 years to come.
We in Government remain more focused on this task and the progress we have made over the past five years gives us a strong platform to work from. We know that if we are to fulfil our ambition of creating an economy that creates opportunities for everyone, then we need fundamentally to rebalance it. It means a paradigm shift around how men and women operate their lives, how businesses invest and how workplaces operate. Above all, it means focusing our efforts not just on professional women and the few near the top, but to make sure we give all women, regardless of their age, background or stage they are at in their career, the opportunities to pursue their own choices and happiness in life.
Our ambition starts with sweeping away the archaic rules and assumptions that can make it near impossible for women to balance work and family life. Last year, we extended the right to request flexible working to all employees and next month will see the introduction of shared parental leave so mothers and fathers can decide for themselves how to balance their family and work life. But even with these changes, we know that we will still continue to see women drop from the labour market unless we do more to make work pay. So we are expanding the amount of free childcare available to make it easier for people to take time off to look after their babies and then return to work. From next month, we are investing an extra £750 million in tax-free childcare worth up to £2,000 per year for each child. This is in addition to our offer of 15 hours a week of free early years education for every three and four year-old as well as for two year-olds in those families most feeling the squeeze. This comes on top of a raft of measures, such as raising the personal allowance threshold and increasing the national minimum wage to its highest ever rate, to ensure that women on low and middle incomes can keep more of the money that they earn.
Women should not have to choose between their job and their families, and all these changes will help them to find a balance that works for them. Supporting more women to set up their businesses is another way in which we can help them to achieve greater flexibility between work and family life. We are stepping up our efforts to invest record amounts in support and training for female business mentors and to encourage greater female take-up of the Business Bank’s Start Up Loans programme. We also want to make sure that starting a business is an option for everyone, so we have introduced a new enterprise allowance, offering expert business mentoring and financial support to people living on benefits. Our message is simple: if you have drive, determination and a good idea, we will do everything we can to help you get that idea off the ground.
We are also determined to tackle the ongoing injustice of gender pay and doing all that we can to reduce the pay gap further and faster. It is, however, a complex problem to solve. It is not as simple as demanding that women be paid the same as men for equal work. Thankfully, the Equal Pay Act 1975 means that cases of outright discriminatory practices are illegal and few and far between. When they happen, we have been very clear that these employers should be dealt with through the full force of the law. Reforms we brought in last year will now mean that companies found guilty of pay discrimination will be required to produce pay audits, to give greater confidence that such discrimination will not happen again.
However, the causes of the gender pay gap are multiple and far more deeply embedded in our culture and in our labour market for them to be solved by changing laws alone. A major factor can be explained by career choices, which remain strongly gender-biased. More women than men choose to work in the caring professions of social work, nursing and teaching, which historically have had lower rates of pay. This gender bias starts early. A 2013 report showed that half of state coeducational schools did not see a single girl progress to A-level physics. That is scandalous. That is why we are pouring our efforts into working with schools and parents to open up young women’s eyes to a much wider range of careers—hence our support for fantastic schemes such as the Your Life campaign to encourage more girls to study subjects in traditionally male-dominated and higher-paid areas like science and engineering.
Of course, that cultural change we are looking for in the classroom also needs to happen in our places of work. Many companies are doing fantastic work to support their female employees, but the fact remains that this kind of corporate support is still not translating into the wholesale shift in attitudes that we need. Institutional discrimination, the old boys’ club and unconscious bias are still in full swing in many places of work. We are working hard to promote greater pay transparency and introducing measures and guidance to help companies to identify and tackle their own pay gaps. For example, through our Think, Act, Report initiative, we are encouraging firms actively to look at how their female employees are faring, take action to address any issues and report publicly on their progress. More than 270 companies have signed up so far, including major employers such as BT, Tesco, Specsavers, Unilever and BAE Systems. That means that more than 2.5 million employees are working in organisations signed up to Think, Act, Report. In December we announced a range of additional measures to ensure that we keep up this momentum. These include free pay analysis software and new simplified guidance that will shortly be available to employers to make calculating their gender pay gap easier and quicker. There is also £2 million of funding towards helping women move from low-paid, low-skill work to higher-paid, higher-skill work.
These are just some of the measures we are taking across Government to improve the prospects of women and girls at every level and in every field. But that work does not begin and end at home. We know how important it is that we use the UK’s position as a leader in development to improve the lives of women and girls across the globe as well. I recently read that a girl in South Sudan is more likely to die in childbirth than to complete primary school. No other fact could so eloquently underline the responsibility that we have to take action, but, as well as there being a strong moral imperative, experience has shown time and again that in development there are few better options than investing in women.
We know that in the Ivory Coast alone an increase of just $10 in women’s income achieves the same nutritional and health outcomes for children as an increase of $110 in men’s income. That is exactly why we have put girls and women at the centre of our development efforts and our engagement with the world. Through the Girls’ Education Challenge Fund, we have raised £355 million with the aim of getting up to a million girls into school in some of the most difficult parts of the world. We have provided nearly 27 million women with access to financial services, such as savings, credit and insurance.
We are helping more women find work through skills and leadership training and business development. For example, our Zardozi project in Afghanistan—“zardozi” means “embroidery”—has created jobs for 6,500 women in the handicraft and textile sector and supported them to set up their own businesses and to become entrepreneurs. I could go on providing hundreds more examples and statistics but I am sure your Lordships have your own to bring to the debate. You may, however, be asking yourselves, “What does all this actually mean for the lives of women and girls?” so I will end by giving examples of two exceptional women our programmes have supported.
The first is a young girl, Immaculate, from Uganda who was forced to leave school after her father died. Determined not to give up, she heard about one of our programmes and walked for three days in a bid to win a scholarship to go back to school. Her efforts paid off and she ended up winning that support to return to education. A few years later, she is now a highly articulate woman determined to become a teacher and to put back into her society what she herself had been able to draw from. The second is a 28 year-old woman, Angelique, from Rwanda. Like most Rwandans, she makes her living from cultivating land, but she has less than a quarter of a hectare of farmland to support her family of three. However, thanks to UK support, she found employment and opened her first savings account. With her first salary, she bought school uniforms for her children, and with her second and third salaries she bought a goat so that her children would not have to go hungry again, and she is now planning to use her savings to build a house for her family. These women are symbols of everything we are trying to achieve and our reason for doing more.
This House has been at the forefront of the journey that women’s rights has taken in this country and across the world, and we look to noble Lords to help us continue that journey.
Baroness Gould of Potternewton (Lab)
My Lords, I fully agree with so many of the principles that the Minister has talked about. Of course, we have all been fighting, arguing and campaigning for women’s equality for so many years, but I want to talk not about the women she has talked about but about those who have really suffered because of the Government’s recession and austerity programme. In spite of the Minister’s words, that programme has seen a widening of the gender pay gap in the UK, which has gone down to 26th in the world from 13th, according to the World Economic Forum gender gap analysis, perhaps because of the increase in the cost of childcare, which interestingly points to the future—over the past five years the cost of childcare has gone up enormously, and many women are having to give up work because they cannot afford it—discrimination because of pregnancy, and perhaps the attack on access to justice, which undermines the rights that have underpinned much of women’s progress in the workplace over many years.
I want to mention in particular a group of women we never talk about, or very rarely talk about: women who, for many reasons beyond their control, find themselves vulnerable and homeless—women who have been overlooked for far too long, who have become marginalised people in society, not from choice but because of circumstance, and who find themselves in a downward spiral of chaos and exclusion, and get little help.
Homelessness is a growing problem in the UK. Government figures show that the number of people sleeping rough has risen by 55% since 2012. Perhaps we could find out why that is the situation. There are currently over 10,000 women in homeless services, and many thousands more who are hidden homeless and are on the streets, at risk. Homeless women who are roofless and with few belongings will not often show up in a headcount of rough sleepers. The hidden homeless may be sofa-surfing, staying with family or friends, or trapped in abusive relationships because they have nowhere else to go. Others may be squatting, living in crack houses, and some unfortunately engage in prostitution. St Mungo’s, the homeless charity, feels that unless urgent action is taken now, the numbers are likely to increase, and too many women will not get the right help to escape homelessness for good—a situation not assisted by the cuts to public services, restrictions on welfare, rising housing costs, or a lack of housing supply.
Women’s homelessness can occur after prolonged experience of trauma, including physical, sexual and emotional abuse. It can follow a cycle of mental health and substance use, and myriad other problems. Half have experienced domestic violence, 70% have mental health needs, and 27% have a combination of mental and physical health problems and problems with substance misuse.
A classic example comes in evidence from a St Mungo’s client, who I will call Ann. She said: “I became homeless because I got pregnant at 14, mum threw me out and after that I got married. My husband raped me and beat me up. So I ran to London to escape him and have been on the streets ever since”. She fled and has been on the streets because her local refuge had to close down through lack of funding. No doubt we will hear from the Minister that £10 million has been put into refuges for the next two years. The problem for Ann and her refuge is that the money comes far too late.
In my own area of Brighton and Hove, evidence from the Brighton Women’s Centre—I declare an interest as a patron—shows that almost half of its clients are mothers, and of those, 67% have had their children taken into care or adopted. So not only are they grieving for their lost children, but in many cases they are also grieving for their own lost childhood. Much of the complexity of homeless women’s needs is rooted in histories of violence and abuse stemming from childhood. These problems are intergenerational. We have to make sure, and work has to be done to make sure, that they are not passed on to the next generation.
So much hurt could be prevented by ensuring that the troubled families programme addresses the risk factors that increase the likelihood of girls becoming homeless in adulthood. Research by Crisis found that many of those homeless women are marginalised in labour markets, and there are examples of women losing their jobs once they have no registered place of abode. None of the women Crisis interviewed were in full-time employment, and only 3% were working part time. But its research goes on to show that the majority of these women wanted to work; they wanted a job. The potential for meaningful occupation, training and employment to boost self-esteem and help recovery from homelessness cannot be underestimated.
Making matters worse for many of these women is the fact that they experience stigma and shame because they are homeless and are judged by societal expectations of women to be good mothers and maintain good homes. A perceived failure to live up to those expectations, and not having a job and not being part of society can be significant barriers to recovery. Unfortunately, the histories of far too many of these women are full of missed opportunities for getting the right help at the right time due to insufficient co-ordination and inappropriate and erratic interventions that leave needs unaddressed and recovery unachieved.
The building of trust and relationships is at the heart of creating a change to empower these women to maintain control over important decisions. However, both national and local government too often fail to understand this. To achieve that trust there has to be a co-ordinated response across the various departments that respond to the relevant challenges, be they drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, mental health services or children’s and adult services. This interrelated challenge means that it is difficult for women to progress in one area without the others being addressed. Co-commissioning across a local authority is key to better co-ordination and the provision of services that can have a positive impact on these women’s lives. Responding to women with vulnerabilities can, if it is done in this way, make real financial savings.
Commissioners should invest in cost-benefit analysis of services to prevent or resolve homelessness. They should look at the savings that can be made by recognising women’s organisations as partners in meeting local needs and should engage and involve them from the very beginning in the commissioning process and early interventions for families in need. Organisations that deliver a range of social and economic benefits over the short and long term to vulnerable and marginalised women and girls, such as my local women’s centre, have proved that every pound they invest in support and care saves more than three and a half times that amount in real terms. We ought to spend much more on the whole question of prevention.
In conclusion, holistic, gender-sensitive support needs to be provided, staff need to be better trained to enable them to provide gendered responses and we need to engage in innovative approaches, partnership working, multiagency case management and cross-boundary initiatives working with peer support groups to address past and current trauma by providing access to counselling in a safe and secure environment. But most of all there has to be preventive support in advising women on how to avoid homelessness, as I said. The longer a woman sleeps rough, the worse her problems become and the more costly it becomes to help her off the streets and to make her life worth while so that she can contribute to the economy of this country.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interests as a trustee of UNICEF UK and a patron of Christian Blind Mission.
Five years of coalition government has meant that 2.3 million women overseas have been helped to get jobs and more than 5 million girls have been helped to attend school. As we know, education levels are a key indicator of the ability to obtain self-sustaining jobs and careers. Those statistics show our commitment to and responsibility for the most vulnerable women and girls in the world. It is not by chance that we have committed 0.7% of GDP to international development. That is part of our achievement in this area and it is important that it continues.
I shall focus my speech on the subject of women’s position in the international economy. Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the UN, said:
“There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women”.
This rings true in so many parts of society but is particularly apt for today’s debate. Many studies on economic development have found what Annan put so succinctly to be the truth—namely, where women succeed and are given economic opportunity, society succeeds. Today, I want to recognise how far women have come, but discuss equally how far we have to go.
As my noble friend Lady Jolly said, the world truly has changed for women, especially working women, even within the past few years. The PricewaterhouseCoopers 2015 Female Millennial report notes that women today are more educated than ever before: they earn more bachelor’s degrees and tertiary degrees than men. They are more confident than ever before, too: just under half of all women beginning their careers believe that they can rise to the top with their employers. They are more able to choose from a wide range of opportunities than their predecessors. However, while we should celebrate their successes, it is important to hold them under scrutiny.
Companies today are more aware and place a higher importance on recruiting women than they did even just a few years ago. Another international study conducted by PwC found that 64% of CEOs have and utilise strategies to increase diversity and inclusiveness in their businesses, and a further 13% plan to form such a strategy. This is a significant improvement on a similar survey conducted four years ago, in which only 1/10th of CEOs voiced plans to change their companies’ recruitment and retention policies to increase women’s presence in their companies.
Yet, we are not seeing results from these initiatives. Improvement to the wage gap has been stagnant across OECD countries, and although more women than ever before serve as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, they still stand as just 4.8% among the body of their peers. Women continue to face difficulty in advancing their careers. In a separate international study of “millennial working women”, it was found that nearly three-quarters of women feel that companies are “all talk” when it comes to equality. They felt that although their companies speak about diversity and inclusion, access to opportunities is not yet equal for women. More than that, it was found that women grow increasingly discouraged about their chances of promotion or of furthering their careers as they progress in them. The percentage of women who believe they are capable of rising to a senior level with their current employer falls by 10 points in just a seven-year period. When the level of talent of the women in today’s economic market is so high—higher than ever before—these statistics are disappointing, to say the least. I do not mention this to temper excitement over the gains that women have made in economic empowerment, but merely to insist that we can and must do better.
I turn now to the economic advancement of women in much different circumstances—women who are not trying to advance professional careers but simply trying to survive and support themselves and their families. For the poorest women in the world, economic empowerment is often just a dream. Up to 45% of women living in the poorest parts of the world have absolutely no say in how their household income is spent, even when it includes their own income. In Bangladesh—a country in which almost half the population survives on $1.25 a day, and in which the disparity of treatment and status between men and women is astounding—situations like this are not uncommon.
However, we should note the groups of organisations that are trying to combat this—the microfinance service providers, in particular the Grameen Bank, which is a microfinance titan and the originator of the micro- financing scheme. Grameen began its operations in Bangladesh just over 30 years ago and exists because, in the words of its founder, Muhammad Yunus,
“the financial system … only serves the top one-third of the world; two-thirds are left out”.
Grameen holds particular significance in our debate today, as nearly all of its 8.4 million clients are women, and women make up the majority of the bank’s management board. Through its microfinancing program, Grameen empowers women to start and sustain small businesses, to support themselves and their families. The benefit of this is felt especially by widows, many of whom are left without resource or recourse after the passing of their spouse.
A recent study by the World Bank found that microfinance, especially microfinancing for women, is beneficial in alleviating poverty and raising income and education levels. With only a 10% increase in women’s borrowing, household spending and women’s participation in the labour force both improve—and improve at higher rates than with a similar increase in men’s borrowing. My hope is that the Grameen Bank continues on this path of achievement and sees similar success in Glasgow, where Grameen UK has opened its first branch. We need microfinancing projects for women here in the UK too.
The final group of women I would like to highlight today is women with disabilities, who face even greater hurdles when seeking economic empowerment. A recent survey by the World Health Organization found that, across the 50 countries studied, only one-fifth of disabled women were employed, compared with one-third of women without disabilities. Many factors contribute to this disparity, but inaccessibility of workplaces, transportation to workplaces, discrimination and lack of education are prime concerns. These factors are amplified in developing countries, where disabled women’s inaccess to accommodation for their disability can severely restrict their ability to receive education, hold a job and participate in society.
To illustrate these key points, I want to share with noble Lords the story of Abena, a Ghanaian woman living with a disability as a result of a childhood bout of polio. She was supported by Christian Blind Mission: given a tricycle that transformed her life and the lives of those around her. CBM is the major disability charity in the world. It runs this initiative aimed at raising awareness of the link between disability and poverty. Abena says:
“I realised that I could not walk. But I was so serious to go to school because the children would go to school and come with their books and be reading. So I would crawl to school. Sometimes at the school the children were playing, jumping and I will be sitting down looking at them. I felt like I am alone. So I decided to stop the school. I said, ‘This one is a waste.’”.
She later reflected:
“I was feeling like I’m not a human being. I felt frustrated and lonely. But when I received the tricycle it was better. I decided to go into trading. I used the small capital I had and bought some groundnuts, biscuits, and I sell pure water. I will use the profit and buy the things again I had. So I think this one is very good”.
Abena has now become a disabled women’s organiser for the Disabled Society in Builsa South district, her area of Ghana, and works to inspire and encourage other disabled women to take on work and lead their lives normally. Abena’s case so aptly shows us how, with a little bit of empowerment, a woman’s life can improve drastically.
John Stuart Mill, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton in 1869, said:
“The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves”.
Abena is testimony to that.
Baroness Greenfield (CB)
My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, on bringing attention to this urgent and wide-ranging issue. As a research scientist at Oxford University, and now founder and CEO of a biotech company, I shall focus on just one aspect: the importance of science for women’s economic empowerment in both private and public sectors.
At a national level, graduates of both genders in the so-called STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and maths—are perhaps unsurprisingly on higher starting salaries. However, there is a clear gender discrepancy. Just over 10% of science-based business owners are women, compared to 33% for other types of businesses. Of the FTSE 100 companies in STEM sectors, 13% of board directors are female, compared to 17% in non-science-based organisations, while fewer than one in 10 of STEM managers is female.
When it comes to apprenticeships, the gender disparity is particularly stark. In IT and telecommunications roughly 10% are taken by women, in engineering less than 4% and in construction just 1.4%. So in the private sector, whether it be founding a company, sitting on a board or taking up an apprenticeship, women are woefully underrepresented in the very occupations that in general would be among the most economically empowering.
The public sector, too, presents problems. While sexist views may be suspected but hard to prove in the corporate world, overt prejudice against women has been explicit in academia, sadly. Back in 1997 a report was published in the high-impact journal Nature from the Swedish Medical Research Council. This clearly demonstrated a gender bias in peer review of grant applications. Astonishingly, women with the highest scores on their objectively measured publication record were judged subjectively to be about as good as a low-average man.
Meanwhile, in January 2005, the then president of Harvard, Larry Summers, sparked uproar at an academic conference when he said that “innate differences between men and women” might be one reason why fewer women succeed in science and maths. Sadly, the situation has not improved. In a paper published more recently, in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there was still an objectively demonstrable bias, this time by the faculty, in both the biological and the physical sciences in terms of perceived competence and hireability of men over women.
Another major hurdle for women in the academic science sector in particular is the lack of any type of structure in the first stages of their career. This will have devastating implications for having children. Typically, a research scientist in a university will gain tenure, and hence any kind of job security and structure, only when they are in their mid-30s. Those women wishing to start a family, as might be expected, in their 20s are therefore faced with an unpalatable set of options.
This is an important thing to grasp about science research: it is at this stage that a young post-doc scientist, having become finally independent of their thesis supervisor, now needs to be maximally productive in publishing their own all-important peer-reviewed papers, which will in turn serve as the gold standard for obtaining a lectureship. Therefore, the choices would be: first, have no children; secondly, defer having children beyond your biological optimum; thirdly, have a child and give up research science altogether; or fourthly, have a child and inevitably take time out just as your male competitors are forging ahead with their publications. Very rarely would a man have to make these choices.
In addition, the situation is not helped by the meagre and often prohibitively expensive childcare facilities available in universities. Moreover, a frequent complaint is that in the national audit of science research in universities—the so-called REF—the one-year dispensation allocated against your track record for having a child is just not enough. One rising star in her 30s, who has a toddler, summed it up:
“Quite frankly it is exhausting and I am not surprised that many women decide to quit science … I don’t feel anywhere near as competitive or productive as my peers can be or I used to be. It does make you wonder if it is all worthwhile”.
It is no surprise, then, that women are once again underrepresented in senior science university posts. I first flagged this issue back in 2002 when, as requested by the then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, I prepared a report on the recruitment and retention of women in science, published as the SET Fair report. Looking back at data from that time to the most recent statistics published in 2012-13, there has been some improvement. Across all STEM areas the percentage of female academic staff has increased from 35% in 2002 to 42% some 10 years later. However, currently just over 2% of all women academics are professors, compared with almost three times as many males, so the situation is still not good enough.
In general, women hoping to flourish in science-based careers face a wide range of difficulties. In a survey of more than 100 employees in the science-related public and private sectors, an astonishing 70% of women stated that they had experienced personal and professional barriers to entry and progression in science. These barriers varied; while some that the survey flagged cannot be readily addressed, such as the need to live in geographical proximity to their partner, others can, including the lack of resources and funding—particularly for childcare—institutional sexism and male-dominated informal networks.
A big problem often is lack of awareness of current initiatives that would help to combat these problems. One example that includes both university and industry is so-called WISE—Women in to Science and Engineering —which aims to improve the gender balance in the UK’s workforce, pushing the presence of female employees to 30% by 2020. WISE launched an ambitious, industry-led campaign in September 2014 to ensure that women in science, technology, engineering and manufacturing have the same opportunities to progress in their career as their male counterparts. They invited a cross-section of businesses to tell them what had made the most difference to the retention and progression of women in their organisation. The result has been 10 recommended steps, which, interestingly enough, all relate to mindset and the need for changing attitudes, particularly in the corporate world.
Meanwhile, for women in science-based academia, the Athena SWAN programme addresses gender equality in UK universities. Athena SWAN has been developed to encourage and recognise commitment to combating this underrepresentation and to advancing the careers of women in science-based research and academia.
In addition, Sheffield Hallam runs Women in Science, Engineering and Technology—WiSET—based within the Centre for Science Education. This aims to widen the participation of underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, maths and the built environment. It has developed and delivered a wide range of innovative projects, resources, schemes and activities for more than 10 years now, based on gender and occupational segregation at all levels of education and employment. It works from a local to an international level and provides resources and runs events to encourage participation in science, as well as supporting those already working in the STEM subjects.
Sheffield Hallam was also one of the universities involved at the start of Aurora. This is a national scheme aimed at developing future leaders for higher education. It was launched in 2013 as a women-only leadership development programme. Aurora aims to encourage a wide range of women in academic and professional roles to think of themselves as leaders, to develop leadership skills, and to help institutions maximise the potential of these women. These are innovative development processes for women up to senior lecturer level or professional services equivalent.
These are all really impressive initiatives that could change the prospects for women in science since I published SET Fair in 2002. So why is there still a problem? Why is it not unusual to read in the press of a “female scientist” but not of a “female politician” or “female lawyer”? It is as though the fact that a woman is a scientist is still unusual and worthy of note. Perhaps that is at the heart of the problem. Clearly, for the real economic empowerment of women in science, attitudes still need to change. I recommend the following initiatives.
The excellent schemes just mentioned for helping women in science need much more publicity and co-ordination. Presumably this could best be achieved by central government. Moreover, it is surely only the Government who could bankroll a sufficiently well resourced scheme for funding a truly realistic—not just a token effort—large number of ring-fenced fellowships and/or return-to-work allowances for pump-priming a career for those returning from childcare. The same benefits currently available to women should be extended to men if they choose to share the burden of maternity leave traditionally taken by women—for example, the allowances in REF and in fellowship applications. This might encourage male scientists to share parental responsibilities more, as they could be less concerned about the long-term effect on their career, and we could move towards an equal future where both male and female scientists were competing on equal grounds.
Within the private sector, the L’Oreal Women in Science awards have shown how awareness can be raised of the achievements of individual women in their research, but we now need other companies, particularly those in science and technology, as well as smaller biotech companies, to take up the challenge of new initiatives for promoting the appeal of science to women as well as celebrating the benefits that they bring. For example, only last week I attended a gender-diversity summit in Luxembourg, organised by KPMG, where the advantages of female representation in the corporate world were stressed over and over by the men attending as well as the women. It would be wonderful if science and tech-based companies were to organise similar events, and from them develop constructive programmes.
Finally, none of these initiatives—neither those already in train nor those just suggested—will have any effect at all without one single, essential ingredient, which has already been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly. That is the essential ingredient of a woman who chooses to do a degree in science. Schoolgirls need to be aware not only of the thrill of doing research at the bench but of the wide variety of career options that will open up to them with a science background, even beyond the lab bench, such as patent law, media, politics and teaching. What a shame it would be if they were deterred from such exciting prospects by the perception—indeed the reality—that a major obstacle to realising their true potential in science was their gender.
Baroness Brady (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to make a contribution to this debate regarding the significant role that women’s economic empowerment has both nationally and internationally. Women’s economic empowerment is often talked about in terms of quotas or targets, but this is the language of charity, of welfare and of equality for equality’s sake. As someone who did not need a quota or a target to get on in the business world, I can assure the House that it is not, and should not be, about those things.
When I became the CEO of Birmingham City Football Club, people thought it was tokenistic, that I was window dressing and that hiring a woman was a gimmick. It was only once they realised that I had a serious plan to turn around a failing business and put that into practice that attitudes changed and people understood that I was there because I was qualified, up to the job and could do it well. After all, that is what they would assume about any man who was taking over. If I had my time again, people might still ask whether I had enough experience to do the job but, if they did not feel the need to ask about my gender, that would be progress. Let me be clear: we are on the path to progress. My mother’s generation did not even enjoy equal rights before the law. Some professions and institutions were completely closed to her. We now need to move on from changing the law to changing perceptions, attitudes and culture.
This debate is important for women but it should be important for everyone interested in the success of our country. Women’s economic empowerment is about success, not just for us but, more importantly, for UK plc. It is about not missing out on half the talent pool which is available to do the top jobs in this country, to lead our companies in the global economy and to start new ones and grow them too. It is about diversity of thinking, different perspectives on the same issues, new skills, new mindsets and new ideas. We need to challenge existing ways of doing things, and empowering women is a great way of achieving this. A good board should have a variety of executives with different backgrounds and bodies of expertise. A starting point should be more women. Boards are there to challenge the executives, to ask the difficult questions and to hold them to account.
So how do we get half of our companies, our boards and even our Governments to be run by women? First, I want to say that I am proud to be a Conservative Peer because I am proud of my party’s record on women’s economic empowerment. Under the previous Government, there were 21 all-male boards in the FTSE 100. Now there are none. In 2010, women made up only 12.5% of the members of corporate boards of the FTSE 100; this figure is now 22.8% and I want to see it increased further. I am not saying that boards with no women should be made to appoint some on the spot, but they should at least be made to answer why they do not have any.
I am also pleased to say that there is a record number of women in work. Our long-term economic plan has helped to increase the number of women in work to record highs—with 14.4 million now in employment, an increase of 796,000 since 2010. As an active business mentor and as this party’s Small Business Ambassador, I am pleased that there are also more women-led businesses than ever before.
On our journey into the world of work, women and their employers need to know that any career door can be open to them, as they start to move away from thinking of certain industries as male-oriented. I know how necessary this is, coming from a background in football. That is why I am pleased that we are increasing the number of women who take up careers in science, technology, engineering and maths. The “Your Life” campaign is working with businesses to support more women in these industries—for example, Airbus is committed to recruiting 25% women engineers. We are also providing a £10 million fund to help women progress as engineers.
It is not all down to government policy. Some of it is down to culture and attitudes—even the attitudes of women themselves. As Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg said, women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If and when they succeed, they typically do not attribute that success to themselves. This needs to change and I hope that I, and many others, can be an example to other women. I have been lucky enough to work with boards which have looked at what I have done, not at my gender. This is the attitude that we need to foster. We do not need to stack the deck in favour of women; we just need to tell them—and tell the world—that women can do anything they want. Where they lack the tools, Governments should provide them.
Someone said to me recently that, in society today, it is not okay to be a bit racist or a bit homophobic, but it is still okay to be a bit sexist. I am delighted that this debate is taking place as a means to stamping that out.
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, welcome this debate. It has become a set piece each year and it is important that we have it. It reminds me how privileged all the speakers in this Chamber are in that we have a voice. With that, comes a responsibility to speak for the women who do not have a voice at any level in our community and our society today. I think that we will see a concordat across the Chamber, as we usually do, about the principles and the purpose of this event, but that we will disagree on how we achieve it. It is important to air and discuss that disagreement. The theme for International Women’s Day this year is “Make it happen”. That is a very profound theme because we can talk all we like, but making it happen is more difficult and challenging, and we have to do it.
This week we will also have the Women of the World Festival on the South Bank, a marvellous festival that has grown in size since it began. I should like to congratulate the BBC “Woman’s Hour” programme on transferring itself to the festival and broadcasting from it each day. If we have seen any steadfast support for women over the years, it has come from Jenni Murray and her team at “Woman’s Hour”.
Some 20 years ago—it does not seem like it, but it is—as a young and new Member of this House, I asked this question: when will women achieve equal pay? We had Barbara Castle’s Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act, which is 40 years old this year, and we have still not achieved equal pay. Without that Act, I wonder where we would be—probably in an even more inferior position than we are today. I am reminded, too, that in the other place the majority of Members on the opposite Benches to the Labour Government of the day opposed both of those Acts, as indeed they opposed the 1997 Labour Government’s National Minimum Wage Act 1998. All three of these Acts have been a big help, not for women like us in this Chamber, who have enjoyed enormous opportunity and privilege, but for the women who do not have a voice.
The noble Baroness, in introducing the debate in such an interesting, wide-ranging and enjoyable way, referred to the fact that there is now a woman on the board of every company in the FTSE 100. The instigator of the policy on that was a Labour Peer, my noble friend Lord Davies of Abersoch, and all credit to him. But going back to the theme of my contribution to this debate, I will say that one swallow does not make a summer. This annual debate really gets my juices going and reminds me of years ago, when I was a bit more of a firebrand than I am today.
In 2010, we were concerned about the gender pay gap. We called for a requirement to be put on medium-sized and large companies—not small ones—to publish information about average wages based on gender in their companies. The coalition decided that they did not want any legislation or regulation, but to encourage companies to take up a voluntary code. Although we tried to get that changed, the Government did not accept it, but we have made progress: four companies are now doing it. That is an average of one a year since the year we tried to introduce the requirement. I raise this, perhaps a bit unfairly on the Minister who is to reply to the debate, to ask whether, when an amendment is tabled next week asking companies employing more than 250 people to publish their average wages based on gender, the Government will accept it. Remember that the theme for International Women’s Day this year is “Make it happen”; that would help to make it happen. The pay, opportunity and empowerment gap needs a whole range of initiatives—legislation and regulation, yes, but also a lot of others. I am not stupid enough to think that legislation is the whole answer; it is not.
I have the huge privilege of being president of the charity the Abbeyfield Society. Indeed, one of its former presidents is in the Chamber and will speak later in the debate: the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone. She did a wonderful job as president and I look forward to her contribution. The charity provides housing and accommodation for older members of our community.
Over the past week, in the lead-up to this debate, a Resolution Foundation survey has revealed that 930,000 care workers are paid less than the living wage. I have chosen this theme for the debate because it is an area that is in the public eye, it is an area that will grow, and it is one of the last big areas of employment where employees are undervalued and underpaid. We read in the press only about the abuse that takes place in a minority of cases. As I say, it is an enormous area of employment. I never thought that I would thank the Times, but let me put this on the record. Last year the Times chose the Abbeyfield Society as one of its Christmas charities of the year, and the Telegraph followed that up. I thank both those newspapers for showing the work that these underpaid and undervalued members of society provide.
The Alzheimer’s Society says that 670,000 unpaid carers are women working for people with dementia. Some 82% of older people’s care home managers are women. It is the biggest area of women’s employment that I can think of. In Abbeyfield, 85% of our staff are women, of whom 26% are in senior management roles. The average number of women working in the care sector is much higher than in most other areas of employment in Britain, so it is a very important area for us to get right. Our first woman CEO, Natasha Singarayer, is an inspirational leader. Under her leadership, in only the last 12 months or so, this smallish charity provided 8,000 older people with homes. Of our 9,000 staff and volunteers, over 80% are women. We have a responsibility for them and we have a responsibility for the people that we care for.
Last year I was proud—as I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, will be—that we were the first national care organisation to pay the living wage. Our 1,500 directly employed staff are now all on the living wage. Of course, some asked why, because in some cases it meant a pay increase of over 20%. But we asked: why not? We expect our staff to give first-class care to our people; we expect them to respect them. How can we expect that if we do not respect our staff in their own right? It was the right thing to do. We have gone a bit further than that; we have said that by March 2017 all our direct staff must be on the living wage and all our suppliers must pay their staff the living wage, too. I give this example because we will not be required to do it by legislation or, probably, by regulation. Depending on the outcome of the election, if it was the coalition’s policy, it will not be government policy either. This is where an organisation has taken responsibility itself, and it is where companies must take responsibility.
I said that today was a day of celebration: it is. In particular, I celebrate and congratulate a Peer on our own Benches—my noble friend Lord Soley. Why him? He is making it happen for women. He is the chairman of the Mary Seacole Memorial Statue Appeal, which he helped to establish. A 15-foot statue will be erected right opposite Parliament, in the grounds of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital. Mary Seacole was the daughter of a Scottish father and a Creole mother, born in Jamaica. In 2004, she was voted the greatest black Briton. The location of that statue is important and the work of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, is also important. The statue has a disc behind it that comes from the very site of a British hotel in the Crimea where Mary Seacole set up her nursing station. She applied to the British authorities five times to go there and they refused, so she made her own way, as women with determination will. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, and his colleagues managed to get the team of artists building the statue into the Crimea just two months before the Russians went in. The disc will come from the site of the British Hotel, as she called it—from the site that overlooks the valley where the charge of the Light Brigade actually happened. Although she was not born in Britain, in my view Mary Seacole is one of the great Britons.
It reminded me that we had a debate some time ago about a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst. It is still a dream of mine that we should have that, as well as a statue of the Special Operations Executive women, which we do not have in Britain. We have too few statues and commemorations of women. That is my dream—to commemorate the women who have gone. But the biggest legacy that we could have in commemoration of those women is making sure that the thousands of women in Britain today who do not have a voice are treated fairly and that the Government—whatever Government—stand up and make sure that they are treated fairly and that equal pay is not still a factor in Britain 40 years hence.
Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow so many excellent speeches by so many strong and experienced women.
The evidence is overwhelming: when more women are in work, economies grow. An increase in female labour force participation and a reduction in the gap between women’s and men’s labour participation result in faster economic growth. Evidence from a wide range of countries shows that increasing the share of household income controlled by women through their own earnings impacts positively on their families and children.
My own maternal grandmother was a very poor woman. She had no education. She had seven children to feed and clothe. She baked bread every day in her village and took in laundry just so that she made enough money—a small amount but it was enough—to feed her seven children. That was in the early part of the previous century, but there are still millions of women like my grandmother all around the world today, who take part in what is called informal employment and do not have the privileges that we enjoy. In south Asia, for example, over 80% of women in non-agricultural jobs are in informal employment; in sub-Saharan Africa it is 74%. Women comprise an average of 43% of the agricultural labour force in developing countries; this varies considerably across the regions from 20% or less in Latin America to 50% or more in parts of Asia and Africa. That is the reality today.
We know that women and children also bear the main negative impacts of collecting and transporting fuel and water. According to the UN Women figures, women in many developing countries spend more than one to four hours each day collecting biomass for fuel. Another study of water poverty in 25 sub-Saharan African countries estimates that women spend at least 16 million hours a day collecting drinking water; men spend 6 million hours a day and children 4 million hours.
Like many noble Lords, I go into a lot of schools, speaking mainly to girls who come from deprived backgrounds. They are very interested in talking about the sorts of issues that impact on women and girls around the world. We also have problems in this country with young girls who come from different backgrounds who are not encouraged to go into further education and reach their full potential. One thing I always tell these girls when I go into schools and colleges is, “Do not let anyone tell you what you cannot do”. Many of us, including me, had it drummed into us what was not appropriate for a girl to do, but I always tell them, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, said earlier, “There is nothing you cannot do. If you focus, get the right education and are determined, there is nothing you cannot achieve”. We need far more positive messages like that for young girls in this country from all backgrounds.
We know that social institutions, as I have mentioned, affect female participation in economic life. A more proactive approach from donor countries such as ours is needed to address the roots of gender inequality. It is entirely right that the approach by donors has been to improve women’s access to education and health—as we heard from my noble friend Lady Jolly—including birth control. That is very important, but it is not sufficient. The root causes of gender discrimination in some of the countries I have mentioned, with very strong social and cultural institutions, also need to be addressed. For example, the enrolment of girls in primary schools can rise without it ultimately increasing female participation in the labour market if traditional customs forbid women from working outside the home. Where such customs go against women being in authority, the enrolment rate in universities may rise without that having any effect on the number of female managers or women starting up businesses outside traditional roles. It is therefore important to increase the effectiveness of country and donor policies. Measures to address institutional inequalities must be put in place.
Even when there are strong customs influenced by culture and religion that have adverse effects, positive changes in favour of women are possible. In Turkey, a country that has seen huge economic development and success, a recent project had the motto, “We Are Equal and We Are Together At Work, At Home, Everywhere”, which was very ambitious. The project aims to create decent work opportunities for women and the development of inclusive and coherent policies to promote women’s employment in Turkey. The UN Women’s regional office for Europe and Central Asia signed a partnership with one of the country’s largest industrial conglomerates, Koç Holding, a significant holding in Turkey that manages companies involved in finance, energy, tourism, food and IT. These types of initiatives are beginning to break down customs and traditions in encouraging women to play a full role in the economic development of their country. Increasing numbers of women are now active in the workforce, bringing greater prosperity not only to their families but to the country. As a footnote, I say that this is by no means widespread. It is a great start, but there are still traditions that have not been broken down that prevent women going out to work, particularly once they are married.
I am going to talk about violence against women, because it has a huge impact on the ability of women to participate in the workforce and community. This is one of the most widespread abuses of human rights worldwide, affecting a staggering one-third of all women. The effects go way beyond individual women to negatively impact across whole communities. Action Aid reports that violence against women and girls is one of the biggest barriers to ending poverty and inequality. It maintains and reinforces women’s unequal status and is really so disempowering, making women more vulnerable to future violence and driving increased inequality and poverty.
Before I came into your Lordships’ House over 25 years ago, I had experience of establishing the first domestic violence project and refuge for women from a Turkish and Kurdish background. In those days, one felt insecure talking about violence against women in the community of which I am part. It was not recognised; it was not addressed; and to talk about it was seen as taking women away from their husbands—I was accused of that many times and faced threats for doing it. Establishing the project, which is still going strong after more than 25 years, is one of my proudest achievements. It has brought huge success and educated a whole community. Sadly, it is still needed, but it has become quite entrenched and well respected. IMECE, the Turkish-speaking women’s group based in north London, is still there and has been doing fantastic work for more than 25 years—it celebrated its 25th year last year.
This debate marking International Women’s Day provides us with an opportunity to ensure that women’s rights are high on the agenda of global leaders. I commend this Government on keeping this issue high on the international agenda and hope that whoever is in the next Government—I am not going to be party political, because I think that we all want the same thing and are all committed, which is why we are taking part today—will do the same.
Later this year, world leaders will agree on a set of sustainable development goals. Key charities are urging the United Kingdom Government to ensure that, for the first time, a globally agreed target on addressing all forms of violence against women and girls is secured, with a stand-alone goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment. Will the UK Government commit to an ambitious action plan to meet this goal? As one of the major donors in the world, we need to lead by example on this. I would like to see a greater focus on women’s economic equality, with SDG targets to recognise, reduce and redistribute women’s unpaid care work and to secure equal rights to economic resources and assets and access to decent work and a living wage. There should be equal pay for work of equal value to ensure women’s full and equal participation and influence at all levels of decision-making.
Each day around the world, hundreds of millions of women collect firewood and water for their families. They cook, do the chores and take care of the elderly, the young and the sick; and all the time, they try to scrape a living from the poorest paid and most precarious jobs. Women’s labour is vital to sustainable development both within the home and outside it, and for the well-being of their own society. Women make up roughly 60% of the world’s working poor, despite their low rates of participation in the labour force overall, but their work is undervalued and mostly invisible. On a global level, we urgently need an agreement to guarantee women’s access to decent work opportunities and to reduce and redistribute unpaid care responsibilities that fall disproportionately on women, just as they do here in the United Kingdom. We need to ensure that economic policies work for women, not against them.
We are already doing a lot of promotion, but we need far more of it to promote women’s voices and leadership at all levels. There should really be no more summits: we see these summits when countries are in conflict or when we are trying to nation-build. There are always these summits, but women have to be there. How many summits have we witnessed where women were just not at the table? How on earth is this going to work when half the population is excluded? As I mentioned, violence against women and girls works against these goals, so will the Minister tell me whether the Government will champion these goals in the way that I have described?
I also make a plea for refugee women. Will the Government please continue to prioritise survivors of sexual violence through the Syrian vulnerable persons relocation scheme? Will they significantly increase the number of resettlement places in the United Kingdom made available to Syrian refugees? We were told that this number is still several hundred. We know the scale of the refugee crisis for the Syrian people; thousands have been taken in by other wealthy countries while we have only taken in hundreds. This is surely not the right way to go: we should be leading by example.
Violence against women and girls is still endemic in Afghanistan, affecting women across Afghan society. A report just last month from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission showed that it is increasing, with 4,250 cases of abuse reported to the commission in nine months. The report followed numerous cases of violence against women making headlines in the country, including, among other practices, beheading, gang rape, execution and the exchanging of women and girls to settle disputes. A significant feature of violence against women and girls in Afghanistan is the violence and threats faced by women human rights defenders. These women in civil society surely need greater support and protection. We have a responsibility, as one of the largest donors to the countries that I have mentioned, to ensure that we attach serious conditions of greater equality and power for women, and that we do not simply allow aid to be received without the acceptance of these key principles respecting the human rights of women and girls.
In conclusion, I commend the BBC for screening “India’s Daughter” last night in face of pressure by the Indian Government, which have banned it. The film exposed the horrific attitudes towards rape and violence in that country. Surely the best way to combat such violence is to shine a light and hold Governments to account. Will the Minister tell us whether, as a major donor to India, the Government are doing this?
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend. I was looking at her maiden speech again only recently in preparing for today, and she has a track record of supporting women in particular who need economic empowerment, have mental health problems or are in prison. I applaud her comments. Speaking about Turkey, she will be concerned, as I am, about Safak Pavey, one of the bravest MPs from the Republican People’s Party in Turkey. She is an LSE graduate, like me, a human rights campaigner and the first disabled woman to become a Member of Parliament in Turkey. She is a reminder, as has previously been said, of the huge privilege that we, as a generation, have of being able to speak freely and openly; we constantly have to remember that life is very different in other parts of the world.
On the first International Women’s Day, a hundred years ago, life expectancy for a woman in this country was about 55. Today it is about 83—a dramatic, life-changing experience for all of us. Of course, in Swaziland life expectancy is 51, in Somalia 52 and in Sierra Leone 39. In our debates, we must constantly be mindful about the paradox and contrast with other parts of the world. Some 774 million adults cannot read or write, 493 million of them women. Sixty per cent of women in the Arab states, south and west Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are illiterate. In Mali the figure is 29% and in Pakistan 40%, while Afghanistan has equally appalling figures. We all know that newly literate women have a positive ripple effect on all development indicators. Literacy does not save lives or fill hungry mouths, but it is a central component in women’s empowerment. A woman who is able to keep her own business records is more likely to be able to manage her income and expenditure, and to manage her family size. The children of a literate mother are more likely to complete their education, all the more so in a technology-driven world where smartphones are ubiquitous. Illiteracy limits women to only basic levels of engagement. The disparity is growing greater, all the more so for women with disability—and I endorse the comments made on that by my noble friend Lady Brinton.
I warmly applaud the leadership from our Secretary of State for DfID, Justine Greening, and the work she had done consistently to focus on girls’ and women’s rights. Having a woman in that role, to me, is extraordinarily important. When my noble friend Lady Chalker held that office, it was the same. The redoubtable Clare Short, as many on the Benches opposite will know, relentlessly campaigned for women and children. The Secretary of State has consistently highlighted the targets, and reported back on progress; women should have control over their own bodies and a voice in their community and country, they should live free from the fear of violence, marry who they wish and when, receive an education and a job, and choose how they spend the money they earn—and how strongly I agree with those points about microfinance and women having control over their budgeting. The recent Girl Summit on female genital mutilation and the work that the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has done with Angelina Jolie on putting an end to sexual violence in conflict are, again, examples of how giving a focus and a profile together with a determined programme backed by resources is critical. That would not be possible without that 0.7% commitment of GDP to aid.
From talking about the parts of the world where there are deep concerns, I will just say a little more about the other end of economic opportunity. I am hesitant to speak at all in this debate without the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, being here. She came into the Chamber briefly and I wonder whether she has lost her voice, as I cannot recall a debate on this subject without her contribution. Although the noble Lord, Lord Davies, has done a lot on this, I do not think he would say that the campaign for female empowerment started with him—although, my goodness, the way he has brought forces together to achieve change is quite remarkable. As has been said, in 2010 12.5% of board members were female. The figure is now 23%. The changes are remarkable. The last FTSE 100 company without a woman on the board was named and shamed and now they all have one. Some have several. In our own House, we have my impressive noble friend Lady Harding, who is one of those leading figures. The first female CEO of a FTSE 100 company was not until 1997, but we now have three. The first female FTSE 100 chair was in 2002 and we now have three. We now have 22 female heads of state in different fields, including Angela Merkel in Germany.
In our lifetime we have seen these dramatic changes. In my lifetime I never thought there would be a woman Prime Minister. We have had a woman Prime Minister, we have had women Leaders of the Lords and the Commons, and we have had women Speakers in the Lords and the Commons. These are all achievements that I doubted would ever be reached. We have a great deal to be excited about, but none more so, at long last, than the church that I belong to, which has overcome all the obstacles to women bishops—and how wonderful that is. I am sure that the right reverend Prelate will speak about this at greater length, and I do not mean to steal his thunder, but the installation of Reverend Libby Lane last month as Bishop of Stockport is absolutely splendid. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this time next year when we have this debate, we might even have a bishop of our own in the Lords, although my campaign now is to get the bishops to remove their white dresses and just have the splendid purple, but I do not want to lead the House down a false avenue in this particular regard.
Women have done well, I believe, under this Government. There is always more to do. The gender gap is closing. There are record numbers of women in employment—numbers that are very favourable compared with anywhere else in the European Union. The tax cuts, the help with childcare, and more to come, all mean that this is a good time to be a woman in the United Kingdom. It is splendid to hear from a great role model, my noble friend Lady Brady, who shows what can be done with energy, ability and a positive attitude.
There are always going to be areas where women’s interests need to be properly considered. I have been thinking about the effect of policies to increase employment into the late 60s and how that may exacerbate gender income and class disadvantages for women. Professor Sara Arber at the University of Surrey has recently been writing in a very earnest way about this, and the noble Baroness’s points about the Abbeyfield Society and the vast number of carers are equally important.
Let me just finish on a topic which the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, has covered far better than I ever could. With all the concentration on the number of women in boards, I have long been far more concerned about the inadequate number of female vice-chancellors. I want the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and anybody else who wants to join him, to focus their efforts on working out why we cannot have more women vice-chancellors and what the obstacles, hidden pressures and prejudice are against this progress. My excellent noble friend Lady Perry might well be able to tell us the answer to all these matters later on.
I always regard this debate as enjoyable and enlightening. I think we are privileged, as I say, to be in this House, but we know that our job is to make life so much better for other women, not only in this country—a liberal and civilised country—but in so many other disadvantaged and very often very disagreeable countries around the world.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, it is a real pleasure to take part in this debate. I remember when we had to argue very hard to have a debate on International Women’s Day and to persuade the usual channels—of, I have to say, the party of the noble Baroness—that this was a noble topic to take up. I am thrilled that now we all take it for granted but it was a real struggle in those early days. Given that the previous Government had women as Chief Whips for such a long time, we were able to establish it without any discussion at all. This has followed what the other House is doing in simply having a debate every year, so we can all bring to it the things that really matter to us as women. It is good that the men also contribute.
As a woman in politics, I go back to what it is that has given me all the privileges and opportunities that I have had. A lot of it was my family, but for two years after my degree I went with Voluntary Service Overseas to work in Kenya and that changed my life. It made me see that I had a responsibility to make a difference—and that I could do that. There were things that I could do that I had never dreamed of doing, certainly not growing up in Sunderland. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, who will speak later, did as well. In my cohort, I was one of only 6% who went on to higher education. I went to Kenya soon after that. There was no internet in those days so you could not keep referring to what was going on back at home. My father by then was a Member at the other end, and he used to send me the Guardian Weekly, so that I could keep some basic sense of was going on in the West, but actually I was taken over by what was going on in developing countries and what our role was.
I am giving this long account to explain why today I will speak about international development and what is going on in the developing world; I will not be tempted by the things that I have heard from colleagues speaking about this country. I have the enormous privilege of having kept in contact with VSO throughout my life and of now being involved with it again in governance. VSO now works in around 30 countries in the world. From that, we have learnt, taken evidence and built up a good means of understanding what is happening in communities in the developing world and of knowing—not guessing—that women’s economic empowerment has such a major effect on families and, of course, on local communities. The whole community benefits. This is particularly true for women in communities where men are absent or are unable to work, particularly in places where men are travelling to work in southern Africa. I will say a little about Mozambique shortly.
I want to say something about Kenya where I keep going back. I met some women’s groups that a volunteer was working with. The first group that she took me to see was able, through microfinance, to buy some goats. At first, they bought about half a dozen goats but by the time I went, there were about 200—goats are good at reproducing. Those goats were now supporting the women to care for more than 200 children in the village who were orphaned through HIV/AIDS. They were remarkably strong women—they simply accepted this was their responsibility and they got on with it. With the volunteer, they had been able to find the means of doing that in an effective way with regular meat and regular milk and then selling some of the goats so that they could financially sustain their responsibilities.
In the next village we went to, the women’s group with the volunteer had begun planting a whole range of seeds that they had not planted much before. They were all seeds that could be milled, so, again with microfinance help, they bought a small mill. They were milling different sorts of flour which they were able to use themselves—so their families were better fed—but they were also able to sell to others. They were making enough money to pay school fees and to do things that otherwise they would not have been able to do.
In Mozambique, VSO is working with the Association for Mozambiquan Miners and has been supporting migrant workers and their families. Many of the men work in the mines in South Africa, which is very difficult and dangerous employment, so many of the women have to bring their families up in the absence of the men, and of course many of the men die early. VSO has been providing support and training to help widows in particular to build a business and move themselves out of poverty and, again, make a huge difference in their local community and in their families. I could read noble Lords testimony from some of the men who are now too old to work but are being cared for because there are these real changes in women’s activity.
I know that empowering women economically really makes a difference to families and communities, but we have to accept that it is not enough. We all talk about the importance of women in development, but we do not take it sufficiently on to the next stage. This is essentially about how to enable women to ensure that these changes are sustainable and that their societies are organised in ways that enable their economic empowerment to be sustainable. However, we know that that bit is not yet working. Why do women still struggle so much for economic equality and work equality? In the world of work, 60% of the world’s working poor are women. Other speakers have given the figures around the challenges that women are facing, such as the lack of literacy. That traps too many of them with insufficient means to be involved in their communities in the way that they should be. So VSO now has a campaign, which I am part of, looking at how to ensure greater equality around the world for women, and that means getting many more women into decision-making positions.
We have begun doing that in this country but we are not there; however, in many developing countries it has hardly even begun. Some of them are doing better than us in terms of the numbers of women in their parliaments, but we really need to move this agenda on. Evidence is clear that where women are participating in and influencing decision-making, it is leading to a more efficient, effective and responsive set of decisions for communities. It helps progress towards gender equality, and helps to transform the deep-rooted social norms and attitudes that act as barriers. It also seems clear to me, however, that it is by tackling the barriers to women’s equality that we will take the massive steps that we need to in order to render the changes that aid is making around the world sustainable. Unless our aid leads to long-lasting change it will continue to be under attack, and that threat is continual.
Decisions this year by the international community are therefore critical. At the meeting later this year to agree the new development goals, those attending—largely men, I am afraid to say—will have a real opportunity to change the position for women and actually develop goals that will enable women to take more part in the decisions around their country, their community and the world. We simply have to say to them that this is an opportunity they have to face up to. They are the people who this year will have to listen and ensure that women’s voices are heard, and face these challenges in the way that they take their decisions. This is a huge opportunity and we will all be watching closely to make sure that this group, largely consisting of men, takes the right decision.
The Lord Bishop of Derby
My Lords, I rise with some trepidation to be the first man to speak in this debate, particularly having been gently chided by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, about wearing a dress. Still, perhaps that is suitable bridging attire at this moment in the debate. I am also very conscious that the church could be seen to be behind the curve on this issue, as has been mentioned, and I hope that noble Lords can see that we are trying very hard to catch up and make proper progress. I want to do three things in this short address. I want to take up the theme that the noble Baronesses have talked about, the international perspective; look at some issues in the UK; and say what we might learn in terms of policy priorities.
A number of speakers, especially the noble Baronesses, Lady Bottomley and Lady Armstrong, have mentioned the importance of an international perspective. I declare an interest as a director and trustee of Christian Aid. It is axiomatic in the developing world, as we have heard, that if you invest in women you invest in an advance for the economy. In western Afghanistan, for example, Christian Aid has been working for over 30 years with partners. There are more and more women-headed households because of all the conflict. We have pioneered a new form of silk production and offer training in technology, with 1,400 women in those businesses. That is producing income that is now being diversified into other sectors such as clothing manufacture, and it is women who have the drive and commitment to make that happen. In Mali, Christian Aid, with partners, has helped 4,000 women to gain access to land. As a result, vegetable production increased by 50%, with women leading and directing the businesses. So it is axiomatic that this is a sensible thing to do.
If noble Lords want more scientific evidence, some might know about Goldman Sachs’s 10,000 Women initiative. In 2008, Goldman Sachs set up this initiative to provide business education, mentors, networks and links to capital. By 2013, it had enrolled its 10,000 women across the world, and of course it does a scientific analysis of the programme’s effectiveness. It shows very clearly that revenues have been increased, jobs have been created and there has been an expansion of women’s contribution to their communities. There is a very clear message, as we have heard: if you invest in women for development, the whole of society benefits.
I want to remind us of some of the factors in our own context, if we accept the principle of investing in women for economic and social development. The Fawcett Society has done some interesting research to show a number of factors that I invite us to think about and the Minister perhaps to comment on. There has been a very welcome growth in jobs in the private sector since 2010, much trumpeted and very valuable. Some 59% of those jobs have gone to men and 41% to women, so we have to think about how we are proactive in giving women equal opportunities.
Further research shows that many women work well below their qualification level in the labour market. We have heard some speeches about getting behind through taking time out for child-rearing, but another factor that might be important is that the jobseeker’s allowance has a strong emphasis on getting people into work; that is understandable, but it can have the effect of getting people into work so quickly that they have to take work that is below their level of ability and skill and therefore not fulfilling their potential. Those people are mainly women, who end up working below their qualification level. We need to take some kind of look at the jobseeker’s allowance strategy.
A final bit of research about our own context is that 85% of the money saved from tax and benefit changes has come from the pockets of women. I invite the Minister to comment on that. The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, said that women need to keep more of what they earn, but 85% of the money saved from tax and benefit changes has come from the pockets of women.
I raise the issues, finally, of policy direction and policy priority. Goldman Sachs has done a very interesting study of Japan which I think can put alongside our own context some markers about policy issues. It has shown that the amazing progress of Japanese culture and economics in involving women has been made through a series of targets: targeting female representation in various fields, as we have heard other speakers mention; targeting lifting female labour participation in particular age groups through a reading of the economy and its potential; targeting the boost of the supply of childcare; targeting an increase in the percentage of fathers who take up paternity leave, which is a shift towards equality; and targeting the issue of companies making disclosures about gender policy and gender practice.
From that research, Goldman Sachs highlights three sectors and a number of issues that we might consider for our own policies with our Government and our business practice. On government, the research says that we need to encourage gender diversity target setting, and the Government need to lead the way. We need to boost female representation in government. That is a very important sign. We need to promote, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, said, female entrepreneurship. We need to encourage retraining opportunities, and we need to invest in childcare. They are issues of policy priority for Government.
In the private sector, the research shows that we need to stress the business case for diversity. There are plenty of studies which show that. We need to create a more flexible working environment. In particular, schemes for evaluating performance and ensuring promotion need to be much more targeted towards embracing women, including women coming at different speeds into the labour market.
We need, in the private sector, to set clear diversity targets. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, talked about the danger of “all talk”. How are we going to encourage the private sector to set clear diversity targets? How are we going to introduce more flexible employment contracts? What is very interesting in the private sector is the Australian model, which you may know about. In Australia they realise you have got to do what they call “engage the majority” in terms of the workplace and the economy, and therefore you need male diversity champions. In Australia the effect has been very significant of male diversity champions acting in this field, especially in the private sector.
Finally, in society we have to challenge the myth that women taking jobs will displace men. In fact, as we have heard, when women take jobs, the whole economy and culture benefit. In society, we have to tackle the mindset that we have heard about violence against women and girls, which is the substructure of discrimination and not taking rights and opportunities seriously. This is the issue that the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, spoke about.
I think there is great encouragement of the general principle of women being at the forefront of economic development and its well-being for society in terms of our experience in an international context. There are serious issues we have to face about women having the right opportunities in the UK. There are some important policy issues for Government, the private sector and society that we may do well to take seriously if we really want to make some progress in this area.
Lord Graham of Edmonton (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure once more to participate in what I call the Thursday debates. I have listened to all of them, and they all inspire me because I am old enough to look back over the years when the situation of recognition of women in any shape or form in running things in the country was far worse than it is now. I am one of those members of society who started to work before the war, and I mean the 1939 war. I was 14. I passed my 11-plus exam, but I could not go because dad was on the dole for the whole of the 1930s. It was not until I got the opportunity given to me by the Open University many years later that I gained a bachelor of arts degree and then was awarded an honorary master’s degree. I knew that I had the degree in me somewhere. The trouble was that it did not come out, or the opportunity did not come out.
I think we should be patient, but we should proud of the progress that has been made, and a lot of progress has been made. During the war, I was in the Royal Marines. I was badly wounded. In May 1944, I was preparing for 6 June in the same year when things went wrong on a certain exercise, and I finished up on a hillside with my guts in my hand and my legs damaged. When the nurse said to me, “The man who did the operation on you is coming round today”, I said, “I’d like to see him”. I said to him, “Mr Anderson, I understand you saved my life”. He said, “Well, put it like this: if I’d got to you 20 minutes later, you would have been dead because of the loss of blood”.
Now, 70 years later, I am still standing here, and therefore I have faith in longevity, and I intend to keep going as long as I can. One of the great things that I can recall of the period is the extent to which this Chamber has changed. I have been here 30 years and in Westminster 40 years. A great change has taken place in the population of both Chambers. The background of this House has radically changed since I first came here. I look across at the Bishops’ Benches, and of course they have changed as well. The change is coming. One has to be patient and not too peremptory in criticising the progress that has been made because I am convinced that the whole of society wills and wants the changes that many of us have wanted. There needs, however, to be a right moment. There needs to be a right happening. There needs to be an event which tips the balance.
One can argue politically, “Well, you could have produced legislation under Labour”, but it would not have got through then because the mood of the country was not there. I believe that the changes that have taken place which demonstrate that both Houses have what I call ordinary men and women who have an extraordinary background of achievement are beginning to tell.
When one looks at sport, the noble Baroness, Lady Heyhoe Flint, who was of course the captain of women’s cricket for many years, is a Member of this House. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, the great wheelchair athlete, has been marvellous. One realises that women have a contribution to make, and they make it very well. When I got my degree, it opened a world for me which I knew was there but the key was given to me through the Open University. I will always be grateful to it.
I am completely on the side of those who want to see progress along the lines described by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly. She was a marvellous opener of this debate, and she must be very proud that the debate itself has attracted so many people from so many aspects of the matter. It is a privilege to be here in this House. It is a privilege to be able to get to one’s feet and to speak on topics like this with a modicum of experience from outside this place. I believe that all we want to achieve is coming. The disappointment, of course, is that at the end of the day it is the politicians who will decide because this will be changed only by legislation, and that legislation needs to be tempered and put forward at the right time. I hope I am still here to support it when it does.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Graham. All these issues we have been discussing today will change only if we get buy-in from men, because men are still in the driving seat in so many countries, so it is a very great pleasure to have his support. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for so ably introducing the debate, and I very much look forward to hearing the response of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden.
I had planned to talk about entrepreneurialism, although, interestingly, women entrepreneurs do not like to refer to themselves as such; according to recent polling, they prefer to be called “business founders”. Having reread the Women’s Business Council report and the Government’s response in preparing for this debate, I was encouraged by how much good stuff there was in it. I will share with the House a very short preview of research by the Centre for Entrepreneurs, which, together with the Legatum Institute, it will launch next month. It has been drawn from polling and interviews with focus groups, 500 entrepreneurs and C-suite executives. I hope noble Lords will forgive me if later on I move on to the topic of women in politics; I quite accept that that does not fit quite so neatly into this year’s topic as it has done in previous years.
On that research, the headline findings are that women are just as interested as men in growing their business. They take a different approach to risk—a more calculated approach. They perceive their growth trajectories to be steady and think of male entrepreneurs as more concerned with fast growth and quick sell. The research shows that they care more about their workforce, few are willing to risk staff for the sake of growth, and many focus strongly on corporate responsibility and their contribution to society and their local area. They spoke of turning to family and close networks for funding, and the exit stage is just not on their radar. Instead they talk about planning, managing and controlling growth. I do not think that any of that will surprise us, as it probably confirms our existing suspicions, but I for one look forward to reading much more when the report is published in April.
In previous years I have discussed the international aspects as co-chair of the Conservative Friends of International Development. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, is unable to join us today and as an officer of the APPG on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, I must make the obvious point that, without access to modern family planning, no woman anywhere across the world can become economically empowered. Investing in women’s economic empowerment sets a direct path towards gender equality, poverty eradication and inclusive economic growth, and that puts our debate today in context.
However, as I say, I hope that this close to the election and with most of the seats selected, I will return to the subject which is so close to my heart—most noble Lords will know that women in Parliament is one of my things—and was at the heart of my own maiden speech, which I made in this same debate four years ago. An awful lot of us were making maiden speeches in that debate. I talked about my grandmother, who was the only Conservative woman MP in 1945, and her father—my great-grandfather—who was a Liberal MP and subsequently a Labour MP, who introduced the first Women’s Suffrage Bill in 1907, and how proud he must have been to see his daughter take her seat in 1937, and how astonished the two of them would be, having sat on the green Benches there, to see me here now.
I also talked about Women2Win, which is the organisation the Home Secretary and I set up nearly 10 years ago, and how after the last election we went from 17 to 49 MPs—which is not great, but a huge improvement. I am sorry that my noble friend Lady Bottomley is not in her place, but I think that when she was in the House of Commons the number of women MPs was considerably lower than 17.
Over the past four years, as Members of Parliament have announced that they are retiring, and those seats have been selected, I have been rather gently teased by Members opposite about how we are not making enough progress and how all-women shortlists is the only solution. I have lost my nerve on the journey and have thought that maybe that was the only solution. Indeed I caused some kerfuffle by saying that, if we go backwards at the next election, all options should be on the table. However, I am delighted to be able to say that I do not think we will go backwards. We have had a very good run, and I will update noble Lords on where we are.
I will take this opportunity to congratulate a number of people who have been involved in making that happen. We all know that going into politics is not an easy career choice or option, and women in particular need to be encouraged to come forward and need to be supported on their journey, from their first interview right through to the green Benches. That is what Women2Win is there for; I know that the Labour Party has a similar organisation, as do the Lib Dems. I therefore congratulate those who have been involved in making sure that the selections that have taken place have, to start with, had a balanced list; almost every interview selection panel has had at least as many women as men. We have voluntarily had 10 all-women finals—those constituencies have chosen to do that—and only four all-male finals. That is significant progress. We have ended up with 33%—one in three across the board—which includes the seats we are not likely to win, and of the retirement seats the figures are nine out of 27, or 12 out of 33 if you count the ones that might be in the margins of error. That excludes the ones that I hope we will gain next time. There was also a bit of a hoo-hah about a number of Conservative women retiring. In fact only three retired, out of 33 retirement seats, and they did the responsible thing, which was to retire early to provide an opportunity for their successors to get in place. Therefore, although the situation post-election is not clear, I am very pleased to be able to report significant progress. I have to say that two of those very good seats selected last week, and I might not have chosen this theme had they not done the right thing and chosen excellent women.
If I may stray a little further from the topic before noble Lords, I also welcome the number of BME candidates who will be joining the green Benches next time, which includes candidates for Fareham, Braintree, Richmond (Yorks), Havant, North East Hampshire, Wealden, and South Ribble—not natural Conservative BME territory. I congratulate those on the selection panel on having gone outside their comfort zone in selecting candidates who might not necessarily fit into those constituencies.
Part of what we have been working on is the next generation. That first step—that first seat—is a challenge, as any of us who have done it will know. I fought a Glasgow seat in 1987 and it put me off—I did not want to do it again. It is lonely, boring and difficult. We have also been raising money for the candidates the first time round. Only yesterday I was speaking at a fundraiser for a highly capable 25 year-old Indian girl who is fighting Dulwich and West Norwood this time; I would love it if she won, but I very much want her to be there in the next generation, and I am delighted that we at Women2Win—the Home Secretary was also there last night—are able to support them, encourage them to come forward, and keep them there.
I take this opportunity to congratulate CCHQ on achieving that considerable success without a row. My noble friend Lady Chisholm is a big part of that. I congratulate Conservative members on selecting outside their comfort zones, and most of all, I congratulate those candidates who are stepping up to the plate. People often say to me, “Why does it matter?”. It matters because women’s life experiences are different to men’s. They are not inferior or superior, but different, and that difference has to be better reflected, whether in the Chamber next door, this Chamber, the boardrooms or the judiciary. Every sector in this country is not doing well enough. None of us in this Chamber, nor the men who understand how important all this is, can afford to be complacent or take our foot off the pedal.
Lord Boateng (Lab)
My Lords, there is an old African proverb in the Akan tradition of west Africa, where I was brought up, which says in translation, “Men tend not to listen to women until it is too late”. Bearing in mind all that is to happen this year in New York and Paris in relation to the sustainable development goals and climate change, we men had better listen to women or it will be too late. So many remarkable contributions have been made, and are to be made, in this debate from so many remarkable women that there is much that we need to heed.
I want to concentrate on Africa and development. Bearing in mind that this is a day of international celebration, I mention two remarkable west African women—my grandmother, an entrepreneurial, innovative medium-sized cassava and cocoa farmer in the Akyem region of the Gold Coast, as it was—Ghana, as is—and Bertha Conton, a renowned educator who taught me to read, was the inspiration for a book club in my primary school and is well into her nineties, but to this day is a teacher presiding over a school in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
I shall concentrate my remarks on Sierra Leone. Ebola has had a devastating impact not simply on the economy of Sierra Leone but also, significantly, on the real progress that had been made in the advancement and empowerment of women. I am afraid that Ebola is not an equal opportunity virus: it discriminates against women. Why is that? It is because women have caring responsibilities. Traditionally in west Africa and, indeed, globally, at times of death or sickness, women are always to be found in the front line either domestically or professionally as nurses and clinicians. The result of that in Sierra Leone is that more women than men have died tending to the bodies and to the sick. However, the consequences go beyond that as the not insignificant gains that had been made in education, which started from a very low base, have been set back markedly. With the closure of schools, girls have been sent home in circumstances which make it very unlikely that they will ever return even when the schools reopen. There has been a huge rise in teenage pregnancies in Sierra Leone and a rise in sexual assaults on girls as men have preyed on the increased vulnerability of these young women who are now often the sole providers in these circumstances.
Sierra Leone is not a poor country but it is an impoverished one. It is rich in minerals, agriculture and human potential but it is impoverished as a result of greed, avarice and exploitation, quite apart from the sister evils of ignorance and neglect. It is an impoverished country where more than half the population lives on less than $1.25 a day. One of the key causes of the civil war, which ended only just over a decade ago, was the unequal distribution of power, the consequences of which were felt significantly by women. Women were effectively prevented from accessing the sources of either traditional power in the chieftaincy or power through democratic institutions. The good news is that prior to the outbreak of Ebola that situation was being reversed. Sierra Leone had one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, as I saw for myself when I had the privilege to visit that country last year shortly before the outbreak. During that visit I met the Parliamentary Women’s Caucus and an inspirational group of women brought together by Christian Aid with their local partners in that country. I met women who were empowered through being able to hold local budget holders to account for the money that was being spent on health and education through a project supported by the European Union, DfID, Christian congregations and others the length and breadth of this country. Women were being empowered through their activity on the ground. The danger is that all that will now be set back and will not produce the real economic gains that were beginning to come on stream.
Therefore, I ask for two things. First, even as we debate what is to happen post-Ebola, we must ensure that we learn from the experience of those women and that we listen to their voices. When you ask women what they want in Sierra Leone and, indeed, in many other places in Africa, they tell you that they do not want massive spending on tertiary hospitals but rather a focus on community and public health. They want girls to attend primary schools but they also want to see them enrolled in secondary and tertiary education because, although real advances have been made in primary education, girls are not advancing in secondary and tertiary education. Even as we advance the cause of primary education on that continent, we must take care not to forget secondary and tertiary education because African women want to be scientists too. They believe that the future of their continent and of Sierra Leone depends on the capacity of African women to become scientists and to take up roles in the health infrastructure. That involves training women nurses and doctors and training women to work in scientific laboratories. Strengthening the healthcare system demands the involvement and engagement of women.
We should not lose sight of that or of the fact that more than 60% of women in Sierra Leone are engaged in agriculture, which is key to the future of that economy and of Africa as a whole. My paternal grandmother—this innovative cassava and cocoa grower—knew the value of agricultural extension officers, who, interestingly enough, were more prevalent in colonial times than they are across Africa today. My grandmother knew the importance of research and development in agriculture. She knew the importance of being able to link, and her produce being linked, to global markets. We therefore have to make sure that we do not neglect agriculture, the role of women entrepreneurs and, importantly, thinking beyond subsistence to the creation of wealth and linking women to global markets.
We have an opportunity on this International Women’s Day to celebrate the achievements of the many great women who have gone before and those who work and are activists now—north, south, east and west and on all sides of the political spectrum. We have the opportunity to celebrate their work and to rededicate ourselves to a future that they are enabled to shape. We need to heed. It is not too late and the best may yet be to come.
Baroness Nye (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, should like to thank the noble Baroness for initiating this debate and perhaps continue the theme started by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin.
It has been 112 years since the Women’s Social and Political Union was formed. Eight years later came the first International Women’s Day. History—even familiar history—can be illuminating, so I looked up the Encyclopaedia Britannica for that year, 1911. It described a woman as meaning a wife, and women as,
“the wife division of the human race”.
We have come on a little since then but perhaps not as far as we would have liked. The “wife division” of the human race then was not economically empowered; nor did it have a right to vote or hold public office. It was also that year Sylvia Pankhurst—I share the view of my noble friend Lady Dean that Sylvia Pankhurst should have some recognition—founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes because she wanted a movement that included women from all backgrounds, especially those from working-class backgrounds, because they had the greatest need of emancipation. The suffragettes wanted to “Make it Happen”—which is the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day. However, apart from proving their worth as war workers, little happened for them until the Representation of the People Act 1918 gave propertied women aged over 30 the right to vote. We had to wait another 10 years before women over 21 achieved equality. I mention this because, in election year, we all have reason to remember those women and to honour their bravery and sacrifice by encouraging maximum use of the precious vote.
I am proud that my party will build on our record of women’s representation in this Parliament because we have more than 50% female candidates standing in our target seats, although there is always more to do. But we have to work hard to find ways in which to engage with the 9 million women who did not vote in the last election and to ask them to not give up on democratic politics. We know that women are worried about the cost of living, the NHS, exploitative zero-hours contracts and the future of their Sure Start, but we have to emphasise that voting is vital to those and other basic concerns.
In doing that, we must never of course forget our sisters who are not properly enfranchised still. In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah declared that women will be able to vote and run in this year’s local elections for the very first time—although, sadly, they will not be able to drive to the polling stations. In Burma, where elections are expected later this year, it is unlikely that Aung San Suu Kyi will be able to stand for President, because the constitutional clause banning anyone with foreign partners or children will not be amended by the quasi-civilian Government. It is hard to see how the elections can be seen as credible and fair without reform of the eligibility clause.
While it was a step forward that President Thein Sein endorsed the Preventing Sexual Violence initiative last year, the military Government continue to stand by while the violence perpetrated by the Burmese army continues with impunity. The Women’s League of Burma and the UN special rapporteur have been documenting rape and sexual violence by the Burmese army for decades. There was one such case in January this year, when two young Kachin female teachers—Maran Lu Ra and Tangbau Hkawn Nan Tsin—were brutally raped and murdered in Shan State. They had been working in the village for about eight months as volunteer teachers for the Kachin Baptist Convention. The Burmese army arrived in the village two days before the murders, posted guards around it but then left shortly before the bodies were discovered. Burma Campaign UK, in which I declare an interest as a trustee, has called upon the British Government to implement provisions in their Preventing Sexual Violence initiative and dispatch a team of experts to Burma to investigate the case. I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on why this has not happened. What are the criteria for making such a decision? The international community, including the UN, has repeatedly called on the Burmese Government to investigate such cases fully. They have repeatedly failed to do so. Those 20 year-old women had left the relative safety of their homes to teach children in an area of ethnic conflict.
In Burma, as elsewhere, there is an urgent need for education, not only for children but adults, if the demand for teachers, health workers and better living standards is to be met. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned, Kofi Annan has said that there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women, and that empowerment must include access to education. Educating girls has enormous benefits for their families, communities and countries. The millennium development goal to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education has been nearly achieved in primary education but progress has stalled. The higher the level of education there is, the higher the prevalence of gender disparity, even for girls living in higher-income households. There are ways to make things better, such as making the school environment more conducive to girls by improving the sanitation facilities, making roads and transport safer, and having more female teachers as role models. It has been estimated that an extra year of primary schooling for girls increases their wages by up to 20%. Mothers with even a few years of education are more likely to send their children to school and have healthier babies with lower levels of child mortality.
The sustainable development goals to be finalised this year include inclusive and equitable quality education, and lifelong learning opportunities for all. I heard the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, asked the Minister about whether there will be a stand-alone goal. However, as Julia Gillard, the chair of the Global Partnership for Education and former Australian Prime Minister has pointed out, aid to education has fallen by almost 10% since 2010, compared with just over 1% in overall development assistance worldwide. She calls for the sharp decline in global aid to education to be reversed and for there to be the political will to reprioritise education aid.
As part of that campaign, the charity A World at School has teamed up with campaigners all over the world to call for every girl and boy, wherever they are born, to have the chance to go to school and get a full education. Tomorrow, the A World at School youth ambassadors, Shazia and Kainat, the teenagers injured alongside Malala on their school bus in Pakistan, will share their courageous story and help launch the Stand #UpForSchool campaign to secure a future where every girl around the world is educated and empowered to reach their potential. As part of that campaign, there is a Throwback Thursday campaign, with which noble Lords can join in by posting an old school picture on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram to promote girls’ education and get more people to sign the petition calling on all Governments to keep the promise made 15 years ago. With 31 million girls denied their right to education and more than 500 million girls dropping out before completing their basic education, there cannot be progress on economic empowerment until no child is left behind.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, we have heard much today about the crucial role that women play in our economy. More than 14 million are in full-time or part-time work, 1.4 million are self-employed, and there are now more women than ever on FTSE 100 boards. However, despite the progress made, there remain great challenges. To ensure that future generations of women are able to access the jobs that will power our economy and continue to improve their economic position, it is critical that our education system helps them develop the knowledge and skills they need to succeed. It is here that I declare my interest as director of New Schools Network.
It is no surprise that as girls’ academic achievements have grown, at both school and university, so their success in the job market has increased and their employment options have expanded. Last year again saw girls outperforming boys at GCSE in every mainstream subject except maths. At A-level, although the gap between them is much smaller, girls continue to outperform boys. While overall the picture of attainment is positive, women remain underrepresented in some subjects, particularly at A-level and then at university.
As noble Lords will know, at A-level boys are twice as likely as girls to study maths, three times as likely to study further maths and four times as likely to study physics. At degree level, fewer than a quarter of maths undergraduates are women, as are fewer than 20% of computer science undergraduates and just 16% of those studying engineering. Yet these are the very subjects that can open the door to some of our fastest-growing sectors, where many of the high-value jobs of the future are likely to lie. While women are well represented in many sectors of our economy, such as the service industries and across the public sector, it is important that they have access to jobs in other leading industries, such as the creative industries, pharmaceuticals and high-value manufacturing.
With education being such an important foundation for increasing women’s economic empowerment, it is little surprise that they have been an important driver for change and improvement in the system over the past few years. The opportunity to set up new schools has been enthusiastically seized by women around the country—by mothers who want a new option for their children in their community, and by teachers, who see them as a chance to raise standards in their area and ensure that all children have access to a good education.
Education is an area dominated by women. More than 70% of teachers are female. As in many sectors, however, they are underrepresented in leadership positions. The free school policy is providing a new opportunity for women to unleash their entrepreneurial spirit and help shape educational provision in their area—women such as Charlotte Warner and Katy Parlett, who both have autistic children and have drawn on their own experiences to establish new special schools in London and Leeds. Another example is Sarah Counter, a determined head teacher who has set up Canary Wharf College, now an outstanding primary school, and is setting up a further two schools to offer high-quality education to young people in one of the poorest boroughs in the country. A group of mothers are setting up a primary school in Crystal Palace to help tackle the acute shortage of school places in the area.
As well as being a driving force behind their creation, we are seeing outstanding female leaders in many free schools, from Sasha Corcoran at Big Creative Academy to Angela Reynolds at Corby Technical School and Sue Attard at Hatfield Community Free School. Furthermore, we are seeing free schools set up with specialisms to help ensure that girls as well as boys have the skills desired by employers of the future. King’s College London and the University of Exeter have set up England’s first two specialist maths sixth forms. North Somerset Enterprise and Technical College is developing its curriculum with local employers to address the STEM skills gap in the area, while students at Sir Isaac Newton Sixth Form in Norwich have regular sessions with leaders from STEM-based industries and leading academics to gain a better understanding of the employment opportunities open to them.
In conclusion, as in so many fields, given a new opportunity, women are rising to the challenge. However, if we are to ensure that they continue to play a growing role in our economy, we have to start early—and that means ensuring that every young woman has access to a high-quality education that helps her develop the character, confidence and skills she needs to do whatever she wishes.
Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to debate women’s economic empowerment as it allows me to highlight the means to prevent so many women entering prison in this country. Economic empowerment of women who have been imprisoned, or are in danger of entering the criminal justice system, is key to their positive participation in society.
In January this year there were 3,807 women in prison in England and Wales. More than eight in 10 sentenced women entering prison had committed non-violent crimes. Most of these sentences were short. Around 60% of women entering custody each year have been sentenced to six months or less. In addition, in a 12-month period around 4,000 women will be sent to prison on remand. The majority of these women spend only around four weeks in custody. Yet any time spent in prison has a devastating effect on women’s lives, often resulting in the loss of their homes, employment and, most importantly, their children.
Financial concerns are a driver to women’s offending according to a Cabinet Office study which found that 28% of women’s crimes were financially motivated, compared with 20% of men’s. Not surprisingly, earlier research on mothers in custody found that 38% attributed offending to a need to support their children, single mothers being more likely to cite a lack of money as the cause of their offending than those who were married.
Theft and handling offences are the biggest single driver to custody for women. In 2013, theft from a shop accounted for more than a third of all custodial sentences given to women, with the average sentence length being 1.9 months. Between October and December 2013 more women entered prison on remand awaiting trial for this offence than for any other. Shoplifting was one of the few offences to increase in the 12 months to June 2014. I fear that with the increase in the number of those on benefit being sanctioned, some will have to turn increasingly to this form of petty crime. The Fawcett Society recently found that,
“particular groups of women … including single mothers, women facing sexual and domestic violence … are exceptionally vulnerable to sanctions through no fault of their own”.
Many women entering prison are in debt and imprisonment exacerbates their financial situation, making it difficult for them to access housing and benefits on release and to be reunited with their children. The Prison Reform Trust has recommended that the time limit for eligibility for housing benefit for sentenced prisoners be extended from 13 weeks to six months to prevent short-sentenced women from losing their homes.
A recent survey of women in HMP Holloway found that benefits were the main source of income for more than half of those surveyed, and 43% admitted that they were currently in debt. Women are more likely than men to have claimed out-of-work benefits prior to, and post, time in custody.
Employment outcomes for women leaving prison are three times worse than for men. Women were more likely than men to worry about housing debts, which is linked to the need for suitable housing prior to regaining custody of their children. Fewer women than men had bank accounts. More women than men said that they felt unsure about managing money. Fewer than one in five women interviewed were offered financial advice while in prison. According to the Prison Reform Trust in its recent and excellent report, Working It Out:
“Former offenders, both male and female, face a number of barriers to employment. A combination of factors including mental health problems, low self-esteem and educational gaps, as well as the legal requirement to declare unspent (and sometimes spent) convictions if asked by employers, can make it extremely difficult for people with a criminal conviction to find work”.
Women in the criminal justice system are disproportionately affected by mental illness, drug and alcohol dependency and lack of confidence. As my noble friend Lady Corston’s ground-breaking report of 2007 said:
“The chaotic lifestyles and backgrounds … disproportionate prevalence of learning disabilities and difficulties result in many women in the criminal justice system having very little employment experience or grasp of some very basic life skills”.
So of those women who are imprisoned, many, if not most, need substantial assistance to become job-ready on release. At the same time, the dual stigma of mental health need and offending history creates extra obstacles. The exclusion of prisoners with mental health problems from vocational rehabilitation, often on the basis that they are “not ready,” is another barrier, despite all the evidence that work promotes recovery from mental illness and desistence from crime.
For women in prison much greater emphasis on training for employment on release is needed. I welcome the Government’s announcement of a package of reforms for women in prison, including English and maths skills assessments on reception, assessments for special educational needs and the introduction of tailored learning plans to meet individual needs that offer a mix of life skills and formal educational skills. However, more needs to be done.
Greater use should be made of schemes for release on temporary licence to allow women assessed as low-risk and suitable for day release to gain the experience and skills that will aid their resettlement by taking up employment in the community, and to help rebuild links with children and other dependants.
Recent changes to ROTL have made it harder for women to access the scheme by insisting that they must have a job secured beforehand. Finding a job or voluntary work in the community while in prison is challenging, given lack of access to the internet, the high cost of phone calls and the inability to meet potential employers face to face. Also, the proposed closure of the only two open prisons for women could result in the loss of local partnerships with employers which have built up over the years. Employment, and the education and training that underpin it, is a vital pathway to reducing reoffending for women. As the Prison Reform Trust has said,
“more concerted action by both government and business would improve employment opportunities for women who have been in trouble”.
It is widely acknowledged that most of the solutions to women’s offending lie outside prison walls. Women’s centres, providing services and supervision to women on community orders, are ideally placed to support them to build the skills, training and confidence they need while maintaining community links. If women have jobs that enable them to find and keep hold of secure housing, look after their children and move away from abusive relationships, they are less likely to return to crime.
The reorganisation of probation services under Transforming Rehabilitation has led to a period of great uncertainty for many centres working with women subject to community orders or on licence from prison. Initially funded by central government and, more recently, by local probation trusts, funding from community rehabilitation companies is confirmed only until this March, when it will depend on commissioning decisions taken in each contract package area. Some CRCs are offering between three and six months’ extension on current contracts, but the uncertainty and short-term nature of such funding risks irrevocable damage to many services and loss of experienced staff. Understandably, there is growing concern that funding for such women’s centres is insecure. What assurances can the Minister give that women’s centres will receive adequate funding to ensure their continuation post March 2015?
Only by supporting vulnerable women to help themselves and their families can we begin to address the cycle of deprivation and reoffending that blights too many young lives.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I wanted to speak in this debate not because I have especially great expertise on women’s issues, but because I think it is vital that we see men being proactive by standing up and speaking up. It is of concern to me that too few men take part in these important International Women’s Day debates.
The second thing I want to say is that women’s rights and equality issues should not be seen as the preserve of just one political party; it is the work and contribution of Members across this House that is important. Indeed, year after year all the Oral Questions on International Women’s Day have come from just one Bench. How refreshing it is that there has been a change this year. I thank my noble friend Lady Jolly for leading this debate and for her excellent opening comments, and I look forward to my noble friend Lady Garden’s closing remarks. I have learnt so much from listening to the debate, and I just wish that more people could hear the comments that Members have made.
International Women’s Day provides us with the opportunity to raise awareness, continue discourse and ultimately accelerate action on women’s economic empowerment in the UK and beyond. As the chief executive of UN Women said, we must,
“push for women’s economic empowerment alongside other priorities, because this is essential to ending poverty and advancing gender equality”.
A major priority must be education, and I believe that the universal provision of education will pave the way for women’s long-term economic empowerment by ensuring that every child gets the best possible start in life. If our ultimate objective is gender equality in business, we must focus on the education of our future business leaders. When we have an educated, literate citizenry, we will pave the way for effective and inclusive economic development.
But gender equality should not be seen as just a women’s issue. The World Bank’s research, Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment, found that improved economic opportunities for women led to better overall outcomes for families, societies and countries. Inclusive and sustainable economic development can be achieved through gender-equal educational provisions, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs across the board and long-term business networks for all.
Education has been defined as one of the top 10 priorities by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, and the ratio of female-to-male enrolment in secondary education is often a crucial indicator of gender equality across the world. Let me tell noble Lords of a real success story. Currently, DfID’s programmes in India support a range of human-related activities that have a positive impact on the lives of women and girls, including assistance with government education and health initiatives. For instance, helping girls to stay in secondary school as part of India’s Right to Education Act can push back the average age of marriage, increasing the potential for greater social entrepreneurship and allowing more young women to become beneficiaries of different social ventures. DfID’s investments have addressed, and continue to address, a variety of different issues that left unchallenged can often act to reinforce each other and affect sustainable development in the long term.
In the UK, economic development should reflect British values and be governed by freedom, democracy and inclusivity. Recent attempts by the Government Equalities Office have sought to step up efforts to attract qualified women to public positions, while ensuring that working practices and conditions are consistently family-friendly. So far, we have been able to help many women reach their potential in the workplace and enabled many businesses to get the full economic benefit of women’s skills, including through the work of the Women’s Business Council, Women on Boards and the Think, Act, Report programme. We have also made a concerted effort to ensure that women’s interests are always represented in government by regularly meeting women’s groups and campaigners and listening to women across the country. Furthermore, more than 4,500 grants have been paid out to those establishing new childcare businesses, with a further £2 million extension of the scheme for the rest of this year.
I am reassured by the progress that we have made so far, but even in the UK many women still lack access to adequate childcare provision, flexible working conditions and balanced career advice. It is encouraging to hear stories of women’s economic empowerment from around the world, and I hope that we can take inspiration from places as far afield as Cambodia and China, in which it has been shown that increasing adult female income by 10% of the average household income increased the years of schooling for girls and boys.
High pupil enrolment and attainment figures are, of course, promising. However, we need to continue to ensure that pupils who are enrolled in our education system can make informed decisions about their future, including the pursuit of STEM subjects from GCSE onwards. At A-level, there are currently almost twice as many boys taking maths as there are girls, and almost five times as many boys take A-level Physics. I find it incredibly worrying that the UK still has the lowest percentage of female engineers in Europe, and even more so that only 4% of engineering apprentices are women.
Some businesses and multinational companies should be commended for their efforts thus far to actively increase the number of women in science, technology and communications, and for their work in enabling young women to develop the necessary skills. Cisco Systems’ Global Education Initiative is an example of good practice that has been able to teach core subject skills to young women around the world in conjunction with the World Bank.
We need to make sure that the 2 million apprenticeships that this Government have created over the past four years are accessible to young women, and that young people from all backgrounds can benefit from the opportunities on offer. Ensuring that we have a diverse range of young apprentices in the UK will mean that we are better placed to compete with our European neighbours in the important fields of science, technology, engineering and maths, in addition to our impressive track record in the arts. We must ensure that the new national careers company effectively addresses the gender disparity in the uptake of STEM subjects and empowers young women to make informed decisions about their futures.
I believe that we have a great opportunity on this International Women’s Day to create real change and discuss the root causes of economic disempowerment. By linking together women’s economic empowerment and the role of education in youth, we can help women directly but also widen the talent pool in the future and with it the potential for market-related innovation. I thank noble Lords for their dedication to this subject, both nationally and internationally, and urge them to consider diversity in the future, primarily as a means of empowering women but also as a strategic business advantage.
Finally, I was interested to hear the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, and her remarks about women in the world of business, yet there are still huge areas of our society where women are absent and little progress has been made. Like the noble Baroness, I do not believe in enforcing targets, but I do believe in role models, action programmes and, perhaps most effectively, naming and shaming. Perhaps in her reply my noble friend might consider my suggestion that the Government from time to time publish lists of areas where very few women are represented.
Baroness Goudie (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, on arranging this debate today, and I am pleased to be able to speak with many of my colleagues. I declare an interest as a board member of the Vital Voices Global Partnership, which is recognised for supporting emerging women leaders and taking their vision around the world. I am also a founding member of the 30% Club—a group of chairs and CEOs committed to better gender balance at all levels in their organisations through voluntary actions. Business leadership is key. This takes the issue beyond specialised diversity effort into mainstream talent. The 30% Club was launched in 2010 with an aspirational goal of 30% women on FTSE 100 boards by the end of 2015. It has become an international business-led approach with men and women working together.
Will the Minister and the Government condemn the action of the establishment running Yarl’s Wood? We are discussing women’s economic empowerment and how to achieve it. Women and children, who have come to the United Kingdom having fled to seek asylum and refugee status, are being treated abominably. They are treated like criminals and even worse, with no respect. Instead, the Government should be welcoming them and expediting applications so that these women and children can start to lead a normal life. I would like to see this as a priority by the Home Office and, if necessary, the Cabinet should be involved across all government departments.
In 2000, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was the first to specifically address the unique impact of conflict on women and women’s important contributions to conflict resolution and sustainable peace. It marked a watershed moment, when the international community recognised the role of women and gender to peace and security. Following UNSCR 1325, subsequent resolutions further defined the importance of women’s roles in conflict and peace, recognising sexual violence as an issue of international peace and security and reiterating the need for a comprehensive response to sexual and gender-based violence. A further resolution in 2013—UNSCR 2122—aims to strengthen the measures to improve the participation of women in all phases of conflict resolution.
We know that women are key to peace. If women are not at the peace table, peace does not last for very long. A number of peace negotiations have lasted for only five years and then they fail. That is because there are no women at the peace table and no local women. Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Melanne Verveer are global leaders and have established an Institute for Women, Peace and Security at Georgetown University. William Hague and Angelina Jolie Pitt encouraged and enabled the London School of Economics to establish a Centre for Women, Peace and Security in February of this year, and we very much hope that these global institutions will continue. We hope to see a further three around the world by the end of this year.
To ensure that peace agreements stay in place, it is very important that Britain should be a world leader. We already had an international conference last year on women’s security and sexual violence, and this year we had a global conference of faith leaders. It is important that we show the lead in this, not only with funding but in encouraging other countries to partner with us.
Baroness Mobarik (Con)
My Lords, like all noble Lords I welcome this opportunity to debate the issue of women’s economic empowerment. I agree with other noble Lords that much needs to be done to address gender inequalities: from the issue of the gender pay gap to the cost of childcare, which makes it prohibitive for some to seek employment; and from fewer girls taking STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and maths—which would lead to higher paid jobs, to the lack of women on FTSE boards, despite there being enough women of seniority and talent available. I know that much has been done to address this, but we still have some way to go. There are also cultural issues preventing aspiration and discouraging women from achieving their full potential.
Of course, there are differences and degrees of gender inequality between countries. Indeed, between the developing and developed world there are extreme and pronounced differences. In fact, women in the developing world are at a serious disadvantage both in education and the labour market. There are many strands to the subject of the economic empowerment or disempowerment of women, and these issues are both national and international. The international issues are enormous and other noble Lords have spoken passionately about these—they need increased and persistent effort. As time is limited, however, I shall confine my remarks to the area of entrepreneurship within the national sphere.
The Institute for Public Policy Research has indicated that men across Europe are 90% more likely to be self-employed than women and that in every European country the rate of female self-employment lags behind the rate for males. The IPPR has also stated that, while the relatively high rates of women entrepreneurs in emerging and developing countries are due to a high level of necessity, in the developed world women are often motivated by other factors, such as maintaining a balance between work and caring for family. There is no doubt that in the UK significant strides have been made in recent years in addressing many of the issues faced by women, with the Government putting in place very many measures to help women into work and to start up businesses. However, we must explore every aspect of what it will take to create real gender equality and real economic empowerment for women.
First and foremost, we must kindle a sense of confidence in women, to make entrepreneurship an attractive career option. Statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that, in 2014, 1.4 million women were in self-employment in the UK—just under one-third of the total number employed. Although this number has increased by 34% it should be noted that the top three occupations for self-employed women were: first, cleaners and domestics; secondly, child minders and related; and, thirdly, hairdressers and barbers. While these activities are important, women have also a role to play in high-worth businesses. For this, we must continue to provide support such as mentoring as well as providing access to education and information and communication technologies.
Very importantly, there must be support in financial literacy along with access to finance. The report of the OECD, Enhancing Women’s Economic Empowerment through Entrepreneurship and Business Leadership in OECD Countries, found that women often have less experience when they start up a business and are also less likely than men to borrow money to finance their business. Although both women and men in OECD countries are likely to hold accounts with formal financial institutions, men are more likely to receive a loan from these institutions. Women also tend to raise a smaller amount of capital when it comes to financing business expansion. According to that report, there is also evidence that women are constrained in accessing equity and venture capital because of their weak representation in key networks.
These are just some of the issues. If the aim is to raise productivity, employment and economic growth nationally, then these concerns have to be addressed. It has been acknowledged that women play a crucial role in driving economic development throughout the world. Expanding our existing business development services to take into account those issues faced by women entrepreneurs would be a useful exercise. Industry-specific business training programmes for women, or other such initiatives, would go a long way towards encouraging more women into business and helping those already there to grow.
If we wish to close the gender gap and to create a diverse and inclusive society where individuals can attain success, then entrepreneurship and leadership for women can play a vital role towards achieving this aim.
Baroness Howells of St Davids (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for raising this debate during the week when we commemorate International Women’s Day. Sunday marks an international day of celebration and events that respect and appreciate women’s economic, political, and social achievements across the world. International Women’s Day was established in 1909; 105 years later, this year’s theme is “Make It Happen”, which for me is very appropriate. It strikes a chord as, putting it quite bluntly, for many women of colour over the years economic achievements have not happened.
With the indulgence of the House, I will explain further. Multicultural Britain can boast many different individual cultures and subcultures that define the term “woman”, as that term is not homogenous. To truly empower women and “make it happen”, all the integral parts that make up womanhood must show advancement so that progress benefits not only the few, but all women.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Abersoch, and others who are further improving women’s economic empowerment by making the business and social case for increasing the representation of women on British boards. These are boards which oversee the activities of our top companies in the FTSE 100 through to the FTSE 350. Having raised the question in your Lordships’ House, I am delighted to say that talented black businesswomen are now getting the opportunity to share in this special social change.
I should like to share with noble Lords an event which shaped my view on the direction of travel of black women’s economic empowerment from a more pointed perspective. In doing so I am reminded of a quote from the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, who said that those who do not know their history are destined to repeat it. I also recall that the economist Arthur Lewis encouraged entrepreneurship among women, saying that they would not flourish unless women were empowered and encouraged to be involved in business.
I quote these because of an experience I had. In the late 1970s I attended a conference on how to a start business. It was attended by more than 200 black people. The first speaker was an official from one of the leading banks. He opened his contribution by saying that he did not lend money to black people on principle. I leave noble Lords to imagine the consternation on the faces of those assembled women and men. It was a totally black audience. Being aware that banks are the lifeline for small businesses and enterprise, I had the temerity to stand up and ask what his principles were. He went on to cite that, to him, black people were not trustworthy, nor did they have any track record for establishing a line of credit. This made them a high risk and he was sure that we would agree that he should not be prepared to risk the bank’s money on those from the “coloured community”. There were up to seven principles but I will not bother noble Lords with them.
Enterprise in Britain was already happening among black women. The first generation of those who came found it impossible to find anyone in this country who could do their hair or have make-up to suit them. So they were doing it in their homes. As community relations officers, we thought it would be good to get them on to the high street and into proper businesses. That bank manager was lucky to leave the room alive. Having been part of establishing that conference, I was saying, “No! No! No!” throughout, because we really wanted to convert him. We wanted to instil in women that growth meant loans and here was a banker dishing out not money but a slap in the face.
In my role as patron of the European Federation of Black Women Business Owners, I am confident in sounding a positive note. The second generation of black women is breaking out of the stagnation which the whole community had to endure. Their pain and suffering are becoming heard and are fast disappearing. It is not quick enough for us, but it is happening. We now have women who are determined to make this a level playing field. It has meant challenges and hard work in order to disprove the claims levelled against them by that banker. What was sad was that the social burdens were deliberate, and were propagated by the media then, as today.
We are grateful that the Scarman report highlighted the needs of the black community. Today you will find black women involved in all sorts of businesses. I want to name just a few. Joy Nichols is the owner and chief executive of Joy Nichols & Associates. Kanya King is a businesswoman and entrepreneur in the music business. Cynthia Dyell opened a care home which, she always says, was on the advice of Mrs Thatcher. She now has four such homes. She is still having problems with local authorities but she carries on and says that the people she cares for decide to call her “Mother”. Yvonne Thompson is another entrepreneur and one of the founders of Choice FM. She has written a book about women on boards. The majority of people buying the book are white, and she is thriving.
The race relations Acts, effective equal opportunities policy, the formation of the British Caribbean Chamber of Commerce and borough councils were all involved in the growth of the second generation into economic development. When we now see a black woman, we do not believe that she would be stopped by the seven principles of that bank manager. The United Kingdom needs all sorts of people to contribute to it. Black women are contributing every day in all areas where the opportunity to do so is offered to them. The banker’s words were for me a seminal moment because I understood right there and then how powerful the negative impact of racism could be. I knew that the whole of the black community was struggling to start up businesses in this country. The first generation served, but the second generation had the advantage of education and was seeking to enter the world of entrepreneurship. If you are powerful and you are prejudiced, it is difficult not to exercise that prejudice, so we have forgiven the banker and hope that he will never say what he said again.
Miss Diane Abbott MP was at the forefront of the economic empowerment of black women in this country. She started an organisation which is still going today called Black Women Mean Business. She also encourages black businesswomen to encourage others. Yvonne Thompson CBE, who I have already mentioned, and her media company, ASAP Communications, are going from strength to strength. I have named these two women, but there are many more. Both of them would attest to the difficulties they faced and the barriers placed before them that were seemingly designed to prevent them and their contemporaries from achieving economic freedom. Diane Abbott’s organisation has provided much-needed support and guidance to black women who dared to want to enter into business. Dr Thompson has gone on to establish the European Federation of Black Women Business Owners, which supports and empowers black businesswomen by creating a dialogue both in the UK and across Europe. Latterly, the Prince’s Trust has also identified the challenges faced by minority groups in business and has attempted to bridge the gap.
In spite of the barriers to economic prosperity, black women in their droves have shown their resilience by finding alternative sources of funding for their businesses. They have maximised local, personal money-lending schemes known in the Caribbean as “pardners” and “sou-sous”. The most prominent among the business start-ups are to be found in the hair and beauty sector, as I have mentioned. It is now impossible to walk down a high street without seeing a black hairdressing salon that caters for Europeans as well. Hairdressers are able to ply their trade and thus to empower both themselves and the country they live in. We know that that bank manager would not be able to say what he said today because attitudes have changed—and we have laws to ensure that he does not.
We now know that the gatekeepers of economic opportunity have become more adroit in excluding those who are black, but we will continue to fight. I have a cautious optimism for the future. I recognise that more people in our society understand that the social and economic isolation of one community affects us all. Another note for optimism are the black women who are the leading lights of today. Those coming after them will have role models to follow. I would mention Heather Rabbatts CBE, a black woman who has the distinction of being the youngest ever chief executive of a local authority in the UK. She has risen to become the first woman to be a director on the board of the Football Association. In her slipstream and one to watch for the future is Karen Blackett OBE. She is the CEO of MediaCom, the UK’s largest media buying agency. This year she has become the first businesswoman to top the UK Powerlist. Karen is a product of the environment that Diane Abbott and Yvonne Thompson have helped to create. With Karen and many other young, determined businesswomen like her blooming in our community like redbuds in spring, I am reminded of a quote by Franklin D Roosevelt:
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little”.
I wholeheartedly welcome the events that will celebrate this year’s International Women’s Day. However, let us together and as a society “make it happen”. We want to see the economic, social and political empowerment not only of white women, but of women from all communities in the UK today.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, I would like to put on the record at the outset my admiration for women and men all over the globe who by their bravery and hard work advance the cause of women and girls, particularly those who risk violence to do so. However, my comments today concern how women’s primary responsibility for bringing up children impacts negatively on their economic empowerment. I hope that noble lords will forgive me if my words start from a personal perspective.
A month ago, when the nominations for the Oscars were announced, there was an outcry that none of the nominees for best director was a woman. In the 87 years of the Academy Awards, out of the 429 nominations for best director, there have only ever been four women, so no surprise there, really. Only in the writer categories do women make a showing, but even there at less than 10%. Women make up less than 1% of sound nominees, there has only ever been one female nominee in the effects category, and for cinematography, none at all. And, as has been the case every year for the last decade, media outlets rang and professional associations set up urgent debates to discuss why.
But this year I was approached by a powerful blogger from LA who had written to every female director they were able to find and asked for an “anonymous” response. My response was to say that the authority and centrality implicit in the role of “the director” is something that is trained in to young men and out of young women, Even if they do make the leap and imagine themselves as film directors, and then advance through the bruising ups and downs of the critical perception of creative genius, box office acumen and adamantine self assurance, just at the point that it may pay off in terms of a stable and highly paid career, many—although clearly not all—become mothers. Being an artist at that level requires a selfish devotion to your art; being a primary carer requires selfless devotion to your charges. It is not an insuperable contradiction to brook at any individual moment, but over the length of an entire career, it defeats many.
Female directors rarely want to highlight their gender, and as it turned out I was the only person, across several continents, who responded to the blogger. The email I got back said, “Spot on analysis. It is hard to get people to talk about this even anonymously ... unless I get three other people responding ... I’m not going to run anything”. Nothing ran.
The rarefied world of the Oscar nominee is hardly the cutting edge of gender inequality. However, an Oscar nomination has an almost magical “multiplying effect” on the financial success of a film and the subsequent career of its director, which, in turn, makes it more likely that when we think of a film director, we think of a man.
Of course, this cycle plays out across many professions. Several years ago I was transfixed by a radio interview where a female politician was being pressed to explain why she was not running for party leader. The interviewer implied that she was failing in her duty to party and people. Eventually, and somewhat reluctantly, the politician explained that she had three young children. Her husband was running in the same race, so presumably had the same three young children. Why did the interviewer not ask what cultural and structural changes the politician thought were necessary to enable women with young children to occupy high office? Why cast the woman as failing in her duty to public and party—why not question whether male politicians are routinely failing in their parenting duty? Why did the interviewer remain entirely silent on the fact that Messieurs Blair, Brown, Cameron and Clegg all had young children when they became party leader—as indeed did Ed Miliband, who was the eventual victor in that race?
As a result of taking on the unequal responsibilities of parenthood, women routinely occupy lower-status work than men, in all fields, with the inevitable downgrading of their economic prospects. On “Question Time” last month a Minister joyfully talked about parity of wages between men and women under 40. I was horrified that a Minister would consider parity of wages under 40 as a measure of victory for women at all. As others have already said, it is not at the beginning of their journey that women experience the most discrimination and difficulty, but as they become mothers. Data show that the gap gets exponential as careers progress, including that published by the Chartered Management Institute last year, which reported a 35% executive pay gap between the earnings of men and women over 40. Figures from the Office for National Statistics on all UK pay show that in their 20s women earn 1.1% more than men, but by their 50s they earn 18% less. As the ONS report said:
“This is likely to be connected with the fact that many women have children”.
To be clear, it is not because women are in a position to “choose” to be at home, in some sort of apple pie or yummy mummy fashion. Some 70% of women in the UK with dependent children are in the labour market, routinely taking lower paid or lower quality work in order to balance duties of parenting and earning a living. For the same reason, it is women who make up the vast majority of part-time workers. The ONS statistics on the UK labour market from February this year reported 6.14 million UK women and just over 2 million men working part time, with the inevitable blight on career progression and greater risk of poverty in old age.
All parts of the political spectrum express belief in gender equality and fairness, but then fail to account for the overall contribution to society, family and the economy by those who bring up the next generation. In failing to account for that contribution we continue to perpetuate a system in which women, who by fourfold are the primary carers, see the possibility of well rewarded or competitive employment recede as they struggle with the dual demands of work and parenthood.
I do not diminish in any way a man or woman who wishes and is able to choose to do full-time childcare. On the contrary, my point is that there is an unsustainable contradiction between our collective duty of care to the next generation, the burden on women as they disproportionately fulfil that duty and our desire for gender equality in public and economic life. Nor is this only a first-world issue. Four years ago I sat at the feet of an elderly woman in Karnataka in south India. She was desperately trying to persuade her 12 year-old granddaughter into sex work. Furious at the young girl’s resistance, she demanded of me, “What shall I do? I am old, my daughter is dead, my brother is disabled, there is rain coming in. How will we feed the children if she does not go to do this work?” How indeed? I had no answer.
The grandmother was not a bad person. The economic options available to her family group were limited to her granddaughter doing sex work. In her world view, she had a responsibility for her daughter’s children and was fulfilling that duty by sacrificing one child who, when she was gone, would be able to support the rest. The girl in question received help, at least in the short and medium term; but this scenario is repeated throughout the world. Estimates suggest that of 40 million sex workers globally, 80% are female. Three-quarters of them are aged 13 to 25 and many are pushed into sex work to support their families.
On every stratum, on every continent and in every context, the outcomes for women are distorted by the unequal responsibility for parenting. So unless and until we see the raising of children as a collective endeavour across gender, family, communities and nations, we will never achieve economic empowerment for women in any context. We will never be able to protect girls and women from sexual exploitation in communities where women do not have access to other forms of paid work. Unless and until we recognise that the unequal responsibility for children is a direct obstacle to women’s advancement and proactively take steps to redress the balance, not only in fragmented corporate and third sector initiatives but as a priority from the centre of government and all parts of civil society, we will never have enough female voices in the system to make the structural and cultural changes necessary to deliver the economic empowerment for women that is the subject of today’s debate.
Baroness Rebuck (Lab)
My Lords, as we approach the 104th International Women’s Day this weekend, I, like so many other speakers, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for introducing this debate, which gives us an opportunity to reflect on how far women have progressed but also on how much more there is to achieve. There have been important strides towards greater equality and many of the opportunities that are taken for granted by young women today would scarcely have seemed possible for their grandmothers growing up in the last century. However, enormous issues of unfairness and inequality, most eloquently highlighted by my noble friend Lady Gould and others, are still there to be addressed, both here and around the world.
At the heart of my comments today is the belief that through achieving greater financial autonomy women are empowered. Education, improved literacy, decent work and an independent income give women the freedom to make choices, support their families and realise their potential. But women also need the role models, the aspiration and the confidence to take up these opportunities. This is crucial to the health of our society. One of the most effective ways to tackle childhood poverty is to support women into well paid work and, for a vibrant, innovative and successful economy, we need as many women in leadership roles as there are men. This is not opinion but fact, based on several close studies of the performance of mixed-gender teams.
Many speakers today have referred to the excellent work of my colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and we can certainly celebrate the fact that in 2014 women made up 23% of board non-execs in the FTSE 100—close, if you like, to the 25% target set for this year. However, if you look at the FTSE 250, where women account for only 17.7% of board directorships, there is still work to be done. There are still 24 all-male boards and although that number is down from the 131 all-male boards that existed in 2011, we should certainly think about extending our targets to this sector. But the real problem we face is in the executive pipeline for women. Yes, more women than ever work—over 14 million in total—but only a small percentage are running their own businesses. Why? Because as the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, has already said, women are half as likely as men to start their own firm, with the majority saying they do not feel they have the right skills or adequate access to capital.
In the workforce, three-quarters of chief executives and 69% of full-time directors are men. Those rates have not budged since 2003. Some 75% of female employees say that they face a glass ceiling, a career bottleneck and little opportunity for advancement. A recent US study showed that women entered their business careers with the wind in their sails, expecting to achieve the same career advancement as men, but over time lost confidence in their ability to contest managerial positions and simply stopped trying. This may be one reason why a particular article caught my eye in the New York Times. Did your Lordships know that there are more men called John than women running America’s largest companies? I kid you not.
Back in the UK, women on average earn 20% less than men. They bear the main burden of child-rearing and caring for elderly parents. But while, as we have heard, the pay gap has almost disappeared for young women working full-time, there is a much bigger pay gap for women in their 40s and older. This suggests that some employers are inflicting a “motherhood penalty”, as Claire Enders describes it in her Women at Work report. We have heard about this from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who will no doubt agree with me. Put bluntly, it appears that professional women of a certain age are simply sidelined. Next Wednesday we will have a opportunity to try to help close the gender pay gap by supporting an amendment to the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill to ask larger businesses to publish differences between men’s and women’s pay.
There is also another factor at play for women—I call it an aspirational gap—with too few successful role models to learn and gain confidence from. This is also true globally, where more than 126 million women entrepreneurs were running businesses in 67 economies in 2012. While many of those businesses were small and started out of necessity, in every single economy women reported worse perceptions of their own abilities than men and a greater fear of failure, which means that support networks and mentoring are as important globally as they are in the UK, and on a par with access to seed funding.
I was fortunate to pursue my career in book publishing, an industry that pioneered promoting women to top positions. My generation felt that they did break through a glass ceiling, often propelled by the memory of growing up with their mothers’ thwarted ambitions. But recently publishing has been wondering why all the senior women who have retired or left the industry have been replaced by men. With women very well represented on boards and at divisional level, why are they no longer the CEOs?
Corporations have to consider what structural and cultural barriers are still preventing women from reaching the top and what training and help need to be put in place—beyond targets—to achieve a fair and dynamic spread of talents. When I became CEO in 1991, it was common for women to feign illness when a family matter interrupted work. But what better excuse than a child’s event at school? A meeting can be rescheduled, a childhood cannot. Businesses simply have to become more flexible, both practically and in terms of attitude, in order to benefit both parents. I have mentored several young women in the media. They were all stunningly gifted and ambitious but after the first 20 minutes of discussing their professional situation, the conversation always turned to work-life balance and how on earth they would cope. So it is right that we reflect on the availability of good childcare, company culture and lack of flexibility.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, I am influenced by Sheryl Sandberg, whose book Lean In I published in the UK exactly two years ago. Sheryl identifies aspiration and confidence as pivotal qualities for women and the extent to which sometimes women’s awareness of the career pitfalls ahead leads them unconsciously to limit their ambition. When I speak to young women in schools, confidence comes up time and again. These students are intelligent and feisty but the world of executive achievement is often as distant from their reality as a show they might watch on television. One initiative that has been beneficial to young women was pioneered at the Women of the World festival at the South Bank, which takes place again this weekend. We have already heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, how important this event is and how grateful we are that BBC “Woman’s Hour” is now recording it. The initiative is called speed mentoring, where young women discuss problems with their mentors in 10-minute intervals, to really astonishing success.
We also have to recognise that while some women are struggling to climb up the ladder, others are fighting to get on it at all. It is a particular problem for low-skilled women, where lack of confidence and education relegates them to low-paid work. The rising cost of childcare also prohibits them from working, even when work is available. For example, the cost of nursery places has gone up a staggering 30% since 2010. One important reason for low aspirations and lack of confidence is poor literacy. A woman who can read confidently can find a better job, keep records and complete a training course. She can help her children with their homework and learn how to protect her health. Whether in the UK or internationally, there is precious little opportunity to escape poverty without the ability to comprehend the written word.
As we heard earlier from the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, of the 781 million adults globally who cannot read, two-thirds are women. But an educated girl will contribute 90% of her income to her family, compared to 40% from men, and will be more likely to insist on her own daughter’s education. The charity Plan points out that one extra year of girls’ education boosts wages by 20% and, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, reduces infant mortality by the same amount. Yet global education on its own will not solve all women’s economic challenges. A UN report showed that unemployment rates among university-educated women in Turkey were three times higher than among similarly educated men; in Saudi Arabia, they were eight times higher. Education and literacy are crucial for women but they cannot compensate alone for discriminatory attitudes.
As we look forward to celebrating International Women’s Day, let us remember how much more there is to do in terms of both legislation and attitude. If we do, women will be a transformative force in the world. I will leave your Lordships with the words of 15 year- old Priya, speaking to the charity Plan, which powerfully express women’s potential. She says:
“Because I am a girl, every man in the corporate world puts a glass ceiling over my head. But because I am a girl, I have the power to shatter it”.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, I add my thanks to my noble friend Baroness Jolly for introducing the debate so well and giving us the opportunity to hear some quite astonishing speeches.
I start by congratulating the five brave men who have spoken in the debate. What a pleasure it was to hear them. But sitting here, I have also been reflecting on what an astonishing collection of women we have heard from in the House today. These hugely high-achieving women have given us absolutely remarkable accounts of their thoughts and their lives. As I was listening to them, one thought suddenly came to me: let us suppose that instead of those of us who are here on these Benches, each one of us was replaced by our mother. How many of our mothers would have been able to have the opportunities to achieve the things that we have achieved? Yet it was their strength and their teaching that made us who we are.
I am very pleased to have an opportunity to speak in this debate. It will surprise no one that I would like to talk about the role of education in women’s empowerment. It is on the quality and reach of its education that the prosperity of every nation depends. I am very proud to be the person who ran one of the first two access courses for women into higher education nearly 50 years ago back in the 1960s. We have come a long way, have we not, from those days? Now, it is taken for granted that women attend university in equal numbers to men and in some cases more so. In those days, it was a very small proportion, as the noble Baroness has already said: 6%, I think it was, back then.
There is much to celebrate in what is happening today. We have come a long way and a great deal has been accomplished in recent years. I would like to talk about some of that good news in a moment, but I pause for a moment to pay tribute to the many splendid women who have fought the good fight for women and girls to be properly educated in times past and on whose shoulders we now stand. Without their courage and determination, we would not have seen the huge contribution that women today bring to the economy, about which we have heard much today. First, I think of London in 1848, when the famous pair, Miss Beale and Miss Buss—names to conjure with—started the Queen’s College school for girls.
In higher education, my own British hero is Emily Davies, the doughty woman who fought the 19th-century prejudice and chauvinism of Cambridge University to found Girton College, my happy home as an undergraduate many years ago. Emily believed that the equality she sought could be achieved only if no concessions were made on the grounds of gender. The girls who came to her fledgling college were to be admitted on the same criteria as the men and to take the same examinations and within the same timescale. Time and again, she was offered compromise to the demanding standards which men at the university had to meet. Time and again, she said no: no lower entry requirements, no longer timescale to reach final, no watered-down easier examinations. I am on Emily Davies’s side. I strongly believe that offering concessions to women because they are women, whether through quotas, targets or distorted shortlists, is not equality, and it perpetuates the myth that women are second class and can achieve only if they are given special treatment.
Around the world, as we have been hearing today, the struggle for women’s education is still being fought. We have been humbled by the courage of Malala in Afghanistan, seeking the benefit of equal access to education for girls at huge personal cost, and inspired by the work of women like Sheikha Mozah and Sheikha Sheikha bint Saif, who have pioneered good education for the girls and women of the Middle East.
So where do we stand in Britain today, and what have the current coalition’s policies brought about for girls and women in education? There is good news to report. If women are to take their full part in the economy of the future, it is essential that more of them achieve in the hard subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and other noble Lords have mentioned the importance of these subjects. I am therefore particularly pleased to see the rise in the number of girls in the STEM subjects. Since the Government introduced the EBacc, the number of girls taking science and maths at A-level has increased by no less that 12%, and the number taking maths and the separate sciences of physics and chemistry has steadily increased year on year since 2010.
This good news is part of the hugely successful increase in the overall number of pupils taking maths and science subjects at A-level: an increase of 13% in maths, 21% in further maths, 16% in physics, 17% in biology, 6% in chemistry. More girls than ever are taking A-level chemistry and physics, while at GCSE the number of girls taking chemistry, for example, has almost doubled since 2009 from over 37,000 to over 63,000. That is indeed good news. We have much reason to thank the former Secretary of State Michael Gove for his insistence on a broad, balanced and rigorous curriculum, which has brought about this much needed change. The young women who have achieved in this new range of tough subjects will be well equipped to take their part in a world economy that depends so much on technology and its supporting sciences.
But it is not only in academic achievements that the Government have succeeded in bringing girls into success, for themselves and for the national economy. Our economy will depend just as much on those qualified through apprenticeships as on those who go on to university. The little-recognised success of this Government in this field is tremendous. Since 2009-10, the number of female apprenticeships has increased by a magnificent 70%. Within those numbers, those starting apprenticeships in engineering and manufacturing has increased threefold. Here, my glass is half full. I rather think that my noble friend Lord Storey’s glass was half empty on these facts, but I rejoice in the good news that there is here. Indeed, it is particularly rewarding to note that in 2013-14, almost 53% of young people starting apprenticeships were female. I cannot adequately express the pleasure that I feel at this news. I feel immensely proud of the Government’s record in bringing real change in the ambitions and prospects of young women through apprenticeship training.
In the academic higher education route, the story is also encouraging. The number of UK women students entering universities here increased from more than 188,000 in 2010 to more than 197,000 in 2014, which is an increase of about 9,000. Adding the numbers from the rest of the EU and overseas, the number of women students entering British universities has increased by almost 20,000 since 2010. That is in spite of dire predictions that the increase in fees would drive down the number of women willing to pursue a university education.
It is also encouraging to look at the recent report on academic staff in universities by Amy Norton, senior HE policy adviser in the Higher Education Funding Council. Her report shows that women academics now make up almost 47% of full-time teaching and research staff. This has been increasing steadily in recent years, and has gone up to around 4,000 just in the last three years. At senior level, especially vice-chancellor level, however, the men still dominate. This is of particular sadness to me, as I was—I do not know whether I would say proud—pleased to be the first woman appointed executive vice-chancellor in the UK. I had hoped that after me the floodgates would open and there would be many more. It has not happened that way.
When we look at the place of women in the state school teaching force, however, we see that the picture is more mixed. At primary level, 81% of all primary teachers are female, and many carry leadership roles below the head. Of primary heads, 71% are female. At secondary level, the picture is much more stark. While 62% of all secondary teachers are female, only 32% of secondary heads are women. Women are still finding it difficult to scale the steep-sided pyramid. Perhaps the women of the future will right the imbalance that leaves so many talented and professionally skilled women who could contribute so much to the quality of our schools lacking the recognition that they should achieve.
In conclusion, I celebrate what this Government’s policies have achieved for girls and women in enabling and empowering them to take a full part in the economic future of this country. With more women skilled and fully equipped to play an even bigger role, I believe that the world of the future will be a better place.
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
My Lords, it is always a joy and a privilege to take part in this annual Women’s Day debate. It always goes off in marvellous and unpredictable directions. A by-product of today’s wonderful debate is a strong call for more memorial statues to women, including Sylvia Pankhurst. I underline my noble friend Lady Dean’s strong call for more recognition for the SOE women of the Second World War. I am delighted to report back to the House that after our debate on the SOE women some years ago, we managed to raise a statue to those women in Tempsford, near the airfield that they flew out of in their highly dangerous missions. Much thanks goes to Tazi Hussain, Tempsford Parish Council and His Royal Highness Prince Charles, who unveiled it last year.
Despite much progress outlined very effectively by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, women’s equality in the world today is as stable as Madonna’s footwear at the O2 Arena last week. It is really not that gender equality is so much unfinished business; it is that the business has barely started to serve its worldwide customers. As my noble friend Lady Gould said, in December 2014, the highly respected World Economic Forum released its Global Gender Gap Report, showing that the UK had slipped from 18th to 26th in the world for gender equality. Perhaps the Minister, when she replies to the debate, could share with us what she thinks about these worrying conclusions.
Yes, of course there is the good news. As the World Bank review recently stated, women’s participation in the labour market globally has, since 1980, increased sharply over time, at each level of income, showing that more women are now engaged in economic activity outside the home than ever before. Indeed, here in the UK, in the last quarter of 2014, 68% of women aged 16 to 64 were in employment. As the ONS put it, that number was,
“the highest since comparable records began in 1971”.
However, much of this, according to the House of Lords Library, reflects the ongoing changes to the state pension age for women, resulting in fewer women retiring between the ages of 60 and 65.
There is also the bad news. Employment gaps globally between men and women continue to persist well into the 21st century, as the ILO has emphasised in its recent data on the subject. It stated that:
“Women continue to suffer from lower rates of employment, are less likely to participate in the labour force and face higher risks of vulnerable employment”.
In the UK, too, as well as large gaps in access to employment between men and women—according to the European Commission—there are also data from Unite the union showing that the gender pay gap between men and women in their 20s has doubled in the past three years and is on the rise between men and women in their 30s. This is becoming a youth problem.
On average, women are still earning just 81p for every male pound, despite the 46 years that have passed since the T&G women at Ford in Dagenham first went out on strike for equal pay and the 30 years that have passed since they finally achieved it. If we look at part-time working, taken up by 42% of all working women in the UK, we see that it is an area where women earn more than one-third less than their full-time equivalents. Does the Minister think that it is time that large companies were required by law to publish the average hourly pay of men and women in their workforce to expose this continued pay gap? Many of us in this House certainly do.
Our colleagues on the coalition Benches might say to me, “Why so gloomy? Look, for instance at the number of women starting their own businesses in this country”. Indeed, we have heard powerful testimony from my noble friend Lady Howells about the challenges for black women going into business on their own. Yes, the good news is that, in 2014, 1.4 million women were self-employed in the UK. Let us rejoice at that. In the past five years, the number of self-employed women has increased by 34%. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, has told us, the top three sectors for women going into self-employment are those golden oldies that we all know, and that do not have very much gold at the end of the rainbow: cleaning, childminding and hairdressing. These are, of course, important and necessary businesses, but businesses that have not traditionally made a big impression on the pay gap. What more can the Minister tell us about the Government’s plans to assist women both financially and in terms of training to expand opportunities for those women wishing to go into self-employment in this country?
Across the world, of course, the picture of women’s participation in entrepreneurship varies markedly. According to the 2012 figures by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the numbers range from 1% of women in Pakistan to more than 40% of women in Zambia who are engaged in entrepreneurship activity. Can the Minister tell the House what priority DfID gives to the encouragement of women into self-employment, globally?
The International Women’s Day theme this year is, as has been said, “Make It Happen”. For us, that must mean making it happen for the most vulnerable women in society. In the UK, according to the Resolution Foundation, one in four women are now earning less than the living wage; many of those are in the caring professions. Why has it not been possible for the Government to match Labour’s proposal to support families on low pay by raising the minimum wage to £8, which would not only give 3.9 million low-paid women a pay rise but make their place in the labour market far more stable? As a member of the rural task force that feeds into the Prime Minister’s challenge on dementia, I often engage with carers and managers. While the proposed introduction of the care certificate for newly appointed healthcare assistants and social care workers is to be welcomed, the issue of low pay in this caring sector, as has been pointed out by several noble Lords this afternoon, cannot be left to one side. Such staff in this sector provide some of the most personal and fundamental support for people with dementia—people who deserve the best possible care.
In conclusion, if we are to continue working towards women’s economic empowerment, both at home and abroad, the last thing this country needs is to come out of the European Union. Farage is a feminist issue. The EU is not only the UK’s largest economic market, but also the body that helped established standards for working men and women on their rights at work. Having worked, many years ago, with colleagues to bring about the 1992 maternity leave directive from Europe, I would not want to see women in the UK lose out on future rights at work through withdrawal from the European Union.
I hope Kathy Lette will forgive me if I steal one of her jokes to make a point. She said that no wife ever shot her husband while he was vacuuming the living room carpet. Be patient with me on this one, but because of our membership of the EU today we can say—perhaps less pithily—that no wife ever shot her husband while he was on paid paternity leave. In other words of course, progress has been made both nationally and internationally. We all recognise that in this House today. However, the work must be relentlessly pursued nationally and internationally.
Lord Watson of Richmond (LD)
My Lords, I suppose, on the arithmetic of the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, I am the seventh of the brave men to have participated in this debate, and—looking at the speakers list—the last. It has been a very good debate, as indeed was the debate last year. If I may say so, I particularly enjoyed the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield. It made many important points. I declare an interest as the high steward of Cambridge University. Although some of the noble Baroness’s remarks related specifically to Oxford, they had resonance with me and the Cambridge experience. Incidentally, she made reference to the L’Oreal scholarships. I heard only this afternoon that the scholarships this year include a presentation to Dame Carol Robinson, professor of chemistry at Oxford University. She came out top of the poll on a Europe-wide judgment, not just in terms of the UK. That is excellent.
In 2003, a long time ago, there was the World Bank report on gender equality. I should just like to read its conclusion:
“Gender inequality, which remains pervasive worldwide, tends to lower the productivity of labor and the efficiency of labor allocation in households and the economy, intensifying the unequal distribution of resources. It also contributes to the non-monetary aspects of poverty—lack of security, opportunity and empowerment —that lower the quality of life for both men and women. While women and girls bear the largest and most direct costs of these inequalities, the costs cut broadly across society, ultimately hindering development and poverty reduction”.
Well, here we are in 2015, being invited in this good debate to,
“take note of women’s economic empowerment and the progress in achieving it that has been made in the United Kingdom and internationally”.
We have heard a number of excellent examples of real progress. However, I want to strike a slightly different note. Progress has been made but, depending on how we measure it, there are still many very alarming signs.
In February, the Sunday Times covered an OECD report which highlighted one critical area for the United Kingdom and its comparison internationally. It makes gloomy reading. When it comes to the performance of girls in the UK in the sciences,
“we have one of the biggest gender gaps in the world”.
The OECD report identified that of the 67 countries measured by the internationally recognised PISA tests, the UK was in the bottom five, just above Colombia and equal with Costa Rica. PISA focused on the 13% difference in science between boys and girls in the UK, compared with an average 1% difference across the 67 countries. That raises the question, and other people have raised it, whether girls are inherently less competent in maths and science. That is a preposterous idea according to the OECD. Its report is adamant that there can be and is,
“no biological reason for girls to do badly”,
in science. Professor Brian Cox, whom we see on television frequently, was also reported by the Sunday Times as saying that girls are for the United Kingdom, science and the economy,
“a great reservoir of untapped talent”—
but why untapped?
The article quotes a lady who read engineering at Cambridge 35 years ago, when she was indeed one of the very few women reading engineering there. She apparently said in this report that she thought not much had changed. I am afraid that I must disagree with that. Certainly, engineering at Cambridge is an extraordinary story. It is now the largest department in the whole university. As many people know, it is led by Dame Ann Dowling, who is an outstanding engineer and very successful businesswoman. The numbers registering for engineering in Cambridge are quite decisive. The numbers of women now reading mechanical engineering have risen by 18% in the recent period and in electrical engineering by 27%. In both cases, these percentage increases are much greater than those recorded by men.
The House of Lords committee that recently reported on the UK’s digital future clarified the issues involved a lot further. That report is also alarming. The committee found that increasing the number of women working in information technology could generate an extra £2.6 billion each year—good for the UK, good for growth—but the facts are that less than 30% of this country’s IT workforce is female. Women make up only 6% of the engineering workforce, despite what I said about Cambridge, and only 15.5% of the STEM workforce. Then, there is an extraordinary statistic. Of the 4,000 students taking computer science at A-level, fewer than 100 are girls. Why is that?
The key conclusion seems to be that girls are disheartened because they see STEM occupations as male dominated—which of course they are. Another finding is that some feel that the subjects are boring compared with social studies, arts studies, history of art studies, education and design. If you read Country Life—in many ways a most excellent magazine—you will see that it features a full-page photograph each week of eligible young ladies soon to be married. They all have daunting names. However, if you read the small print under the glamorous photographs, it is striking that, overwhelmingly, those depicted above are described as having or studying for degrees in subjects such as art history, social studies or other soft subjects. I think Country Life has the wrong role models, though I was glad to see that in the current edition the lady concerned is apparently reading biology. That is something. Not only is Britain, and business in Britain, wasting a huge talent pool; so many individuals are denying themselves opportunities, intellectual fulfilment and, of course, superior financial rewards.
There is one further dimension, well expressed in this House of Lords digital report. If IT is our second industrial revolution, sadly, it will not replicate Britain’s commanding lead in the first. As one witness expressed it to the committee:
“The kind of innovation we are getting relies on the whole on young men with narrow engineering degrees thinking about the future … If we want a creative industry, we need a diverse workforce”.
Creativity, as we all know, is the key to a competitive future. Let us also recognise, while congratulating ourselves on some progress that has been made, that the greater involvement of women in the STEM industries is crucial to this country’s competitive survival and success.
Baroness Turner of Camden (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for introducing this debate—and for the manner in which she did so. Today, it is appropriate to celebrate what has been achieved by previous generations of women, their courage and their persistence. Of course, much remains to be done and we have been reminded of that in the marvellous debate that we have had this afternoon.
One hundred years ago, women did not have the vote. It took campaigns and much suffering, including terms in prison, before that was eventually achieved. It pains me when I hear some young women say that they will not vote and to hear them oppose any form of political involvement. We should remind people that equal pay was achieved in law in this country by women’s organisations—and after the wonderful women employed by the Ford Motor Company came out on strike for it and eventually achieved it in law; although, of course, we have heard today that far too many women are still working in low-paid employment. We should be proud of the fact we live in a welfare society. Child benefit, maternity leave and other provisions have all been achieved as a result of campaigns mostly organised by women and their unions.
In this context, I recall a Member of this House who sadly died recently and was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, in her introduction: Baroness Platt of Writtle, who was the chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission at a time when I was a member. She was herself an engineer at a time when it was not thought a suitable occupation for women. She campaigned for what was known as the WISE campaign—Women into Science and Engineering—by the Equal Opportunities Commission. We had some success. We went around, talking to schools and to parents to try to persuade them that training in science and engineering was a suitable career for women. I must admit that, following the campaign that was introduced, women have emerged in science and in engineering in a way that would not have been possible without our campaign. A great deal was owed to the leadership we had from the Baroness Platt of Writtle.
There is another development that bothers me greatly and I feel I should refer to it: the recent disappearance of young girls—aged 15 and 16—to join the Islamists in Syria. The newspapers say that around 60 young women have made a similar trip. Do they realise what they are doing? The ideology that they are joining treats women not as individuals at all and as not entitled to any kind of human rights. The extremist culture involves FGM—female genital mutilation. Although we have made it against the law in this country, there still have not been any successful prosecutions. To oppose this extremist ideology is not to be in any way anti-Muslim. I know many Muslim women who are opposed to these inequalities and to this terrible kind of ideology. I am referring to an international committee which many Members of your Lordships’ House have supported from time to time. The committee concerned is mostly made up of refugees, mostly from Iran, and is led by a woman, Maryam Rajavi, who is based in France. The campaign is for equality. Again, you have to admire the women who, in a culture that is certainly not pro-women, are campaigning and continue to campaign for equality. I and others have supported them and continue to do so. It is right that on a day such as this we should say that these are the people we should support—the people who are in difficult circumstances but nevertheless struggle and campaign for equality.
Again, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for introducing this debate and all the women who have participated. We can all very well support what they have said to us. We say there should be more attention paid to women who need support. We have to press ahead with our campaign in the way that we have done —and we will continue to do so.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I apologise to my noble friend Lady Turner for standing in her place. As a Member of the House of Lords on 8 March 1999 and as the first woman, I believe, to call, very unfashionably, for a debate on International Women’s Day, I feel deep pride at taking part in this now well established honourable practice of celebrating women’s advancement to mark International Women’s Day.
I am speaking in the gap to make two points. First, if the definition of economic empowerment is the ability to make decisions and make things happen, then, despite much of the progress rightly noted by noble Lords, we have giant leaps yet to take. As some of the most powerful and respected women leaders present in your Lordships’ House will know, economic emancipation and opportunity remain far out of reach for the majority of Asian women lying at the wrong end of the statistics regarding employment, education and political participation. Too many minority women lack opportunities for mainstream lives and economic empowerment. I am truly impatient about the pace of change. How do the Government intend to bridge the gap between women and women of colour, as referred to by my noble friend Lady Howells, who after all are also citizens?
My second point is about violence against women. In many regions in the past 50 years, women’s status has improved markedly, but violence against women and girls remains a global phenomenon that historically has been, and indeed still is, hidden, ignored and accepted in many parts of the world. Child sexual abuse has remained a silent shame. Rape is often a matter of stigma for the victim rather than the perpetrator. Violence in the home is still considered domestic, despite being a crime. The full extent of the abuse of children within our own institutions and across our communities is slowly unfolding, while multiple, differing forms of violence around the world have become ever more difficult to counteract.
No magic wand will eliminate violence against women and girls, but evidence tells us that changes in attitudes and behaviours are possible, and can be achieved within less than a generation if we are certain in our determination to root it out. It requires many responses, but one is to provide adequate funding, including for refuges in the UK and globally, through our inter- national development funds, particularly to encourage Governments to support women raped in conflicts and wars, as the Bangladeshi Government are doing.
Violence against women and girls is not just another women’s issue; it is a public health and development matter of concern to all. Its elimination should be part of the post-2015 sustainable development goals, just as the elimination of apartheid was an important goal of the 1970s and 1980s for the world community.
I add my tribute to that of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to the work of Grameen and its impact on women’s economic empowerment. I also draw the attention of the House to the remarkable work of Sir Fazle Abed and BRAC—the largest NGO in the world, operating from Bangladesh in 69 countries—and its 43-year programme of economic empowerment of women in Bangladesh. It is an amazing example to the world and offers an effective model for the empowerment of women entrepreneurs.
Baroness King of Bow (Lab)
The message today, on International Women’s Day 2015, is on “Empowering women”. I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, on securing this important debate. Empowering women means giving them the practical tools to escape poverty and prejudice. Around the world, including here in Britain, a baby girl’s life chances are disadvantaged in comparison to her brother’s at almost every turn, and once she becomes a woman the disadvantage becomes entrenched.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, opened the debate by giving examples of how investing in women yields radically better results than investing in men. The noble Baroness, Lady Gould, gave the example of how spending £1 on vulnerable women here in the UK saves £3.57 later on. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, quoted Kofi Annan on this point, who has said that there was no more effective tool in development than investment in women. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby quoted Goldman Sachs to show scientifically that investing in women benefits society economically. Indeed, the many noble Lords who spoke powerfully about the international development aspect of this debate, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Bottomley and Lady Hussein-Ece, and my noble friends Lady Armstrong and Lord Boateng, all said that we must invest in women. It is fantastic that there is no disagreement; there is complete cross-party consensus that we must do that. From the government Minister to former Cabinet Ministers on both sides of this House to every Back-Bencher, everyone is agreed on the clear, indisputable fact that investing in women boosts the economy and benefits society.
I applaud those international development programmes funded by this Government, some of which the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, outlined, that invest in women. My question is: why do the Government disproportionately advantage women in their overseas programmes yet disproportionately disadvantage women in their domestic programmes? There is an avalanche of data showing that the coalition Government are doing domestically exactly what they decry internationally. Instead of following the common-sense strategy of putting money into women’s pockets, which everyone here, including government Ministers, has supported, the Government have systematically taken money out of women’s pockets. Independent research from the House of Commons Library shows that, over the course of this Parliament, a staggering 85% of cash raised from tax and benefits changes has come straight from women’s pockets, a figure that was quoted by the right reverend Prelate. Eighty-five per cent is a truly staggering figure. That is not all: according to the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, the group hardest hit by the coalition Government’s choices are families with children.
Sadly, the Government’s choices are not delivering women’s economic empowerment; quite the opposite, they are not benefiting women and children. The Government’s own figures show that, for example, in terms of some of its reform policies and benefits, two-thirds of those hit by the bedroom tax are women. It is easy to go on. The majority of those on zero-hours contracts, which the Government refuse to ban, are women. The majority of those earning the minimum wage are women. While Labour will increase that minimum wage to £8 per hour, the Government will not. The Government will not listen to their own advice on increasing women’s incomes, and the Government package this ongoing wealth transfer away from women as benefits reform, deregulation, cutting red tape, liberalising the labour market or value for money. The point is that either the Government do not undertake gender impact assessments or they ignore them.
So here are five key changes the Government could make immediately that would transform women’s lives. First, close the gender gap, increase the minimum wage to £8 per hour and ban exploitative zero-hours contracts. Secondly, improve maternity and paternity provision and provide affordable childcare, because, as Ministers will be aware, under this Government childcare costs have increased by 30%. Thirdly, do far more to protect women from violence, most often sexual violence. Again, the facts are shocking: despite a rise in reported rapes, prosecutions for rape are down by 14%. Fourthly, give women the power to challenge discrimination. Face facts: since the Government introduced tribunal fees—and this is one of the saddest statistics of all—claims for sex discrimination have fallen by 91%. It is not possible to put a price on justice and not realise that that price will be paid, and here it is clearly being paid by women. Fifthly, empower the next generation: stop channelling girls into low-paid work. So much of this is bound up with cultural barriers, as illustrated by the noble Baronesses, Lady Greenfield, Lady Brady, Lady Rebuck, Lady Perry, Lady Kidron, Lady Mobarik and Lady Crawley, among others. I am sorry I cannot mention every single Peer in this debate—although I am doing my best. Also, my noble friends Lady Howells and Lady Uddin raised the point of the obstacles facing BAME women.
What everyone is saying is “Give girls and women a level playing field”, and this theme was taken up by IMF managing director Christine Lagarde. The IMF is not known for its bleeding-heart liberalism. Christine Lagarde says that nations should remove laws that prevent women from working in order to increase the female labour supply and boost economies. She says:
“In too many countries, too many legal restrictions conspire against women to be economically active. In a world in search of growth”—
and that is our holy grail, as we all want growth—
“women will help find it, if they face a level playing field instead of an insidious conspiracy”.
Here in the UK we do not have an insidious conspiracy; we have insidious complacency. This brings me to our very own gender pay gap. I will focus the majority of my remarks on this subject, not because it is the single most important subject, but it is the single most important issue we are debating today that will be up for a vote in this House next week. I hope your Lordships will understand why I focus my remarks in this area.
I want to highlight the campaign begun by Harriet Harman and Gloria De Piero and taken up magnificently by the women’s magazine Grazia on pay transparency and closing the pay gap. Since Grazia launched this campaign, it has heard from countless women who are paid less simply because of their gender. One told how she managed to create a department at an ad agency. Looking at the salary information, she was staggered to see an obvious wage differential between the male and the female employees. Another woman described her horror at discovering that the man who was employed to take over on her maternity leave was paid more than her. When she confronted her boss about this, she was told that the man—who, incidentally, was less qualified than her—was paid more because he had to support his family.
Ellie, 36 years old, a former investment banker, discovered she was getting paid £5,000 less than a male colleague only when he let this slip himself. Ellie says:
“We were identical in performance, age, level, experience, everything. Even he supposed we were paid the same ... I confronted my boss, but he warned me that pay was confidential and couldn’t be discussed. I’d already been given a higher offer by a rival bank, so I offered my resignation there and then”.
Asha, 55, ex-director of an investment bank, long suspected her pay was not keeping up with that of her male colleagues, but she could not get her bosses to admit the difference, let alone begin to redress the balance.
“They would insist I was at the top of my pay grade, and tell me to keep it up, but despite working harder and longer than my male counterparts, my pay plateaued”.
It took her £60,000 and 16 months to reach an out-of-court settlement with her former employer. That is time and money most women just do not have.
Those are the women, the 91% drop, who cannot bring these claims any more, so women’s ability to achieve economic empowerment is being cut away from under them. That is why transparency is the answer—and, incidentally, a very cheap answer. I understand why Members on the Benches opposite probably do not agree with our view, in the Official Opposition, that we should increase the minimum wage to £8 per hour. I understand; it is a different world view—fine. However, pay transparency does not cost anything, and it really is unforgivable not to bring it in. As Asha, the ex-director of the investment bank who got the money back by taking legal action, said:
“Why would turkeys vote for Christmas? Transparency has to be legally enforced, with repercussions for not doing so”.
Possibly my favourite example is Shannon, 25, who works in advertising, and whose end-of-year bonus was a £100 Liberty voucher. Guess what her male equivalent got in the same job as an end-of-year bonus. He did not get a £100 Liberty voucher—he got £2,000 hard cash. Those examples of blatant pay discrimination are going on right now, today, this hour, this minute, in Britain, and we have a way to remedy them.
I will mention only one more example—there are so many others. Donna, 38, was a PR director from Yorkshire. She explained:
“I landed a job at a PR firm in London. After a year I was promoted to account manager and at this point they employed another account manager to work alongside me, with the same amount of experience. The only difference? He was a bloke. I was stunned when over lunch he told me”,
he was earning over 30% more than her. Donna approached her bosses for a rise but still did not get enough to match her male colleague’s salary. She says—and I would really like noble Lords to understand the implication of this—
“I know I could have sued for sex discrimination, but I didn’t want to rock the boat so early in my career. All I wanted was to be paid fairly”.
That is the point. Women are not asking for charity. They are just asking not to be blatantly, systematically discriminated against just because they are women.
Therefore I ask the government Benches opposite: what are they going to do to deliver the pay transparency that would help all those women and hundreds of thousands like them up and down the country? When the amendment on pay transparency comes up next week, so ably championed by my noble friend Lady Thornton and others in this House, including my noble friend Lady Crawley, whom will they side with? Will they side with Donna, Asha, Shannon and Ellie, who have been discriminated against just because they are women, or will they side—as they are currently saying they will—with the employers who refuse to pay them the same just because they are women? It is a simple choice.
I make no apology for getting quite angry about this. It is a scandal. What is more, it is a scandal that the Government could right, and do so fairly easily. We are the people who have a voice in Parliament; Donna, Asha, Shannon and Ellie do not have a voice here. As my noble friends Lady Crawley and Lady Dean said, we have that voice and we need to make that change. The vote is next Wednesday; the amendment to the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill would implement Section 78 of the Equality Act 2010, which enables the Government to make regulations requiring companies employing 250 people or more to publish information on the differences in pay between men and women. Granted, that is the very beginning—it would not help women who work in smaller companies, some of whose cases I just mentioned—but it is a start.
It is 44 years since the Equal Pay Act was passed, and here we have clear evidence that the law is being broken, day in, day out, to the detriment not just of women but, by the Government’s own logic, of our economy as well. How much longer do we want to wait? I echo the comments of my noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton, who said that we should be proud of the progress we have made—and we have made incredible progress. I remember that when I think of my grandmother, who was the auntie of Uncle Ted, as I call my noble friend Lord Graham—he is my mum’s first cousin. His auntie and my gran—being one and the same woman—worked in a cigarette factory. Jenny left school at 13 and worked in a cigarette factory. Do noble Lords know what her job was? It was picking cigarettes off the conveyor belt at intervals and dragging on them to check whether they were dragging properly—literally, the definition of a dead-end job.
I know that we have made progress and I am grateful for everything that the Labour Party has done in this regard—it has been predominantly the Labour Party which has done this—but the Government have done some things here and there as well. I admit that I cannot think of any off the top of my head, but the Government will have done some things because, to be fair, all of us in this House think that the instances of clear pay discrimination that I have just described are unacceptable.
On this issue, I appeal to the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, who described her family’s extraordinary heritage in championing women’s rights. The noble Baroness’s grandparents would surely have been dismayed to see such blatant sex discrimination going unchecked. Perhaps the noble Baroness could champion this issue. I appeal to the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, who surely has the clout—I know that she has the decency—to get the Government to make this simple change. The noble Baroness said that our job is to make life much better for other women. I appeal to the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, who said that our job is to give women the tools. This is the point; pay transparency is just a tool. It is not even a case of giving women any money, but it is giving them a tool. It is not charity and it is not expensive. Surely, those on the government Benches have a teeny bit of influence in this area—a smidgen, a soupçon, a crumb. Not a single Member opposite can consider that what is going on is acceptable.
In summary, I ask the Minister only two questions. I do not expect her to answer the first, but I would be sincerely grateful if she would answer the second. First, how can it be right to push money into women’s pockets overseas but take money out of women’s pockets at home? Secondly, will the Minister agree to lobby the Government to make a concession and support pay transparency next week in this House? It is clear that women’s economic empowerment is intertwined with their social, psychological, physical and cultural empowerment. I am sorry that I have not commented on all the fantastic speeches that touched on the cultural and educational aspects that we need to improve. Those speeches show that you cannot disentangle economic empowerment and place it neatly in a box. The least that we could do is empower women and pay them the same as we pay men.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, the debates in the House of Lords for International Women’s Day are always outstanding, and this has been no exception.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said, it has gone off in wonderful directions. I was pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady King, said that there was clear agreement on much that was mentioned in the debate, although she then seemed to go off in another direction.
I am delighted to attempt to respond to contributions which have covered a very wide range of topics and themes from both men and women. Any hope of ending gender inequality will be achieved only with the active involvement of men. The noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby, my noble friend Lord Storey and others spoke of men as being the agents of change for gender equality. At the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, the UN will mark the HeForShe campaign.
My personal experience mirrors that of some other speakers. My noble friend Lady Perry spoke of our mothers being on these Benches. I was reminded that my mother achieved a first at Cambridge in the 1930s, but never became a graduate. It was not until 1948 that Cambridge accepted that its women students were members of the university and awarded them degrees. What is more, she had to resign from the Civil Service as soon as she married.
I was at Oxford in the 1960s when, as the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, said, only 6% to 7% of people went to university, and at Oxbridge there were seven times as many places for men as for women. This was a feature of the single-sex college set-up. Our university careers office advised women who might get married that teaching or secretarial work would be sound futures to consider. For me, who married an RAF officer, that was definitely not a route to economic empowerment, but I have never for one moment regretted my marriage. As the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, said, we were the wife division of the human race. Astonishingly, no one suggested that we might aspire to be a football club CEO. My noble friend Lady Brady has chosen a challenging career in which her talents and hard work have led to great achievement, and she has totally ignored glass ceilings, quotas and targets. These days, equal numbers of men and women go to university, and no careers office would last long offering women the narrow set of options that we were offered.
Looking to education, many doors have been opened but there are still barriers to be overcome. I pay tribute to the right reverend Prelate and the church for all that it does in education in this country. How exciting it was to have in this House the Bill on women bishops, which is going to fast-track women on to the Bishops’ Benches. I am not sure how far the role brings economic empowerment, but I am sure that spiritual empowerment should be equally valuable.
Too many girls feel that their career options are limited because of stereotypes about jobs being more suitable for boys or girls. We heard that from my noble friends Lady Mobarik, Lord Storey, Lady Perry and Lady Evans, and the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield. This can start from a very young age. In an experiment in the United States, primary school children were asked to draw pictures of a scientist before and after a visit to a lab. In the “before” drawings none of the boys and only 36% of the girls depicted a scientist as a female. In the “after” drawings, although, interestingly, still none of the boys depicted a scientist as female, for girls there was a 58% increase in female scientist representation. There is much research showing that aspirations are indeed formed at a relatively young age, and that gendered influences in particular begin very early. A recent Ofsted report found that girls as young as seven and eight thought of conventionally stereotypical jobs for men and women. This is one reason why it is so important that we get careers advice and people from business and the outside world into schools for the very earliest ages.
Expanding the apprenticeship programme and improving careers advice help to open the eyes of young women to options and aspirations that they may not have considered—or, if they did, considered them inaccessible. We have heard of the programmes to raise girls’ aspirations, and to encourage them to study STEM subjects and pursue careers in science and engineering. I am glad to hear that my noble friend Lady Perry’s glass was half full, and to hear my noble friend Lord Watson affirm that girls are not biologically wired not to be able to do maths and science. The noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, spoke with great expertise and wisdom on STEM subjects, and I join her and the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, in recalling Lady Platt and all she did for WISE—Women into Science and Engineering—a fantastic programme that continues to help young women.
Compared to 2010, a thousand more girls are studying physics at A-level every year and two thousand more are studying maths, but they are still too few. As the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, said, we need to open up the thrill of science to get more young people engaged in the excitement of it. There have been 1,260 new science-based apprenticeships since 2010. Again, we are getting there but they are too few. The STEM Ambassadors programme is a network of 28,000 volunteers, of whom 47% are women, who work with women to encourage science uptake. Organisations such as Athena SWAN do excellent work in trying to encourage this, too.
The Government are setting up a new employer-led careers and enterprise company to support greater engagement between employers, schools and colleges. As my noble friends Lady Brady and Lady Brinton pointed out, it is important to change the culture of the workplace. We have just launched Your Daughter’s Future, an online guide to help parents support their daughters through qualification and career choices. We are working with the media to tackle gender stereotypes and improve diversity of representation. I also salute, with the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, “Woman’s Hour” and other programmes that have, over the years, helped to empower and educate women, and encouraged them to take up interests much wider than they have found at home.
Even in the field of education, women are less likely to be in positions of authority, as head teachers, principals, professors or vice-chancellors. My noble friend Lady Bottomley lamented the shortage of women vice-chancellors. The latest data show that 20% of vice-chancellors are female. That, my friends, is up from 17% two years ago. So there we are; there has been meteoric improvement. We believe that sector should go much further to seek out and harness the diverse talent available. HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, is continuing its active programme to try to identify senior managers from more diverse groups. In the world of work more generally, women’s strengths and skills remain an untapped resource.
I turn to employment and enterprise. We have been berated about the measurement which showed that the UK had plummeted down the gender gap ladder to number 26. That was based on a particular set of measures. It does not represent the gender pay gap as it stands in the UK. That is now at 19.1%, the lowest level ever, and the pay gap has been virtually eliminated among full-time workers under the age of 40.
Baroness King of Bow
Does the Minister, however, accept, from some of the examples I just gave, that there are many unreported instances of the pay gap—including those brought to light by campaigns such as that of Grazia magazine—where it appears that professional women are quite often earning 30% less than their male counterparts?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
I agree that there are cases of that in women’s earnings, and that women are still bearing the greater responsibility for children, the home and the care of sick and elderly relatives. However, we are encouraging much greater transparency in the reporting of pay. I will not be lured into pre-empting my noble friend the Minister next week, when the amendment on transparency of pay comes up. Rest assured, however, that the Government have done a great deal and have taken practical measures to ensure equal opportunity, whether it be in Parliament, among judges and editors, or on boards. However, as the right reverend Prelate also said, women very often take jobs below their qualification level, which is another feature of the lower pay that women may receive. Very often it is part-time pay, which is one of the factors that influenced the OECD measurement—it was factoring in part-time pay as if it was full-time pay.
My noble friend Lady Jenkin has spoken of the Women2Win initiative and the initiatives of all political parties to encourage more women and ethnic minorities into the political field. It is particularly important that the other place is fully representative of the country. It is, in fact, the most diverse Parliament ever. Women represent 22.8% of current MPs. That is up from 19.5% in 2010. With the efforts of all parties to promote women and to mentor and help them into Parliament, we can hope only that the next election will see even more women coming into Parliament.
We set ourselves an ambitious aspiration that by the end of Parliament at least half of all new appointees made to the boards of public bodies will be women. We are getting there. From April to September 2014, the percentage of public appointments given to women across all departments increased from 37% to 44%. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck, and my noble friends Lady Brady and Lady Bottomley, all talked about the FTSE 100. The percentage of women on FTSE 100 boards has been climbing steadily. Women now account for around 23% of FTSE 100 directors and over 17.4% of FTSE 250 board directors. The numbers, therefore, are going up: they are still small but we are seeing progress. Furthermore, the Women’s Business Council, in its recent report, has made recommendations to both the Government and the business community. Those recommendations are being implemented and will go some way, we hope, to promoting better equality.
We have seen some progress in the City of London, the financial hub of the country. Last year only the second woman in over 800 years became Lord Mayor of London. Dame Fiona Woolf brought distinction to the post as she travelled around the country, and the world, promoting UK plc and, indeed, women’s contribution to the world of work. The other key historic roles within the Corporation of London are those of the two sheriffs, where only five women have held office since the 12th century, three of them within the last five years. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, has just become one of the few women aldermen in the City. So the pace is quickening.
Staying with the City, key to education and training for work have been the livery companies. There are now 110 of them, some dating back to the medieval guilds. Over all the centuries, the number of lady masters, of whom I have been one and my noble friend Lady Byford another, has been just over 100.
My noble friend Lady Mobarik spoke of the importance of enterprise. Indeed, there is enormous potential in women’s untapped entrepreneurialism. The noble Baroness, Lady Howells, who has been a champion in this area, reminded us of the contribution of black women in business. The noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, mentioned this too. Indeed, we recently held a summit for black and minority ethnic women entrepreneurs, chaired by my noble friend Lady Verma, a successful entrepreneur herself, which highlighted the immense achievements of the community but also some of the challenges that it still faces. We shall continue to support and encourage the talents of BAME women.
Nevertheless, we can celebrate the fact there are now more women-led businesses than ever before: 20% of small and medium-sized enterprises are run either by women or by a team that is more than 50% female. These women contribute around £82 billion gross value added to the UK economy. The Government are supporting them in myriad ways, for instance by providing £1.6 million to support rural women’s businesses, by providing £1 million to the women and broadband challenge fund to help women move their businesses online, and by investing £1.9 million in the Get Mentoring project.
The amount of time that women spent on care came up in a number of contributions. Carers are the unsung heroes of society. We are helping them to combine their caring responsibilities with work. The noble Baroness, Lady Dean, and others referred to these essential workers’ low pay, but we have just begun a £1.5 million project to help local businesses support more carers to work remotely from home through the use of assisted technology.
We have done a great deal for women in this coalition Government. We have lifted 1.1 million of the lowest-paid workers out of income tax altogether, more than half of whom are women. We have also increased child tax credits for low to middle-income families. We have introduced shared parental leave and the right to request flexible working. To tackle the concern that parents have about their children getting the right start, we have invested a record £7.5 billion pupil premium in education to help the poorest children get the boost they need.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, had thought-provoking words on the impact of motherhood on careers, especially within the arts. We all noted her concern about the lack of women in such specialisms as film directing. Given how well the UK does in the creative fields, it would be good to see women represented across those fields too.
The cost of childcare was also mentioned. We now have tax-free childcare supporting childcare costs for working families. That can be worth up to £2,000 per child per year, to be introduced in autumn 2015.
A number of noble Lords mentioned violence against women. The noble Baroness, Lady Gould, linked it to homelessness. We acknowledge that women facing violence need support to rebuild their lives and to become economically independent. The Government have announced a £10 million fund to support women’s refuges in 100 areas across England. I also note her comments on joining up the services so that people do not fall through gaps between different forms of support services. We have ring-fenced nearly £40 million of funding for specialist support services and brought in legislation for tougher enforcement. This includes laws to combat stalking, to enforce the protection of girls from female genital mutilation and to make forced marriage a crime in this country. As we seek to combat the oldest of challenges, so we are acting to tackle the new ones and treating the online abuse of women and girls as robustly as offline abuse.
I turn to the international dimension of this debate, on which we had a great many contributions. I apologise if I may not be able to refer to them all. My noble friend Lady Brinton and the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, mentioned Grameen Bank, which has reversed conventional banking practice; 97% of its customers are women. It is doing great work to enable and empower women to go into business. On microfinance, access to finance for women is a core priority for DfID. We have exceeded one of the departmental results targets, access for 18 million women by 2015, with 27 million accessing finance in 2014. DfID’s programmes for microfinance around the world have a focus on savings, especially for women in rural areas. As a number of noble Lords have said, it makes all the difference in the world, particularly in underdeveloped countries, if women are enabled to go into business.
On fuel and water poverty, which my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece and the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, mentioned, my noble friend Lady Northover and other DfID Ministers have led an 18-month campaign on clean energy access for girls and women. We support programmes to improve technology and to increase access to affordable and clean energy sources.
The noble Lord, Lord Boateng, also mentioned how Ebola affects women more, because it is women who care. DfID is indeed supporting two local NGOs in Sierra Leone through Womankind Worldwide and Women’s Partnership for Justice and Peace, specifically to address the Ebola impact on girls. I note his remark that men tend not to listen to women until it is too late. I hope we will make sure that it is not too late.
A number of noble Lords mentioned social norms and culture, including the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, relayed just how transformative her VSO experience had been in Kenya, finding a completely different culture and way of life. One of my daughters went off to Lesotho for a year after she graduated and found it an absolutely transformative experience 20 years ago in a land where the need and level of living was so completely different from anything in the UK and the developed world. My noble friend Lady Bottomley also spoke powerfully of the difference between women in the UK and women in other parts of the world. The right reverend Prelate mentioned the work of Christian Aid, which has such importance and has had such an impact on underdeveloped countries. My noble friend Lady Jenkin referred to family planning, proper maternity care and health for women. That, of course, can have an enormous impact on women’s lives in these countries.
We have put women and girls at the centre of our development efforts. We should be proud that last week we passed a Bill to put into legislation a target of spending on overseas aid of at least 0.7% of national income. We hope that our efforts will enable women to exercise voice, choice and control, which are critical to ending poverty and building freer and fairer societies. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, spoke of the challenge of sex work.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
I am running out of time. I apologise but I cannot give way as I have only a couple of minutes and want to finish quickly.
We hope that putting more work and effort into businesses for young women will help them to avoid going into sex work. The noble Baroness, Lady Nye, mentioned the Stand Up for Girls campaign, which has been so important.
I will touch on one or two other issues. The noble Baroness, Lady Healy, spoke about women offenders, which is an enormously important area. I am afraid that I cannot possibly do justice to it now, but the Government are mindful that we need to have more financial information within prisons and more support when women come out of prison. It is on the radar and we just hope that we will see improvements. The noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, mentioned Yarl’s Wood. I assure her that steps are certainly being taken to ensure that those vulnerable women are treated with the due care and consideration that they deserve, often having come here with some absolutely hideous experiences in other countries. It is perhaps notable that the noble Baronesses, Lady Rebuck and Lady Brinton, my noble friend Lady Brady and others spoke of the importance of instilling confidence in women. Even this generation of young women do not seem to have the confidence of their male counterparts. It is important to encourage girls to do things, as my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece said, and to instil in them that there is nothing they cannot do if they really set their minds to it.
I apologise that I am out of time and have missed answering some of the issues that were raised, but I shall write to noble Lords on issues to which I have not had the chance to respond. I would like to note that many older women were trail-blazers in their time, and I acknowledge, if I may, with due deference in your Lordships’ House, that such people as the noble Baronesses, Lady Turner and Lady Trumpington, both hit through glass ceilings in their time in ways that we of our generation can only begin to imagine.
I hope that I have made clear the Government’s determination to everything in our power to transform the rights and opportunities available to women and girls in the UK and overseas. This has been a most insightful, stimulating and informative debate, which will play its part in driving forward the gender equality that we all need to see. It will benefit women, families, communities and nations. I thank very sincerely all noble Lords who have taken part.
Transport: Accident Prevention
Earl Attlee
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to use, and to encourage the development of, technologies to reduce the number of collisions between heavy goods vehicles and cyclists.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, the House will be aware that, every year in London, there are several cyclist fatalities involving HGVs and that these accidents often occur at relatively low speeds. These are extremely distressing incidents for all concerned, not least because of the gross disparity in vulnerability. I have been first on the scene on one occasion and witnessed a near miss on another.
My noble friend the Minister, his department and Transport for London take these accidents very seriously. When one occurs, TfL does not just place another appropriately coloured sticker on the map. It takes it very personally and understands the effect on the families, friends and all concerned. The House will also recognise that, for every fatality, there are also numerous serious and life-changing injuries.
The Metropolitan Police should be investigating each fatal accident carefully and dispassionately. However, it is not clear to me why, on one occasion, it was appropriate for the highways engineers at TfL to be interviewed under police caution. It would be helpful if the Minister could write to me to help me understand the logic of that police action.
While the Department for Transport has been a bit slow in consulting on some obvious and desirable changes to the construction and use regulations, TfL has made imaginative use of a traffic regulation order concerning mirrors and sideguards. I expect that other noble Lords will cover this point. However, mirrors work only if drivers invariably use them and if cyclists do not enter the truck’s blind spot or danger areas in an inadvisable way. We could alter the technical requirements for the cab of an HGV but these are quite properly determined at European level. Designs are predicated on the needs of operators using national roads and not for the peculiar problems of London.
Last week, I attended the Construction Logistics and Cycle Safety—CLOCS— conference at ExCeL. We saw some of the technological developments in better cab design, sensor technology and how freight operator recognition scheme operators can reduce risks. I am sure that all noble Lords will applaud the efforts of all those involved in the CLOCS programme.
Can my noble friend the Minister explain why the CPC regime for HGV drivers does not include a mandatory road safety objective? Furthermore, at present, a work-related, road traffic accident fatality is not reportable under RIDDOR. There does not even seem to be a need for a risk assessment for work-related driving. Why not?
While all these points and policies are helpful and interesting, they are not predicated on meeting a target of zero. By that I mean that, in some years, no cyclists in London will be killed by an HGV, irrespective of fault.
My understanding is that, despite claims to the contrary, none of the sensor systems developed thus far is good enough to be mandated. That is how I was briefed when I was in the Minister’s position and I do not think that it has changed. However, we could make the problem orders of magnitude simpler if cycles were to be fitted with transducers for truck-mounted equipment to detect. I want to emphasise that I am not applying parliamentary pressure to adopt any particular technology, nor have I been stimulated by any outside organisation. I have proposed a system whereby one or more infrared transmitters are fitted to the relevant truck. The cycle has a transducer mounted on it which retransmits the IR signal radio frequency back to the truck. This is known as a tag-and-beacon system, and a very similar system has already been marketed which uses RFID. These systems do have the difficulty that the cycles would have to be fitted with a tag, which could be a problem, but that has to be balanced against the technical advantages. It would be necessary to fit only certain types of high- risk HGVs, in particular construction vehicles. My understanding is that the concept would work, but the difficulty is in its implementation.
I understand that in the past three years more than 20 new companies have been set up selling HGV blind spot safety technology. The technology they offer ranges from simple electromagnetic and ultrasonic sensing devices to sophisticated camera monitoring systems, radio frequency identification, short-range radar and infrared. We should applaud their work. The sales pitches of these companies make ambitious claims about being “the solution to the problem”, but static tests and live vehicle trials reveal why it is very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to make these claims themselves. During my researches this week, I have come to realise to my horror that there is no specification in terms of functional and performance criteria for what the equipment and technology must achieve in order to be mandated. This is clearly a role for the DfT since we cannot have large metropolitan authorities each having their own systems and standards. I have to ask my noble friend the Minister what he is doing about this.
Products said to be designed to save lives should be independently evaluated and compared. The operators of HGVs would then have all the facts they need to make informed choices and know that the safety equipment they are investing in offers value for money and is effective. I am sad to say that this is not the case. Unlike every other safety device in the workplace, those being sold to HGV operators do not have to meet stringent performance criteria or undergo rigorous testing. A robust and consistent process needs to be established independently to evaluate HGV safety products against the functional and performance criteria set. Does the Minister agree that his department, and not TfL, should ensure that there is an assessment and approval organisation and mechanism in place?
This is not regulation for regulation’s sake. Not only will it help HGV operators now, it will also steer the technological developments of the future so that more lives can be saved, and not just for this specific type of accident. I am passionate about road safety and I believe that we should be going for zero for this type of accident. I will happily engage with all concerned both inside and outside the House. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for initiating this debate because it is a terribly important subject. We have regular debates both in the House and in Grand Committee on the minor detail of the various bits of legislation under which people use the roads, and often Ministers say in their responses that basically it is all too difficult. All the legislation going back almost 100 years needs to be reviewed. That is not going to happen quickly, so let us get on with what we can do.
I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Cyclists’ Touring Club. Like everyone else, the club is very interested in this subject. I suppose we should start with the problem, which is that lorries and cyclists do not mix, and we are trying to find solutions to that. I want to talk about a number of those. The most obvious one is more space. We have a lot to learn from some continental cities, not only in terms of the space that has been provided for whatever reason—demand from cyclists, political will or whatever—but in the design of our cities. We are making progress here. The Mayor of London is going ahead with the east-west highway, which is a segregated route. I think it is absolutely wonderful and have welcomed it for a long time. If we cannot have segregation—and cyclists feel much happier if they are properly segregated—then we need space with suitable white lines that are not transgressed by other vehicles. There are particular problems at junctions, as we have seen in London. It is very easy just to talk about London, but the problems are just as bad in other cities. In fact, there may be fewer people cycling in other cities, but there are also fewer facilities. Certainly, when I go to some other cities with my bike, I sometimes feel a lot more frightened than I do in London.
Another issue of course is the trucks. We are focusing in particular on construction industry trucks, which is the right thing to do; but we must not forget the logistics industry. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group, so I get involved in quite a lot of it. Big lorries in the middle of towns are necessary for delivering freight, unless there is some kind of logistics transfer point at the edges at which the freight can be transferred into smaller vehicles. In some places it is proposed that freight is taken round by smaller vans, or bicycles. Obviously, this cannot be done for construction traffic.
Here we come to the issue of enforcement, which the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, mentioned. First, it is a pity that more people do not obey the law. Cyclists have been infamous for going through red lights, sadly. It is good that the trend is reducing in London, perhaps because there are more cyclists; perhaps it is due to peer pressure. I am pleased that PCSOs have now been allowed to stop cyclists—I have seen them doing it and have talked to them—if they go through a red light or the stop lines. It is ironic that they are not allowed to fine vehicle drivers in the way that they can fine cyclists for doing it, because it is a different regulation. What is good for cyclists surely should be good for vehicles. I have seen PCSOs talk to car drivers and it is obvious that some of them would like to have these other powers.
Another issue is the reduction in traffic police. CTC has produced figures that show that the number of road traffic police has reduced to a third of what it was in 2005. That is a very major reduction in enforcement and I suspect that many road users probably reckon that they can get away with more than they could then. There is a strong argument for having a separate traffic police force, though that is probably a slightly separate argument.
On enforcement, there is a further example of a man who ran over and killed a cyclist in 2009. He had been disqualified from driving as a teenager; he was breathalysed when the accident occurred; and he was also talking on his mobile phone. One of the possible solutions to this issue came up when we were debating the then Infrastructure Bill. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, mentioned it briefly—namely, the question of why we do not use the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act and RIDDOR in the roads sector. I put down an amendment to that Bill suggesting that since the Office of Rail Regulation was going to be responsible for monitoring the costs of the new strategic highways company, as it does for the railways—it should also be able to enforce cost reductions, as it is required to for the railways, which is another subject—it should be responsible for road safety, as it is for the railways. Let us not forget that 2,000 people are killed on the roads in this country every year and one on the railways.
It comes back to the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act: people should be responsible for their own actions. If these people are employed—as in the example I have just given of the accident in London—why is nobody taking action against the companies that employ them? They are not doing what they should be doing to ensure that their employees are behaving and complying with the law. There is an awful lot more that could be done there. It is a massive subject but if you think about everybody driving—whether pedestrians and cyclists come into it, we can debate—being responsible for your own safety as far as is reasonably practical would make many road users think twice before doing some of the very stupid things that they do at the moment.
I will say one last thing about the technology. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, mentioned the idea of fitting transponders or something to cyclists. It sounds attractive in the first instance but there are questions to be asked, such as, if they did not work, who would be guilty? Would there be too much information in the cab for the driver of the lorry to be able to appreciate it all? Would it be a defence, if the cyclist did not have one of these transponders, that it would be all right to run him over? That is a bit of an extreme example. I hope that the Minister will tell us a bit more about what research the Government are doing to look into all these things, finding out what is going on on the continent and elsewhere, because something needs to be done but I think it would probably be better if it was led by the Government as a major contribution to safety. Then we would be able to move forward on all the various other issues that, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, suggested, could reduce the number of cyclists killed in this country—not just London—to zero.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this important debate. I thank my noble friend Lord Attlee for initiating it. It was also a pleasure to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who is a transport expert like my noble friend. I am not a transport expert and I am not a cyclist—I think a combination of laziness and fear has prevented me. I am afraid I will probably concentrate on London, as that is my experience.
I was first sensitised to the issue we are discussing today as a local councillor in the 1990s in the London Borough of Islington, when I was aware of two fatalities in my area. As a Member of the European Parliament, I got involved particularly in supporting the See Me Save Me campaign, which was started by the Cairns family after Eilidh Cairns was killed in Notting Hill.
The death statistics are indeed terrible. I think there are about 14 fatalities of cyclists a year in London. Heavy goods vehicles represent only about one in 20 of the vehicles on the roads but are responsible for 55% of the fatalities. There are clearly some cowboy HGV drivers and employers but I feel that others are let down by the poor design of cabs and the lack of warning equipment leading to these fatal lorry blind spots.
The basic design of HGVs can and must play a significant role in reducing cycling fatalities and serious injuries, and I think there are three issues. The first is better design of cabs, allowing greater visibility to see cyclists and other road users. That can be done by lowering the cab, placing the driver in the middle of the cab, using more glass and improved mirrors. Secondly, there could be some kind of warning equipment. My noble friend talked about the possibility of equipment. I tried to follow the technical aspects of what he said, but it was about some kind of RFID on a bike. My experience has been more learning a bit about sensors on a lorry to warn the driver. But I take the point—I think that Transport for London makes the point, too—that there are so many different schemes, it is very difficult to assess their value. TfL is doing a study to try to get an evaluation of them. The third issue, which I will come back to in a second, is side guards on construction lorries.
I very much welcome the agreement recently achieved at EU level on a new directive on the weights and dimensions of lorries. That should deliver life-saving changes to lorry design, improving the direct vision under the front windscreen and minimising the risk of overrun and damage in the event of collision by replacing the blunt front with a more elongated and rounded one and an expanded glazed area with mirrors and cameras. Are the Government committed to the follow-up work from this directive? As I understand it, the talk is of a type-approval directive with a rather long timescale—longer than the European Parliament wanted—of about seven years. Are the Government committed to seeing the directive into law and to a mandatory requirement for HGVs to carry these safety features? Last year, in conjunction with some other politicians, I wrote to the Minister’s colleague Mr Stephen Hammond. It was slightly unclear in the reply whether there was that commitment from the Government. I would like to know whether there is a formal position of the Department for Transport on the prospect of a type-approval directive. I think that we do need to get HGVs fit for the 21st century.
As I said, TfL has commissioned a study to develop an independent testing method for vehicle safety technology. My noble friend Lord Attlee talked about the national role for the Department for Transport. I am sure that that is right, eventually; but in the mean time, it is good that TfL is doing some work on this.
I mentioned side guards, as others have. We know that among the HGVs involved in fatal collisions, construction lorries—tipper lorries, skip loaders and so on—are disproportionately represented. They are apparently exempt under the 1986 regulations because they claim to be vehicles designed and constructed for special purposes where it is not possible for practical reasons to fit side guards. TfL does not regard these vehicles as special purpose. Only in very special circumstances are they going on to such terrain where side guards would help stop people being pulled under the wheels of the lorry. The question is whether they really do need to travel around London without safeguards. I think that we are all a bit disappointed that the Department for Transport has been slow in launching its consultation on removing those exemptions from construction vehicles. Can the Minister give me a date when the consultation will be launched and a promise that it will be expedited and wide in scope, in the sense of reducing, as far as possible, any exemption?
While we wait for European and national action, I am pleased that the Mayor of London, Transport for London and London Councils have agreed on a London-wide ban on lorries not fitted with safety equipment to protect cyclists and pedestrians coming into London. I think that the Safer Lorry Scheme will be launched in September, once warning signs and so on are in place. All roads in Greater London, except motorways, will be covered by this scheme. It will require vehicles of more than three and a half tonnes to be fitted with side guards to protect cyclists and class V and class VI mirrors—I confess that I do not actually know what those are—to give drivers a better view of cyclists and pedestrians around their vehicle. I saw recently that Sir Peter Hendy, the boss of Transport for London, has indicated his willingness to mandate cycle-friendly HGVs on all contracts. It has been operating on the Crossrail contract, but it sounds as though he is interested in widening that procurement role.
I conclude with some points that are unrelated to lorry design or equipment. I very much welcome, as does my colleague Caroline Pidgeon on the London Assembly, the superhighways for cycle lanes in London. I have also been asked to find out, going outside London, when the Department for Transport will empower local authorities to enforce moving traffic offences, such as stopping in box junctions and driving in cycle lanes. Apparently, some foot-dragging appears to be going on there. I must stop now. I look forward to answers from the Minister.
Lord Freeman (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Attlee on securing this debate. Perhaps I may say once again in your Lordships’ Chamber how much your Lordships appreciated the noble Earl’s spokesmanship for the Department for Transport, which he discharged not only with courtesy but with tremendous efficiency and knowledge. I listened to his speech and agreed with what he said. I do not have the expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, or my noble friend Lady Ludford, but my contribution is based on being a parent of a 20 year-old daughter who cycles regularly from home in Dulwich to work in Battersea and to visit her parents in Kensington. Each time she does that, particularly at night, my heart is literally in my mouth. Therefore, I have taken an interest in security for cyclists in London. Frankly, every life lost is probably a life that could have been saved and is avoidable. Some of the ideas that my noble friend Lord Attlee has mentioned need to be pursued with great vigour.
I compliment the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, on what I call “the cycling revolution”. It has some penalties and downsides to it but we must congratulate him and a bank whose name I will not mention on the initiative in terms of the growth of cycling in London. One sees while travelling to and from your Lordships’ House in the morning and in the evening how many cyclists there are. However, I am an advocate of greater discipline among some of the cyclists. Whether changes come through legislation or clearer direction remains to be seen, but I often see cyclists in central London without proper lights, headgear or yellow jackets to identify them. I have heard the comments of many taxi drivers in central London who are concerned about the behaviour of some cyclists. It is not just that they go through red lights, as many of your Lordships will have witnessed, but it is sometimes difficult to see them and there is also concern about their ability to see other traffic. I am in favour of certain compulsions on cyclists, certainly in the metropolis.
I turn to an excellent campaign article provided by the research department in the House of Lords. I again compliment it on the publications it has reviewed and the documents it has produced for your Lordships for this debate. The national cycling charity’s December 2014 briefing states:
“In London specifically, where HGVs make up around 3.5% of traffic, almost half of the 44 cyclist fatalities between 2011-13 (inclusive) were as a result of a collision with a lorry. Of these 21, ten involved a collision with a left-turning lorry”.
The statistics are horrifying just in that brief period of time. I very much compliment the charity for drawing this to our attention.
What is the solution? I find myself very much in agreement with my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who I think referred to known black spots. Work needs to be done on improving visibility at certain known black spots. That is the responsibility of Transport for London and the Mayor of London. Whether it means widening the road or giving clear indications to both cyclists and traffic—heavy good vehicles in particular—depends on the precise location but work needs to be prioritised at these known black spots.
I welcome the cyclists’ designated area along the Embankment, but the implications for road traffic, let alone buses and heavy goods vehicles, remain to be properly analysed. Certainly, creating that space will better protect many cyclists heading for the City and work. In passing, I just mention the joint work that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and I tried to undertake—we failed—to get more heavy goods vehicles off the road by taking freight from Felixstowe on to the railway. Much of that traffic comes into and crosses central London to go west or south.
Concrete and tipper lorries seem to be the culprits in many of the incidents that have been referred to. They in particular need a mandatory warning system in the cab. That needs to be complemented by appropriate precautions regarding cyclists. I am not familiar with all the technology but my noble friend Lord Attlee reminded me that up to 20 companies are already interested in the technology to be either installed in the heavy goods vehicles or applied to the cycle. I am not a technologist and do not understand the technical complications but there ought to be renewed enthusiasm and effort here by the Department for Transport, which is best placed to judge the right technology. If necessary, focus within the department, working with Transport for London and other transport authorities around the country in our bigger cities and conurbations, could identify what is the sensible technology to put in the cab and on the bicycle. I am not in any way competent to comment on the technology and I suspect that my noble friend Lord Attlee would not claim to have that knowledge. Someone in the department or some individuals in the department will certainly have that knowledge. Mandatory assessment and approval by the department and recommendations to the industry about what should be applied is much to be desired. I hope very much that the Department for Transport will take up that challenge.
Lord Jordan (Lab)
I thank the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for this timely debate, coming as it does during RoSPA’s family week. I declare an interest as a vice-president of RoSPA.
My interest in safety began while working on the factory floor. My passion for cycling, sadly now dormant, predated that; I was part of a great bunch of lads with the unlikely name of “The Eager Beavers”. With them I cycled every weekend come rain or shine. Our single claim to fame was to have cycled from Birmingham to Abergavenny and back in one day. Its connection to this debate is that I was stopped on the way back, just half a mile from my home, by a policeman who told me that my front light was not working and that I would have to push the bike the rest of the way.
For many years we never had an accident on what seemed at the time to be car and lorry-free roads. It is not now as it hath been of yore. Every year in Great Britain, around 100 cyclists are killed, 3,000 are seriously injured and 16,000 are slightly injured in reported road accidents. Lorries present a particular danger to cyclists. Although cyclists are less likely to be involved in a collision with an HGV than with a car, they are more likely to be killed or seriously injured in any collisions that do occur.
Between 2009 and 2013, HGVs were involved in 23% of cyclist deaths, despite comprising only 5% of the traffic. A disproportionate number of female cyclists are involved in collisions with HGVs. HGVs present a particular danger to cyclists when they are turning left: 55% of cases where cyclists were seriously injured by HGVs larger than 7.5 tonnes in London occurred when the driver turned left across the path of the cyclist.
So what is being done about this problem? There are many good developments, and many solutions are being developed, especially in London, by Transport for London, the Met and individual companies that use large vehicles. Of course, very significant effort and resources are being put into producing a safer road environment for cyclists, especially in London but also in many towns and cities across the country.
Vehicle technology is also advancing rapidly and will help to significantly reduce road crashes and casualties. HGVs are increasingly being fitted with sensors and cameras that warn the driver if a cyclist is to their nearside. This type of technology will certainly help, although in the case of cameras it still requires the driver to check the screen as well as the mirror. Sensors can often give an audible warning, but may pick up pedestrians on the pavement.
Many of the companies who enter RoSPA’s managing occupational road risk—MORR—awards are making good, innovative use of technology to reduce the risk created by large vehicles.
The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has given us an example of the sort of technology that is being developed to minimise cyclists’ vulnerability. Another example is a new collision-avoidance system that was presented to RoSPA’s national safety committee in October by Professor David Cebon of Cambridge University. The system uses sensors to detect the presence of a cyclist on the HGV’s near side, and software that predicts the path of the speed of the cyclist and the HGV. If it predicts that the HGV is going to hit the cyclist when it turns, it automatically applies the HGV’s brakes to bring it to a stop. According to Professor Cebon, an analysis of 19 fatal accidents involving a cyclist and a left-turning HGV concluded that 15 of these would have been completely avoided, and three would have been less severe, using the new system.
The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, makes a very good point about the lack of performance requirements for HGV blind-spot technology, although perhaps it would be better to put these into a standard rather than directly into regulation, at least until the point is reached where they could become mandatory in a European directive. The regulation would then require products to meet the standard. As technology develops, it would be easier to update a standard than a regulation. This should also apply to the transducer device fitted to bicycles if, of course, that particular technology is progressed.
What more can be done? We could adopt the Vision Zero approach recommended by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, which principally means attempting to prevent crashes from happening in the first place and reducing the impact of those that do to a level low enough for those involved to survive without serious injury. Another would be to include a mandatory road safety objective in the certificate of professional competence—CPC—regime for large vehicle operators and drivers. Another would be a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the CPC directive, specifically of the effectiveness of both the initial qualification and periodic refresher training requirements for large vehicle drivers.
As the noble Earl suggested, making work-related road traffic accident fatalities and injuries reportable under RIDDOR is a must. Of course, with so much varied development under way, it would be very useful for the Government to review and co-ordinate all these developments to identify the best examples and then push them forward, including proposing any necessary legislative changes in the European Community.
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, I welcome the debate that the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has tabled. I declare that I sit on the board of Transport for London, which is listed in my interests on the register. I also chair the surface transport panel and sit on the safety, sustainability and accessibility panel, where these very tragic circumstances are discussed, as well as being reported and debated at the main board.
Being a board member has been an eye-opener in terms of the rules and regulations that govern this area. It would be easy to assume that it might be slightly simpler, but it is with a heavy heart that I hear of any tragedy on the road. As a very slow recreational cyclist when a member of Cleveland Wheelers, but also when I was wheelchair racing, most of my training was done on the roads. Two friends of mine have been killed on the roads by cars, not in the UK, and a number of friends have been injured cycling, my husband included. Perhaps very fortunately, he ended up with a spinal cord injury rather than being another of the number of fatalities.
I have been hit twice on the road while training at T-junctions when I had the right of way. I was able to recognise that the driver was not looking correctly, took evasive action and was left with nothing more than a few bruises and a couple of black eyes, but it is very shocking when it happens to you and it makes you think very carefully about everything else that is on the road.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is right about peer pressure. I have seen a change in London in the past year or so with the increased number of cyclists: when somebody jumps a light, other cyclists shout and tell them to be more careful.
In London, heavy goods vehicles are overrepresented in fatal collisions with cyclists and pedestrians. Between 2008 and 2013, 55% of all pedal cycle fatalities involved an HGV. In 2013, 20% of pedestrian fatalities involved an HGV. I would like to see more direct action to improve the safety of the most vulnerable road users, such as cyclists and pedestrians, but support is needed.
There are many issues, many of which have been most ably covered by other noble Lords in the Chamber. The first for me, though, is that some HGVs, which are overrepresented in fatalities, are exempt from basic safety features. The requirement for HGV side guards under the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986 does not apply to certain vehicles,
“designed and constructed for special purposes”.
Should there really be vehicles that have this special-purpose designation? Older HGVs, so pre-2007, are also exempt from close proximity class V and VI safety mirrors designed to address vehicle blind spots. In September 2015, the Safer Lorry Scheme will come into force in London. This will require HGVs registered after 1983 and driven in London to have side and class V and VI mirrors fitted.
I agree with noble Lords who say that the DfT has been a bit slow in its proposal to consult on removing side-guard exemptions for certain HGVs. Their planned consultation will cover only HGVs first registered after 2010. The proposal is also expected to consult on the retrofitting of class V and VI mirrors to all HGVs first registered from 2000. Will the Minister consider whether the consultation should seek public and industry opinion on retrofitting these safety features to vehicles registered from 1983?
Many operators are investing in vehicle safety technology and camera systems, but it is an emerging market, and an awful lot more could be done. There are many that claim to solve the problem, but I think this can be confusing for a number of operators, and I believe that the DfT should work with TfL and other relevant organisations to develop and communicate performance-based criteria for safety systems that are technology-neutral.
Other noble Lords have mentioned the European Commission and its review of weights and dimensions. Will the Minister tell us if the Government will declare their position on this proposal and actively support the Commission’s recommendation to ensure the next generation of HGVs is fit for 21st-century streets?
Under driver training, drivers have to undergo 35 hours of training over five years. This covers rationalisation of fuel consumption, and may cover first aid, manual handling and customer care. All these are very important, but a driver could achieve the full CPC qualification with no training covering driving standards and road safety. It seems crazy to me that we are not taking these seriously and are not including some of the most obvious things.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, mentioned workplace deaths and work-related road deaths. The management of work-related road risk lags behind the management of more general health and safety. I would like to see the Government review the regulations governing this. In the short term, perhaps an approved code of practice could be published on the management of work-related road risk.
Finally, a consistent national approach is needed to improve HGV/cycle safety. I have talked about London, and it is probably in London that these things are reported more often, but accidents like this are happening all over the country that might just make the local news but would not make the national news. I do not think that a lot of people are aware of the number of fatalities that happen in this way. The Government have recently announced £114 million of funding for Cycle City Ambition, in addition to the £94 million awarded in August 2013. The eight cities are Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich and Oxford.
TfL has significant experience in dealing with HGV/cycle safety and has developed proven initiatives aimed at raising operator and driver awareness. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, mentioned CLOCS. There is also Safe Urban Driving, which is a driver CPC accredited course in which drivers undergo an on-cycle hazardous awareness module. That has had a great deal of success. There is also an award-winning Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme, which has been recently rolled out nationally.
Does the Minister agree that we should strongly encourage Cycle City Ambition to adopt and support these existing initiatives? That will save money, not by designing new standards but by ensuring that operators have national consistency. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. A lot of good work is happening, but there is not enough awareness.
Finally, once again I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, as well as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, on his passion for cycling—I wish I could go at the speed he does on his bike. I congratulate both of them on their persistence in promoting safety on the roads for cyclists.
Viscount Simon (Lab)
My Lords, I find it very interesting that the noble Baroness has just discussed the training of HGV drivers; I shall attack from a completely different angle.
I have observed Operation Motorwise on an Army base a few times. Essex Police hold the exercise on a regular basis on private land in various locations throughout the county, in which teenagers are introduced to all kinds of useful matters to do with driving prior to learning to drive. That includes the Highway Code, some mechanical bits and pieces, observational tests, and various other items that prepare them for when they learn to drive and warn them of some of the hazards that might well not be brought to their attention and which might go wrong during that period.
Of those latter hazards, they are shown some emergency braking distances taken by HGVs at increasing speeds, and they all seem to be shocked by the results. They are also invited to sit in the driver’s seat to observe where cyclists can be seen in the numerous mirrors. So far, so good—they learn from that. However, when an HGV begins to turn, the mirrors will also turn, and the cyclist who was clearly visible a few seconds earlier might well have disappeared from the view of the driver. There is nothing the cyclist or driver can do to resume sight, irrespective of the number and construction of the mirrors.
The noble Earl suggested some very interesting technology that might well overcome this problem and, having chatted with him recently, it sounds well worth developing. He mentioned some companies that have developed various systems: a company in Braintree has fitted alarms along the side of its HGVs, which make a sound when anything gets too close to the sides of the vehicles and which alert both the driver and the cyclists or pedestrians. That is really good news, and it is a start on the part of that company to address the problem. As the noble Earl has suggested, there must be other such companies.
What can we do to reduce deaths and injuries in the mean time? Both cyclists and HGV drivers are aware of the problem facing them, and it would be wonderful if all cyclists wore high-visibility clothing, crash helmets and good lighting fitted at the front and back of their cycles. It would also be wonderful if they obeyed the traffic lights and other legislation. However, the initial manoeuvrability of a cyclist exceeds that of an HGV, which can lead the cyclist into a sense of false security—but an HGV turning left at a slow speed can kill or seriously injure that cyclist.
Is there, therefore, stalemate? No. It might seem very heavy-handed, but at least it would stop the deaths and injuries to cyclists if they were encouraged not to be alongside a stationary HGV or one turning left until such a time as suitable safety technology is fitted to all HGVs. I am afraid that the cyclists would not like it, but in the interim, would that not be nicer than adding more deaths and seriously injured cyclists to the figures of STATS19, which is currently the position?
Lord Rosser (Lab)
My Lords, as everyone else has done, I extend my congratulations to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, on securing this debate on cycling safety and heavy goods vehicles. Not everyone has necessarily agreed with the specific proposal he highlighted as one way of addressing a very serious problem. However, there certainly has been agreement on the need to take action to reduce the number of collisions between heavy goods vehicles and cyclists. If today’s debate contributes to realising that objective, it will certainly achieve its purpose.
The Transport Committee in the other place issued a report last July on cycling safety which included information highly relevant to this debate. Transport for London has also provided some relevant statistics. Heavy goods vehicles are disproportionately involved in fatal collisions with cyclists. Some 20% of cycling fatalities in the last five years have involved HGVs, even though such vehicles account for only some 5% of motor traffic. As has been said, in London the situation is even worse, since between 2008 and 2013, some 55% of all pedal cycle fatalities involved a heavy goods vehicle despite HGVs accounting for less than 4% of London’s road miles. Indeed, in 2013, HGVs were involved in nine out of 14 cyclist deaths on London’s roads.
Reference has already been made to construction vehicles. Construction vehicles, and particularly concrete or tipper lorries, are most likely to be involved in collisions with cyclists, with seven out of nine fatal collisions in London between cyclists and large goods vehicles in 2011 involving construction vehicles. There has also been an issue with vehicles that carry stone, sand, cement and water in compartments and mix the concrete when on site, known as volumetric mixers, and which are classed as plant and not goods vehicles and are thus exempt from a number of regulations in place for goods vehicles, meaning that operators of such vehicles do not require an operator’s licence, and are not required to subject the vehicles to annual roadworthiness inspections. It seems that the Department for Transport found that targeted vehicle inspections led to five out of six volumetric mixers that were stopped receiving immediate prohibitions for mechanical defects, and that in addition three of the stopped vehicles were also prohibited because of either overloading or an insecure load. No doubt those who believe that regulations represent red tape and a burden will see no need for action, but what is alleged to be a so-called burden for one person is the potential difference between life and death for another.
The Government published their response to the Transport Committee’s report on 31 October last year, and the Minister’s reply may draw quite heavily on that response. However, I hope that he will also reply to the specific points raised by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, since I for one will be interested to hear where the Government now stand in relation to encouraging or promoting the effectiveness and practicability of HGV blind-spot safety technology, and in their response to his point made on lack of specifications in terms of performance for what this equipment and technology should achieve and lack of independent evaluation and testing. Indeed, on those specific points made by the noble Earl, Transport for London has said that while many HGV operators are investing in vehicle safety technology and camera monitoring systems to protect cyclists, the effectiveness of some of the products is questionable and HGV operators need independent product information to inform their purchasing decisions.
Of course, steps are being taken to try to improve cycling safety in the important area we are discussing. London Councils is working with Transport for London to implement a new London-wide Safer Lorry Scheme from September, which will require the fitting of extended view mirrors and side guards to all heavy goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes.
Transport for London has also called on the Government to review the driver certificate of professional competence syllabus to ensure that the European regulation requiring HGV drivers to undergo 35 hours of training over a five-year period with,
“specific emphasis on road safety”,
is fully satisfied. Under the UK’s application of the driver certificate of professional competence, it is apparently possible for a driver to achieve the full driver CPC qualification with no training covering driving standards and road safety. Transport for London has said that the Government should introduce a mandatory and more prescriptive road safety objective which should include minimising the road risk for vulnerable road users. Like the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, I ask the Minister to comment on this in his response.
In his contribution, my noble friend Lord Jordan referred to a new collision avoidance system being developed. There was an indication that an analysis of 19 fatal accidents involving a cyclist and a left-turning heavy goods vehicle concluded that 15 of those would have been completely avoided, and three would have been less severe, with this new collision avoidance system. In view of those figures, it would be helpful if the Minister could say what the Government know about this new system and what role they are playing in encouraging its development.
We need to further improve cycling safety if we are to encourage more people to make the switch and increase the number of journeys made by bike in the UK from its present figure of just 2%. The recent RoSPA-commissioned poll indicated that one-third of people think that cycling safety is one of the biggest transport issues we face, with more than 100 cyclists a year being killed.
When in government, we made real progress on cycling, with cycle use growing by 20% and casualty figures falling significantly. These increases in cycling numbers and casualty reductions did not happen by chance but through decisions we made, with ambitious road safety targets, increased use of speed cameras, road safety awareness campaigns, traffic calming measures and new home zones, which have introduced 20 miles per hour limits in residential areas. What we have seen since then, from 2010 to 2014, is half of all local authorities feeling that they have had no alternative but to reduce their investment in cycling, and no long-term certainty to enable local authorities to plan ahead and invest in the infrastructure they need, which is so important for increasing cycling usage and improving cycling safety.
This situation was highlighted by the fact that the Government’s Cycling Delivery Plan, published recently but more than a year late, contains no specific targets on increasing the percentage of journeys undertaken by bike from the current level of 2%, and no specific long-term funding targets for cycling. The Government’s strategic framework for road safety, published in May 2011, contained no specific goals for making cycling safer, and targets to cut deaths and serious injuries on roads have been axed, with heavy goods vehicle speed limits on single-carriageway roads being increased from 40 miles per hour to 50 miles per hour on a highly questionable evidence base. Cuts to front-line policing, which the Government said would not happen, have made, as my noble friend Lord Berkeley, said, enforcement of road traffic offences more difficult, with some 23% fewer traffic police patrolling the roads, and a very much higher figure in, for example, Essex, where there has been a reduction in traffic police from 257 in 2010 to 76 in 2014.
Cycling safety clearly remains an issue of concern, and the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has drawn our attention in this debate to what is far from the only cause of concern affecting cycling safety but certainly the one that receives the most publicity. That is no doubt in part because of the number of collisions between cyclists and heavy goods vehicles occurring in London, on the doorstep of the national media and Parliament, and because, in proportionate terms, such collisions result in more fatalities and serious injuries than any other single form of collision or incident involving cyclists.
I hope that, in his response, the Minister will include firm assurances and evidence that the Government are actively engaged in ensuring that HGV operators will have vehicle safety technology that is effective and fit for purpose, and will enable us to reduce still further the number of fatalities and serious injuries involving cyclists and heavy goods vehicles.
Lord Popat (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to respond to this Question for Short Debate on technologies for reducing the number of collisions between heavy goods vehicles and cyclists. It is a privilege, admittedly a daunting one, to respond to my noble friend Lord Attlee. When I became a Whip, he was the lead spokesman for transport matters in this House, and was kind enough to mentor me in these matters. He not only speaks with great passion and knowledge on these matters but upholds the finest traditions of this House when doing so.
Moving to the matter in question, I would like to assure your Lordships’ House that the Government are fully committed to creating a safe environment for all road users. As I will set out, advancements in technology will play a vital role in this. All of us who use a car know how much technology is advancing, and improving both the driving experience and safety—and the same is true for HGVs. However, it is not just about technology. Everyone has a part to play: central and local government, manufacturers of technology, the police and of course road users themselves. This is an important matter, as can be seen from the four tragic fatal collisions to cyclists involving heavy goods vehicles already this year in London.
Britain’s roads are among the safest in Europe, but we cannot be complacent: we can and will do more. Following the successes of our Olympic team, cycling has become increasingly popular, and we wish to build on that excellence. Cycling can contribute to keeping you healthy and we want to encourage more people to get on their bikes. The first step is ensuring that they feel that it is safe to do so. The Construction Logistics and Cycle Safety event last week at the ExCeL centre, attended by my noble friend Lord Attlee, gave 200 delegates the opportunity to view 10 new HGVs fitted with the latest technologies to detect cyclists.
Some of these technologies, such as “tag and beacon”, can be fitted to bicycles and would alert the driver of an HGV of their presence. However, there is a risk either that this may provide a false sense of security for both the cyclist and the driver—as neither of them can rely on the other having the equipment—or that the driver suffers from overload because of repeated warnings. The existing sensor-detection technologies are not connected to the vehicle controls. The combination of the detection time, the reaction time of the driver and the operating time of the braking system means that a cyclist moving at moderate speed could have travelled the length of the HGV after being detected, which makes it very difficult for the driver to avoid a collision.
I turn to other matters. I can report that the Government have secured improved requirements in the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe regulations for mirrors on the passenger side of vehicles, which will mean that drivers have a better view of the area adjacent to the cab, and should improve safety for cyclists. The European Union has now mandated these improved mirror requirements for new HGVs registered after 30 June 2015.
Department for Transport officials are continuing to work in the UNECE to develop the technical requirements for camera monitoring systems that replace existing mirrors and enable the driver to have a better view of other road users. Although we cannot be certain how quickly these discussions will progress, it is possible that such systems could be on new HGVs by 2017.
The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and my noble friend Lady Ludford mentioned side guards. Since 29 October 2014, most new HGVs have had to comply with revised European rules on side guards which permit fewer exemptions than the current domestic legislation. Changes to domestic legislation are also being prepared for consultation which will reduce the number of exemptions for existing vehicles. More vehicles will be fitted with side guards.
The noble Baroness also asked about the Cycle City Ambition and whether such cities should follow some of the initiatives that Transport for London has undertaken. These decisions are a matter for individual local authorities. However, I am sure that many cities—not just the eight mentioned—see the work done in London as a benchmark for which to aim.
The Government, along with European Union member states, have developed the proposal to amend the general circulation directive, in particular to allow extra length for HGVs in order to enable more aerodynamic and safer cab designs. These negotiations were successful and formal approval will follow shortly. Officials are continuing to work closely with the European Commission and other member states to ensure that type approval legislation is amended quickly, so that the benefits of these improved designs are on the road as soon as possible.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked what research the Government are doing on this. The Department for Transport is working with the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, Transport for London and other stakeholders on HGV safety, including manufacturers of sensor technologies. As part of this, Transport for London has contracted the Transport Research Laboratory to test a range of products to identify ones that may provide an improvement in safety. Although all vehicles meet minimum safety standards, hauliers can fix additional equipment if this would be beneficial for their specific operations.
I mentioned earlier the role of local authorities. They have the flexibility to introduce 20 miles per hour speed limits in residential areas, which could have a significant effect on cyclist safety. The Secretary of State issued two special authorisations on traffic signing in 2011 to enable all English local authorities to provide Trixi mirrors at road junctions to make cyclists more visible to drivers and “no entry except cycles” signing, which can facilitate overflow cycling.
I am pleased that a number of initiatives have emerged on the role that hauliers have in improving safety. These include the construction-industry-led CLOCS initiative and the Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme, which encourages good practice for road freight operators. They are now both supported by more than 3,000 operators nationally. The CLOCS standard is being used in major transport construction projects in London and across the UK, including Crossrail and Network Rail, and it is intended for HS2. The Department for Transport has also been providing advice to road users through the THINK! campaign, with the most recent launched on 2 March.
Compliance rates with legal requirements for HGVs in use have been nearly constant nationally over the last few years. For the construction and waste sectors, an interagency HGV taskforce has been in operation in London over the last 17 months. It involves the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency and police to carry out highly targeted enforcement to crack down on non-compliant and unsafe HGVs. For the benefit of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, I can say that, in its first year or so, the 16 officers from the DVSA and the police have made about 4,000 highly targeted stops, issued about 2,000 roadworthiness prohibitions and more than 1,000 fixed penalty notices, detected 1,500 drivers’ hours offences and seized nearly 50 vehicles. Furthermore, enforcement officers report better load security on scaffolders’ HGVs.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, mentioned a report, the draft Cycling Delivery Plan, which was heavily discussed and debated in the other House. It was published on 16 October 2014 for informal consultation. It includes action on justice, sentencing and cycle-proofing to ensure that cyclists are considered at the design stage of new and improved road infrastructure, which in turn benefits pedestrians too. Responses are currently being analysed and should be published shortly.
The DfT continues to monitor the number and rate of all road casualties, including cyclists killed or injured in incidents involving HGVs. This evidence base will be used to assess progress in improving road safety.
My noble friend Lord Attlee raised the issue of the HSE and being interviewed under police caution. It has been the rule ever since the HSE was set up that it does not duplicate the work of other enforcement bodies. The police are responsible for road traffic legislation, but the HSE works with the police on cases where unsafe working practices appear to be implicated in a road traffic incident, and employers can be, and have been, prosecuted by the HSE following incidents on the road.
My noble friend Lord Attlee mentioned that some TfL staff, including highways engineers, had been interviewed under caution by the police. I have been advised that this was as part of a corporate manslaughter investigation. In these circumstances, it is appropriate that people are interviewed under caution so that they have all the legal rights and safeguards that that process brings, including having a solicitor present.
I hope that noble Lords can see that this issue is complex and that there is no single solution that will provide the outcome that we are all seeking: to stop these terrible collisions. I trust that this has sought to clarify the actions that the Government have taken and the areas where we will continue to focus our efforts in collaboration with other cycling interests.
Lord Berkeley
Could the Minister possibly write to noble Lords on some of the questions that he has not had time to answer, including, for example, whether there is a specification from the department about the near-side equipment that we have all been debating, and also how many convictions there have been for employers whose vehicles and things have contravened the legislation that we have been discussing?
Lord Popat
As time is a limiting factor I cannot answer all the questions now, but I am happy to write to noble Lords, and I will go through the Hansard report.
This is a very serious issue. There is cross-party agreement that we are very concerned about the incidents happening. Week after week we hear of injuries because of cycling and we want to minimise them. If we can bring them to zero that would obviously be much better. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Attlee raised the very important issue of whether technology can help to reduce the numbers. It is a tragedy when any cyclist dies and my heart goes out to all the families who have had to cope with such terrible circumstances. This Government will not be satisfied until our roads are safe for all users—more especially cyclists. I hope that advancing technologies can help to make this a reality.