House of Lords

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Monday 5 February 2018

14:30

Prayers—read by the Lord Bishop of St Albans.

Recycling: Chinese Import Ban

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Question

14:36

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they are taking to ensure that materials collected for recycling by local authorities are not incinerated as a result of the Chinese ban on taking plastic and other waste materials.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are encouraging industry to access alternative markets and are taking steps to reduce waste and recycle more. Where waste cannot yet be recycled, modern incineration facilities ensure that it can be used to produce energy and to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. These facilities divert waste from landfill and are tightly regulated by the Environment Agency. Our resources and waste strategy will set out further actions to increase recycling and manage waste to incineration.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, we hear fine words from the Government, with lots of promises, reports, press releases from No. 10, and so on. But recently, the UK declined to commit to the EU-wide 65% recycling target by 2035. That target does not seem unreasonable. Why do the Government not put their promises into action?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, we certainly need to consider this target carefully. The approach we want to take in future is to support our ambitions in tackling avoidable waste and supporting a circular economy. However, we need to consider this further because we do not want perverse incentives on heavy waste when actually, we need to consider what the most important waste is that we ought to be reusing and recycling more.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, has the Minister seen the suggestion in the press that we should bury all this at £86—I am not sure per what measure, but think of what it would cost; it is expensive now even to suggest that—and then dig it all up again to recycle it when our facilities are available? Surely the answer is for us to set up companies in this country that can carry out the recycling, which would be to our advantage in business and environmental terms.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, there is certainly value in waste, and we want to ensure that we have reduced dramatically the amount of waste going to landfill—that is why the landfill tax has been so successful. Interestingly, it is important that we do not put paper, for instance, which creates methane, into landfill; it is far better that that goes for incineration, if necessary, so that we can use it for energy.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, the Government’s 25-year environmental plan promised a waste strategy later this year. Will they take advantage of that and bring forward the target of ending plastic waste by 2042 by a decade or so?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, we are extremely ambitious: as your Lordships know, we have some of the strongest arrangements on microbeads, certainly in Europe, if not in the world. We want to go as fast as we can, which is why the resources and waste strategy will be important, and we want to reuse and recycle more.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, what studies have the Government commissioned into the environmental hazards that may occur if we start to burn large amounts of plastic waste, and what percentage of plastic can be recycled according to the Government’s own estimates?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, following considerable investment, there are now about 40 large municipal waste plants. They are highly regulated by the Environment Agency precisely to ensure that we recover energy and, importantly, they also operate within all the emission tests. I do not have the precise figure for what is currently recyclable but I will write to the noble Lord. However, the whole essence of our objective is to cut the amount of plastic in circulation and to reduce the variety of plastic so that we can recycle ever more.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

In his original Answer to my noble friend Lady Jones, the Minister mentioned that the Government were looking for alternative markets to replace the Chinese market as the current receptacle for much waste. Is it not immoral to say that we are just going to look for another place in the world to dump the rubbish that we should be looking after ourselves?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, there obviously need to be alternatives and we are looking at them. Nothing is exported in the way that the noble Lord describes—there are very strong and strict requirements. I agree with him about wanting to recycle more at home but a number of countries—Turkey, Taiwan, Vietnam and India—all have resources and are taking more waste. However, we certainly want to work more on recycling at home.

[Baroness Redfern (Con)]

My Lords, embracing the Chinese ban and implementing further restrictions in the coming years could be an opportunity to overhaul our current system and invest at home. What progress is being made in moving towards a joined-up waste and recycling policy that can respond positively?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, the resources and waste strategy will be very important in that regard, and it is encouraging that industry is picking this up. We have already had announcements from businesses about plastic-free brand products, and it is interesting that we are now recycling 60% of our packaging. Therefore, although we need to seek further increases in recycling rates, we are now going in the right direction.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, is it not time that the people at the top of the supply chain started taking more responsibility for the materials they produce? Manufacturers are always very quick to blame recyclers for allowing a build-up of waste to occur but, rather than just relying on manufacturers to take a voluntary approach, what are the Government doing to hold them to account for the plastic pollution they produce? That is at the heart of the problem. They need to produce alternatives to plastic but they are not doing that in sufficient numbers.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, we certainly need research and co-operation from all to increase recycling rates. Business is beginning to make some important strides. The Co-op, Iceland, Unilever and the packaging industry have committed to implementing solutions to enable the sustainable recycling of all black plastic packaging by the end of this year. We need to collaborate and work with business. We have strong targets and we all have to change many of our attitudes.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, what are we doing to increase and enforce penalties on those who dump household goods and other things in the countryside and, in the process, spoil some of the most beautiful parts of Britain?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend that fly-tipping is a terrible blight, whether in towns or the countryside. That is why we have introduced stronger powers for local authorities and the Environment Agency—for example, to seize and search vehicles involved in suspected crime. We have also introduced the power for local authorities to issue fixed-penalty notices and we have just published the waste crime consultation, which proposes providing local authorities with the option of issuing fixed-penalty notices to those whose waste ends up being fly-tipped.

Data Protection and Privacy

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Question

14:44

Asked by

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking, or plan to take, to ensure that people are aware of their rights and obligations in respect of data protection and privacy.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for the opportunity to highlight the fact that the GDPR takes effect on 25 May this year. To that end, the Government are working closely with the Information Commissioner’s Office to ensure that individuals and organisations are increasingly aware of their rights and obligations before new data protection laws come into effect. In addition to supporting the commissioner’s work to update and publicise the guidance provided through the ICO website, the Government will deliver an awareness-raising marketing campaign targeted at those organisations and sectors most in need of support.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution: a revolution fuelled by data—our data. Does my noble friend agree that much good work has been done but that we need a public debate on a grand scale to enable everyone to understand the potential, and indeed the pitfalls, when it comes to the use of their data?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I completely agree with my noble friend. That is why we are establishing the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, which will advise on the measures we need to enable and support safe, ethical and ground-breaking innovation in artificial intelligence and other data-related technologies. I remind noble Lords of this House’s Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. As for where we are with the centre, the process of appointing a chair for the interim centre is under way and expressions of interest for the role are currently live. More information is available on GOV.UK.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the earlier namecheck. Thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, there will now be a statutory code of practice on age-appropriate website design, which will set standards required of websites on privacy for children. Will the Government make sure that young people and their parents are clearly and effectively told what these standards are at an early date? That is especially important given that the ICO’s draft children and the GDPR guidance has already been overtaken by this major amendment to the Data Protection Bill.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The noble Lord is right to mention the Kidron amendment—I think it is called that now, by universal approval—which the Government are pleased to support. It is early days, to the extent that the Data Protection Bill has not even had its Second Reading in the other place. However, the ICO is aware of what it will be required to do if this amendment remains in place and is working on that. In the meantime, it is concentrating on the GDPR coming into effect on 25 May, and the work that has to be done to get people up to speed before that date.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, following the question of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, does the Minister believe that the best place to start is in schools, with personal data taught as part of a statutory PSHE course?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

It is very important that all young people are aware of both the opportunities and the dangers associated with the internet and data-driven technologies. To that extent, I agree with the noble Lord.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

Further to the previous two questions about young people, does the Minister accept that many children are being given access to mobile devices well before their 13th birthday, which is the point at which most websites and providers are supposed to limit the availability of certain kinds of content? While there is a certain amount that legislation can do about this, it is really an issue of public information, particularly as many of these young people are being enabled by their own parents, who need to understand the dangers. What are the Government doing to further the public education that would help that?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The new general data protection regulation specifies that children are a special case and have to be protected more than adults. I completely agree with the noble Baroness that education is important, and that is education for parents and not just for young people. Across all age groups, a lot of people have things to learn about the dangers of the internet. One thing that the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation will do is show that it is not just Government who are involved in this but the industry, education, regulators and charities. All sectors in society have to come together to make sure that this tremendous opportunity is used safely by everyone.

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

Is my noble friend able to confirm that no government agencies now sell on or disclose to third parties personal data without the explicit agreement of the individual concerned?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I do not believe that that is the case although I cannot give an absolute guarantee because I am not sure of my facts. One thing that the Digital Economy Bill did was to outline what Governments can do with their own data. They can use it within government. The general data protection regulation makes the issue of consent much more explicit. Consent has to be genuine consent.

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister add the National Health Service to the list of organisations that need to be involved? Does he agree that within the National Health Service there is an enormous amount of data that could be of fantastic benefit to medical research? It can be anonymised. It may be, for example, that in cohort studies people have already given their consent to that data being used. I declare my interests, as set out in the register. Will he agree that there can sometimes be a misunderstanding of the extent of data protection, which could act as a real obstacle to the sort of research that we all want to see?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

That is the subject of the amendment to the Data Protection Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell. It gives a good example of the sort of thing that the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation could consider. On the one hand, the National Health Service has an unparalleled amount of medical information that could be used to advantage. On the other hand, if it is monetised and sold on, which has the superficial attraction of providing money for the NHS, it could prevent researchers using that information in the same way that pharmacological organisations do. It could actually prevent health benefits occurring. It is a classic example of an ethical dilemma that the centre will be able to look at.

Asylum Seekers: Legal Advice

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Question

14:52

Asked by

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend to ensure that every failed asylum seeker, and anyone facing removal from the United Kingdom for whatever reason, has access to adequate legal advice.

[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Keen of Elie) (Con)]

My Lords, legal aid is available for individuals faced with deportation where they are claiming asylum or challenging their detention. The Government have commenced the post-implementation review of legal aid, which will include the scope of legal aid for immigration and asylum cases.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that many asylum seekers are unable to access legal advice, for different reasons. Some are penniless and others just do not know the procedures. The result is that many of the decisions made by the Home Office are unsound and reversed on appeal. In 2005, 13,000 appeals were allowed. In 2010, 35,000 were allowed and, in 2015, 17,000 were allowed. Therefore, in 10 years 250,000 appeals were allowed—a quarter of a million wrong decisions by the Home Office. Will the Minister please tell me what he is doing to remedy that situation so that we have a procedure that is fair and equable?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, all persons detained in immigration removal centres now have access to a duty solicitor and therefore have access to legal advice.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, it should be axiomatic that legal assistance is available to people facing removal and the Minister has made it clear that that should be the case. However, surely the underlying problem is the shameful record of the Home Office in this area. We read regularly that people who have been living in this country for decades, often working and having led a successful life here, are now being ordered to depart. Will the Government review the performance of the Home Office and its policies in this very sensitive area?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, the period for which a person has remained illegally in this country should not be and is not a determinant of their right to remain here. It is necessary to apply the relevant law both to the issue of asylum seekers and those who arrive here unlawfully, not even seeking asylum.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords, a Bar Council report published last November found that at any one time more than 3,000 people, mostly failed asylum seekers, are held in administrative detention without being convicted of a crime, at a cost of £34,000 each. More than half are ultimately released into the community when their appeals succeed. Last Friday, in the case of VC, an asylum seeker from Nigeria with mental problems, the Court of Appeal slammed the Home Office for misinterpreting its own policy and awarded damages. Will the Minister review the means and merits test applied by the Legal Aid Agency, which academic research shows operates to exclude detainees from legal aid by,

“seizing upon the tiniest thing”,

to declare their applications ineligible?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, the Legal Aid Agency is of course independent of Government for very proper and good reasons. The application of LASPO—the legal aid Act—is the subject of internal review at present following an announcement by the then Lord Chancellor in October last year.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, research by the Children’s Society shows that unaccompanied and separated children are particularly vulnerable. Only 12 grants for exceptional case funding were made in 2015-16, fewer than 1% of the expected number of cases under the previous system. Hundreds of children are being left without a legal safety net. Can the Minister confirm that the situation of these children will be specifically considered within the review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, current figures show that 103 children were put into detention in immigration-related matters in 2016, of which 42 were under 12. Some of those may have been unaccompanied but, under the policy of the 2014 Act, unaccompanied children should not actually go into immigration removal centres; they should be held pending removal decisions. With regard to exceptional case funding, the figures for the first two quarters of 2017 indicate that the success rate for immigration-related applications was 73%. Some 652 applications were made during that period.

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords, we should remember the United Nations convention, which originally set out the criterion for granting asylum: to people in great need of protection. Does my noble and learned friend agree that it is terribly important for us to restate that, and to make sure that asylum is not used as a vehicle for immigration rather than giving the protection that the most extreme cases require?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, it is clearly in the interests of genuine asylum seekers that the system for seeking asylum as permitted under the UN convention should not be abused and should not be seen to be abused.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, according to an Amnesty report published in 2017, over 2,000 young people seeking refuge in the UK were deported to Afghanistan between 2007 and 2015, the majority of them since the legal aid cuts were introduced. Does the Minister agree with Amnesty that the UK is in breach of its international obligations and law, and if so what steps do the Government intend to take to put this right?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, we do not agree that we are in breach of our international law obligations, nor is it obvious that there is a connection between the figures given by the noble Lord and the availability of legal aid.

Modern Slavery: Indian Supply Chains

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Question

14:59

Asked by

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many British businesses have taken action and reported their efforts to prevent modern slavery in supply chains from India.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, the UK is the first country to require businesses to report on the steps that they have taken to tackle modern slavery. Thousands of businesses have published transparency statements, with many examples of good practice emerging in India across a range of industries, from textiles to landscaping materials. I encourage businesses to stay vigilant and to work with local NGOs to understand the risks in their supply chains.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

I thank the Minister for her Answer. According to the Government’s estimates, between 9,000 and 11,000 businesses with a turnover of more than £36 million a year are required to submit these statements, but the Government have not been willing to set up a central register. Groups of NGOs have set up two websites. According to them, less than 4,000 businesses have so far set up statements. Only 14% of these conform fully with the law. The NGOs further add that there is particular complacency among certain high-risk industries, which might also point to high-risk groups such as the Dalits and Adivasis in India. If the Government are still not willing to set up a central register, what steps will they take to ensure that all businesses comply with the law and provide a statement?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble and right reverend Lord gives a figure of 14%, but two independent NGOs have collated statements and found that between 32% and 50% of eligible companies have produced a statement. Clearly there is further to go. The legislation is relatively new. On compiling a register, we have considered in detail whether the Government could publish a list of businesses covered by the Modern Slavery Act. It is not easy to do so because it is not currently possible to filter the databases of Companies House by turnover size, but the Government are looking at this.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, it is not easy to find out whether the companies that are required to provide the annual report are complying. The companies we are concerned about operate right across the world, not just in India, although India is clearly very important. The Government really do need to take some action to ensure that there is pressure on these companies to comply with the Modern Slavery Act.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, part of the pressure is from the public, because the public are more and more concerned that their clothes are produced ethically—or whatever goods and services. The Home Secretary can apply for a court injunction requiring businesses to comply. If they still refuse, they will be liable to an unlimited fine for contempt of court.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister realise how weak her answers sound? In response to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, she said that it is for NGOs to keep a list; to the noble and learned Baroness she said that the public have to put on pressure. There has to be a little bit more action from the Government. They have this requirement, so they have to get behind it to make sure it happens. We understand, as we heard earlier, that the Government set their face against any statutory regulation in this regard, but will the Minister tell us what action the Government will now take to do their utmost to ensure that these companies register and understand the risk in their supply chain, as has been highlighted by the Corporate Responsibility Coalition, which recognises that many companies just are not looking at this and taking it seriously? The Government have to step up to the plate.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I did not absolve the Government of responsibility by saying that it is up to the NGOs to produce a list. I outlined the difficulties of producing a list, because of filtering by turnover size. The idea of public pressure is a strong one. In addition, I outlined the remedies available to the Home Secretary, which include applying for a court injunction requiring businesses to comply. They are liable to an unlimited fine for contempt of court if they do not.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I believe that the Government have not yet taken the step, which I accept is something of a nuclear option, of applying for an injunction. Is the Minister aware that the National Audit Office, in its report in December on modern slavery, commented on the fact that,

“the Home Office does not produce a list of businesses that are expected to comply with the legislation and cannot say how many companies that should have produced a statement have done so”?

It also says:

“The Home Office has acknowledged that to date the quality of statements has been variable. Statements therefore do not provide equal levels of assurance to those scrutinising them”—


that is, the NGOs and members of the public. Do the Government have any ideas as to how to assist those who would wish to scrutinise them?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, in terms of the Government, all government departments require their suppliers to tell them whether they are compliant with the transparency requirement of the Modern Slavery Act. I accept the noble Baroness’s point that some of the statements vary in terms of the quality and the information that they provide, but I reiterate that the legislation is relatively new and I expect that the whole system will see improvements.

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, because two noble Lords were speaking I did not hear my noble friend’s question.

[Lord Spicer]

My Lords, the person who has done more than anybody else to further this cause is Mr Anthony Steen. Should not something be done to recognise that fact?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, that decision is probably above my pay grade, but I congratulate anybody who is helping to make improvements in this area. It is a major priority of this Government.

Civil Service Impartiality

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Private Notice Question

15:06

Asked by

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to defend civil servants from unwarranted criticism regarding their objectivity and impartiality.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask a Question of which I have given private notice.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, the Ministerial Code says:

“Ministers must uphold the political impartiality of the Civil Service”.


Our Civil Service is envied the world over and, as the Home Secretary said over the weekend, has the complete confidence of the Government. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 enshrines in legislation the core principles and values of the Civil Service, which include impartiality, integrity and objectivity. These values are set out in the Civil Service Code, which states that civil servants,

“must not … knowingly mislead ministers, Parliament or others”.

I do not believe that they do.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for that Answer. Of course, he more than anyone has upheld the Ministerial Code during a very long and distinguished ministerial career. However, in the last few days we have had assertions made, both by Ministers and by Members of Parliament, that officials are deliberately frustrating Brexit or fiddling the figures. Those civil servants cannot defend themselves in public. Does the noble Lord agree that officials must have confidence in being able to provide robust and dispassionate advice without fear of intimidation? Given that No. 10 Downing Street and the Prime Minister have failed to slap down those Ministers and MPs in his own party who have made these disgraceful slurs, is it too much to ask of the Prime Minister that she finally show some leadership?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

So far as Ministers are concerned—I answer for Ministers, not for Back-Bench Members of Parliament—the Minister concerned made a fulsome apology in another place on 2 February. He said:

“I accept that I should have corrected or dismissed the premise of my hon. Friend’s question. I have apologised to Mr Charles Grant, who is an honest and trustworthy man. As I have put on record many times, I have the highest regard for our hard-working civil servants. I am grateful for this opportunity to correct the record and I apologise to the House”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/2/18; col. 1095.]

The noble Lord generously referred to my experience as a Minister. I think I have done 20 years on and off—probably more than anyone else in this House—but with many discontinuities, and I have never had occasion to question the impartiality or objectivity of civil servants. They have spoken truth unto power. They have quite often said things that I did not want to hear, but I would never accuse them of some of the things that have recently been levied against them. I think we should be proud of our Civil Service, and I reject the smears that have been made against it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister will recognise that this is not just a British issue. The current attack by the President and his Administration on the FBI in the United States raises rather similar issues. Can the Minister assure us publicly that, when we say that civil servants are expected to be impartial, they are not expected to be impartial between evidence and supposition, and that when Ministers prefer faith or fantasy to evidence, civil servants have the right to point out that good governance depends on paying attention to the evidence, wherever one can find it?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. I quoted a moment ago the Civil Service Code, which includes objectivity. Objectivity is defined as,

“basing your advice and decisions on rigorous analysis of the evidence”.

It is these standards for which our Civil Service is renowned.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, can I ask my noble friend’s honest opinion? He will be familiar with this document: the Treasury analysis of May 2016 forecasting a complete collapse of the British economy if we were to vote to leave. I have maintained that this document is propaganda from top to bottom, and it turns out to be utterly untrue in reality. My noble friend has praised the objectivity of those who produce government statistics. If I continue to criticise the mandarins and the Ministers who approved the statistics and this document, does that make me a snake-oil salesman or a 1930s German Nazi—or maybe a bit of both?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I think my noble friend should distinguish between criticisms of Ministers and criticisms of civil servants. The document that he has in his hand was publicly presented by the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. Any criticism should be directed at the politicians who presented it. I think it was also endorsed at the time by the noble Lord, Lord Darling. They are the ones who should be criticised, rather than the civil servants.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister says that the Minister concerned has already apologised but has faced no sanction. Does that now mean that a civil servant can break the code and not face any sanction if he apologises later?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

That would be a matter for the Civil Service Code. There are penalties levied against civil servants who break the code. Depending on the severity of the offence, they can lose their job, as has happened in some cases, or they can apologise. In this case, the Minister has apologised. He has explained the circumstances. He had no reason to believe that what was being said at the time was not true. When he discovered it was not true, at the first opportunity he came to the House and apologised. I think that was the correct thing to do.

[Lord O'Donnell (CB)]

My Lords, I had the pleasure of working with the Minister in his many guises and, if ever there was a Minister who lived by the code he has just talked about, it is the noble Lord. Does he believe that those making allegations without supporting evidence against serving civil servants, who will not respond, are undertaking a form of bullying that, to be honest, actually diminishes those making the attacks but, more importantly, damages our democracy?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Well, whether the accusations made in the House of Commons last week constitute bullying, I am not quite so sure. I think they were ill-advised, given that the evidence did not stack up for the accusations that were made. But I agree with what the noble Lord said in his final remarks that the people who come out of it worse are those who make the accusations, rather than those they are levied against.

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

Does my noble friend believe that those MPs and Ministers who impugn the impartiality and good faith of our civil servants are behaving very much as President Trump does in the United States with regard to the FBI?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am not sure I want to open up a fresh front from the Dispatch Box, but I hope President Trump will read what my noble friend has just said.

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, is it not the case that every sane business carries out an investment appraisal before it embarks on an investment, that every sensible person will always produce a business plan before starting a business, that responsible and sensible Governments must engage in cost-benefit analyses and policy analyses and that, if we gave up those habits, it would be deeply damaging to the future of the country? That is the logic that some of these people are trying to drive us to: that we should not have any experts, we should not have any studies and we should not have any analysis at all.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I have not seen the documents that are the object of this exchange, but I understand that they were looking at a number of post-Brexit scenarios from an economic point of view. I also understand that the Prime Minister subsequently said that they were looking at off-the-shelf options, and she has made it clear that she is not looking at off-the-shelf options.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, nearly every political generation experiences a reprise of this question. In the early post-war Treasury, Hugh Dalton was given some unpalatable advice and denounced his officials as “congenital snag-hunters”, but surely that is what we pay them for. Does the Minister agree that it would be pointless to hire ciphers for the beauty of their political opinions because that would be the road to a politicised Civil Service which would be ruinous for this country?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I agree. It is the job of civil servants to bring to Ministers’ attention the consequences of their policies and to argue forcefully against them if they believe they are misguided but, once the decision has been taken, to go out and deliver them as best they can. My experience with civil servants is that that is exactly what they do, and I agree with the noble Lord.

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that disparaging remarks were made in a debate 10 days ago in this House by a Member of the Opposition Front Bench who impugned the integrity of the civil servants in our Library because she did not agree with the brief that they produced? I went straight to the Library, apologised on behalf of the House and said that no one would agree with her.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I hope my noble friend will understand if I pass on that one, not having been privy to the accusations that were made or the evidence, but I am sure my noble friend did what he felt was right in defending the Library.

Role of Women in Public Life

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

15:17

Moved by

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

That this House takes note of the role of women in public life and the progress made in increasing their representation in Parliament 100 years after the Representation of the People Act 1918 received Royal Assent.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, 100 years ago this House, our Parliament and every other Chamber across the UK looked very different. Every woman in the country was unable to vote, stand for election or sit in your Lordships’ House. The year 1918 was a turning point and, 100 years on, women and men gather to celebrate and commemorate. It also marked the end of a horrific and unimaginable war that changed our country for ever—and from the tragedies of that war came an acknowledgement that our country needed to change.

The Representation of the People Act received Royal Assent on 6 February, exactly 100 years ago tomorrow. The Act gave the vote to women over 30 with property for the first time and extended the vote to all men over 21. It was a massive step in the right direction, but the fight for women’s participation goes back decades before 1918 to petitions, lobbying and debates throughout the 19th century and includes the first petition to Parliament in 1832, the first mass petition in 1866 and countless failed Bills in the following 50 years. The determined lobbying, and the persistent production of thousands upon thousands of pamphlets alongside those petitions, are most associated in later years with the suffragists—the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies—led by Millicent Fawcett.

The suffragettes—a pejorative name given to the more militant campaign—were centred on the Women’s Social and Political Union and the Pankhurst family. Tired of the lack of progress, this group changed its mode of campaigning to include protest, vandalism and even arson. The suffragettes were also joined by prominent figures such as Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who upset her neighbours in Hampton Court Palace, where she lived in a grace and favour apartment, by selling suffragette newspapers at the palace gates.

This fact demonstrates the nature of the campaign for women’s suffrage: it crossed social boundaries, cultural boundaries and international boundaries. It brought together women from all walks of life in a common purpose, all determined to be heard and all intent on making their case. Women wanted to be truly represented in the laws and customs of our country; women demanded to take part in writing the laws and customs of the UK. The voice of women deserved to be heard. The suffragettes and the suffragists may have used different tactics but they all saw them as a means to achieve the same end.

In 1910 Princess Sophia joined Emmeline Pankhurst and other women and attempted to meet the Prime Minister in Parliament. Many of them were forcibly removed. This was just one of numerous incidents when women entered Parliament only to be ejected by violent means. Many were gradually banned from the estate after they continued their acts of vandalism or chained themselves to railings and statues. You can see their work on damaged statues all around the Palace. Their story and their relationship with this building are told by the stained glass window that nods to the Cat and Mouse Act. This Act released hunger-striking women from prison until they regained their health, only to then promptly return them to their cells.

Being of a peaceful and non-law breaking nature, had I been alive 100 years ago I would like to think I would have been a suffragist. I would like to tell the story of the procession organised by the suffragists in the summer of 1913. They organised marches throughout Britain which culminated in a great rally in Hyde Park on 26 July. Volunteers led multiple routes to the rally. Over about six weeks, meetings were held along these routes, bringing together women from all walks of life. By the time the marches ended in Hyde Park, the group of women was 50,000 strong.

There are very few occasions even now when you see women collect in numbers of that scale. That the suffragists collected in such great numbers, with such pride and despite the risks, is testament to the strength in their souls and the knowledge in their hearts that they were right. The will and the determination of those women, and the men who supported them, meant that not only could some women vote in 1918 but that they could also stand as parliamentary candidates.

But it would be another 40 years until women were welcome in your Lordships’ House. The year 2018 also marks another key milestone: 60 years since the Life Peerages Act, which allowed women and men to enter the House of Lords for the duration of their life. The Act marked a fundamental shift in the entire make-up of the House of Lords. It meant that Parliament could acknowledge and benefit from the vast pool of expertise of both women and men to work alongside hereditary Peers. In total, 294 female life Peers have been created. At the current time there are 203 female life Peers in your Lordships’ House, which means that 69%—or over two-thirds—of all the female life Peers created are still here. I find that an amazing statistic. But women still represent only 26% of the total. I hope that noble Lords will agree with me that there is still a way to go.

The women in your Lordships’ House today also reflect a broader change over the past 60 years. They are drawn not just from political careers but from professional roles, from business, and from science and the arts, bringing a huge range of talent from across the full spectrum of society. This would have been unthinkable 100 years ago: not only that women would be recognised for their merit but that they have had the opportunity to demonstrate their merit with careers.

Women have made history in all sectors. In your Lordships’ House, the first two Lord Speakers were women. I am particularly amused by the comment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who said that,

“it gives me some quiet satisfaction that, should a man break through the glass ceiling to succeed me, he will be known as the first male Lord Speaker”.

I hope that the current Lord Speaker appreciates his role in history. The point remains that any man who goes first is always the first person. I sincerely hope we are on our way to a world where a woman can be remarkable for achieving a feat rather than for doing so despite the implied handicap of her gender.

I shall mention some other brilliant women firsts who followed Baroness Wootton as the first female life Peer. Baroness Swanborough became the first woman to take her seat in your Lordships’ House in 1958, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester took her seat as the first female Lord spiritual in 2015 and Baroness Young became the first female Leader of this House. Outside the Chamber, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, became the first woman to be appointed Attorney-General in 2007, the noble Baroness, Lady Hogg, was the first woman to be chief executive of a FTSE 100 company and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, became the youngest woman to join this Chamber at the time when she took her seat, having already succeeded in the male-dominated technology sector.

The brilliant women of your Lordships’ House have succeeded in every corner of society: in law, football and cricket, as business owners, scientists, activists and performers. It is not the mere presence of women such as them that rights the wrongs of past inequalities but the role that they play in giving voice to their communities. They are providing scrutiny of the laws of our country and acting to drive change by contributing a diversity of opinion and experience. We have always been comfortable with the diversity of political opinion that a partisan system brings, but only in this past century have we seen what diverse debate really means.

I am honoured to work alongside some extraordinary women and to work with excellent men who all value the experience and knowledge that we bring. We must also remember and celebrate the many men who have supported the cause of gender equality, and indeed those who continue to advocate for women, for diversity and for equality. The Acts that have given women access to democracy and to Parliament were passed by men. Gender equality is not a zero-sum game. I will make the same comment as last year; I would like to see a greater number of noble Lords of the male variety contributing to debates such as these—and I thank those who have stepped up on this occasion.

I pay tribute to all the extraordinary women and brilliant men who have moved us this far, and to those who continue to strive for equality. There has been 100 years of progress. Let there be 100 years more.

15:28

[Baroness Gale (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, for securing this important debate. I know she worked hard to get it on the agenda today.

Over the last 100 years, women’s lives have seen great improvements. There are more women in political and public life than ever before, although they are still a minority in Parliament. Since 1918, 489 women have been elected to the House of Commons but that compares with 4,801 men. That is quite a minority, so it is not a great figure. Of those 489 women only 45 went on to become Cabinet Ministers, but there have been two woman Prime Ministers in the last 100 years.

The new institutions seem to work better for women. Devolution in 1999 meant that there were many more women in political life, as we have seen in the National Assembly for Wales, the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly. I give the example of Wales, where more women were elected in one day, 24 on 1 May 1999, than the total number of female Welsh MPs—19—in the last 100 years.

New ideas were tried to ensure that women were elected, as Labour did in Wales by using twinning or pairing of constituencies to ensure that we fielded an equal number of women and men candidates. By 2003, 30 women and 30 men were elected to the Welsh Assembly. That made it the first democratically elected institution in the world to have an equal number of men and women members. If we can do it in Wales, we can do it anywhere.

New institutions serve women better; a different agenda is pursued because they are much more diverse than the Houses of Parliament. One thing I know: where there is a level playing field, women will come forward. There is no shortage of women wanting to stand for public office and give service. All women want is a chance to serve.

Women have made progress in other walks of life since 1918, not just in political and public life. In the past, many jobs had a married women’s bar which meant that women had to give up work when they got married. In 1946, this bar was abolished in the Home Office, but it took the Foreign Office until 1973. This bar operated in many walks of life, and it must seem strange to women today that it could possibly happen. Thankfully, our laws now prevent it.

There are many ways in which the lives of women have been improved. The advent of oral contraceptives—the pill—allowed women to control their own fertility for the first time. The Abortion Act 1967 meant women were able to seek safe, legal abortions and did away with the backstreet illegal abortionists, where, as we know, many women lost their lives.

The founding of the National Health Service in 1948 meant that women—certainly working-class women—could now get free healthcare. In the past, a woman went without in order that her children could be treated; or, she just could not afford the cost as money was needed for other things, so she went without. Despite some criticisms of the way the National Health Service works, it is still the best thing we have, but it needs to be well taken care of and should get the resources it needs; otherwise, we are in danger of losing such a precious asset.

The lives of women have been improved by the Government setting up new institutions such as the Equal Opportunities Commission, established by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, established in 2006. The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, and we remember the Dagenham women who started off the debate by campaigning for equal pay in their workplace.

Unfortunately, there is still a gender pay gap, about which much has been heard in recent weeks. The Women’s National Commission was set up in 1969 and continued for 40 years until, unfortunately, the coalition Government of 2010 decided it was time to close it down. I served as the commissioner for Wales for more than five years, and I can vouch for the great work it did for women as a whole in the United Kingdom, as can my noble friends Lady Crawley and Lady Prosser, who both served with great distinction as chair of the WNC and will speak later in our debate.

The closure of the WNC was a great loss to women’s organisations. No doubt the Minister will say that it was taken in-house—into the Government Equalities Office—but that does not do the work or have the engagement of the WNC. That was definitely a minus for women.

Although women’s lives have improved, there is still much more to be done. Women need to be able to live their lives without fear. Violence against women is still with us. On average, two women a week are killed by their partners or former partners. Women are victims of domestic violence, stalking and coercive and controlling behaviour. The conviction rate for rape is still low compared to other crimes. Sexual abuse and harassment is rife in the workplace and in schools. Women in all walks of life are still underpaid in comparison to men. Many women in public and political life are abused and harassed, especially on social media.

However, despite all this, we all recognise that life is much better for women in many ways. Women’s charities such as Women’s Aid, the Fawcett Society and End Violence against Women, and organisations like the Women’s Institute, Girlguiding and many more, have done great work and continue to support women and girls in many and different ways, although some of these organisations have had their funding cut and are facing resulting difficulties.

Research has shown that austerity has hit women much more than men. Analysis has found that 86% of the savings to the Treasury through tax and benefit changes since 2010 have come from women, and that the previous Budget did nothing to change this. Women continue to bear the burden so much more than men. Many organisations that support women have had their funding cut, meaning that they cannot provide the services they have in the past.

How can we now improve the lives of women for the future? There are certainly a number of ways to ensure that more women come into political and public life. A starting point would be the Women and Equalities Committee’s 2017 report and recommendations. One suggested enacting Section 106 of the Equality Act 2010—that all political parties publish their parliamentary candidates’ diversity data for general elections. Another recommendation was to extend the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002, allowing all-women shortlists to be extended beyond the current provision of 2030, and to extend its use to police and crime commissioner elections and mayoral elections. Unfortunately, the Government rejected all the recommendations; I do hope there will be a rethink.

Very few women hold positions of power in all walks of life. Achieving equality for women is still something we are still waiting for and getting impatient about. The more we strive for equality, the more we will provide role models for girls to aspire to. This is achievable but needs government action and working with civil society, such as the Fawcett Society. Tomorrow, the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, the society will launch a campaign, #OurTimeNow, which plans to break down the barriers to gender equality throughout 2018 and beyond. Let us work together towards that aim so that future generations of women will have a life with no barriers to overcome, and life will be better for all.

15:38

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Vere and Lady Gale, this afternoon.

For me, the story of women’s growing role in politics and other aspects of public life is a story of numbers, because what we do not measure, we cannot manage. So my first number is, of course, 100. It is 100 years since women over 30, with certain property qualifications, got the right to vote. But it would be another 10 years before women got equal voting rights with men, then set at 21, and a further 30 years before non-hereditary women were eligible to enter your Lordships’ House with the Life Peerages Act 1958, when the first four female life Peers took their seats, as the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, has already said. Today, women still comprise only 26% of this place—a poor comparison to the Commons, where we have reached the dizzy heights of 32%.

This improvement in representation was made possible, at least in part, by the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002, which for the first time enabled all-women shortlists to become a reality. This was conceived and introduced by the Labour Party, which does so much better than other parties, with 45% of women in the Commons, as opposed to Liberal Democrats on 33% and Conservatives on 32%. Others, like my own party, have struggled with the concept of all-women shortlists, but the figures clearly speak for themselves. The notion that it must be the quality of the individual candidate which determines selection has dogged us, and I would that it were not so. The guilt engendered in so many women at the thought that they might be advantaged over men and, Lord forbid, be a token woman, causes them to hold back. If I thought that deliberately choosing a quotient of women would result in any deterioration of quality of representation, I might agree. But when you look at some of the men who represent us, who have no doubts about their entitlement to rule—well, I rest my case. Noble Lords in this House this afternoon are of course exempted—not wishing to get lynched.

Anyway, moving on—my next figure is 1979, which, of course, was the date when we got our first female Prime Minister. Personally, I would feel more inclined to celebrate this milestone if she had encouraged other women to come forward, to use some of the talented women that she had at her disposal. But, sadly, she got to the top and pulled the ladder up behind her, which is a great shame, because the whole point of having representation from all parts of society is to make for better government. We know for a fact that companies with diverse boards thrive and prosper more than boards comprising all men, of the same ethnicity and the same class, from the same school and even belonging to the same club. It is obvious that you get better decisions when you take more views into account, but when you look at one of our ruling political groups today, you see that pattern. I am not saying that men would deliberately discriminate against women, different ethnic groups, disabled people, people from different backgrounds, and so on. They just do not think about us. Out of sight, out of mind. That is why we need to be there, around the table, where the real decisions are made—and role models for us are few and far between.

So my next number is 90%. That represents the percentage of statues in London depicting men. That is clearly unfair to all the female talent that we have to inspire us, and I have my own suggestion for who the next candidate for a plinth should be. I am sure many of us have been approached by Bee Rowlatt, chair of the Mary on the Green campaign, to erect a statue on the green outside Parliament of Mary Wollstonecraft, who fought for women’s suffrage a full century before Millicent Fawcett commended her as the “leader in the battle”. If there is one thing the Minister could agree to today, it could be to take back to her colleagues the request and suggestion that Mary Wollstonecraft be acknowledged in a statue for her trail-blazing work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. I hope that she will give us as favourable an indication as she can in her remarks later.

Women are important in all aspects of public life. We comprise 28% of judges, but only 9% of Supreme Court judges. We are 33% of councillors, but only 17% of council leaders. There is a deficit—a talent deficit—and, in these challenging times, I would respectfully suggest we need all the talent that we can get. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, what we do not measure we cannot manage. The EHRC is calling for Section 106 of the Equality Act 2010 to be enacted. That section requires political parties to publish candidate diversity data. Bringing the facts into the cold light of day has a wonderful effect on behaviour. The gender pay gap reporting rules come into force this year. As I speak, large companies are scurrying around looking at their gender pay gaps and trying to put in place systems to ensure that they do not get shown up in the same way again. The shaming effect of having one’s less-than-commendable statistics published for all to see would give political parties the incentive they need to revise and reform the way they choose their candidates.

My final number is 276. A postcard with that number printed on it arrived on my desk last year, and it took me a while to work out what it meant. It is my number; my place in the history of women elected to the British Parliament. In 2005, when I was elected, only 275 women had preceded me. Today, progress has speeded up but even so it will, apparently, take another nine elections before we achieve parity with the men. I want to see parity in my lifetime, but if I die before it happens I will jolly well come back and haunt these corridors until we have fair and equal representation of all the talents in this potentially great country of ours.

15:46

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, we celebrate the centenary of the Representation of the People Act tomorrow. I take this opportunity to reflect briefly on one element of how it all came about. Much of the focus over the coming year will be on the suffragettes, the suffragists, the Pankhursts, the Fawcetts and other brave women who courageously campaigned in this cause. However, I should like to spare a moment to think about one group of people who may not get the attention they deserve: the men who introduced the legislation and made it happen, and one man in particular. Although there was a growing groundswell of support for women’s suffrage before the First World War, the contentious issue of the parliamentary campaign was not whether women should be able to vote, but how many. All the political parties were anxious about extending the franchise because of how it would affect them.

Willoughby Dickinson was a Liberal MP—later a Labour Member of this House—who dedicated his entire parliamentary career to winning women the vote. According to the Vote 100 historian in Parliament, he was the only MP with a perfect voting record on women’s suffrage. He introduced the first Bill of the 1906 Parliament and reintroduced it every year until the outbreak of war. He called for equal pay for women in 1903, secured financial support for the masses of women who were left widowed by the war and protected the rights of women who were married to foreign citizens imprisoned during the war. He was a crucial member of the Speaker’s Conference, chaired in 1916-17 by the grandfather of the noble Viscount, Lord Ullswater, the recommendations of which finally led to the Act which we celebrate tomorrow.

Through his years of parliamentary campaigning, Dickinson had the franchise knowledge, the cross-party contacts and the experience of suffrage debates to produce a solution to the deadlock. He emerged as the conference’s deal breaker, winning a majority of one vote by suggesting that age be used as the discriminatory barrier. Millicent Fawcett’s NUWSS wrote to him, saying:

“We all know that a very large part of the great triumph of this week was due to your personal efforts … we always felt that you were our true champion in the House of Commons”.


He wrote in his diary:

“The House of Commons passed the third reading of the Representation of the People Act without one protest. The greatest measure of reform since 1832 ... It is ten and a half years since I first introduced my Women’s Suffrage Bill and now at last I see something done. I feel as if I had not lived in vain”.


For him, this campaign was not merely matter of justice; he was also motivated by the fact that his sister, an eminent doctor who worked behind the lines in Serbia during the war, could not vote while he could. How proud he must have been to see his daughter, my grandmother, take her seat in 1937 as the 33rd ever woman MP, and how proud I am of them both today. I hope they would be pleased that I have taken on their fight, which today we still need to win.

Therefore, although we can celebrate the fact that 489 women MPs have been elected since they were able to stand in 1918, compared, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, said, to the 4,503 men over that same period, there is still much to be done. Today, one-third of MPs are women—better, but by no means good enough. Noble Lords will be aware that, thanks to all-women shortlists, the Labour Party has already reached 45% and is committed to a target of 50%.

When we went into the election in May last year with 70 Conservative women MPs—up from 17 in 2005, when Theresa May and I founded Women2Win—and with 30 candidates in good target seats, I felt pretty confident. The polls showed us winning most, if not all of those and, looking ahead to the election beyond that, we were confident that a substantial number of old, white men would pack it in and women candidates would be in a good position to get selected for many of those retirement seats—job done. I, too, could retire. But it was not to be. Not a single one of those target seats was won by a woman, and the additional challenge we were not expecting is the 30 ex-MPs who may be looking to return to Parliament at the next election. In addition to not winning those target seats, many Conservative women candidates received disproportionately vicious abuse, online and in the constituencies. Resilient they may be, but the whole experience had been far from joyous for many and, as the results became clear, I could hardly bear to crawl out from under the duvet.

But here we are, and having picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves down, we are ready to support the next generation of talented women. I am today delighted to welcome Women2Win’s new co-chair, Mark Harper, former Chief Whip in another place. For us in the Conservative Party our pipeline remains challenging, so if any of your Lordships know someone you think would make a good MP, please encourage her to step up and start the journey. If she is a Conservative, please send her our way. The #AskHerToStand campaign needs to be supported by all who care about diversity of experience in Parliament.

I welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment to deal with the issue of abuse, and I understand that she will spell out her plans in greater detail tomorrow. No one standing for public office should be treated with anything but respect. It is an honourable thing to aspire to represent one’s community, and women in particular should be encouraged rather than bullied. We should never allow our public discourse to become toxified, and we should stand for decency and tolerance. I urge the Labour Party to sign a similar behavioural pledge to the one we are committed to. We also need to be aware of the barriers that women who want to work in Parliament still face, including working between multiple locations, balancing caring responsibilities with long and demanding working hours, and ensuring their financial stability while pursuing election.

Even today people sometimes ask me, “Why does it matter if there are more women in Parliament?”. Conservatives are, sadly, at 21%, Labour is at 45% and Parliament at 32%. It matters because women are different. Their life experiences are not the same as men’s. They are neither superior, nor inferior, but different, and that difference has to be better reflected here in Parliament.

15:53

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to be part of this debate, in which across the Benches of the House we recall an historic event and remember some of the brave and foresighted women who made change happen.

Opposition to women’s suffrage came, of course, from all quarters. The Labour and trade union movement did not much like the idea because these women were upper class, posh, and most likely to side with the Tories if they came into the House. Equally, the concept of feminism was neither universally popular nor widely understood. Rebecca West is quoted as saying:

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what Feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat”.


We have been there. Then there were those women who felt the whole argument had nothing much to do with them: women with no money, too many children and no independence. It is no wonder that people said at the time that the coming of electricity was a greater liberator than the suffrage.

However, the point of increased representation or participation in either Parliament or public life generally was about more than the numbers; it was to bring about change and to bring a different perspective to the debate, with different experiences being brought to the table. That was the high intention but change was a long time coming.

In the 1940s, women in the Transport and General Workers’ Union held a conference. The general secretary of the day, one Arthur Deakin, was asked why so few women were employed by the union to work as organisers. He replied that every woman had the same opportunity as every man to apply and to be brought forward for interview. Over 40 years later, when I was appointed to work as the national women’s secretary, the union had about 2 million members. There were 400 paid organisers, of whom four, including me, were women. So much for the equal chance. That was an in-your-face example of wishful thinking going nowhere.

When Bill Morris—my noble friend Lord Morris of Handsworth—became deputy general-secretary, he and I introduced a series of positive actions designed to get more women involved in the work of the union and instituted programmes which were important to women, such as the Full-Time Rights for Part-Time Workers campaign. Every region had to employ a women’s organiser and run women-only education and training programmes. These programmes were intended to get women on to the union ladder. After initial separation, they would then join the mixed programmes. “Separate to integrate”, we said.

That brings me to the situation today. As far as I can tell, all and any pieces of legislation or policy designed to improve the position of women in society have been introduced by various Labour Governments. My noble friend Lady Gale has already mentioned some areas of legislation, such as the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act, and the Social Chapter was also brought in. It was a wonderful basket of initiatives designed to enable women to participate more fully in the world of work.

I cannot find any such initiatives which have been introduced by a Conservative Government, and therein lies the rub, because just like the situation I have described from all those years ago in the T&G, women’s lives will not improve as compared to those of men unless positive action is taken. In fact, the coalition Government of 2010 actually did away with programmes which were going very well at the time. The Women and Work Sector Pathways Initiative was a programme designed to improve women’s employment skills and was vigorously supported by employers, both financially and practically. It trained or retrained more than 25,000 women, enabling them to move up the ladder or move into work, but it was done away with in a swipe.

That initiative came out of the Women and Work Commission report, presented to the then Prime Minister in February 2004. All 40 of its recommendations were accepted by government and a general programme proceeded, including, for example, looking with employers at ways in which better-quality part-time work could be provided, training programmes, as I have mentioned, and initiatives in schools to get more girls into STEM subjects. I get slightly fed up with discussions on the gender pay gap when there is a pretty clear and well-trodden area of debate as to how to help eliminate it.

I cannot conclude my remarks without quickly mentioning all-women shortlists, which have already been referred to. These were another recognition that there comes a time when softly, softly is simply not enough to bring about the change that is required. However, we will not be defeated. Let us remember the words of Charlotte Whitton, who was the first woman mayor of Ottawa. She said:

“Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good”.


Then she said:

“Luckily, this is not difficult”.

15:59

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in this important debate and declare an interest as a woman who, like other noble Baronesses speaking here today, has had a long journey to reach this Chamber. Many of us, as we stand on the summit of life’s mountain looking down at the valley of experience, think, “Who would have thought?”.

In 1966 I started my journey as a lowly clerk in the chief accountant’s office of Barclays Bank, a place dominated by men in grey suits and bowler hats. At that time it was my ambition to become the first black woman bank manager in the country. Sadly, it did not take me long to realise that there is a difference between ambition and fantasy. I did, however, cause uproar when I dared to go to work wearing a trouser suit instead of the obligatory skirt. Many of my female colleagues soon copied me, much to the consternation of our male counterparts.

In 1981, at the height of my career as a regular presenter on BBC children’s programmes, getting pregnant was considered a serious error of judgment. In those days it was almost certain that it would be the end of your career, as you were expected to disappear gracefully, with babe in arms, to a life of wifely domestic servitude. Pregnant women were certainly not to be seen below the waist on television when their pregnancy started to become evident. Fortunately for me I had a visionary producer, Cynthia Felgate, who at one time was in the Guinness book of records for producing the most television programmes in the world. She allowed me to continue working and presenting until I was eight months pregnant. This was unheard of and made national and international news. I was seen by millions of viewers fully pregnant, and once I even stopped mid-dance to declare, “I can feel the baby kicking”—the children watching loved that moment. Other female presenters were grateful for this pivotal moment, because they, too, could become pregnant and carry on working onscreen throughout their pregnancy.

It was around 1968, living through the civil rights movement and the race riots here in Britain, when I started to become conscious that more women’s voices were needed in politics. So I organised political meetings and events for fellow Caribbeans in London who felt excluded from society—something that the legendary Claudia Jones had earlier fought against by establishing the West Indian Gazette and the creation of what we all know now as the Notting Hill Carnival. Because of these influences, over the years I began to speak out more and more: I wrote letters to political leaders and campaigned on issues such as seat belts on school buses, diversity in publishing and in the media, and, for 20 years, for a Minister for Children—until we finally got one. It is such a shame that that position has now been downgraded from a full ministerial post. I hope that the Government will reconsider this change and correct this short-sighted mistake.

There have been many women who have been motivational to others and acted as mentors. One in particular for me was the late inspirational and visionary Marchioness of Lothian—Tony Lothian as she was affectionately known. She influenced thousands of women’s lives. She was a journalist, a writer, a benevolent force for good and the founder of the Women of the Year lunch. She was awarded an OBE for services to women, which she treasured and considered her greatest achievement. She believed in bringing women together from all over the world, from all creeds and classes, and from all social, religious and financial backgrounds. She fought for liberty, peace, fairness and equality.

She set up the Women of the Year lunch to highlight the efforts of women who were changing the world and making a difference and to recognise the contribution that they were making to public and political life. But in 1955, when she decided to celebrate professional women’s achievements with a lunch that would raise funds for the blind, she was told condescendingly that she would be lucky to find 50 women to attend. She found 500 and the lunch has continued to this day, with thousands of women from all walks of life being acknowledged.

Many occupations and professions that were closed to women simply because of their gender are now annually celebrated. Among the guests are pilots, train drivers, engineers and of course Prime Ministers—a position women could only dream about back in 1955, when women were not even elevated to the peerage here in this Chamber. Women leave the lunch feeling that they want to inspire others and to press the reset button for change.

But it is sad to think that, 63 years on, an event such as the Women of the Year lunch is still necessary because that resistant glass ceiling still exists, especially for women of colour who, as they progress up the ladder of society, are often asked, “What are you doing here?”—or they get “the look”. Women of colour know that look. It is the look that says it all. A few years ago, when I put myself forward for a board position, I was told, “Who do you think you are, rising above your station?”

Do not get me wrong: things have slowly changed over the last 100 years and we are gradually reaching a state of equality nirvana. It is great to see so many women now being propelled into high-level positions in public and political life, at local level and here in Parliament. That includes women of colour, too—but not enough.

One of the many challenges that women sometimes have to contend with when they reach new heights is that they are so often judged differently from men and have to work harder to prove themselves. Opportunity is what we all need to make progress, to be all-embracing and not to be tribal, defensive and protective. I always get excited when I see real progress, so I was thrilled that recently two of our public service broadcasters appointed female chief executives. I hope that they are paid equally to their male counterparts.

Many women have banged on the doors of inequality and continually tried to break down barriers. We have been told to shut up or we would never work again, to back off and know our place—but that has never deterred us from fighting for equality and fairness. My mother was a housewife and did not have the chance to have a career in public life, but had she lived in today’s world she would have made it right to the top. She was a determined and remarkable woman. So we must never underestimate the value of women of her generation, who nurtured, guided and influenced their girl children to reach for the sky, and made huge sacrifices in doing so.

We can all personally do our bit to inspire, motivate and pave the way for future generations by encouraging young girls and women to experience environments such as Parliament by inviting them here to visit this Chamber to see for themselves the differences being made by women in public and political life. We need to write books about our personal experiences—or at least keep diaries so that future generations can measure progress.

One of the most extraordinary women of our times is Her Majesty the Queen, a woman dedicated to duty who is a record breaker on several fronts. No other monarch, male or female, has achieved or will ever achieve what she has—at least not in the next 100 years. I am an optimist, so I look forward to the day when matters such as the struggle for equality and lack of diversity are looked on with a degree of bemused nostalgia, and when the contribution of women in Parliament, business and public life in general is regarded as entirely normal. That day is fast approaching and, as I reach the age of 69, I am so pleased, proud and privileged to have lived and worked through an era when huge changes have taken place in women’s rights. I hope that I survive long enough to see the day when sexism, misogyny, gender inequality, sexual harassment and violence against women are consigned to the dustbin of history where they truly belong.

16:07

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to contribute a few historical reflections to a debate that so clearly invites them, as my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington demonstrated so movingly, along with my noble friend Lady Vere, who introduced this debate so powerfully.

My starting point is that posterity is sometimes inclined to give undue credit for great advances in political and public affairs to those who campaigned for them in dramatic and memorable ways. The suffragettes live on vividly in the public mind, immortalised in literature and in film. The bravery and courage they showed in the face of harsh treatment by the authorities will always command widespread admiration. But their militant campaign in the years before the First World War did not mark the vital turning point. One of the objectives of all that is going to be done this year to celebrate the centenary of a great parliamentary reform, and the subsequent if incomplete progress that it made possible, should be to ensure that this achievement is seen in a clearer historical perspective.

What happened 100 years ago represented above all victory for the law-abiding suffragists, led by Millicent Fawcett, a woman who retained the respect of Gladstone and his Liberal Party after parting from them over Irish home rule and becoming a prominent Liberal Unionist in alliance with the Tory party. She and her supporters, some 50,000 strong and thus far outnumbering the suffragettes, waited a long time for their triumph. It was in 1897 that their effective advocacy of their cause first secured a Commons majority for the principle of women’s suffrage. Legislation did not pass because successive Governments failed to give it priority. Winston Churchill and others opposed it tooth and nail, and opinions differed as to the property and residence requirements which women should meet in order to vote, as my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington mentioned.

When the suffragettes came on the scene, support for women’s suffrage in the Commons slipped. It is hard to argue that law-breaking assisted the cause. Millicent Fawcett never wavered in her opposition to violent methods. It is surely right that her memory should be honoured this year by a statue, the first of a woman to be erected in Parliament Square. I hope that it will stimulate greater interest in her remarkable career, which spanned a period of more than 60 years and encompassed many other causes besides women’s suffrage.

The Conservative Party was prominently associated with the 1918 Act. Its leading politicians dominated Lloyd George’s coalition Government, who were responsible for the legislation. In marking its centenary, Tories today will be deeply conscious that this is also the 90th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act 1928, a more far-reaching measure which gave the vote to all women. It was made possible by the resolve of Stanley Baldwin, the first person to use the phrase “one nation”, which has been incorrectly ascribed to Disraeli. Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1927-28 overcame the strong opposition of his Chancellor, Winston Churchill, who never really reconciled himself to the emergence of women in public life. In 1930 Baldwin, as a leading champion of the right of women to vote, unveiled the well-known statue of Mrs Pankhurst, who had been the Tory candidate for Whitechapel at the time of her death two years earlier.

For far too long, women MPs remained few in number. Some leading Tories were not content with that state of affairs. They included Sir George Younger, the great-great-grandfather of my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie. As chairman of the Conservative Party in 1921, he explained that:

“I have tried my very best to get certain constituencies to accept a lady candidate”,


adding that one constituency chairman,

“wrote back saying I had given him the shock of his life”.

It is important to remember that by this point many women were already involved in public life as members of locally elected bodies. Women had been given the right to vote for and to serve on many of them in 1869. They proved especially successful in winning election to school boards and Poor Law boards. After 1907, all local authorities were open to them.

Furthermore, the Tory party itself had provided significant roles for women since the 1880s. About 1 million of them worked with great commitment in the Primrose League, the largest voluntary mass movement Britain had yet seen, often taking charge of a branch, of which there were some 2,300 in all. After 1918 the party swiftly created an elaborate organisation of its own throughout the country. It provided many opportunities for women. I got to know well one of the first women constituency agents as she approached her 100th birthday, which was duly celebrated here in the Lords with Margaret Thatcher. She would have made a fine MP, but found fulfilment in another political sphere.

Tory women in Parliament during those early years regarded themselves as part of a wider movement within and beyond the party. Nancy Astor became a national celebrity with her exuberant feminist views. “I married beneath me”, she declared, “All women do”. Katharine Atholl was admired for her diligence as a junior Education Minister, later exhibiting great independence of spirit as a supporter of the republican cause in Spain. Mavis Tate worked with women in other parties on campaigns for equal rights. They and others were all resourceful pioneers.

Baldwin once said that Conservatives must be capable of,

“continuous adaptation to the ever-changing facts of social life”.

But as Conservatives have adapted over the years they have held firmly to the principle on which Margaret Thatcher, the greatest of all Conservative women, insisted: merit should determine the positions women occupy in public life, just as it should for men.

16:16

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to join this already spirited and good-humoured debate—how could it be otherwise, when we have so much in common and so much to celebrate? I will take a rather oblique look at the occasion. I will do so by virtue of the suffragette colours: violet, white and green. I see that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is in her person acknowledging those colours, which at one point were supposed to stand for, “Give women votes”, but apparently that is apocryphal. These three colours are still worn in girls’ schools around the country on the occasion of their founders’ days. My daughter went to Camden, which was founded by Ms Beale, one of the great suffragists. The suffragists set the tone for a policy that would have to intensify with the suffragettes.

There are still women marching in the streets of this city wearing the suffragette colours. They are proud to do so. They use the suffragist methods. They are, of course, the WASPI women—the Women Against State Pension Inequality. The occasion of their protest was a good one, because the whole idea was that equality of pension age was overdue in fairness to men, which is something, of course, that they acknowledge. But the decision was a wrong one. It was implemented incorrectly. Steve Webb, the Minister of State at the time, told us so. He said that,

“we had to make a difficult decision”,

and that, two months later, they realised that,

“the implications of what we were doing … were very different from what we thought … so that’s a decision that we got wrong”.

That wrong decision affects 3.8 million women. Their failing was to be born in the early 1950s.

WASPI’s campaigning reflects much of the suffragist movement. It has more than 140 local branches across the UK. It has a grant from the Rowntree Reform Trust to further political campaigning. It has the support of UNISON. It delivers petitions. Last October, 100 MPs petitioned on its behalf, many of them, of course, women. It has had petitions signed around the country. Some 193,000 people signed the last one. It has had five debates in Parliament. It has had the intervention of the ombudsman to speed up the Government’s response to its requests. The most recent Motion on this, moved by the SNP in November last year, passed in the Commons by 288 votes to zero. The DUP voted for the WASPI women, and five Tory rebels voted for them too. This is not yesterday’s event, nor 100 years ago; it is a living campaign that has adopted and respects the methods of the suffragettes. In the most recent debate, introduced by Ian Blackwood, it was said that these women are guilty of nothing; they simply had the misfortune of being born female in the 1950s. This House knows that being born female is no answer to anything. The WASPI women are today’s heirs of the suffragettes.

16:20

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this most timely debate in what I hope will be a historic, transformational year in addressing the barriers to women entering public life. I take great strength from the number of dedicated and inspirational noble Baronesses who are speaking today from all sides of the House. I also thank the noble Lords who have stood up to be counted, for we need your help; we will not win through alone but by getting men to understand that parity of female representation will create a better society for us all. Before I go further, I must declare my interests as honorary vice-president of the Conservative Women’s Organisation, co-chair of the APPG on Women, Peace and Security and a member of other organisations specialising in women’s issues, as set out in the register.

We have already heard many statistics about women in Parliament but some are worth repeating. A total of 489 women have been elected to the Commons since 1918. At the general election last year, 208 women MPs were elected: 32% of all MPs and a record high. Prior to 1987 women had never made up more than 5% of MPs. Women were not allowed into the House of Lords until 40 years after 1918, and as of last July we make up only 26% of its Members. There can be no doubt that progress has been made in the last 100 years, and not just in Parliament—look across our judiciary, clergy, Armed Forces, police and many other areas—but it is not enough. While 32% of MPs might be our all-time high, this ranks us only 39th in the world for women’s representation in Parliament: the Nordic countries and Rwanda lead the pack. Last year’s general election broke the 200 barrier for the first time, but the Fawcett Society highlights that this represents only a 2% increase on the last election. If the UK improves by only this much at each election, we will not see equal representation in the other place until 2062—almost another 50 years.

I am proud of and commend the hard work of Women2Win, the Conservative Women’s Association and the #AskHerToStand campaign within my own party, seeking reform, encouraging and supporting women candidates to put themselves forward, helping them along the bumpy road of politics. Each political party needs to take responsibility to review, reform and enact changes, but we must make sure that the system and the process as a whole are much more welcoming. Women still shoulder the burden for most of the caring responsibilities in the home, and thus the demands of political and business life can impose an enormous strain on relationships. Research published in 2013 found that 45% of female MPs did not have children, compared with 28% of male MPs: there is clearly a motherhood gap in Parliament that needs to be considered as part of the gender gap.

Today, I believe it is the terrible abuse that women are exposed to, both campaigning and online, that is making them turn away. Just look at some of the responses my noble friend Baroness Jenkin got for speaking out the other day. Just look at the findings of the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s report on intimidation in public life, which found that women, especially Conservative and BAME women, received the greatest amount of abuse. Even in the 21st century, women seem intrinsically less confident than men and therefore need much more support and encouragement. We need to keep looking at how our culture and education systems continue to reinforce this lack of confidence down the generations.

There is not enough public recognition that women’s lives often have a different shape to men’s. Many take time out in the childrearing years, but this is sometimes misinterpreted as lack of dedication in the very male workplace. When they have children at home, many do not wish to work the long hours demanded by City firms, which make their employees sign out of the EU working directive. Thus they do not get promoted, or choose to leave the industry. Some women choose to return to the workplace when their children are older but often it is hard for them to get employed in a job that matches their ability.

We know that having women involved in the policy conversation and in decision-making positions makes a difference, as many issues impact differently on women, who are, after all, about 50% of the population. I know from my experience of international women’s issues in developing, conflict and post-conflict countries how important it is to have women around the peace table and to have gender-focused humanitarian relief, such as women and children safe spaces in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. In the business world, female entrepreneurs and businesswomen support growth and stability through diversity. One need look only at the work of the 30% Club on getting women into boardrooms here in the UK or how female-led microfinance and SMEs form the backbone of individuals’, families’ and communities’ paths out of poverty across the globe.

I welcome this debate. It is an excellent forum to discuss and exchange ideas, as there is still much further to go. I ask my noble friend the Minister: what action do the Government plan to take this year to further the cause? We talk smugly about how the UK is leading on gender equality across the world, yet we have never nominated a woman to serve on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Doing this would demonstrate that the UK is serious about gender and wishes to highlight the work of this important body. Through support to UN Women, the UK could work with it to help evaluate the effectiveness of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. It is, after all, the second biggest annual meeting at the UN, yet we hear nothing about it. Surely this is a missed opportunity. As the Fawcett Society has asked, when will Section 106 of the Equality Act, requiring political parties to collect and report monitoring data, commence?

At a time when trust in public figures is low, surely it is a no-brainer that removing barriers to enable more women to enter Parliament and participate in public life will benefit our country and, critically, help us achieve goal 5 of the UN sustainable development goals. After all, we should never forget Mrs Thatcher’s famous words:

“If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman”.

16:27

[Baroness Corston (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate, to commemorate the fact that 100 years ago tomorrow certain women in the United Kingdom were enabled to vote: women over 30 who either owned property or were married to men who owned property—so no woman on either side of my family would have been able to vote; they had to wait another 10 years. Indeed, seeing my noble friend Lady Gale at the Dispatch Box today reminded me that, in 1978, she and I were at a reception in 10 Downing Street where we commemorated the 50th anniversary of universal female suffrage. As my late right honourable friend Tony Benn used to say, when you reach the age of 50 you realise that a century is not a very long time.

As the 168th woman elected to the House of Commons, in 1992, I am conscious of the fact that in those days there were more men called John in the House of Commons than women MPs. In the very first vote of that Parliament, we voted for the Speaker and I voted for my noble friend Lady Boothroyd. In the Division Lobby, I saw the noble Baroness, Lady Jowell. She and I were friends. We saw each other and I said, “Tessa!”, and she said, “Jean!”, and we gave each other a hug. We were overlooked by two gentlemen whom the Conservatives used to refer to as knights of the shires—they used to call them the Sir Bufton Tuftons—and one nudged the other and said, “Look at this: the place is filling up with women!”. I also want to say how fortunate I was to have Barbara Wootton as a friend—the first woman to sit on that Woolsack and the first woman life Peer. She was absolutely a model for us all.

I want to spend most of my speech on a woman whom I knew when I was the women’s organiser for the Labour Party in the south-west region, based in Bristol, from 1976. She was coy about her age, but she was in her 80s and she was one of the last surviving suffragettes. Her name was Jessie Stephen. She was a Scot, the eldest of 11 children. Her father was a tailor. She left school at 14 and went into domestic service. She realised in no time that it was drudgery from dawn to dusk and it was isolating. She had a half-day off every week. She said to me, “During my afternoons off, I would go around Glasgow putting incendiary devices into post boxes”. She was a suffragette. Although I note what the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, said from the Government Front Bench, the suffragettes needed the suffragists and the suffragists needed the suffragettes, and I do not make a distinction.

At the age of 17, Jessie founded the Scottish Domestic Workers’ Union and was its general secretary well into the 1920s. She saw in me, she said, a reawakening on some of the things on which she had fought in her life, issues which she thought had become dormant in the 1950s and 1960s—the issues that we were concerned about then included access to jobs, abortion, rape, childcare—and it pleased her no end. She used to reminisce with me on the fight for women’s suffrage. She talked about the Cat and Mouse Acts and about helping to organise suffragette meetings. I loved to hear, more than once, about how she helped to carry a big wicker laundry basket into meetings during the time of the Cat and Mouse Acts. The police on the door would say “What’s in that basket?”, and the organisers would carry it as if it contained what they said it contained—bunting—but it actually contained Mrs Pankhurst. They would take her to the back of the hall and find a room. When the meeting opened, Mrs Pankhurst would appear and the police would try to rush the platform, but there was a phalanx of women like Jessie on the front of the platform whom they had to negotiate while Mrs Pankhurst was spirited away out the back.

Jessie joined the Labour Party and stood for the council in Bermondsey in 1919, as shown in the Daily Express of 30 October of that year which recorded how many serving women were delighted to find that one of them was standing for election. She became celebrated on the lecture circuit of the United States and Canada, and when she had to dash back for an election the Liverpool Echo recorded that she had come back from a lecture tour. She was a woman whom people knew. When she was in Portsmouth, she stood as a Labour candidate and reduced the Conservative majority from 18,000 to 5,000. Although there were other speakers on the platform, when she finished speaking most of the audience would leave with her for her next meeting. She became the first woman president of the Bristol Trades Council in 100 years, which was no mean feat in a city characterised by industrial workers and dockers.

Jessie also turned her hand to journalism. The title of one her articles particularly amused me. It is: “After the Wedding: Why Should Wives not Continue to Work?”. It was written in 1920. The 4 October 1919 edition of John Bull put her down as one of the world’s most powerful women.

Jessie was a parliamentary candidate three times—of course, she stood in seats that were not usually winnable. I understand that because, when I was a women’s organiser in 1979, I persuaded some women to stand for election in the south-west of England. None of them could have won, but one of my male colleagues in another region—who is now departed from us—said, “Who’s that woman in Bristol persuading women to stand for Parliament”, as if it was an offence when nobody complained about him conducting shortlists that were all men.

This was the wellspring of reminiscence and experience in that little house in Bedminster, Bristol, which so impressed me, and I am pleased to say that Bristol City Council has recognised Jessie’s worth and there is a plaque on the wall of her house in Chessel Street, Bedminster, recording when she lived there. She wrote her autobiography and bequeathed her papers to me, as she thought of me as a kind of daughter, but because of a misunderstanding her sister burnt them the day after the funeral. Noble Lords can imagine the distress I felt about that. But I discovered that her trade union had a copy of her autobiography and some of her papers, photographs and press cuttings, and I have deposited them in the Bristol reference library.

In June 1979, the National Conference of Labour Women was in Felixstowe, and I was told that Jessie was ill and had gone to hospital. She died on 4 June, and it is recorded that her last words were, “You’ll have to change my tablets; I am going to a women’s conference”. The point of all this is that we stand on the shoulders of women like Jessie: women who nobody has ever heard of but who mean so much to us. I wanted to record here and now that, without people such as Jessie Stephen, we would have waited even longer for some of the privileges that we rely on today.

16:35

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, women’s involvement in public life and particularly in government did not begin 100 years ago. Women had some limited franchise prior to the great leap forward achieved by the Act of 1918. Women were allowed to stand for election to the newly created school boards in 1870, to district and parish councils in 1893 and finally to county councils in 1907.

This gradual progress of enabling women to take on responsible roles was, as can be seen, in areas where women were deemed to have some practical knowledge. Women could contribute to social reform—and they did. That perspective came to define women’s involvement in government at all levels for a hundred years. The generally accepted view, though, was that women did not have the experience or, indeed, even the brain power for the big issues of government: taxation, defence, foreign affairs. I think it is questionable as to how far society has rid itself of that prejudice.

Women in the Liberal Party had long been advocates of women’s suffrage. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Women’s Liberal Federation was formally committed to equal pay, to equality in divorce laws and in access to all areas of employment, and of course to women’s right to vote on an equal basis to men. Sadly, some of the most senior men holding power in the Liberal Party opposed women’s suffrage. The male tribal preserve was to be protected.

Some senior Liberals did, however, publicly advocate votes for women. Notable among them was Sir John Simon, who was at the time Liberal MP for my home area of the Spen Valley in Yorkshire. Eventually, the pressure from the many mainly women’s groups for the vote, combined with the catastrophe that was the First World War, broke down the barriers, and the coalition Government under the Liberal Lloyd George in 1918 passed the Act giving, as we have heard, only some women over 30 the vote.

I now turn to the achievements of Liberal women in the last century in local government and some in central government—first, local government, where things can really be changed. The renowned Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had a trio of firsts in public life, as the first woman to sit on a school board, the first woman to be qualified as a doctor and the first woman to become a mayor of a local council—a true trail-blazer for women.

Another woman I want to draw the attention of your Lordships’ House to is somebody who is not really well known, Gertrude Elsie Taylor. She was elected to Batley Borough Council in 1927. Many of your Lordships will not know Batley, but it is a male preserve. It is a woollen mill town—actually, a heavy woollen mill town—and not the sort of place where a woman would easily succeed in public life, but Gertrude Taylor did. She became the mayor of Batley in 1932.

These women across the country laid the foundations for all of us who have been elected to local councils, and the Liberal women who were elected to Parliament in those early years are equally to be recognised. Margaret Wintringham, who in 1924 became only the second woman MP, was elected to Louth in Lincolnshire despite advocating many feminist causes. Margaret Ashton fought every election as a Liberal from 1918 to 1935 as well as by-elections in 1937 and 1944, in an era when standing as a Liberal and standing as a woman were not particularly to be acknowledged. She gets a special mention for flying the Liberal flag in an era when that was not easy to do so.

Despite this early success and 100 years of the acceptance in principle that women could and should be able to vote and hold high office, there is much that needs to change. Men still dominate both government and local government. Women are often still rarely elected to leadership roles of councils or, indeed, as metro mayors. For instance, the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and I were the first women to be leaders of our respective Yorkshire councils. The sad fact is that the same cultural fault-line runs through our society as 100 years ago, be it in business or government, wherever major decisions are being taken.

Despite the best endeavours of many people and the clear progress that has been made, women are still not involved on an equal basis with men when it comes to significant decision-making. Women need to be fully engaged in the discussions prior to the formal decision-making. In my experience, that is often not the case. Until there is equal representation from all parts of society at the early stage of decision-making, in business, in government or in any other part of public life, then inequality will persist.

So let us celebrate the tremendous achievement of those campaigning women over 100 years ago. Laurels we must grant in abundance to the many women who campaigned for the right to vote, but we women today should remember that laurels are not there to be rested on.

16:42

[Baroness Morris of Bolton (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Government for giving time to this historic debate and to my noble friend Lady Vere for opening it so eloquently. If my mother had still been alive, she would have been 102 years old today. She was born in 1916 into a world where women were not allowed to vote, and born to a mother who, although she was poor and worked in a cotton mill, was highly political. It would be 1928 before my grandmother and all other women over the age of 21 had the vote, but she celebrated, as do we, the vote given to some 6 million eligible women after many years of struggle and sacrifice. We should not forget that the Representation of the People Act 1918 also widened the franchise for men, and it had in it proposals for proportional representation. As the Manchester Guardian headline on 7 February 1918 read: “Reform Bill Passed: Women’s Vote Won … Alternative Vote Definitely Rejected”.

My grandmother may not have got the vote in 1918 but that did not stop her keen interest in politics. Over the years, due to deaths and remarriage, she ended up the mother and stepmother to 14 children. By any measure she lived in poverty but she and her family had a wealth of love and generosity, and no matter how many mouths my granny had to feed there was always something left for someone else in the street who might not be well or had lost a loved one. People came to her for advice and help with their children and even with the birth of their children. She was simply a one-woman welfare state—and she was a staunch Tory.

I mention this to highlight the countless women over the years who, had their circumstances been different, would have made a significant contribution to public and national life, and I join the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, in paying tribute to them. That is why those of us who have been lucky to play our part have a responsibility to do all we can to motivate and support women to take the opportunities afforded to them.

I doubt there is one woman in your Lordships’ House today who would be here without the championship of other women. As the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, said, we stand on shoulders. I know that I would not be here without my noble friend Lady Seccombe—like many women in the Conservative Party, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to her—although I might not have had the benefit of her support without Barbara Porter. Barbara was chairman of the Bolton West Conservative Association, and she sent me off on a cold and foggy November weekend—with great reluctance on my part, it has to be said—to a training session for women in West Bromwich, which turned out to be the catalyst for all that followed. I owe her heartfelt thanks for pushing me out of my comfort zone.

It was that weekend that subsequently led me to stand for Parliament in Oldham in the 1992 general election, and to meet someone else who encouraged me to persevere. I have never subscribed to the view that unless you share the same politics, you cannot share friendship. So it was that I met and came to like my opponent in that election, Bryan Davies, now the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham. He was so kind to me at the count, where I inevitably lost. In his speech, he thanked me for a good campaign and said that he hoped that I would get to Parliament, just not in Oldham. If only all politics was like that.

The advances made by women over the past 100 years would never have happened without the help of enlightened men, as we heard from my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington. I am sure her great-grandfather would have been very proud of everything she does today. I know that my work as vice-chairman for candidates would have been that much harder without the wise counsel of my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who was dedicated to getting more women into Parliament. After all, we had no shortage of young men beating a path to our door looking to fill in that awkward gap between leaving university and becoming Prime Minister. I am delighted that my honourable friend Kemi Badenoch now has the role of vice-chairman for candidates. I know she will do it brilliantly and I wish her well.

History will rightly praise David Cameron for the way he changed the face of the Conservative Party, but if it had not been for the drive and determination of my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith, with his resolve that the party must look and sound more like the country it wished to represent, and attract more women and ethnic-minority candidates, all the exciting progress my party has made would have been that much harder to achieve. The progress we have made from 2005 to today is in large part down to the wonderful Women2Win, which I had the pleasure of co-chairing for a short time. It was formed after the 2005 election when, although we had far more talented women on our candidates list, many of whom are now in the Commons or your Lordships’ House, serving as Ministers and members of the Cabinet—some of them are sitting not far away from me now—we had not made the electoral breakthrough that we needed to make a significant difference.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, who is not in her place, that she is plain wrong when it comes to the Prime Minister’s support of women. The founders of Women2Win—my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington—both knew that it would not be easy, but they threw everything into searching for new talent and then training and nurturing that talent, and our party and Parliament are much the richer for their efforts.

Of course, it started before 2005 for the Prime Minister, who in her previous position as the first woman chairman of the Conservative Party pioneered a number of radical initiatives to shake up the selection process for candidates. That included the first-ever open primary, in Warrington South in November 2003, which resulted in a woman candidate for the Conservatives. She never shied away from facing down complacency and prejudice, and I am therefore not at all surprised that the Prime Minister will use this historic centenary, when we celebrate the bravery of those who fought so hard for the extension of women’s rights, to highlight the pressure and abuse facing women—and many men—today as they exercise their freedom to express their political views, which some would seek to deny them.

In 2002, I was interviewed by Simon Mayo on Radio 5 Live about how the Conservative Party was going to attract more women. I was asked the inevitable question about all-women shortlists, and I was just about to give my stock Conservative answer when I decided to say something different: “Whatever your views on all-women shortlists, you cannot deny the impact they made”—and, they did. The numbers could no longer be ignored and it meant that the rest of us, in our own way, had to step up our game. We have come a long way since 2005, but in the words of the trailer on Channel 4 for its all-girls special of “The Secret Life of 5 Year Olds” to mark 100 years of women’s suffrage: “A lot has changed, but we are not there yet”.

16:51

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, who has always worked hard to promote women in her party, and it is a delight to take part in this unique debate. I am much encouraged by the many activities and events that Parliament and the Government have so far planned for this exciting anniversary year.

I can remember talking to my grandmother, Sarah Ryan, about how proud she was of her first chance, in 1918, to vote and how she got quite irritated with my grandfather, who thought she might not know how to, and tried to come in with her to show her. The Representation of the People Act 1918, it could be argued, was the most significant piece of legislation for women in the history of our country, as it opened the door to our democratic participation. After so many years of reasoned debate and persuasion falling on deaf male ears, the civil disobedience and imprisonment of the suffragettes and then the war years when the banners were swapped for spanners in the arms factories of the First World War, in 1918 women started—I realise it was only a start—pushing open the door towards full parliamentary participation.

The Representation of the People Act, of course, as my noble friend Lady Corston said, was only for women who had access to or owned property, and only for women over the age of 30. How patronising. But it was thrilling anyway for millions of women such as my grandmother. So, along with the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918, which gave women the right to stand for election to the House of Commons for the first time, the long lists of firsts began. Countess Markievicz of Sinn Fein was the first woman to be elected to Parliament—but refused, in that Sinn Fein tradition, to take her seat. Nancy Astor was the first woman to take her seat, as the result of her husband’s by-election in Plymouth Sutton in 1919. Plymouth is a city I love and grew up in, and I can remember my mother saying how she had met Nancy Astor, and how she had been “quite a character”. In 1921 Margaret Wintringham became the first Liberal woman MP, and the first Labour women MPs were elected in the 1923 general election—Margaret Bondfield, Dorothy Jewson and Susan Lawrence.

The first time women and men had equal voting rights came in 1928, with the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act. We are the beneficiaries of the Life Peerages Act 1958, referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, in her spirited introduction. It saw the creation of peerages for women for the first time. By the end of 1958 there were 884 male Peers and four women Peers. We have come a long way—but not far enough.

As we know, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman Prime Minister in 1979, nearly 40 years ago. Baroness Young became the first female Leader of the House of Lords in 1981—a popular practice now on both sides of the House. Betty Boothroyd was our first woman Speaker of the House of Commons in 1992. The noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, is very much an active Member of your Lordships’ House and was on her feet yet again last week, making a powerful intervention on the EU (Withdrawal) Bill. Of course, another very important first for us was my noble friend Lady Hayman becoming the first woman Lord Speaker in 2006.

To tack back a bit, by 1945 the total number of female MPs elected since 1918 had increased to 77. Here in the Lords in 1963 there was legislation to enable the first woman hereditary Peer to take her seat—and so Baroness Strange, who I had the pleasure of knowing, and who was a great campaigner for widows’ pension rights, became the first to take her seat. Of course, the noble Countess, Lady Mar, remains a very active Peer today. No female hereditary Peer in her own right has ever been admitted to the House through the hereditary by-elections—another reason to see the back of them.

In graph 1, available to us in the House of Lords Library’s excellent briefing for this debate, we see that the pivotal year for a significant increase in women’s numbers in Parliament was 1997, when Labour won the general election and increased hugely the number of women elected—the result of all-women shortlists, as noble Lords have said, and other promotional activities within the Labour Party to see more women in Parliament. That is a very good reason to keep all-women shortlists going beyond their sell-by date of 2030, as called for by my noble friend Lady Gale in her excellent introduction.

The 1997 election saw 13 Conservative women elected, 101 Labour women elected and three Lib Dem women elected. That was the year when the force of scale really mattered for the first time in women’s influence in the Commons—although, of course, there had been many very important individual women’s contributions up to that point. I remember very clearly and worked with the redoubtable Baroness Barbara Castle, for instance. At the moment, I am writing a piece about a terrific Birmingham MP of the 1970s called Doris Fisher. So, yes, in all parties there were many significant individuals, but I believe that 1997 marked a turning point in the influence and political heft as far as women were concerned—and so began another round of firsts. Margaret Beckett was the first woman Foreign Secretary in 2006. The first female Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, was appointed in 2007, and the first female Attorney-General, my noble and learned friend Lady Scotland—and here in your Lordships’ House in 2015 the first female Bishop, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester. Of course, we look forward to welcoming our first female Black Rod, Sarah Clarke, very shortly.

So we have come a long way, here in the mother of Parliaments, but we must not forget the many hundreds of women councillors, referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and MEPs, who represent people so well locally and internationally—although, unfortunately, our MEPs will soon be gone. Although we have come a long way, the place of women in the modern body politic is a complex one. We share the general lack of trust and disillusion meted out to most politicians, but we are picked out for particularly vicious abuse and vitriol on social media and elsewhere. At its most extreme, we witnessed the terrible death of Jo Cox MP. We have seen women MPs standing up for other women, in the recent #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns, and that must continue.

The legislation that women MPs have worked on down the decades on equal pay, access to justice and maternity leave, and against violence against women, has without doubt helped improve women and girls’ lives in this country—but the pace of change and of cultural change has often been glacial. But that, as we know, is no reason to give up. In education we must continue to be vigilant to guard against any cultural or religious restrictions placed on girls’ lives. On pay, we have only to look at the current fight to close the pay gap at the BBC to realise that there is so much more to do. My own bugbear is the effect of Brexit on women’s rights—and so the fight goes on. There is much to celebrate in this anniversary year, but much to make us all even more determined than ever not to give up the fight. As Barbara Castle would say, “Keep the faith”.

17:00

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, this debate has been a pleasure and it has been entertaining. One cannot often say that about debates in your Lordships’ House. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, who outlined the progress that has been made, but also said that progress has been glacial. I do not want to bring the mood down too far but would like to outline some of the problems that society still has in this regard.

I am sure all your Lordships know that society is still extremely unequal as regards women’s place in it. Therefore, we still have a long way to go. I wish to make some suggestions about how we can speed up that process. A lot of noble Lords have quoted people. I should like to quote Theresa May, who said:

“There are women who gave up their lives to have the right to vote in this country and people who yearn, across the world, to have this freedom and so we should use it”.


That is absolutely true. We are incredibly lucky that we have got as far as we have here. However, if we really valued the vote, we would make sure that elections were fair and not stitched up by an archaic voting system. We need a system of proportional representation for both Houses of Parliament. In bodies where that is used, more women are elected. As the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, said, in the National Assembly for Wales, just over two-fifths—42%—of Members are women. In the Scottish Parliament, just over one-third—35%—of Members are women. In the Northern Ireland Assembly, 30% of Members are women. Following the 2014 European Parliament elections, women account for 41% of UK MEPs. An elected second Chamber using a system of fair votes would transform this House, where only a quarter of the Peers are women. We keep talking of the figure of 489 women who have been elected to the other place so far, but we should remember that they would still not fill all the available seats. We are still hugely unrepresented. The Green Party parliamentarians are 100% women, but there are only two of us.

Whatever your take on the results of the European Union referendum, where every single vote counted, wherever it was cast, it showed that if you give people a say and give them a vote that means something. They can be very political indeed, as citizens who feel that they can be genuine agents for change or not. Here in the UK, we no longer have agents of the state arresting women and torturing them by force-feeding. However, we have undercover police invading the lives of innocent women and using them in a systematic attempt to get information about campaigners. Those women were lied to and there were even children born of those liaisons. The “spy cops” case is once again in the High Court. At 9 am today, I stood outside the High Court protesting about the case in which the Met is blocking every move it possibly can to hide the identities of the police officers involved. The Met still refuses to see the illegality of its position and its actions.

We also have example after example of online trolls hounding and abusing women—and it seems mostly to happen to women. Anonymous rape and death threats are not pleasant and must be taken very seriously. In America, the #MeToo campaign has highlighted the systematic abuse of women by powerful men, including their President, condemned by his own boastful words.

Here in the UK, we had the Presidents Club fiasco last month, showing that the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns are vital for us here as well. Over the weekend, there were reports of the Freemasons here in Parliament: journalists, parliamentarians and staff—a male bastion of privilege and cosy, women-excluding creepiness that I cannot imagine. Freemasonry records show New Welcome Lodge, set up for MPs, Peers and parliamentary staff, and Gallery Lodge, for the political press corps. Both remain active, according to the Guardian. Apparently, New Welcome Lodge has about 30 to 40 members, of whom only around four are understood to be MPs, while none is a Peer. Well done, gentlemen.

The WASPI women are another classic case of inequality and injustice that we ought to be discussing more.

In 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst said that the vote would create equality for women. We know now that that is not the case, but it opened up the possibility of equality, if women choose to make their self-interest a priority on issues such as pay and childcare. It says a lot about the society that we live in that it still has to be mostly women who speak out on those issues.

When we talk about women’s equality, there is always the Thatcher and May question: is it not great to see women in positions of power? Strong women have emerged in recent years and they have had to struggle against the odds in their parties, though not in the Green Party, obviously. Having Arlene Foster as leader of the DUP, however, does not make it a force for liberal politics and feminism. It is not a bad thing to have different types of people, but I would like young women to be inspired by different role models, such as, for example, Caroline Lucas—who would be a much better Prime Minister than Theresa May—Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, or Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru. There are 10 male Peers speaking in this debate and I congratulate them on standing up today. I shall listen carefully to what they have to say. It is obvious that we women cannot do it all on our own; it is incredibly important that we have the support of men.

I close with a last word from the Local Government Association, whose Be a Councillor campaign,

“works with councils, political parties, individuals and talent-spotters to encourage more people to stand as local councillors. It is important that local government reflects the communities it represents”—

I cannot emphasise that enough—

“and the Be A Councillor campaign includes a focus on encouraging woman and under-represented groups to engage with and enter politics”.

However far we have come, we still have a long way to go. Things such as this debate will enable us to see a more equal society.

17:08

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I decided to speak in this debate because it is important for some males to contribute. I have one or two things to say and, as has been referred to, the second woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was returned for Louth, in a by-election in 1921, following the death of her husband, Tom.

The first of my two points is to draw attention to the somewhat anomalous wording of the Motion. The Representation of the People Act was enacted in 1918. Women have been able to stand for election to the House of Commons since 1918. However, they have not been able to stand for election by virtue of that Act. The qualifying age for election to public office is dealt with in separate legislation from that governing the franchise, and the Representation of the People Act left unchanged the ineligibility of women to stand for election to the House of Commons. It was eight months after the Act received Royal Assent that the House of Commons approved, by 274 votes to 25, the Motion:

“That, in the opinion of this House, it is desirable that a Bill be passed forthwith making women eligible as Members of Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/10/1918; col. 785.]


The Bill to give effect to this wish had one clause and received Royal Assent the following month, on 21 November. As there was no reference to age in the measure, the minimum qualifying age was deemed the same as that for men: 21. The omission appears not to have been an oversight, as the implication was acknowledged when the Act was going through the Commons. There was no real opposition to letting women stand at the age of 21. The reason the franchise was restricted to women aged 30 and over was to ensure that women remained in a minority in the electorate in the immediate post-war period. That reasoning, of course, was irrelevant to the qualifying age for election to the House of Commons.

Thus, we should be acknowledging in the Motion the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918. That was the measure that enabled women to enter the House of Commons. As we know—it has already been touched on—it did not exactly open the floodgates to women being elected as MPs. This brings me to my second point. There may not have been quantity in numbers but there was quality. Some of the women elected to Parliament in the inter-war years made a significant contribution to the nation’s politics. The House of Commons may not have seemed a conducive environment for the few women MPs elected in this period. Some, though, did take to it, and with effect. Nancy Astor was obviously high-profile and capable of giving as good as she got. However, she did not achieve as much as some other women MPs.

Three years ago, I gave the Speaker’s Lecture on Eleanor Rathbone, the independent MP for the Combined English Universities from 1929 until her untimely death in 1946. She was the first woman to be elected as an independent and remains the only woman to have served as an independent MP throughout her parliamentary career. She knew how to use Parliament to get what she wanted, and she enjoyed it. When the House got a little unruly, she confessed to Mary Stocks that she,

“rather liked the House when it is in this rollicking mood, though I suppose it would shock a serious critic of Parliament”.

She knew how to use procedure and how to pursue Ministers, not just in the Chamber but in the Corridor. As Harold Nicolson recalled, she would stalk through the corridors, weighed down with her papers, to waylay Ministers, who in time became to view her approaching figure with some trepidation. As Susan Pedersen wrote of her:

“She was, simply, implacable; and, since she was well-placed, impossible to shut up, and immune from party discipline, officials and ministers had no alternative but to deal with her. But when they did so, they often found, to their surprise, that she was neither fanatical nor impractical, but flexible, imaginative and terrifyingly good on the details”.


Her achievements were remarkable. She is credited with getting family allowances introduced—the Family Allowances Act was enacted shortly before she died—but she did much else beside. She was amazingly prescient in recognising the dangers posed by Nazi Germany. Six weeks after Hitler became German Chancellor, she was on her feet in the House, warning of the dangers. She fought hard for refugees: with three other MPs, she set up a Parliamentary Committee on Refugees. She fought to improve the condition of women in India. She became a champion for the creation of what became the State of Israel. She demonstrated real stamina in pursuing her goals—all the more remarkable for the fact that she was first elected to the House of Commons at the age of 57. According to one of her biographers, she was the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century. As I said in my lecture, one can identify a “look at me” politician, driven by ego, and an “I want to get things done” politician, driven by values. The two types are not mutually exclusive, but Eleanor Rathbone was a pristine example of the latter.

Rathbone was thus distinctive, though she was not unique in being a female MP who made a mark in the inter-war years. She worked with the Conservative MP, the Duchess of Atholl, to evacuate some 4,000 children from Spain during the civil war. The duchess resigned her seat in 1938 to fight a by-election in opposition to the Government’s policy on appeasement. On the Labour side, there were politicians such as “Red” Ellen Wilkinson and, of course, Margaret Bondfield, who was the first woman to serve in the Cabinet.

They all deserve credit for demonstrating that women could do just as good a job as men in the House of Commons, if not better. Rathbone has been described as an early Margaret Thatcher. It would probably be more accurate to describe Margaret Thatcher as a latter-day Eleanor Rathbone. They were very different in many ways, although both were products of Somerville College, Oxford, and both demonstrated what women could achieve in the House of Commons.

As has been emphasised, the return of women MPs has been slow—indeed, for decades glacial—but one should not lose sight of what the few who were returned in those early years contributed to public life and in a not necessarily congenial institutional setting. This is a great opportunity to draw attention to all that they did.

17:15

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, for her very kind remarks about our election contest. When I expressed the hope that we would meet in the Chamber in due course, I had assumed that it would be at the other end. Never once, when we met in discussion over the political position of the nation, did I conceive that either she or I would be present in this Chamber.

I too want to concentrate my remarks mainly on one woman. When I first entered the Commons in 1974, there were three women in the Cabinet: Barbara Castle, Judith Hart—the Minister for Overseas Development—and Shirley Williams. Although it might be going a little far to say that they were household names, certainly for anyone with the remotest interest in politics those women made a big impact. Many of my male colleagues rejoice in that but we recognise that we have an awfully long way to go to produce anything like fairness towards women. Undoubtedly the big step forward was having all-women shortlists in the 1997 election. I have met enough men who have objected to those shortlists; nevertheless, their efficacy is undoubted. If we are to make significant progress towards anything like equality of representation of the sexes in the House of Commons, other parties also have to think along those progressive lines.

This debate commemorates the achievement of the vote for women in 1918 and we all salute the contributors to that cause. Some names are very well known. Those of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia drop off the tongues of anyone remotely interested in such history, but I want to concentrate on someone who I think deserves similar recognition but gets infinitely less. Her name is Annie Kenney. She was brought up in Oldham, the town which I had the privilege to represent in the Commons some time ago. She started off as a mill girl in one of over 400 mills which Oldham—the cotton king of England—boasted of at that time. Annie always bore the scars of that work. Just as miners often have the tips of fingers chopped off through the dangers of their work, women mill workers lost fingers through controlling the bobbins on looms in the factories, and Annie suffered from that handicap. It is about the only handicap that she ever recognised because, my goodness, she was a woman of considerable spirit.

There is presently a proposal to erect a statue of Annie in Parliament Square in Oldham. It is a very fine square. On one side of it is Oldham’s war memorial, quite a wonderful piece of sculpture and deservedly so, because Oldham lost its sons at the Battle of Loos in 1916. In those terrible times, the young men of a whole ward could be wiped out by the carnage on the Western Front. On the other side of the square is a magnificent example of 19th-century civic architecture: the town hall, complete with the requisite Doric columns. It also has a blue plaque, which states that Winston Churchill addressed the people of Oldham there on his election—his first election—as a Member of Parliament. It is a prestigious location, and I will now give the reasons why I think Annie Kenney should be commemorated there.

Annie listened to Sylvia Pankhurst at a meeting of the Oldham Clarion in 1905, and immediately struck up a political relationship with Sylvia. There was no doubt at all that Annie was born of very strong stuff indeed. She was certainly a militant suffragette; the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, paid tribute to them, while disavowing their effectiveness in the long run. She was alongside Sylvia when the first political meeting was disrupted by the suffragettes. Sir Edward Grey was one of the speakers, and Winston Churchill another, so it was a fairly star cast to upset, but the suffragettes had no inhibitions about that. As a result, Annie spent three days in jail. Subsequent to that, following further disruptions carried out by the militants, she suffered force-feeding in prison after being arrested and was a victim of that outrageous cat and mouse Act, whereby women were released until they were fit enough to be returned to prison, where they were treated just as cruelly as they had been in the past.

The militant suffragette campaign was suspended in 1914, and of course Annie was a patriot: not for her any question of reservation about participating in the war. It was the job of men to go to war and it was the job of women to fill the places that the men had vacated and play their full part in sustaining the war effort, which Annie did as ably as she could. At the end of the war, Asquith was long gone, and Lloyd George had been convinced, partly through the militancy of the suffragette movement before the war, that the vote had to be granted to women. So although I accept that of course wartime changed a great deal in British politics, and although I accept that the militant aspect of the suffragette movement will always arouse some degree of controversy, there is no doubt that it played its part. By far the most important part was the war effort and the fact that women were able to demonstrate that they were the equal of men in sustaining production at home. But it was inevitably the element of challenge laid down by women—a determination that they would be satisfied—that helped to convince the political establishment of the time, all of whom were male, of course.

I hope and expect that a statue will be constructed over this next year. I hope that Annie Kenney will be recognised for the outstanding Oldhamer, subject and woman that she was. Tremendous courage was needed to sustain these activities over many years, and we should do nothing else but give due praise to the women who did so.

17:24

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I am humbled to take part in this important debate on the role of women in public life and their increase in representation in Parliament, both in this Chamber and in the other place. We have already heard how hard-won the battle was for all women in the United Kingdom to be allowed to vote and to play their part in electing the Government, and about their selfless struggle to gain equality. I wonder how those women would have viewed the progress that has been achieved in the past 100 years. On the ballot paper, a woman’s vote is still worth exactly the same as that of a man, but there is still a significant underrepresentation, as we have heard, of women in Parliament. In this Chamber, the percentage of women Members seems to be stuck fairly stubbornly at 25%. Although there is a higher percentage of women on these Benches than there is on the Benches of the other major parties, I do not think that 33% is yet good enough. Of course, as we have heard, in the other place, only 32% of Members are women.

If we look at the position of women in the rest of our society we see that there is no equality. There are whole swathes of society where women are barely represented. According to Fortune magazine, there is a greater chance of being a CEO of a FTSE 100 company if you are called David or Stephen than if you are a woman. I guess being called Mike means that I would never have made it big in the world of business. Perhaps I should have called my daughter David or Stephen.

The representation of women on the boards of major companies is pitiful. The Women in Sport survey found that half of the 68 bodies funded by Sport England and UK Sport have fewer than 30% of women as non-executive directors—a percentage that is now a precondition for receiving public funding. The small number of women is reflected in the tiny coverage of women’s sport in our national newspapers, although both the BBC and Sky deserve praise for increasing the coverage of women’s sport.

Just as 100 years ago the tectonic plates of history were finally shifted by those remarkable campaigning women, the plates are now shifting again. The row over the gender pay gap at the BBC is now moving into other areas of public life. The denigration of women, whether at a rich men’s dinner cloaked in fundraising for charity or some working men’s clubs, or the appalling sight of scantily dressed women having to publicise a boxing tournament or Formula 1 race, is not acceptable any more. It is heartening that the public are universally clamouring for this change.

It is through education that the esteem and self-esteem of women must be started. In primary and secondary schools we need to ensure that there is parity of opportunity for men and women and that stereotypes are challenged. That must continue into apprenticeships, further education and higher education to ensure that we have strong role models. It is a pity that our school curriculum and GCSE and A-level syllabuses are so strongly weighted towards men.

I want to talk about two important women, one of whom has already been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Norton. However, you do not always have to be famous to make a change to your community and society. I start with Eleanor Rathbone, the Liverpool campaigner and independent MP for Combined English Universities. One of her first speeches in this Parliament was on preventing female genital mutilation. She joined the British Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council to support human rights and was, as we have heard, outspoken on appeasement. She co-founded the Liverpool Women’s Citizen Association to promote women’s involvement in political affairs and was president of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship—the renamed National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

In Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone formed the 1918 Club for women, reputedly the oldest women’s club still meeting, which of course celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Our Lord Speaker has kindly agreed to host a reception for its members in her honour. It is important that we remember and celebrate the thousands of remarkable women like Eleanor Rathbone.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, women from all walks of life have brought about change. I think of my mother. She was German and a refugee fleeing from the invading Russians. She ended up in Liverpool, the city that was the most heavily bombed place in the UK outside London. She did not speak a word of English and was 24 years old. That woman managed to survive, to run a business, to bring up a family and to live happily ever after. When my father suggested that my mother might like to return to Germany, she said, “No, my home is in Liverpool now”. There are millions of women like that who do remarkable things every single day.

We recognise the contribution that women have made. Currently there is an excellent exhibition in Portcullis House, a raft of events planned in Parliament for this year, and a celebration in the year-long Women and Power project organised by the National Trust. Of course we must remember that before 1918 it was not only women who did not have the vote, it was also non-householders. They included men living with their parents, working as servants, serving as soldiers and the homeless. Without the women’s suffrage movement I wonder whether universal suffrage would have been extended to men as well.

We must all take responsibility for challenging the underrepresentation of women wherever we come across it. We must use the correct term to describe occupations because language is important. It is not acceptable to talk about “firemen” and so on. I know that some people will say, “What’s in a name?”, but actually it is important for us and for our children growing up. Parliament should become a beacon of women’s rights and opportunities, not just in the Chambers but in the number of female officers, staff, researchers and interns we employ. It is about equal pay and equal opportunities.

Two weeks ago I met a group of women who are campaigning for more women to be employed in the construction industry. As a result of that meeting I put down a Question for Written Answer, and yesterday I received a reply from the Minister telling me that practical steps are being developed, including the Be Fair framework. As I walked to the Chamber earlier, I looked at all the scaffolding around Parliament, and I wondered how many women we employ from the construction industry on our own building. I would bet that actually there are none, but we could be a beacon and ensure that women in the construction industry are employed here in Parliament itself.

In conclusion, I should say that I was very nervous about speaking in this debate, but I am glad that I have. Without being patronising, I have been genuinely inspired by Members’ contributions, and I thank them for that. As I have said, much needs to be done to reach the nirvana talked about by my noble friend Lady Benjamin, but with women like her and others in this Chamber, it will be achieved.

17:33

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

Although much of the focus of this debate is on the representation of women in Parliament, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, that we should reflect on the role of women in local politics, both in the suffrage campaign and in the present day. In this centenary year, it is worth remembering that local government led the way for women’s rights. Women could vote in local elections nearly 50 years before they won the right to vote in parliamentary elections. They stood for election as local councillors and Poor Law guardians, and used their positions to fight for better conditions for their local communities. The Women’s Local Government Society and the LGA have worked to identify 100 suffrage pioneers who were active in the campaign for votes and went on to use the extended rights to citizenship in a positive way locally. The suffrage pioneer campaign will be launched tomorrow, on 6 February.

My home city of Bradford was at the heart of the women’s suffrage campaign. A rally held in 1908 at Shipley Glen, close to where I live, was attended by crowds of 100,000 people. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, mentioned Margaret Wintringham in her list of able women. She was born in Keighley, which is part of Bradford, and she took her seat in 1921. She was the third woman, rather than the second, to be elected as a Member of Parliament. The noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, told us that Lady Astor was the first female Member of Parliament to take her seat. We note that she was a Conservative. The second was Countess Markievicz, who represented Sinn Fein and never took her seat, while Margaret Wintringham was a Liberal. That shows us that the suffragette movement encompassed women of all political persuasions, and we should learn from that as a way of doing things that deliver. We all have something to offer and no one has a monopoly over all knowledge and virtues.

I have really enjoyed hearing about the inspirations that other Members and women have referred to in their lives, and I particularly liked the description by my noble friend Lady Morris of her mother and grandmother. I was fortunate in that both my mother and grandmother ran their own businesses, which was absolutely unheard of in their generation. Moreover, the Primrose League, which has been mentioned, featured large in my family history. But I must say something positive about how the encouragement and inspiration to do things in political life came from the male in my life—my father. He died in 2001, aged 96. He had always been very encouraging of women. He had only brothers and no sons, just me. He was determined that whatever I wanted to do, I should be encouraged in that. He encouraged me to take a deep interest in politics, and he employed women on occasions when many others would not have done. He gave them responsibilities and always regarded them as intellectual equals. I am very lucky in that, and I thank the male Members of the House who have taken part in this debate because we appreciate that not all men have negative views about the rights and role of women. Long may we encourage them to play their part in bringing forward even more opportunities for women.

This centenary celebration must not only be a time for looking backwards; we must look forwards and find practical ways of encouraging more women to serve their communities as local councillors. The lack of parental leave and pension contributions can act as barriers to standing as a councillor, and in particular to taking on the responsibilities of a cabinet member and needing to give up full-time employment. The intimidation of people in public life, which affects both men and women, is also a barrier to standing for public office.

The Committee on Standards in Public Life recently published a report on intimidation. It recommended that the Government should bring forward legislation abolishing the requirement that those standing to become local councillors should publish their home addresses on ballot papers. This is a recommendation that I would encourage the Government to look at closely, having personally suffered harassment in the past and unwelcome intrusions into my family’s lives when I was the first woman leader of Bradford Metropolitan Council. I know that some men suffer intimidation, but I doubt that male leaders both before and after me in Bradford council were on the receiving end of so much unwarranted treatment.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, mentioned, the Be a Councillor campaign is a very helpful way of getting underrepresented groups to engage with and enter politics. It has recently formed a network of women councillors, which can help and advise those who are thinking about standing for election. I encourage all noble Lords to support it. In closing, I ask whether the Minister could update us on any further plans to increase women’s representation nationally and locally in political and public office, given the work that both central and local government are doing to invest in the Be a Councillor campaign.

17:40

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I am so glad that we have this opportunity to celebrate the huge breakthrough that took place in 1918 when women first got the vote. It was a really great leap for womankind and another victory in the struggle for equality, but it is important to remember that none of it happened because the powers that be gladly decided to share power. It had to be extracted from them, like pulling teeth. Power is never given away readily. It was the product of monumental struggle—a visceral, gut-wrenching struggle.

The demands for suffrage had started long before 1918. As someone mentioned, they probably started when Mary Wollstonecraft started arguing about the rights of women at the end of the 18th century, but during the 19th century there was that great struggle by women fighting for property rights. The Married Women’s Property Act created a seismic shift in the status of women, albeit middle-class women. Having your own money and your own property is a liberation for women, as we now know so well and as women have realised.

Women did not want to be seen as the property of their fathers or their husbands. They were demanding access to education, the universities, medical schools and the legal profession, just like their brothers. They brought cases to court—I say this as a lawyer, because it is a piece of history that really is shocking. The women argued that the law was neutral. It said that “any person” suitably qualified could enter university, become a city councillor, study to be a doctor or enter the Inns of Court, so why not them, if they were suitably qualified? But the judges, intellectually honest to a man, said that the word “person” did not apply to women. Male exclusivity won the day. It was only by persistent pursuit of cases through the courts and challenges to the ruling bodies and institutions that the rules were eventually changed.

The rights to higher education, to enter the professions and to vote were achieved only after a traumatic and painful set of battles in which women were vilified, humiliated, battered, beaten, imprisoned and force-fed, and in which they lost their lives. So when women today are trolled, abused online, stalked and humiliated, or sexually violated and hurt, it is not new and we are right to ask: have we come far enough? It is shameful that after 100 years we have not yet achieved real equality.

The whole issue is about the position of women. Many wonderful women—we have heard tributes paid to so many remarkable women—took part in struggles. It should be a source of pride to us that we have had so many wonderful women in Parliament. Some noble Baronesses here now were women in the Commons. They have held high office. We have had wonderful women in the senior judiciary and in all our institutions. Although we have had all those good women who have enriched our society, improved it, brought their gifts into the public arena and defied scorn to fight for equality and a better society, there is still a huge “BUT”, which has to be written in capital letters and spoken very loudly: we still have a long journey ahead.

We have tried to do it the nice way. We have tried to make nice. We have listened to our elders who used to tell us not to rock the boat. I heard it said to me so many times. Happily, many of us in this House did not listen, but we made a mistake in believing what we were told—that by asking for equal pay, equality, equal treatment and just laws somehow equality would automatically follow. We packaged our demands according to the male template. We adjusted our demands to the male norm. Unfortunately, we followed the stories about the law’s neutrality and blindness to gender and that we get there on merit. We have to ask ourselves: who is deciding what is meritorious? Who decides the values that will be attributed to the roles that should be available to women as well as men? Treating as equal those who are not equal does not create equality.

We have to look at the deeper structures of our society, which I regret to say are still coded male. That is why we have to change the structural engineering of our society if we want real change. It is why it has to go beyond the numbers game that we are talking about today. We have to look at the economic structures that keep women in low-paid jobs and caring jobs, which are so undervalued and never get the resources they deserve. Women are supposed still to have almost exclusive responsibility for children or elderly parents and to look after the home. That is still going on all too often.

I have played my part. I have been an activist in the law. I have written on the law’s failings for more than 40 years. In fact, I have devised many of the reforms that have been introduced by women parliamentarians into the legal sphere. Women in Parliament have collaborated with women practitioners such as me. We have tweaked and amended the law, and passed new Acts of Parliament. But I ask noble Lords these questions: have the changes delivered justice in rape cases? Are we seeing domestic violence ending? Did our changes to the law stop Jimmy Savile or any of those others? Did it prevent the church scandals, the Rotherham scandal or scandals in any other cities, or have we continued to see the normalisation of violence towards women? Do women get equal pay? We have just had the BBC matter, but we know, when we look right down the line to the low-paid jobs, the ordinary factory jobs, the secretarial jobs and the jobs inside our companies, that there is not equal pay. Have we removed sexual harassment from the workplace? What does #MeToo tell us? How can it be that prominent businessmen still feel able to hold men-only sleazy events?

So why do women suffer so much misogyny on the internet and social media—trolling, stalking and revenge porn? I am afraid it means we have to look at the attitudes that underpin the way our society works. Women who have succeeded have often had to play the game by male rules. That method has delivered for some with great success, but not for most. Sometimes those confident older women who have enjoyed success are very hard on women coming up behind them. It takes a lot of courage for young women who are being exploited, harassed or abused at work to speak out about what is taking place. Older women should be supporting younger women, not disparaging them, when they take their confidence into their hands.

We do not have equality. Young women are saying, “Enough: everyday sexism has to stop”. They want equality and I am on their side, as I know most people in this House are. I want quotas and all-women shortlists because I have lost patience. I thought that the world would have changed by the time I got to the great age that I now am. It has been too long a-coming. I say to you all: we tried doing it the nice way and now we are going to have to kick down the barn doors.

Yes, let us celebrate the wondrous women who went before. We do walk in their shoes. Let us chalk up every gain, victory and position that is taken. But now I say to you men: you have to make this your business too.

17:48

[Lord Loomba (CB)]

My Lords, women’s empowerment and gender equality are all at the heart of my work and what I strive to achieve as an advocate for women and girls’ rights across the globe. These rights that we are celebrating today have been hard won and are still being hard won the world over as progress continues to move at a snail’s pace. Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 and is acknowledged as the leader in the battle for votes. Here in this House, female participation, through life Peerages, took a further 40 years after the 1918 Act to achieve.

Globally, the latest figures from the UN show that only 11 women are serving as head of state and 12 as head of government. The figures also show that, globally, there are 38 states in which women account for less than 10% of parliamentarians in single or lower Houses, including four Chambers with no women at all. One country that particularly stands out is Rwanda, where women have won 63.8% of seats in the lower House, the highest number of women parliamentarians worldwide. Figures from the IPU show that globally the UK is ranked 39th for female participation in Parliament. While we are not that far in front of Afghanistan, in 55th place, we are faring much better than the USA, in 99th place; but our closer neighbour, Germany, is in a similar position, in 45th place. France has bucked the trend and recently achieved over 40% of female Members in its last elections.

What can be seen from all these statistics is that the mainly slow, grinding process of increasing women’s participation in political life is not achieving a lot; as Helen Lewis said in a recent article:

“It is embarrassing that it took 98 years”,


until 2016, for the total number of women ever elected to our Parliament—to date, 455—to reach the same number as male MPs sitting at present. It is something that we, as a developed nation, should be leading the way on. We should be setting an example on the world stage that we truly believe in equality in political life.

Women make up nearly half of the world’s population, yet very few are actively involved in the decisions that affect their lives. Each country is different, with different needs and different priorities, but what is not so different is the lack of women in political life. If Rwanda can increase women’s participation, so can we. We must seriously look at what it is that prevents women partaking in politics in this country and do something about it. Is it the issue of work/life balance? Is it the awful abuse we see meted out? Is it parity of pay stopping women achieving these aims? Is it lack of interest? Is it all of these things and more? Do we know the answer to these questions? It is only by knowing what is stopping women getting into politics that we can seek to address the problem.

Just as the UN has the HeForShe campaign, we too can encourage more men to get on board with the idea, so that it is not a fight for gender equality but a collaboration, a working together so that we can achieve it. We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, that there are only 10 men participating in today’s debate and three times more noble Baronesses. It should not be like that; we should be at least equal. The UN has also asked everyone to “step it up” with its “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality” campaign. But how can we possibly help women to achieve in other walks of life if we do not have enough women in Parliament too? We should be stepping it up, but ahead of 2030, and making it a challenge for the next general election.

17:54

[Baroness Seccombe (Con)]

My Lords, I have found it very interesting to hear how families have been behind many of us here today. I pay tribute to my mother, who was behind me every step. She loved elections and came canvassing with me even when she was 92, in the year she died. I also pay tribute to the many husbands, because I feel that for a certain generation, one had to have your husband behind you and they did wonderful work in supporting us.

Today I feel like a parent in 1918 reading her son’s school report: “A little progress, but could do so much better”. 1918 was indeed a milestone, when all men over 21 and some women were enfranchised. These were privileged women who owned property: had I been about at that time, I should have been livid if I had not qualified. This was at a time when women had been not only keeping the home fires burning but keeping the country going—running businesses and farms, nursing sick and broken men returning from the front, as well as upholding their family responsibilities and keeping life on as even a keel as possible.

I understand from the House of Lords Library that the number of men who qualified at that time was 12,913,000, while 8,417,000 women became eligible to vote. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, said, the age qualification for women was to ensure that they did not form the majority of the electorate. How disgraceful. I must not be curmudgeonly and grumpy, but I feel for those women who did not qualify. They had been struggling for four long years and were rejected in this savage way.

I find it strange that in 1918, although women were not allowed to vote, they were allowed to stand as candidates. Dame Christabel Pankhurst, as she became, the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, stood in the rough, tough area of Smethwick in the West Midlands. Elections were fought in large gatherings in those days, and she was subjected to oranges laced with razor blades being thrown at her. You had to be brave and courageous to be a candidate then.

Throughout my life, I have always felt that we needed more women in every sphere of public life, not only to balance the numbers or for equality reasons but because I feel that the country is missing out on so much talent. My role as a vice-chairman of the Conservative Party was to find women and encourage them to take the plunge, to promote them whenever and wherever I could. I think we can say that we made modest gains, but I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jenkin and other colleagues who, with the wholehearted support of the Prime Minister, are succeeding in so many ways. Women bring a different perspective to issues, and now many who were given the chance are thriving. Today it is much more normal for the best applicant to be appointed, male or female, and long may it be so. However, we must not forget that there is always more to do.

I pay tribute to those courageous women who, at huge cost to themselves, blazed the trail. Therefore, there is every reason to celebrate the enormous change that has taken place and I do so enthusiastically, but I hope that in 2028, in 10 years’ time, there will be a remarkable celebration for the day that all women became entitled to vote. I will not be here, but I hope that those who will be will have a very good party.

17:59

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, what a great pleasure it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe. In her quiet and undemonstrative way—although she was not all that quiet just then—she is a real champion for the role of women in society and I pay public tribute to her. It is right that we pay tribute to the women—and men—who campaigned for votes which we too often take for granted.

When you look at the serried ranks of the establishment at the time, those campaigners faced formidable barriers. No one has mentioned Lord Curzon yet—the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, is nodding. He was co-president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage immediately before the Act. In 1914 he warned this House that suffrage would,

“unquestionably weaken our prestige and influence throughout the world”,

and that women lacked the “balance of mind” to use the vote. Even a social reformer such as Octavia Hill, who helped establish social housing in Britain and was one of the founders of the National Trust, believing in the right to clean air and open spaces, was anti-suffrage. She thought that there would be,

“a serious loss to our country … if women entered … political life”.

Those who campaigned against such odds are a role model and an inspiration.

I suspect that I would have had to wait a further decade before being enfranchised, as the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, said, because only those with property qualifications benefited in 1918. The majority of the working classes were excluded. It may sound cynical, but I suspect the vote was granted to women only because ex-servicemen over 19 and other men over 21 were given it, and leaving women out would have been seen as unnecessarily provocative.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to make any direct links between enfranchisement and prosperity or equality. That is not to diminish the importance of the vote. In my trade union days, I visited Pinochet’s Chile, the former South West Africa—now Namibia—and apartheid South Africa to support trade unions and visit political prisoners. People died for democracy in those countries, just as they did here. I know how important it is to be able peacefully to vote a Government out of office. When I first joined the campaign trail for equal rights for women in the 1960s we had the Ford women workers as our inspiration. I thought we would have made more progress, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, in achieving equal pay and pension rights, better representation for women, and protection against sexual harassment and domestic violence. Of course I was idealistic. In some areas the absence of real progress is appalling: an estimated 54,000 maternity sackings; two women killed every week in domestic violence incidents; and women still dependent on men, in England at least, for the payment of their benefits.

We had a debate quite recently, as has already been mentioned, about the WASPI women: women who lost out on their expectations of a state pension because they were too young for one system and too old for the new one, after also being discriminated against in occupational pensions all their working lives. They call themselves Women Against State Pension Inequality. Now we learn that thousands of military spouses are also losing out on their state pension if they reached pension age before 6 April 2016, whereas those reaching retirement age after that date will be able to claim credits equivalent to a year’s national insurance for any year they were abroad since 1975. Those who reached pension age before 6 April 2016 will be entitled to only 60% of their husband’s pension. As one military wife has said, it was frowned on for wives to work:

“Even throughout the 1980s, women had to live on the base. I had to look after the 100 or so families on the base”.


She was expected to be hostess and welfare adviser, all unpaid. She cannot claim credit for her six years abroad serving her country in an unpaid capacity and she will now receive a reduced state pension. I believe this is a betrayal of some of the military wives in the same way as WASPI women were betrayed.

Anniversaries such as this give us the opportunity to reflect on whether we have made a contribution to society—what inspired us about the suffrage movement—but also how far we still have to go. I was the seventh woman president of the TUC in the 132 years of its history. My noble friend Lady Prosser was the sixth. She was a role model for many of us. Margaret Bondfield, who has already been mentioned, would have been the first president of the TUC in 1923 but she left to take a post in government. It was left for Anne Loughlin of the Tailors and Garment Workers’ Union to become the first woman TUC president in 1943—75 years after its founding. However, since 2000 there have been eight women TUC presidents, including my noble friend Lady Drake—three in the past three years—and a woman general secretary, Frances O’Grady, for the first time. We made a slow start but we are now catching up. I represented low-paid workers, mainly women, in my trade union and was extremely proud to be appointed to the first Low Pay Commission in 1997. So far I am the only woman to have been chair of ACAS.

I learned from the women campaigners before me that you need determination, patience, a great deal of gritting of teeth and an understanding that there are different ways of working. My noble friend Lady Prosser put part-time workers centre-stage in the trade union movement and I was privileged to move acceptance of the part-time workers directive in the European TUC, which at the time quietly believed that only full-time work was respectable. As an aside, a Canadian-style deal with the EU after Brexit will end up with ILO minimum standards and the current protections for part-time workers, paid annual holidays, parental leave, and the protection of working conditions if your company is taken over by another will not be there. I promise that anyone who tries to remove those protections will have quite a job on their hands.

In conclusion, the campaigns are still needed, whether it is on the gender pay gap or protecting workers’ rights—people’s rights—after exiting the EU. There is still much to do.

Immigration White Paper

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Statement

18:08

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat in the form of a Statement the Answer given by my right honourable friend the Immigration Minister to an Urgent Question in the other place. The Statement is as follows:

“Mr Speaker, it is a great pleasure to come to the House today to answer the Question from the right honourable Member for Pontefract and Castleford. In doing so, I should point out that Ministers have made great efforts to keep the House informed of the state of play relating to the UK’s exit from the European Union, bearing in mind that we are in an ongoing negotiation and we cannot give a running commentary. Since June 2016, there have been numerous ministerial Statements.

This Question, however, relates specifically to immigration so let me remind the House where we have got to. Our first priority in negotiations was to reach a deal on citizens’ rights—the position of the 3 million EU citizens currently in the UK and, just as importantly, the 1 million UK citizens who reside in other EU member states. An agreement was successfully concluded on that last December, meaning that all those people were guaranteed continuing rights to live and work as they do now. Of course, we updated Parliament fully at the time.

Our next priority is to agree the arrangements during the implementation period—the period immediately following the UK’s exit next March. Negotiations are shortly to begin with the EU. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister set out the UK’s broad objectives in the speech she gave in Florence last year. We will publish a White Paper in the coming months, when the time is right, and of course we will consider how we can update the House as negotiations progress.

As to the longer term, as the House will know, the Government have commissioned the independent Migration Advisory Committee to advise on the economic aspects of the UK’s exit. The MAC has been asked to report by September 2018, although it has been invited to consider whether it could also produce interim reports. Let me be clear: given that we expect to have an implementation period of around two years after we leave, there will be plenty of time to take account of the MAC’s recommendations in designing the longer-term immigration system for the UK.

We are clear that the Government will make a success of Brexit. We will end free movement and build an immigration system that works in the national interest and we will, as we have done thus far, ensure that Parliament is kept informed and up to date”.

18:11

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Answer to the Question given in the other place by the Immigration Minister. Her problem is the Government’s lack of any credibility on this. We have Boris Johnson and Michael Gove charging round seeking to undermine the Prime Minister, and they were recently joined by Jacob Rees-Mogg. The Government’s action, particularly on immigration, is making us an international laughing stock. Will the Minister explain to the House why publication has again been postponed? Is there anything in the department, even in draft, or are there just sheets of blank white paper sitting in the Home Office? What assurance can she give the House that we will not be sitting here again in a few months’ time with another postponement? The Minister was not specific on when she will come back to us. We would like to know that we will not be here again in a few months with another postponement.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. On the timing, it is clear that we are considering a range of options for the future immigration system. This is incredibly important. We will set out initial plans in the coming months. We have to make sure that all decisions we make for the future immigration system are based on evidence and engagement. I encourage all noble Lords and those they talk to to consult the Government about what they would like a future system to look like. We are already in consultation with a wide range of representatives from business, universities and various countries and when we are satisfied that we have the evidence and have completed the consultation, we will make our decision.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, presumably the Minister will have seen the political coverage over the weekend about the damage caused by the uncertainty over Brexit, not least to the National Health Service, which EU nationals are leaving because of the uncertainty. From a situation where they felt they had some certainty, we now learn that there is no certainty during or after the implementation period. The Minister talks about there being plenty of time, but the longer the delay, the more people will leave. What further damage does the Minister believe this delay and the publication of this White Paper will cause to an already understaffed and underresourced National Health Service?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank the noble Lord for his observations, but I do not feel he is quite correct. Let us be clear: we have already reached a very important milestone. We have reached an agreement—a citizens’ rights deal—with the EU. That covers EU citizens who already live in the UK, so if you are a nurse from the EU living in the UK, you are covered. You need to register with the Home Office. You will then be able to obtain settled status and can remain in the United Kingdom and have the same rights as you would have had prior to our leaving the EU. What will happen during the post-exit implementation period is subject to negotiation, and it would be foolish for us to reveal exactly what we want because the quickest way not to get what you want is to reveal it.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

Would the Minister notice, or agree, that the timing for the White Paper that she has given is about as vague as anything I have heard, and I have heard plenty of vague promises from government about the timing of White Papers? Can she say that the White Paper—when it comes, if it comes, whenever it comes—will cover the aberrant practice of treating international students as economic migrants and will finally address that issue in terms that stop that practice?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I think I can assure the noble Lord that it will come, so “if” is not required in his question. I think I have been very clear that it will be with us in the coming months as the situation progresses. The noble Lord raises including students in the net migration figure, and I am well aware that it is an issue about which he feels very strongly, but we are no different from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US in including international students in our net migration calculations. I am afraid I cannot make any promises to him about what will be in the White Paper.

[Baroness Redfern (Con)]

I thank the Minister for repeating the Answer to the Urgent Question. Will there be a regional dimension to our future immigration policy?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank my noble friend for her question. We have to take into account the labour requirements in regions and in different sectors of our economy. This is why we have commissioned the independent Migration Advisory Committee to advise on the economic and social impact of the UK’s exit from the EU and on how the UK’s immigration system should be aligned with the Government’s modern industrial strategy, which was published recently. The Migration Advisory Committee will report in September 2018, so there is sufficient time to do the work that needs to be done. We are considering a range of options for a future immigration system, and I am sure we are not ruling anything out at this stage.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

Will the Minister please be a little more open with the House about the Government’s objectives for their immigration policy in the transition period, or the implementation period, as the Government call it? Is the objective to reduce numbers coming to this country or is it not? The Minister talked about policy being evidence-based. Is it not absolutely clear that at the moment, as the NHS scours the rest of the EU for doctors and nurses to keep our health service going, any restrictions on free movement in that implementation and transition period would have a devastating effect? The Government should make clear that they will not impose conditions on their rights of residence in the United Kingdom.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

The noble Lord will know, as I am sure many noble Lords know, that immigration numbers have already started to fall. It is our ambition to achieve a sustainable level of immigration after we exit the European Union and after the post-exit implementation period has completed. The noble Lord asked what our objectives are for the post-exit implementation period. It is instructive to look forward to the period beyond implementation because that is the period for which we have to establish a stable and robust immigration system that works for every region and every sector of our economy. So in terms of where we are now and where we will be in, say, 2021, the objective for the implementation period and the immigration system for that period is a smooth transition. It is to ensure that there is no cliff edge and that we are able to have the people and skills we need in our country.

[Lord Hylton (CB)]

My Lords, it has been well known for a long time that there have been acute shortages of high-skilled and low-skilled workers. The Answer makes no reference to them. What are the Government thinking and what will they do?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

My Lords, we are well aware that there are shortages in certain areas and there may be overstaffing in other areas. As for what the Government are doing, they are listening. The most important thing that we can do at the moment is to listen to businesses, to universities and to our colleagues across the European Union. The Government have a number of user groups, which have been set up with representatives from all sorts of different organisations. The most important thing we can do is listen, and if we feel that there will be shortages in certain areas—whether regions or sectors—that is what our future immigration policy must address.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, order. This side.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I believe the Government have made a mistake in recent years in understating the scale of immigration and forecast immigration in their planning for health, housing, schools and infrastructure. What annual estimates of immigration are the Government making for the next three to five years—ranges if need be—beyond the implementation period, and how are they planning for the consequences for public services and infrastructure? Will this feature in the White Paper?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank my noble friend for her question. I am afraid I am not able to answer the questions that she has raised about the numbers we are looking at and the forecast for our public services. I can say, however, that we are working very hard to improve the quality of the data we use for immigration forecasting. We are working very closely with the ONS and other parts of government to improve the quality and use of administrative data. We need a better understanding of how many migrants are in the UK, how long they stay for and what they are currently doing. The ONS will be reporting back within a year, and we look forward to its report.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords—

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

My Lords, we have had 10 minutes. We are now moving on to the next Question.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords—

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

Order. Lord O’Shaughnessy.

NHS Winter Crisis

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Statement

18:23

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord O'Shaughnessy) (Con)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House I will repeat as a Statement the response to an Urgent Question given by my honourable friend the Minister of State for Health in the other place. The Statement is as follows:

“Winter is challenging for health services worldwide. With a high number of flu cases this year, we have seen an increase of around 35% in A&E attendances from flu—triple what it was last year—with around 3,000 hospital beds occupied as a result of flu, and a further 700 because of norovirus. The NHS saw 1,200 more patients a day in A&E compared to this time last year. The guidance issued by the national emergency preparedness panel sought to free up capacity for emergencies given the high number of flu cases, including two dominant strains of flu co-circulating this year.

It is important to remind the House that the deferment of operations referred to in that guidance applied to around 13% of hospital beds dealing with elective patients, of which around half were protected within the guidance in respect of cancer and other urgent elective treatments. That guidance was updated on 26 January to confirm that further deferment of hospital operations was no longer needed. In terms of the impact that the guidance has had on operations, we will not know this until mid-March, when that data will be published and placed in the Library for the benefit of both sides of the House”.

18:24

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Statement. Before I ask my questions, I also thank the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister for their responses to the United States President’s bizarre attack on our NHS.

Over 95% of hospital beds were full last week, leaving just one bed in 20 available. We saw the highest number of accident and emergency diverts for any week this winter, with 43 incidents across England. I pay tribute to our NHS staff, who have gone the extra mile in very challenging circumstances. We know that 50,000 elective operations were planned to be cancelled, but it would seem that some urgent operations have been cancelled, too. Will the Minister explain to the House why those operations have been cancelled, despite NHS England’s advice to the contrary?

It would also now seem that the accident and emergency targets that are enshrined in legislation and the constitution have been abandoned until March—that is, March 2019. Will the Government bring forward legislation to amend the constitution? Finally, will the Minister accept that the winter plans that have been outlined are now being compromised in the light of the fact that at least 23 trusts are now on black alert, which means that they are under severe pressure?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her questions. I agree with her that we are all proud of our NHS, on all sides of this House, and I am sure that we all have great pleasure in stating that through whatever means we are required to. I also join with her in paying tribute to the staff, who do such a fantastic job, often in challenging circumstances.

She asked first about urgent operations. It is clear in the guidance that they should not be cancelled when it would negatively affect patients’ outcomes. If that has happened, NHS England is investigating and reinstating those operations. The guidance is quite clear and NHS England has followed that up.

As for A&E targets, we know that they have not been achieved recently. It is important and instructive to look at the extraordinary increase, not just in winter but overall, in the number of episodes that are happening. They really are increasing at a very high rate. Demand is very high—higher than I think could have been anticipated—and it is a credit to the NHS that it has produced the performance that it has. The aim now, with funding given at the Budget, is to get us back to the four-hour target that we all agree ought to happen. That is what will be happening over the coming year.

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

My Lords, this morning I visited a suburban hospital in London, with an almost brand new A&E unit and a well-managed winter crisis. But despite all that, it has still had to face a bed occupancy rate of 97% on several days, which is stretching its ability to make this work. Money was clearly an issue—the hospital was quite anxious about what its end of year accounts might look like. Today, the Liberal Democrats launched a report looking again at a different way of funding the NHS through the creation of an office of budget responsibility for health and care, long-term health and care funding, and a ring-fenced tax to replace national insurance. Also, there is a clear need for some sort of short-term fix, and we have suggested that £2 billion should be raised by adding a penny to our income tax. Has the Minister looked at this report and will he agree to meet with me to discuss it?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I thank the noble Baroness for her questions. I am glad she had a positive experience this morning at the hospital she mentioned. She is quite right that bed occupancy is very high at the moment. A good job was done in getting it down below 85% across the system in the run-up to Christmas, but of course it has filled up subsequently. An important part of dealing with this is the social care side, as we know, and the extra funding that has gone in is having some impact on these so-called DToCs—delayed transfers of care—and freeing up a number of beds.

The noble Baroness is right of course that money is important, particularly as we have the demands of a growing and ageing population. More money was of course announced in the November Budget for the short term. As for the long term, there is obviously a very informed and lively discussion going on not just among the Liberal Democrats but across the system and across politics about what is the right long-term solution. Obviously, as I have said before, issues of taxation are for the Chancellor and not for me, but I would be delighted to meet her to discuss those plans. What I can say, on behalf of the Secretary of State, is that we understand that there needs to be sustainable, long-term increases in NHS funding. We have to find the right way to do that.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

Do the Government recognise the concern of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine that the revised way of collecting data by NHS England does not allow meaningful comparisons because it includes walk-in and minor injury units, some of which are off site from the level 1 major emergency departments? Its concern is that this may be giving an overoptimistic impression of throughput and does not reflect the huge pressures on level 1 units. Will the Minister undertake to meet the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine with me to discuss some of its concerns?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

This is an afternoon of agreeing to meetings—but, yes, I would be delighted to do so. I am not knowledgeable enough about the issue that the noble Baroness mentioned but, while of course there is a huge difference in the kinds of workloads of those different types of A&E, the target incorporates all of them. They all have the obligation to reach the four-hour waiting time standard and we want to make sure that, whatever the situation and whatever the venue, we can do that.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister explain how, five years after the Francis inquiry, there is a lack of investment in the health and care nursing workforce in England, as outlined in the RCN report published today? That report, Left to Chance, shows that even if we had more beds we would not be able to staff them. In comparison, Wales has invested heavily in new nurses and continued professional development, and is doubling the number of district nurses that it intends to train this year. In England we currently have 4,400 qualified district nurses, but in 2010 we had 7,500. How can we resolve this quickly and ensure that we have more district nurses in training by this September?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

This is a really important point about nursing numbers. I think the particular accusation was about the Francis report and the follow-up to it. Of course, a lot of that was about nurses in NHS hospitals and indeed on wards. The latest figures from October 2017 show that, when compared to May 2010, there has been an increase of more than 14,000 in acute, general and elderly. At the same time, that has meant that some other areas of nursing have been impacted; we have talked about mental health before as well as district nursing. I say to the noble Baroness that the big increases in nurse training places ought to mean that there are more nurses going through not just into acute, general and elderly but into mental health and community nursing as well.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, despite the increase in population over the last 30 years, the number of beds in the National Health Service is half what it was 30 years ago. Germany has eight health service beds per 1,000 and in France the figure is six, but in the UK it is two and a half. Is it not about time that we revisited the whole question of the number of beds available in our National Health Service?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Lord raises a very interesting issue. As he rightly points out, that number has been dropping over a long time. It has plateaued in recent years, but it has been falling. This is a difficult situation. We all agree that more care should be delivered in the community, but we also understand that at certain times of year you do need beds in hospitals. I will point to two things: first, making sure that bed capacity is more efficient so that people can stay safely for less time and can spend more time being treated in their homes—which often is where they want to be, and that is why the extra funding for social care is important; and, secondly, the reconfiguration test that has been introduced by NHS England, which is about stopping reductions in bed numbers—which, as the noble Lord said, has happened under successive Governments—where it cannot be proven that any reduction is for the benefit of patients in terms of their overall care.

[Baroness Masham of Ilton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the Spinal Injuries Association. Is the Minister aware that at Stoke Mandeville’s national spinal centre, a ward that is absolutely necessary has been taken away from the spinal unit and used for general patients? There are waiting lists in the seven spinal units all over the country, affecting seriously ill patients who need specialised treatment. Will the Minister look into the situation?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I was not aware of that but I shall certainly investigate and write to the noble Baroness.

Grenfell Tower: Insulation Materials

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Statement

18:34

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House I will repeat a Statement made by the Housing Minister in the other place earlier today:

“Mr Speaker, I wish to comment on the decision by the Building Research Establishment to withdraw a building cladding safety test from its website. BRE was contacted by Celotex after it identified anomalies between the specification for a cladding system that it had submitted for testing and the actual system tested. It was alerted to this issue last week. As a result, BRE has withdrawn the classification report relating to that test, which was carried out in 2014. That is the right thing to do.

The cladding system in question included a fibre cement board rainscreen and Celotex RS5000 insulation. It is important to underline that this was not a test of the aluminium composite material cladding system understood to have been present at Grenfell Tower. We understand that Celotex is contacting customers who have used this material. We have published a range of advice for building owners on the fire safety of cladding and insulation materials, including this type of insulation.

That advice still stands. As it makes clear, building owners should take their own professional advice on any further action, reflecting their building’s particular circumstances. We continue to expect building owners to progress necessary remediation work and, where necessary, to implement the interim fire safety measures to ensure that residents and their buildings are safe”.

18:36

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the answer to the Urgent Question given in another place. I remind the House of my declarations of interest as a councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

The answer is disappointing and highlights for me that the testing system is in chaos. More than seven months on from the disaster at Grenfell Tower, only three of the 300 tower blocks have had their unsafe cladding replaced, leaving thousands of people living in homes that are not safe. How many residents are living in tower blocks with insulation that now has invalid approval? What action are the Government taking to ensure that any other similar tests are also not flawed?

Some in the industry now suggest that the government-commissioned cladding tests used different standards from those in official guidance, with cavity barriers three times as fire resistant. Can the Minister confirm today that that is the case? What does he say to insurers or landlords who say that the Government’s tests are not sufficient to show that they breach building regulations so they will pay no removal and replacement costs for leaseholders, leaving them liable to foot the bill?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the test system is not in chaos. I made it quite clear that the Celotex issue does not have a bearing on the advice that we have given in relation to the Grenfell testing. The system tests were designed in line with the British Standard and were scrutinised and witnessed by independent observers. This is a discrepancy between what Celotex thought it had submitted and what was actually tested; it was not a reflection on the testing itself. Meanwhile, officials are working with the manufacturer on what has happened, and we will look to learn lessons from this. I will write to noble Lords to give more details of that as they become apparent, but I want to underline that this is no reflection at all on the testing system, or on what has happened in relation to Grenfell.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

There are 10 points in the Government’s response. Paragraph 2 says that the Building Research Establishment was contacted by Celotex last week. However, the reply does not say why this problem occurred in the first place. Why was the testing inadequate?

With regard to paragraph 5, the Minister has made clear that this was not a test of the aluminium composite material cladding system that was understood to have been present at Grenfell Tower. However, weekend media reports said that Celotex RS5000 insulation was on Grenfell Tower. Was that the case?

Thirdly, on paragraph 8, the Minister says that the advice currently given to owners of high-rise blocks and public buildings still stands, but I suggest to him that it is not enough. As of 10 January 2018, there are 312 residential buildings over 18 metres high in England, and public buildings are part of that total. All those have aluminium composite material cladding but, of the 312, 299 have aluminium composite material cladding that the MHCLG’s expert panel advises is unlikely to meet current building regulations guidance, and therefore presents fire hazards on buildings higher than 18 metres.

Does the Minister feel that that situation is acceptable, and does he understand the frustration of building owners that the Government are not being sufficiently clear on fire safety measures that are essential, nor on exactly where the finance for essential works will come from?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord raises various material points which I shall try to deal with. First, I restate that nothing in the system of testing done in relation to Grenfell is faulty. The Grenfell testing is not in question from the Celotex test.

The noble Lord raises an issue about the 299 tests that failed. He is absolutely right about that figure; it is the ministry figure. These are failed tests following the Grenfell fire in June last year, and we are in the process of ensuring that all are remedied. Some are on local authority buildings, some are public buildings, some are student residences, some of them are in private hands, but on all of them either interim measures have been taken or the process has been completed. That process was put in place post Grenfell and, as I said, there is no question but that appropriate action is now being taken in relation to those 299 failures of the 312 tests undertaken.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, is not the simple truth that there are many tenants in private, publicly owned and social-housing blocks of flats nationally who are completely unaware whether their flats or the blocks that they live in are a fire risk? With that in mind, would it not be wise to introduce a simple and cheap initiative? That would be for all freehold landlords of all blocks in the United Kingdom, whether they be social landlord, private or whatever, to place in a public place in the entrance to those blocks a sign on the wall which specified the cladding of that particular block. That information in the hands of tenants would be a powerful weapon for them to use when they sought improvements to the standards of insulation of their block.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

The noble Lord is right that many different blocks have been tested and found wanting in this process. I just referred to the 299 that have failed and I have the breakdown here: 45 in local authority hands, 115 housing association, 13 public buildings, 95 private residential and 31 student residences. They are going through the process of ensuring that appropriate measures are put in place.

Meanwhile, the Hackitt review is looking at the area much more widely. In response to the disaster that we had at Grenfell, it was felt appropriate to have a thoroughgoing review of fire safety measures; I agree. We are already acting on the interim report. We are now awaiting the final report, which will come up with recommendations which we will pursue once they are made. That is expected in the late spring. There is also a public inquiry.

There are many aspects to this, but in relation specifically to the Grenfell-type of cladding, we put in process a system of testing that goes across all sectors, public and private, and I do not think we could really be expected to do more.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister inform us whether the documentation of the type of cladding includes the way it is attached to the building? If it is adherent to the surface, there will not be an updraught on both sides of it. The problem, as soon as anything starts to burn, is updraught, which brings more air and oxygen in and fuels the inflammability of whatever material is there.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has a degree of expertise which I do not profess. If I may, I will pick up her specific question, but I think it is appropriate to say that it was the system that was tested, not just the cladding. I will write more fully to her and ensure that my letter is copied to other noble Lords who have participated.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, the noble Lord did not answer my question. I am interested in the position of the tenants. The tenants do not realise what is happening. I suggest empowering the tenants by giving them the knowledge so that they can put pressure on the landlord, whoever it is. Will the Minister answer my specific question, which is about the rights of tenants?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I take the specific point that the noble Lord makes. It is not so much that something is happening; it is ensuring that that is percolated down, as it were. It is a fair and material point; I apologise for not seeing it earlier. I will make sure that that is put in front and drawn to the attention of the Hackitt review.

Rail Update

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Statement

18:46

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Sugg) (Con)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House I shall repeat a Statement made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport in the other place. The statement is as follows:

“On 10 January, I informed the House that my department was preparing contingency plans for running train services on the east coast main line in the event of the existing franchise failing. Despite delivering significant returns to the taxpayer and having some of the highest passenger satisfaction scores in the country, the lead operator of the franchise, Stagecoach, has been incurring significant losses. In that debate, I promised to return to the House to provide an update Statement on the situation, and I am doing so today.

Since 2015 the franchise has met all its financial commitments to the taxpayer, returning nearly £1 billion to the public purse, but this has come at a substantial cost of nearly £200 million to Stagecoach. I already informed the House that the franchise will in due course run out of money and will not last until 2020. It has now been confirmed the situation is much more urgent. It is now clear that this franchise will be able to continue in its current form for only a matter of months, and no more. Last week, following detailed analysis, my department issued the franchisee with notification that the franchise had breached a key financial covenant.

It is important to be clear with the House—and, indeed, the public—that this will not impact on the railway’s day-to-day operations. The business will continue to operate as usual with no impact on services or staff on the east coast. But it does mean that I will need to put in place in the very near future a successor arrangement to operate this railway and to end the current contract. Given the imminent financial pressure that the existing franchise is under, I am taking action now to protect passengers who depend on these train services and ensure continued value for money for taxpayers. Given the urgency of the situation, I would like to take this opportunity to update the House on my plans.

It is worth remembering that our franchising system as a whole has delivered great benefits to passengers. There has been new private investment totalling £6.4 billion over the past 11 years, and passenger journeys on the rail network have more than doubled. The private sector is paying for new trains across the country. There are those who want this stopped because of a dogma that the state could run the railways better, but we see the fruits of private investment all round the network.

There has been much misinformation about this franchise, so it is worth stressing again at the outset that, because payments to the Government have been subsidised by Stagecoach, the taxpayer has continued to profit financially from this franchise. Passenger satisfaction is high and preparations are well under way to deliver state-of-the-art new trains on this railway.

The problem is very straightforward. Stagecoach got its numbers wrong. It overbid and is now paying a price.

Contrary to widespread speculation and rumour, no deal has been done on this railway and I have not yet made a decision on the successor operator to run the east coast line until the longer-term plans for the integration of track and train can begin in 2020. There is no question of anyone receiving a bailout. Stagecoach will be held to all its contractual obligations in full. As the Brown review said five years ago, this is what you would expect in a competitive franchise system—private businesses risk substantial amounts of their own capital, and if they fail to live up to their stretching targets they lose out, not the taxpayer.

To anyone who thinks that the nearly £200 million that Stagecoach will lose is insignificant, let me put it into some context. The combined profit of every single train operator in the country was only £271 million last year. The loss equates to over 20% of Stagecoach’s total market value. So it is a significant amount of money by any measure, and it should also act as a stark warning to any company tempted to overbid in future. Moreover, the franchising system has been adjusted to further deter over-optimism when bidding.

The priority now is to ensure the continued smooth running of the east coast franchise for its passengers. I have therefore asked my officials to conduct a full appraisal of the options available to the Government to ensure continuity of service until we implement the east coast partnership on the route from 2020. My decision on which option to choose will be made in accordance with the key principles set out in the Statement on how I use my rail franchising powers. This includes: protecting the interests of passengers; preserving the interests of taxpayers by ensuring value for money; and supporting investment and improvement in the railway, including the deployment of the new intercity express trains on the east coast.

In order to inform this decision, the department will assess the extent to which each option performs against these principles. Our value-for-money assessment will be based on a number of criteria, including which option returns most money to the taxpayer, the risks attached to each, and the value of any improvements in passenger services. I will also have regard to the effect of my decision on other franchises. This decision will be taken in a transparent way. The department’s assessment of the options will be published and be properly validated.

At this stage, one of the options is to consider the possibility of Stagecoach continuing to operate services on the east coast under a very strictly designed and short-term arrangement. The current management has a strong record of customer service and to rule out its involvement now would go against the principles that I have outlined above. However, given the circumstances in which the Government are having to step in to protect passengers on this line, I am prepared to consider this option only on the basis that the franchise will be operated on a short-term, not-for-profit basis. The only potential financial reward for Stagecoach would be received at the end of the contract and only in return for clearly specified passenger benefits and improvements being delivered.

The second alternative is that the east coast franchise would be directly operated by the Department for Transport through an operator of last resort. My department will subject this option to the same rigorous assessment to establish whether it will deliver value for money for taxpayers and protect the interests of passengers. This option is very much on the table and will be selected if the assessment I have set out determines that it offers a better deal for passengers and taxpayers than the alternative.

In either scenario, the east coast main line is expected to deliver substantial revenue to the taxpayer. The line will also continue to deliver premium payments to the Government once the east coast partnership is in place from 2020. Let me be absolutely clear: the east coast franchise will deliver a healthy operating profit for taxpayers. It has over the course of this franchise so far, and it will in the future.

There will be those who claim that because Stagecoach overbid, it should be excluded from bidding for future franchises. The legal advice on this is clear. As Stagecoach is meeting its contractual obligations to support the franchise, including with the full parent company support, and because it has operated the services on the east coast successfully, the department has concluded that there are no adequate legal grounds to restrict it from bidding on current and future franchise competitions on this basis. It will be understood that it is my duty to follow that legal advice, and I will therefore do so. But let me be clear: we will keep its eligibility for current and future bids under close scrutiny and constant review.

It is not just me who has encountered this restriction. Following the failure of National Express in 2009, the NAO report on the issue made it clear that the then Government and Secretary of State agreed that the company would not be precluded from bidding for future franchises. Indeed, it went on to win the c2c franchise in subsequent years. It is vital that we continue to focus our attention on delivering benefits for passengers across the network and secure the benefits of privatisation.

So, in addition to the transparent, rigorous process I have set out for the east coast, I am making some additional franchising announcements that will deliver benefits to passengers on the west coast and east Midlands routes. In December 2016, we set out our plans to award the West Coast Partnership—the franchise that will deliver the first passenger services on HS2. In that announcement, we made clear our intentions to agree a short, direct award with the incumbent to allow us the time necessary to design the West Coast Partnership. These negotiations have been completed and we have agreed a direct award with the existing operator, Virgin Trains West Coast. As set out 14 months ago, this is a sensible bridge between the existing contract and the West Coast Partnership, and once that partnership is ready, this direct award will cease to exist.

Let me be clear, the east coast and west coast franchises should not be confused. The west coast franchise has a completely different corporate structure, where Virgin Trains is the majority shareholder, and is meeting all its contractual obligations. Virgin has transformed the west coast from a poorly performing service requiring a subsidy of over £75 million a year to the franchise with one of the highest passenger satisfaction rates, at 91%, and returning over £200 million per year to the taxpayer. This has included introducing trains every 20 minutes between London and Manchester and London and Birmingham, hourly services between London and Scotland, installing wi-fi on all trains, lengthening Pendolinos to 11 carriages to accommodate growing passenger numbers, and introducing a free, at-seat entertainment service.

My decision is also in keeping with the three key principles I set out earlier in protecting passengers, ensuring value for money and supporting investment. I look forward to the release of the invitation to tender for the West Coast Partnership in due course, and I am confident we will see strong competition for this exciting new franchise, which will help transform rail travel in this country through the delivery of the first HS2 services.

We are also transforming the east Midlands franchise in the coming years, with the biggest investment in the Midland main line since it was completed in 1870. Passengers will benefit from more seats, new trains and dramatically reduced journey times from Nottingham and Sheffield to London. Once complete, there will be almost twice as many seats into London St Pancras in the peak compared with today. The next operator will be required to deliver many of these improvements, so I am today setting out the next step of the competition that will award this contract. Abellio, Arriva, Stagecoach and a joint venture between First and Trenitalia have all been shortlisted to run the east Midlands franchise that will deliver these improved services. As I said, the Government have no adequate legal grounds to restrict Stagecoach from bidding. The competition will be run on a fair, transparent basis, including new safeguards against overbidding. Ultimately, the winner will be the firm that offers the best service to passengers and best value to the taxpayer.

In a competitive market, franchises will sometimes fail. When that happens my duty is to protect passengers and taxpayers and ensure continued investment in the railway. Stagecoach has paid the price for failure, as stipulated in its contract. Passengers on the east coast main line can be assured that services will continue as normal. This Government will undertake a transparent appraisal of the options available to ensure that passengers and taxpayers are protected. We remain committed to the success of a private railway. It is vital we remember the benefits that privatisation has brought to our railway over the past 20 years. Passenger numbers have doubled. We have one of the safest railways in Europe. Passenger satisfaction is high across the network, and other countries are now adopting Britain’s model for running the railways. The plans I have set out today will allow the British public to continue to benefit from an ever-improving railway into the future. We have challenges to meet, but we will meet them. I commend the Statement to the House”.

18:58

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

I thank the noble Baroness for repeating the Statement made in the other place earlier today. Railways were privatised in 1994. Whatever we think of privatisation—there was lots going on at that time—it is fair to say that it has not gone well over the last few years. There were problems with Railtrack, Network Rail and various companies, and here we are again with another problem with the railways.

Today’s announcement by the Secretary of State, repeated by the noble Baroness, is just another monumental misjudgment, and adds to a growing list of miscalculations by the Secretary of State. I do not think that taxpayers or rail passengers are at the heart of this, or the rail industry itself. The culture in the Department for Transport is not serving the taxpayer or the travelling public well. I regularly use the railways in and around London as well as to and from the Midlands and the north of Scotland. With all the times that I have been detrained at Doncaster and elsewhere, and the problems and frustrations on the east coast line, it is really just not good enough.

It is frustrating to hear in the Statement what the Minister said about the new tender, that of course we cannot prevent the provider from actually tendering, because legally we are not allowed to do that. That is fair enough, but I recall the public sector being prevented from tendering for this contract; it was running it very well but was not even allowed to tender, which is very frustrating. If we want to get the best value for taxpayers, you want to get the best service possible.

I just do not believe that making direct awards to Virgin/Stagecoach on the west coast or east coast represents good value for money at all. I am really not convinced by that one little bit. We now have a number of train companies getting contracts without competition; many of our routes are now run that way—west coast, Great Western, east Midlands, CrossCountry and now east coast. That is because the Secretary of State is ideologically opposed to the public sector running railways; that is the political dogma that we have here today in front of us.

The Statement from the Minister is lengthy, and I have a couple of questions. The Statement said that the problem was that Stagecoach got the numbers wrong, that it overbid and is now paying the price. Maybe the Minister can explain to the House whether, when the bid was submitted—I assume that it was analysed and looked at—anybody anywhere thought, “Oh, maybe they’ve got their figures wrong here”. At the end of the day, of course you want to get a lot of money for your contract but, if it was actually not going to work, why did nobody spot that? Were any questions raised anywhere, when that contract came in? I would be very interested to hear what happened with that contract. Also, with regard to contracts in future, what is going to happen there?

The Statement talks about ensuring the,

“smooth running of the east coast franchise for its passengers”.

Can the Minister say a bit more about that? How will the Government ensure that it will be a smooth operation with no problems for passengers? I like the idea of this short-term, not-for-profit basis for a railway. That is the policy of the Co-operative Party. I have been a member of that party for many years, and we have a policy for a people’s railway, with the whole railway run on a not-for-profit basis. So I am delighted to see that, even if it is only in one small part of the policy, the Government have actually taken that point on board.

Can the Minister say a bit more about the operator of last resort? Who would that operator actually be? How would it actually be done? On the legal advice, the Minister said that they could not actually exclude Stagecoach or anyone who failed. Would it not be wise to draw up the contract in such a way that, if an operator fails to deliver on it, they cannot come straight back in and have that contract again? They may need to look at that as well because, if they cannot get the bid right, what is the point of having people running it who cannot get it done properly?

I shall leave it there and look forward to the Minister’s response on the issues that I have raised.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

I start from a rather different position, as I do not believe that the answer lies in renationalisation—but I am sure that the Minister will accept that things are not going well. We have had the fiasco of Southern and we have had Carillion being given more and more contracts, despite the profit warnings. We have had HS2 and the unauthorised payments, and now we have the east coast. The DfT seems to be presiding over a tale of muddle and huge commercial misjudgment.

The Secretary of State in his Statement says that Stagecoach/Virgin overbid. We all knew that it had done so; there was commentary in the commercial press at the time by other operators that this was a hugely overoptimistic bid. Why did the DfT allow that bid to go ahead if it was unrealistic?

The Statement says that,

“the franchise had breached a key financial covenant”.

Can the Minister please explain to us what that is, and why they are stepping in now as opposed to at any other point?

Much is made in the Statement of the £1 billion return to the public purse, but does the Minister accept that the railways are run as a service to passengers and that maybe the DfT is expecting far too great a return to the public purse, and the whole concept on which this is based is unrealistic? The Government are slowly reducing the percentage subsidy to our railways at a time when the railways are expanding and the number of passengers is generally increasing. Does the Minister accept that this is actually unrealistic as a way forward?

I am glad that the Statement includes options for the future and that among them it has the DfT as the operator of last resort. When that happened before, rather a good job was done by the state stepping in, and I urge the Government to do that in the case of Southern. Does the Minister consider that the concept of a franchisee needs to be expanded so that it includes public/private partnership and public sector bodies? Maybe mutual models, which involve staff and passengers, could be allowed to bid as well.

I also want to ask about the knock-on effect on other franchises. It is known that other franchisees are having a tough time. We need only a small hint of further problems in the economy and those franchisees could say, “The Government stepped in this time—why can they not step in and help us?”.

Finally, how is it that there is no adequate legal ground to exclude Stagecoach from further bids at this point? Surely the DfT should be writing the franchises more tightly than this.

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, as the Statement set out, our priority is to ensure the continued smooth running of the east coast main line for the passengers who use the service. As the Statement said, it has a 90% passenger satisfaction score, and we are looking at the future options for either direct operation through the DfT or Stagecoach continuing to operate. We will look at each of those options and work out the best solution to match the three principles set out. As the Statement says, it is a profitable line and we want that to continue in future.

On the franchising system and privatisation, the franchises will maintain an element of risk because they are run by private companies, and the success of the franchise is down to how they run the service. I think that the benefits of privatisation have been made clear in the Statement. I could add that, back in the mid-1990s, taxpayers paid out £1.8 billion in subsidies to the operators, and now the operators invest in the railways and pay premiums to the taxpayer—of £763 million last year. We have also seen investment of more than £6 billion from private investment over the last 11 years.

We are continuing to improve and refine the franchising model. Obviously there was an overbidding in this case, and we look at the performances of all franchises closely. In recent franchises, we have looked to take a different approach to the risks and are now moving more clearly towards the offer which will provide the highest-quality service for passengers and away from the highest bidder. The noble Baroness was absolutely right that passengers should be put first.

To address some of the lessons that we have learned from previous franchise evaluations, we have introduced new measures to deter overbidding as well as improving on our financial modelling and stress testing. With this added testing, the department will be able to forecast bids that are likely to default and exclude them in future. We have engaged with the market about those changes and continue to highlight to prospective bidders the more rigorous testing that bids will be subject to on the upcoming franchise competitions.

On the operator of last resort, there will be a team within the Department for Transport, supported by specialist advisers, to maintain continuity of passenger services. As I say, the changes in the rail strategy last year are designed to ensure that we get the best of both public and private sector worlds, and the new model will keep the benefits of privatisation while maintaining vital infrastructure in public hands. We have already begun this process of evolving how we run the railway.

19:09

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, there is a huge amount of waffle in the Statement that the noble Baroness has just repeated. But I shall cut through it: Chris Grayling, the Secretary of State, is undertaking another unjustified bailout of Virgin and Stagecoach at the expense of taxpayers. I would like to ask the noble Baroness a few questions about this bailout. First, will she confirm that Virgin has been awarded its new contract for the west coast main line without any competition whatever? Secondly, will she confirm that Stagecoach is being allowed to bid for the next three franchises despite walking away from the east coast main line? Thirdly, will she confirm that Mr Grayling appears, astonishingly, to be prepared to allow Stagecoach to continue operating the east coast line despite walking away from it, and that he has not ruled this out, although he is putting in place legal procedures that look to me to be the prelude to re-awarding it the contract? Fourthly—this affects my tenure in the office of Secretary of State personally—will she confirm that it is quite wrong to say that National Express was not banned by me from bidding for future contracts in 2009? It was banned. The incoming Conservative Government in 2010 lifted that ban, which is a fundamentally different point. I believe that that was a mistake and that it has prepared the way for the problems that we face today.

Finally, will the noble Baroness confirm that the reason for these disgraceful bailouts which we have seen from Mr Grayling is because he simply is not prepared to contemplate putting his duty above ideology and substituting for failing private companies a state company? This is not a matter of being left-wing or right-wing; it is a matter of him performing his duties as Secretary of State for Transport, which he is declining to do because, as we heard in the Statement, he wants to make a whole set of cheap points about “private good, public bad”, which I think demean his office and are costing the taxpayer very dearly indeed.

[Baroness Sugg]

I will attempt to answer the questions the noble Lord raises. If I do not manage to answer all of them, I will certainly follow up in writing.

I am afraid that we do not recognise the bailout accusation. As I said, Stagecoach will be held to all its contractual obligations in full. It has returned nearly £1 billion to the taxpayer and resulted in a nearly £200 million loss to the parent company. On the west coast line, it was a direct award and no other bidder was involved. As we stated in December 2016, we set out the plans to award the West Coast Partnership with that direct award. It is a short-term award and there was no other bidder involved. It was put in place before the new West Coast Partnership was awarded. On whether Stagecoach was allowed to bid for continued franchises, as we said, it will bid for the new east Midlands franchise. We are keeping the legal advice on that under review, and we will see what happens in the coming months, but as things stand Stagecoach is bidding for future franchises. The Secretary of State quoted the 2009 NAO report. I will send the noble Lord a copy.

[Lord Adonis]

It is not correct for the noble Baroness to say that National Express was not banned from bidding. It was banned from bidding.

[Lord Shutt of Greetland (LD)]

My Lords, there is a conflict in the Statement between what it is stated in paragraph 7:

“The business will continue to operate … with no impact on services or staff on the East Coast”,


and what is stated in paragraph 18:

“I have … asked my officials to conduct a full appraisal of the options available to the Government to ensure continuity of service”,


until the fresh start in 2020.

The noble Baroness may well recall that I tabled a Written Question last week, which she kindly answered on 1 February. I had had a look at the press release that was put out by Stagecoach when it got the franchise in the first place. It said that it would give us direct services from Middlesbrough to London, two-hourly direct weekday services between Bradford, Harrogate, Lincoln and London, and a new direct peak-time service between Huddersfield and London, to be established by May 2019. The noble Baroness answered that the Government:

“expect to provide additional services between Lincoln, Harrogate, Bradford and London from May 2019. It remains our intention to deliver additional services to Middlesbrough and Huddersfield”.

She does not say when. She continued:

“Virgin Trains East Coast has contingent rights to run services from London to Middlesbrough from May 2020 and firm rights from May 2021”.


I do not know how strong they will be now. I do not know when all this brewed up, but does she still stand by these services commencing in May 2019 that she signed off on 1 February?

[Baroness Sugg]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. On the issue of making sure that we get the decision right for passengers, as the Statement said, protecting the interests of passengers is the first principle which we look at and we will be looking at the comparison between the two on that basis. I have a copy of the reply to the noble Lord’s Question as I thought that he might bring it up; he helpfully read it out. We absolutely expect to meet those commitments. Whatever decision the Secretary of State makes on the running of the franchise up to 2019, whoever gets it will inherit those. Again, with the new partnership in 2020, they will be expected to deliver that.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I for one am rather relieved and reassured that the Government are stepping in before the situation adversely affects passengers. This is not a bailout if Stagecoach is losing £200 million. However, I am delighted to hear that this line makes a net contribution to taxpayers. It is a line well known to many in your Lordships’ House. However, I would be most grateful if my noble friend the Minister could give further details on how the Government will maintain the current high levels of customer satisfaction on this line.

[Baroness Sugg]

As I pointed out, there is a high level of passenger satisfaction on this line and we aim to continue to keep that. I reassure noble Lords that there will be no impact on the running of the trains and the services will continue. Tickets are valid as normal. The Secretary of State has today set out the options being considered for the future. We are working to ensure that passengers continue to receive the service they expect.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I detect a certain amount of ducking and diving in this very long Statement. I congratulate the Minister on keeping a straight face on some of it. However, the role of Network Rail is not mentioned at all. My understanding from several sources is that Stagecoach’s contract was based on Network Rail undertaking a large number of enhancements on the east coast main line so that Stagecoach could run more trains, and, presumably, get more revenue. This has not happened because, apparently, Network Rail has run out of money. Surely the answer is to give Network Rail the money to do that and not blame Stagecoach for everything that has gone wrong, as I think that most of the blame lies within the department and its own infrastructure manager, Network Rail. Perhaps the Minister would like to comment.

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, I agree that there is no simple reason why the franchise has failed; there are a number of reasons. The east coast has not performed as expected. It can be attributed to external factors which were not predicted. For example, the decrease in petrol prices resulted in increased competition. On the enhancements, from the start of this franchise to date all the infrastructure upgrades planned for the east coast have been delivered. Further upgrades for the route are planned but were not due to be completed by this stage. It is clear that Network Rail’s overall performance has not been satisfactory in recent years and we need a change within the business to deliver a more customer-focused policy. Network Rail has committed to transformation and an efficiency programme of change. That will see it judged on the performance it delivers for passengers in partnership with train operators. We continue to push Network Rail to devolve to ensure that there is one route managing director directly accountable to passengers.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness says that on a franchising system such as this operators will sometimes fail; I think those were her words. This is three times on the same route. I fancy that if GNER had been allowed to exit its contract on a basis as favourable as Stagecoach has been allowed to, with the possibility of rebidding, it might not have left the line in the first place, which would have been helpful as it was probably the best of the operators that we have had. But each time we are told, “Oh, the department is refining its system. It is all going to be better next time”. Given the three failures, is there really a system in place which can judge bids at all?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, on the failure of franchises, the Statement quoted the Brown review, which identified that it is neither sensible nor realistic to design franchise structures that seek to completely eliminate the risk of default. At the time, the department carried out an assessment to ensure that the bid was realistic and in the best interests of taxpayers and passengers. However, Stagecoach rightly took a degree of risk with its assumptions. I do not recognise the noble Lord’s view that this has been a favourable exit for Stagecoach. As I said, we are holding it to its obligations, and this has cost it dearly. It has lost almost £200 million running the service—a big sum for a company which is worth less than £1 billion.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that, contrary to what my noble friend said earlier, she did not keep a straight face while reading the Statement and grinned on a couple of occasions? This was entirely to her credit because she must know, in her heart, that the Statement is absolutely preposterous. This House is being asked to believe that the franchising system on the east and west coast has been perfect, yet a Statement is being made that both are being scrapped. The Minister said that there are no other bidders for the west coast, but no one has been asked to bid for it. If the late Brian Rix were still alive, he could have a Whitehall farce about the whole franchising business. Does the Minister accept that the Government have not come out of this business with any credit, either on the east or on the west coast? Can she confirm that whoever bids for the Midland main line will not be running electric trains to the great cities of Leicester, Nottingham and Derby but to the town of Corby, which until recently was not even on the railway map? That is not a railway project; it is lunacy.

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, I apologise if I did not keep a straight face throughout the Statement. I was a little distracted by the noise from the Benches on the other side. On bidders for the west coast and east coast, the noble Lord is absolutely right that there was a direct award for the west coast and we are considering the options for the east coast. Those are both short-term plans and in 2020 we will be opening them up to further bids. We look forward to receiving them to deliver what the passengers need.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, it seems to me that there is the past and there is the future, and I know that there has been a lot of agonising in the department on the future of franchising. Will my noble friend summarise the improvements to the franchising process that the Government are planning, including Network Rail’s role, to avoid the kind of problems that have been identified in relation to National Express, Stagecoach and so on? Can we look forward?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, I would absolutely love to look forward. As I set out, we are making improvements within the department. There was, obviously, a problem; the franchises failed and we are learning those lessons. We are introducing measures to deter overbidding and looking at our financial modelling and stress testing. We hope that, with this added testing, we will be able to forecast and exclude bids which are likely to default. We are continuously improving our risk-assessment process to reduce the likelihood of overbidding in the future. As I said, we are working with Network Rail to ensure that it devolves its services and performs better in future.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a regular passenger on Virgin west coast, a not infrequent user of east coast and someone who, from time to time, has to make use of the services from St Pancras. What has been sadly lacking in these exchanges is a tribute to the staff: the train drivers, train staff, platform staff, clerks and people operating the signal system, without whom the railways simply would not operate. We are blessed with an incredibly committed and, on the whole, cheerful staff who make sure the railways are a success. Do all these shenanigans, uncertainty and financial confusion give them the kind of support and structure they deserve? They are about serving the nation, not making profits. In that sense, will the Minister please accept that we have heard enough about the private sector being the right way to deliver public services? Look at the prisons, the probation service, and now the railways. Where is the practical, pragmatic evidence that what the Government claim is true, as distinct from ideological fulfilment?

[Baroness Sugg]

I am pleased that the noble Lord’s experience of staff on the trains is positive. He is absolutely right to say that they are committed. When we are making decisions about future franchises, we are also trying to provide consistency and structure for them, so that they have the security of knowing that the services will continue. I am afraid that I do not agree with the noble Lord on privatisation. I have spoken before about the amount of investment it has brought in. Passenger numbers have doubled; we have one of the highest satisfaction levels and safest networks in Europe. New trains would not have been delivered without private investment from rail franchising. Some 7,000 new carriages will be introduced to the rail network between now and 2021.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I share the interests of my noble friend Lord Judd as a regular traveller on Virgin trains and agree with his kind remarks about the staff. I seek a point of clarification from the Minister about what she said in the Statement and in answer to questions. Is she saying that the Secretary of State has no legal power to ban Stagecoach from seeking to operate this franchise in future? Is it being seriously suggested that if Stagecoach tried to take the Government to court, because it was not allowed to bid, a judge would uphold its right, given the way it has let down the taxpayer in this instance?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, as Stagecoach is meeting its contractual obligations to support the franchise, including full parent-company support, and because it has operated the services on the east coast, there are indeed no adequate legal grounds to restrict it from bidding in future franchise competitions. That is the current situation: we will continue to look at it as the months progress and we look at future franchises.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister in the other place set out some admirable principles that should be observed: protecting the interests of passengers; preserving the interests of taxpayers by ensuring value for money; and supporting investment and improvement. Looking to the future, the Minister has indicated a possibility that the current east coast franchise may stay with Stagecoach, under a very strictly designed and short-term arrangement. Will she spell out with more clarity what that involves? Unless there is some easement on the money side, the three principles which the Minister has set out cannot be met and there must be some give on at least one of them. What is likely to happen if we do go down that avenue?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, if Stagecoach continues to run the service and it is decided that this would be the best option for taxpayers and passengers, then that would be on a not-for-profit basis. By operating a not-for-profit service, VTEC would only receive a performance-related payment at the end of the contract, assuming that it met the stretch target set out by the department. That would ensure that VTEC would be wholly focused and incentivised to achieve excellent performance and would, consequently, provide a better experience for passengers over the life of a contract, but would not receive any moneys unless those targets were reached.

Role of Women in Public Life

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note (Continued)

19:29

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to join colleagues today in a debate commemorating 100 years since women were first enabled to vote. I pay tribute to all those women who campaigned, struggled and suffered, whether physically or mentally, but who refused to give up the fight for votes for women. I thank them for their courage, fortitude and determination to achieve a basic and fundamental right for women. I also thank all Members who highlighted the contributions and records of particular women throughout this long and important campaign.

Although 100 years is a long time, attitudes and mindsets have been very slow to change, as other noble Lords have said. The battles that the suffragettes and campaigners fought were to counter beliefs that women were intellectually inferior, incapable of understanding such things as politics, and downright dangerous if allowed to vote. Yet these same arguments are used today in discussions about extending the vote to 16 and 17 year-olds. I believe that they are as untrue today as they were then. Young people are not only capable of understanding and evaluating arguments but have to do so much more than perhaps their parents and grandparents did. As school curriculums have changed and learning has been transformed, both in method and substance, it is essential that proper education be provided so that our young people are enabled to be active, interested and sceptical citizens of the 21st century.

Education in citizenship in this country is patchy and variable in quality. How can such important subjects as how we are governed, our democratic rights and how we exercise these rights be considered optional? There has been much discussion on the failure of democracy and disenchantment among young people, yet they are the future and should have the chance to participate in an active way, to be consulted and to deliver their verdict through the ballot box. On the 100th anniversary of the granting of women’s franchise it seems timely to be considering extending democratic rights, including full education on government and citizenship, to 16 and 17 year-olds. I hope that the Government will be listening and will at least soon enable a consultation and public debate on the subject.

Coming back to women’s rights, there have been significant achievements. Many of us here today will have real-life experience of times when low status and even lower expectations were the norm for women. I can remember when I was growing up that the view was held by some that educating girls in anything other than basic skills and domestic tasks was a waste of time. Girls had to demonstrate much higher levels of ability to study science subjects and to be considered capable of higher education. Indeed, I knew many who did not challenge this and left school at 15 to go to work. My own mother, who was a widow, understood that sometimes, as happened to her, women had to manage alone and bring up their children without the support of a man, and that earning sufficient money was possible only with an education.

However, in 2016, 59% of all undergraduates were women and now they lead the way in high achievement. We have the Equal Pay Act and other rights for women, including maternity leave and pension entitlement. But after 100 years of progress, as other noble Lords have said, only 34% of MPs and 26% of Lords are women. It seems scarcely believable that only since 1958 have women been Members of this House. Equally, 60% of FTSE companies have failed to meet the 25% target for female representatives on their boards—and, despite the Equal Pay Act, the gender pay gap is still widening: it was 18.1% in 2016 and 18.4% in 2017.

Unsurprisingly, the historic gender pay gap results in a pension pay gap across every occupation. A report published in January 2018 from Aegon demonstrates that the pension pay gap gets worse as women get older. At 50, the average female pension is worth £56,116, and the average male pension is worth £112,789. A woman would have to find a contribution of £360 a month to gain equality with a man.

A recent IFS report says that for every £1 a man receives, a woman receives £32. Nearly a quarter of single female pensioners live in poverty. Women suffer as a result of the gender pay gap; they are not treated equally, so pension contributions are also unequal. Women suffer even at the end of their lives for having taken breaks in their career to have and bring up children. They are often in low-paid jobs with little pension, and are more likely to be part-time workers with limited entitlement. The OECD reports that the UK has the lowest state pension of any developed country as a percentage of earnings. There is also a high dependence on private pensions, where women receive much less than men. So I hope that, as part of the legacy of 100 years of women’s franchise, a revisiting of women’s pension rights—including the 1950s WASPI women, as described by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Donaghy—will pave the way for fair treatment of women and will provide all women with a pension they can live on.

The sacrifice made by so many campaigners places a responsibility on us all. We must step up the fight for equality of representation, reinvigorate our democracy and extend participation, and battle as the suffragettes did to end the injustice still suffered by so many women throughout their lives.

19:36

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

First, can I say how proud I am to be part of the 25% of speakers—in other words, men—who are speaking this afternoon and this evening? I hope that next year we can get closer to parity—so I shall be enlisting the help and support of my noble friend Lady Jenkin in this cause.

This debate is about the long fight for women to play their full part in the public life of our country. It is about the long battle against the deeply entrenched prejudice that there are jobs that women cannot do, should not do, or cannot do as well as men. The battle has gone on for a century—and it still goes on. Many noble Lords have of course mentioned the Act passed in 1918, which gave women—although only some—the vote and which allowed them to stand for the House of Commons. But a long road still lay ahead. It took another 40 years before women could become Peers and Members of the House of Lords.

Fast forward to 1957, when Harold Macmillan’s Conservative Government brought in the Life Peerages Bill. The Bill was broadly welcomed, but there was opposition to one provision: the admission of female Peers. I will give your Lordships an indication of the kind of prejudice that the campaigners were up against, even as recently as the 1950s. I will read to your Lordships what one Peer said in that debate:

“Frankly, I find women in politics highly distasteful … I believe that there are certain duties and certain responsibilities which nature and custom have decreed men are more fitted to take on … It is generally accepted … that a man’s judgment is generally more logical and less tempestuous than that of a woman. Why then should we encourage women to eat their way, like acid into metal, into positions of trust and responsibility which previously men have held? … If we allow women into this House, where will this emancipation end?”.


He ended his speech by saying that,

“we like women: we admire them; sometimes we even grow fond of them; but we do not like them here”.—[Official Report, 3/12/1957; cols. 710-11.]

Fortunately, the House of Lords overruled him. To give that Peer credit, 25 years later he happily and loyally served in the Government of Margaret Thatcher and disowned his remarks.

However, progress elsewhere was still slow. I was amazed to realise that it was not until the 1960s that we had the first female judge, and we had to wait until the 1970s before women were admitted as members of the London Stock Exchange. Then there was a big breakthrough in 1975 with the election of a woman to lead the Conservative Party. At the time, many people thought that a woman leader, whom they caricatured as shrill and shallow, would be an electoral disaster for the Conservatives. I am told that on the evening that Mrs Thatcher was elected leader, Denis Healey went round the House of Commons poking Conservative MPs in the ribs and saying, “Out for a generation. Out for a generation”. Of course, Mrs Thatcher became the longest-serving Prime Minister of the century.

Whatever one thinks of her politics, she showed the world and a new generation of women that a woman can do a man’s job. Indeed, so much so that when in 1990 John Major became Prime Minister, my 11 year-old niece was shocked to find a man doing the job. She thought that, with the Queen as sovereign and Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister, women running the country in a kind of matriarchy was the norm and that a male Prime Minister was rather strange.

But still the battle had to go on—and it carries on today, well into the 21st century. I refer of course to the BBC. The BBC apparently committed to transparency—but in name only, because for years it hid the gender pay gap, which at last has been exposed. I saw Carrie Gracie give evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee last week. I heard her say, as people will have read, how the BBC had tried to justify her unequal pay by telling her that for the first three years as the BBC’s China editor she had been “in development”. Those in the BBC responsible for that should be ashamed of themselves. Christina Lamb, the highly distinguished journalist who has worked for the Financial Times and the Sunday Times, was on “Desert Island Discs” a couple of weeks ago. She said that in 30 years she had never had a female foreign or news editor.

So prejudice persists and, sadly, it still does in some areas of politics. Seven years ago, in 2010, John McDonnell MP said that he wished he could go back in time and assassinate Margaret Thatcher. Then in 2014 he repeated remarks which had been made by somebody else about lynching Esther McVey. I played it back last night. Far from condemning the remarks, he quoted them approvingly—and they were followed by laughter from the audience. I know that he has now tried to disown those remarks—and rightly so, because surely, following the murder of Jo Cox, people should realise how inflammatory and dangerous such casual language can be. Therefore, I welcome the prospect of legislation from this Government to protect parliamentary candidates from abuse and intimidation.

This is a hugely important debate and I have only one regret—I wish that more men were taking part in it.

19:44

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, and perhaps I may match him story for story. In 1834, when this building was burned down, the House of Commons had to meet in the old House of Lords, which had somehow miraculously survived. In 1835 there was a proposal that galleries should be added to the Chamber so that women could come to watch the proceedings. The House of Commons, to a man, was shocked at the idea that women should be allowed to watch them. As one Member said, if women were there, it would cramp their style—I have put that into modern parlance—and therefore it would be a bad thing. Luckily, they were overruled and women were able to watch politicians in Parliament. So progress has been made, although it has been rather slow.

I have another story. In about 1974—I think it was before Mrs Thatcher was elected as leader—I was babysitting my young daughter, who was about two or three years old, and I took her to the LSE. It was a glorious summer’s day and we were standing outside a pub. Robert McKenzie, my colleague at the LSE, was there and I said, “What do you think of Shirley Williams’s future? How soon do you think she could be Prime Minister?”. Robert McKenzie looked at my daughter and said, “It will be lucky if we have a woman Prime Minister by the time your daughter attains maturity”. In 1974 he thought that there would not be a woman Prime Minister for another 20 years. So sometimes time speeds up and sometimes it is very slow.

We have heard lots of very good speeches, especially reminiscences and examples of people who are not in the public eye. I want to make a suggestion which has not been made so far. I think that we need a museum for the women’s franchise and their struggle for the vote. I have recently been associated with another museum which my wife has set up, the theme of which is the partition of India and Pakistan. Memories are still alive there—they have been recorded. We can still record people’s memories about their mothers and other people they knew. Those memories of women who were local councillors, mayors and so on need to be preserved for posterity. If we do not do so, they will be lost. It would involve a lot of work and a lot of money, which I am sure could be raised from private donations. I urge not necessarily the Government but people here to make a concerted effort to set up a museum to pay tribute to women’s progress in our society. Of course, there has not been enough progress, as we all know.

In this debate there has been talk about suffragettes versus suffragists, but I do not think you can have one without the other. The suffragists, starting in the 1890s, patiently burrowed away at Parliament but eventually it was the suffragettes who made progress. They may have publicly lost the support of the Commons but I can tell your Lordships that the Members of the Commons were frightened out of their wits. The suffragette movement was perhaps the most violent political movement in the British Isles—even more violent than many trade union movements had previously been. However, something like that had to be done to wake people up to the fact that there was a burning desire on the part of women to get some sort of equality. Of course, the First World War helped as well. It was not just the suffragettes and suffragists; Rosie the Riveter helped too. Had women not worked as a vital part of the wartime economy, men would not have realised that women could do more than just sit at home and cook. Therefore, those three things—the suffragettes, the suffragists and the First World War—together were very helpful in building the case for women’s suffrage.

Many noble Lords have mentioned that, yes, there has been equal suffrage, but there has not been equality. One has to say that getting the vote is a very small part of the struggle for equality. There is no equality among men, there is no equality among women and there is no equality between men and women. Political action and political democracy are a very small part of what generates the day-to-day inequalities in income and wealth. We could talk about all sorts of disadvantages that we find very hard to remove, and there are parts of the world that still have gender selection of children. Women suffer disadvantages from birth onwards. Very often, even well-to-do families will send their boys to private school but their girls to the local state school. The advantages for the male child are built in from the early years onwards. Those things add up.

Substantial equality between men and women and between all people is a distant goal that we will be able to achieve, but political action is one thing that we can do now collectively. That is why it is important that we go on, through the legislative process, trying to remove the many disadvantages that women suffer. We must hope that, in the future, other people will follow our path and achieve equality. So I welcome this debate and I look forward to the debate in 10 years’ time, when we will celebrate the centenary of universal adult franchise. That is when the country became a real democracy.

Let me add one more thing. The impact of 1918 and 1928 was even more profound on the Commonwealth. All the countries that became independent from the Commonwealth had, at the outset, universal adult franchise. India had universal franchise for men and women in 1950, upon its birth. That would not have happened without 1918. That is a tribute to what was achieved.

19:52

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Vere of Norbiton for moving this Motion to mark 100 years of women winning the right to vote. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Desai, with whom I agreed on quite a lot.

It is always good to stand and reflect on how far we have come and how much more there is to achieve. It is right to pay tribute to the extraordinary—and the ordinary—women who put their lives on the line for equality, and to those who have tirelessly and passionately advanced the cause, a number of whom are sitting in the Chamber this evening. But we should remember the motto adopted by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters when they founded the WSPU: “Deeds not words”. It is easy to talk about equality and to impose arbitrary quotas. It is far harder to ensure that all talent flourishes and to show the courage, honesty and relentless determination needed to tackle the real problems.

The increase in the number of female Conservative MPs owes a huge debt to a force of Baronesses—my noble friend Lord Sherbourne assured me earlier that “force” was the correct collective noun. The combined force of my noble friends Lady Seccombe, Lady Morris and Lady Jenkin has certainly helped to support and promote many female MPs and candidates. I know that when my noble friend Lord Maude, as party chairman, made it his mission that the Conservative Party’s MPs should be more representative of modern Britain, many were sceptical about whether we could succeed without all-women shortlists. I have heard the persuasive arguments in the Chamber, but I still believe that quotas and targets are rarely the answer by themselves. Persuasion and merit work far better.

While the battle is well under way, it is far from won. The moral and business cases for promoting women are beyond question, so we need to ask ourselves why more women do not rise to the top tiers of public life. While organisations mostly acknowledge the need to be more inclusive and policy intentions are clear, their implementation is often inconsistent, unco-ordinated and lacking in real drive and commitment. “Deeds not words” must remain the maxim.

The narrow focus on targets and quotas has failed to change the culture, and indeed can sometimes harm the cause. Our successful experience during the coalition Government of increasing the number of women appointed to the boards of public bodies demonstrated that quotas in isolation had previously failed to work. They failed to address the real barriers and obstacles that women faced. A key point was that the insistence on track record and proven experience meant that the same candidates were constantly being recycled from one board to another and did not allow for new participants. By replacing such a requirement with an emphasis on talent and ability, we managed to expand the field of female candidates. We made other small changes, such as the requirement that job advertisements should be written in intelligible English, and we held events to persuade and encourage women to apply. It was not rocket science, but the difference was quite clear: over 45% of appointments to public bodies in 2016-17 were to women, which continued an upward trend from five years ago when the figure stood at 34%.

We applied a similar practical approach when tackling gender diversity in the Civil Service. We commissioned a report from the Hay Group, which was given a remit to be brutally honest, identify real problems and barriers, and make practical recommendations. Its Women in Whitehall report was an eye-opener. Despite policy being broadly in line with best practice, and in some cases being described as “leading edge”, the culture and leadership climate was identified as preventing women progressing into senior roles. Line manager practice was variable, so experiences of leadership and talent were something of a lottery. Many women simply did not believe that the rhetoric on policy and promotions matched the reality on skills and behaviours.

I do not have time to go into all the detailed findings, and I am sure noble Lords are grateful for that, but I will highlight some of the more revealing. One man described the contrast between the stated way that promotions are made—on competence—and the way that they are really made, which was on personal recommendation and cronyism. A woman described how she applied for a promotion but failed to get an interview because,

“I would have performed better than the preferred candidate—it was his turn for promotion”.

The leaders of the Civil Service were described as simply “not leading” and the culture as “cut-throat and underhand”. It was all quite shocking, and we commissioned further reports on LGBT, BME and those with disabilities, which in turn informed the Talent Action Plan, published in March 2015.

I mention this plan because I fear that what has subsequently happened highlights the ongoing gap between words and deeds. The Talent Action Plan was a two-year plan with key deliverables and specific and measurable objectives. In March 2016, the Cabinet Office published a detailed progress report, highlighting an increase in unconscious bias training and that all Permanent Secretaries now had diversity objectives. However, it is relatively easy to increase training and to write objectives; it is far harder to address underlying problems of culture and the various application of policies across departments. The two-year progress report on the implementation of the Talent Action Plan was due last March. It has not been published. The Minister for BEIS at the time wrote after a debate in April to say that the,

“Civil Service has implemented the majority of actions”.

The plan has now been superseded by the diversity and inclusion strategy, which tells us:

“We have made good progress but we know that we need to go further”.


There is no granular and transparent evidence to show what practical advances were made, what remedies worked and what practical issues remain. This was the original commitment. I worry that without such focus the diversity and inclusion strategy will be yet another grand strategy, full of bland and worthy platitudes, but which, like so many, fails to implement itself.

The commitment to women’s progress in public life is hard work and we need to get it right. It requires strong leadership and concerted action. I applaud, admire and pay tribute to those who fight, and who have fought, long and hard, but the battle is not over. It will not be over until the old joke—“That’s a very good point, Miss Smith, perhaps a man would like to make it”—becomes unrecognisable and part of history. I fear that we are still some way off that time.

19:59

[Baroness Goudie (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, who has been working on the issues that I and others have been working on and will talk about this evening. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, for arranging this historic debate today to celebrate 100 years of the Representation of the People Act 1918 receiving Royal Assent and the continuing role of women in public life. What would have happened without the passion and commitment of our ancestors, those old and young and from all work walks of life who were bound together to pursue, demonstrate and lobby politicians until it was accepted that women should have the vote? They went down many difficult roads.

In 1918, the vote gave women from the age of 30 with property the right to vote in parliamentary elections for the first time. The key development of women having the right to stand for election to the House of Commons quickly followed. In 1928, women had equal voting rights to men. In our House, it took some time and we saw the creation of women life Peers in 1958. I thank the late Baroness Bea Serota, who was a great mentor to me. When I was a local councillor, she was in Camden while I was in Brent. When I came to this House, she was wonderful to me right up until she died.

I would like to think that, in Great Britain, we are leading the world on women in public life. To an extent we are, compared with a lot of other places, including America, which I have to say is going backwards. We were brought up years ago to think that America was the future, but it is no longer and they are having to fight today to keep the rights that none of us thought would be taken away from women. We must also look today to ensure that the rights that we have can never be taken from us.

Great Britain has women in public life. We have more women qualified as lawyers, doctors, engineers and accountants and in the STEM subjects. But where are they at the top? They are not getting the opportunity to move further up, and we have to fight for that.

The debate is to celebrate what we have achieved in the past and where we wish to be. Moving forward, after the next general election, I think that we are agreed across the political divide that we would like to see a larger proportion of women in Parliament and in the elected Assemblies. We should be striving for 50%. To achieve that, political parties must agree to having all-women shortlists for the next three elections. It is possible under the Equality Act. We should take a lead from my party, which did this with the help of the trade unions and the leadership of Harriet Harman and Prime Minister Blair. That made the change for our party. Unfortunately, we did not continue in that way with all-women shortlists and there were other difficulties around the electorate. We should try together to push for that because that will really make the change.

Women are often discouraged from standing because of the violence and verbal harassment against other women politicians that they have seen in the media and in the way that they have been stalked. We need to see legislation tougher and quicker in these situations.

We must look for a way to make the pipeline easier for women to become interested in politics—not just turning up, as we all know, to the dreadful branch meetings that are all right for the very committed. They will come later. Let us really encourage women; then they can see some of the more boring sides of life, which are also important because we cannot get policy change without meeting with the electorate.

With Britain’s influence, we can persuade other countries to have better representation of women. We know in countries that are war-torn, part of the peace process is to have a 50:50 Parliament. On that issue, we must also ensure that Britain takes a firm stand about women at the peace table. Local women are there. They make the decisions, as I have told this House many times. War is over when women say that enough is enough. They have every right to be at the peace table, as they fought for in Northern Ireland. We need to have more women who are trained, as they are being trained at the LSE and in Georgetown, to be part of that peace process with other women parliamentarians. When women are in Parliament and at the peace table, the peace lasts; when it is only men, it lasts five minutes. It is an important issue for us and for this House. Women bear the brunt of all of this.

I ask noble Lords to think about the women in the FTSE 100 and in the 250. Where are the women CEOs? The disproportionate number of women is staggering. In 2010, the 30% Club was launched in the United Kingdom by me and my colleague Dame Helena Morrissey and it is now in many major countries around the world. The goal is to reach a percentage of 30% of women executives in the boardroom and on executive committees by 2020. The 30% Club has developed what has become an international business-led approach for developing a pipeline of senior executive talent. The 30% Club does not believe in quotas. We believe in a voluntary, business-led approach to realise meaningful and sustainable change.

Our plan works in conjunction with senior business leaders, government, men and women working together to achieve measurable change. Our strategies complement individual company approaches and networking. With the help of the Davies commission and now Hampton-Alexander, we hope to be able to take things further forward.

Statistics show that companies with more diverse boards perform better. One reason is that diverse boards often better mirror customer and client bases. Having a diverse board can help better understand purchasing and consumption decisions, particularly because women drive 70% to 80% of all purchasing. Listening to and including the viewpoints of a diverse board brings a new perspective and new ideas. Above all, it helps the organisation to succeed.

I ask noble Lords today not only to acknowledge and celebrate the changes that have taken place for women in the past 100 years but to realise that, deep within, these changes took strength, grit and perseverance to come to fruition. I ask all of us in this Room to capture a sense of that strength and courage in order to continue to take action for true equality for women. It was not easy 100 years ago for our forefathers who started the momentum. It is our job and our duty to continue to look for a robust pipeline for the future leaders of this country.

20:06

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am a representative of the minority 25%. Indeed, it is slightly worse than that, because I am a hereditary Peer with an older sister.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Addington]

Yes. I thought that my spiritual gum-shield might be required today.

If we accept that we have a society comprised of more than 50% of one group, that group should probably be represented in roughly that number among those who make the decisions about it. You will understand it better and have a better way in and so forth. You will be able to understand the pressures and things going on. That is a reasonable assumption to make. But it is one that has the weight of history against it. It also has a great track record of people trying to change that. That is what drew me to this debate. Why has it not happened?

A hundred years ago, women arrived as voters, and very closely after that they arrived as representatives. Then there was a very staggered process through. The amazing thing, looking at the guidance provided by the Library, was that in 1964 we had 29 female MPs. We did not exceed that number until 1987—six general elections in a row there were fewer. That suggests that positive action is required. Then we should discuss what type of action.

We have heard two primary schools of thought here—either to change the structure or to drive change through by action out there with shortlists. I suspect that we will have to work from both to achieve change if we are not to wait another 100 years to get close. But if we achieve change only by affirmative action, we have also failed. You have achieved balance when getting 50% is not a big deal and is not a surprise. You have it when you get to the point where you can say, “This time it was 52% and then it was 48%”. That is what happens when you achieve true equality.

How do we get there? The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, who is also a friend, said that we should work across the parties and learn from each other. That is because we seem to agree on the target. There are different ways to move forward and different pressures, but unless we start to learn from each other, we are not actually going to achieve the target. The cultures and political stresses in the parties will fight against each other and slow things down unless we can establish a degree of consensus. The great virtue of this House is that we can probably start to get some consensus a little more easily than you can down the Corridor, and that is a fact. We are dealing with a practical question, and unless we work together, we will not get there as quickly, easily and sustainably as we might otherwise.

The other thing that attracted me to this debate was the fact that gender balance in representation is another example of how, if you want to change society, you have to be incredibly persistent. Most of the activities I have taken on in this House have been in the area of disability, where you hear similar types of arguments in different packages: “Oh, you can’t do that because”, or, “I know we can make the change, but really we haven’t done it before”, or, “What do you mean I have got to change the way I behave?”. That last is the worst one, and if anyone who has worked in this field has not come across it, I will buy them many beers. It is something that we have to address, so taking the messages from this area of social change is very valuable because, let us face it, it is the one which has the most experience and the most form. You also have potentially the biggest lobby, and it might set good examples to help you carry on. But unless there is a coherent attitude of persistence by saying that certain changes must be made, all of these areas will struggle.

We hear things like, “It doesn’t concern me and it’s okay because no one’s complained”. That is the best one. “We have never asked the question, we have never considered it, it has never arisen, so there is no problem and let’s move on”. You might hear, “We’ve passed a bit of legislation, so for the politicians the job is done”. We only get dragged back to look at an issue when the campaigners say, “It hasn’t worked”, or, “It hasn’t worked properly”. We must take this example into all areas of social change so that we go back, re-examine and make sure that what we are doing is right. Ultimately, time has to be spent on readdressing issues.

What we do not do, and this is a problem across Parliament as a whole, is say, “Okay, we have passed the law, so now let’s see how it works in practice”. If we had done that in the areas I have talked about and in the areas other noble Lords could talk about it—if passing a law were enough—there would not be a problem. “We have the Equality Act. Hey, job done and problem solved. Go away”. But it does not happen like that, because you have to go in and back it up. We have two models in this area: affirmative action and culture change. Unless we learn to bring them together, we are going to come back and applaud ourselves for making small changes, not for the big ones. I hope that we can make progress and take the examples set in this area into other parts of our society that desperately need them.

20:13

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with so much of what the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has just said. Women are now leading and shaping this country like never before, but while it is right to recognise progress, it would be wrong to become complacent. I am afraid that once you scratch the surface, it is clear that there is still significant inequality of power between men and women in this country. The quality of women in Parliament does go some way to making up for the lack of quantity, and we on the Conservative Benches owe my noble friends Lady Jenkin, Lady Seccombe and Lady Morris a great deal on this front. So although the situation is much improved, female levels of representation are still a long way from being good enough. We, like the other place, need to be more representative of society generally, and if not, we surely risk being irrelevant and some of the rocks that are thrown at us are sometimes justified.

We all know why women are not running into politics in their droves. Spectacles like PMQs, with all its braying and shouting, are big turn-offs, as is the combative, aggressive default position of many politicians. We need to show each other more respect in politics. We all want the same thing after all, which is to make the country a better place, but we sometimes disagree on the route to get there. More signs of working together to get the right outcome and less division would make political life more appealing to many people, and not just women. We also need to practise what we preach in Westminster. There would be outrage if business tried to ape some of our loose employment structures. Harriet Harman made this point well last week. If we want more women to seriously consider politics as a career, which no one disputes we do, then we have to find ways to make ourselves more appealing and more modern.

The media also have a part to play in this. I do not suggest that they should stop holding politicians to account by going soft, but I do think the relentless aggression sometimes shown to reasonable politicians simply setting out their stall must surely eat away at the numbers of women wanting to sign up to life as an MP. Technology is supposed to be a great leveller, but with the easy availability of hardcore porn often degrading women and the seemingly endless pressure to be body beautiful, social media need to make sure they do not play an unintended part in holding women back. Moreover, the persistent trolling and intimidation of MPs, or indeed anyone, on Twitter for standing up for their views is a sickening and unattractive development of public life.

This debate is about recognising the progress that has been made in increasing our numbers in Parliament, but we have a duty to represent those who are nowhere near public life, and I want to broaden my speech out with that in mind. All of us recognise that there is no easy switch that can simply be flicked to solve the stubborn issue of gender inequality. The subject is complex and tied up with long-standing cultural attitudes that both men and women still hold. While I do not pretend to have all the answers, a good place to start is being more honest and open about the potential barriers.

First, deeply ingrained gender stereotyping starts early on. When my daughter was barely four years-old she bounced in to the kitchen saying, “Mummy, I want to be a nurse”. I was delighted, until she followed up by saying, “I would quite like to be a doctor, but only boys can be doctors”. This was last year. I have no idea where she gets this into her head—in fact I do, it is “Peppa Pig”, but moving on—but it serves to highlight my point that it starts early and is very subtle. It can still subconsciously drive women and men down different paths.

Secondly, we should be open and cognisant of the female tendency to be a bit more cautious. I have done it myself and I have witnessed it time and again in both my professional and my personal life—passing off opportunities or perhaps not speaking out in that crowded meeting because I did not feel 100% qualified. We need to engender girls from an early age with a strong and resilient self-belief. We also need to keep that ambition going throughout their lives.

I also thank my mother, who is watching this debate. She gave up her career to look after us, so I owe her a great deal. To borrow a phrase from others this evening, I do indeed stand on her shoulders.

I have been unbelievably fortunate in my career. I have had several brilliant bosses—all male, I might add—who never put any limitations on what they felt I could achieve. I drew enormous confidence and strength from their belief in me. I do not think it can be underestimated how powerful mentoring and coaching can be. It frustrates me that it is very often still only the preserve of senior executives. It should be encouraged right from the get go, starting in education and continuing throughout a career.

Finally, on children and jobs, we should be honest about how challenging this can be, if and when children come along. All the talk of superwomen having it all is not very helpful to most women in this country. “Leaning in” is all very well if you are a highly paid executive with wraparound childcare, but less so if you are a single parent or if both of you work very long hours and there is a hard stop for nursery pick-up. It also should not be a crime against your career to want to see your children awake during the week.

Organisations that show little or no flexibility will lose good people, but particularly women. Women do not want special treatment, but we do deserve a level playing field. If a woman takes time out to have a child then companies must try to ensure that the broken service does not serve to level off her opportunities. They must also try to help her maintain the same level of ambition.

Laws and legislation are not the only answer, but the Government should be rightly praised for the proactive role they have played. Shared parental leave and gender pay reporting are arguably the biggest thunderclap moments for this agenda in many years. Legislation makes organisations and companies look at themselves in the mirror and ask painful questions, forcing them to interrogate internally. “Could we change the culture at the top to promote fairness? Are we creating an environment where the juggle is sustainable? Is there flexibility? Is there an option of a meaningful job share, weekend travel bans and”—most importantly in my mind—“a stamping out of a macho culture that sniggers behind its hand at shared parental leave or dads playing a bigger role?”. Equality at home is the ultimate game-changer for equality in the workplace.

Nothing in isolation offers an overnight panacea, but I hope they all add up and over time help to shift attitudes even further. The signs are good: the intellectual argument has been won. Nobody could argue that society is not far healthier if it is balanced and fair, but we must march on and keep the pressure up to make sure a debate such as this at the bicentenary would be long obsolete.

20:21

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, I so welcome this debate. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, for introducing it with such vigour. Speeches from men and women in such debates are always enjoyable and powerful. It is always wonderful to hear how so many amazing women are being celebrated. Women may not be content, rightly, with underrepresentation in Parliament or in top jobs, with unequal pay and other gender discrimination, and with unacceptable harassment and abuse, but women have much to be proud of and to rejoice in.

I am proud that last week, in the Second Reading of the withdrawal Bill in your Lordships’ House, 48 women spoke confidently and incisively on divisive issues. From these Benches, I was proud of the scintillating performances of my noble friends Lady Smith and Lady Hayter, a team who have worked tirelessly, endlessly and patiently to present so effectively the complexities facing us regarding Brexit. The debate was relatively respectful and good humoured on all sides, from men and women. It was an example of knowledgeable and analytical presentation, enhanced, I believe, by the presence of women, just as I believe that today’s debate is enhanced by the participation of 10 men—most of them are not here, but there were 10 altogether. I am proud that women are moved to protest against put-downs, insults and affronts to their bodies. On 20 January, women in the United States marched in cities to protest against the Trump concept of their place in society. My daughter, an American, was there and sent me a picture of a placard saying: “We are the granddaughters of the witches you never burned”. Anyone from Lancashire or Massachusetts will appreciate that remark and celebrate women’s resilience and determination.

It is a good sign that one daily newspaper last week had a huge spread on the history of women’s suffrage. It is wonderful that cities around the UK will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act in dynamic ways in the coming months. I know there are problems with grass-roots funding for projects and I regret that, but today in my local tourist office in Lewes, Sussex, I saw a wonderful window display on women and the vote, together with comments from young people expressing their disappointment that they are not able to vote at 16. I agree with them. I look forward to the Museum of London’s “Votes for Women” exhibition, our own parliamentary “Voice and Vote” in Westminster Hall and the Pankhurst Centre in Manchester’s year-long celebration of the suffragette movement.

Manchester was, of course, where Emmeline Pankhurst held the first meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. It may not be generally known that Pankhurst was voted the greatest northerner in history in a recent poll. A statue to her will be unveiled in Manchester in 2019. I was born and brought up close to Manchester and I am proud of the northern suffragettes; not all upper-class ladies but also women who worked in mills and in domestic service. In passing, I say that while we celebrate women in public life we should also celebrate the women who may never be in public life, nationally or internationally, but who work hard and diligently to bring up children, to care for members of their family, to do volunteer work, work in the professions and toil in the lower ranks of politics—we all know what that is like. Here’s to them.

Just after the women’s march, I read in an American magazine comments on the #MeToo movement. It reminded me that women attain professional goals, or sometimes simply do a job, under duress and discrimination. This means that courage and drive play a part. I quote from that article:

“Women in positions of power know one thing for sure: they’re leaving the world a much better place than they found it”.


Studies have shown that female participation in the labour market improves the strength of economies. From working on boards and in Parliament, I believe that women’s contributions improve the depth and quality of decision-making. There is much more to be done in persuading women into and retaining them in public life. It is true that powerful women will leave a legacy, but not without tapping the shoulders of the next generation to continue the fight.

Speaking of tapping the shoulder, Millicent Fawcett acknowledged Mary Wollstonecraft as the “leader in the battle” for votes. One was born in 1759, the other in 1847. Fawcett will shortly have a statue in Parliament Square. Wollstonecraft, for some inexplicable reason, has no memorial except her novels, histories, the great treatise “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” and, of course, as the mother of Mary Shelley. Surely it is time that she received some visible accolade as a leader in the feminist movement.

I move on to more recent events, with two women of contrasting backgrounds that I want to mention again. Nancy Astor became the first woman MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. In her maiden speech she spoke these words:

“I am simply trying to speak for hundreds of women and children throughout the country who cannot speak for themselves”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/2/20; col. 1631.]


It is a familiar theme in our Parliament. Margaret Bondfield, a working-class girl from Somerset, became the first female Cabinet member in 1929, in a Labour Government. She witnessed first-hand the drudgery of women and the lack of prospects for women shop workers, and became an active union member, determined to improve equality for women. I cite but two examples of women politicians down the years who have striven mightily for justice and democracy. There have so been many and I am delighted that today we acknowledge and celebrate them.

20:29

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Vere of Norbiton for moving the Motion marking such a monumental milestone in the life of our democracy and, indeed, civilisation. Although it was long overdue, it is hard to believe that a whole century has passed since women over 30 were allowed to vote in parliamentary elections for the first time, so significant have the achievements been since then. Who could possibly have conceived that only 51 years after the 1928 Act which gave women the right to vote on the same terms as men, we would have our first woman Prime Minister and now, 90 years later, our second? What a tribute that simple fact is to women, to have overcome such prejudice in the public service of our country and its people, and how much richer we are as a society for that, in so many ways. Yet it is worth reflecting that until relatively recently all of this was a pipe dream. As the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said, who would have thought it possible?

I will not repeat the key developments about which we have already heard from my noble friend and other noble Lords. I am sure they fill us all both with pride in the progress that has been made to date and, as other noble Lords, such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Gale and Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, have argued, an impatience for the further progress that still needs to be made to ensure that women realise their potential in public life. I say that not just because I acknowledge their right to realise their potential but because it is something that society has a direct stake in—as my noble friend Lady Seccombe told us, it is society as a whole that benefits and has benefited so much over the past 100 years as women have contributed more and more to our parliamentary democracy and other fields.

Marking this centenary is of course a cause for celebration, and yet it is more than that. The remarkable progress achieved by women in public life, particularly when one considers for how long their exclusion had been normalised, is also a cause for hope, not just for other women but for me personally and other disabled people who still face discrimination, as I appreciate some women do—although, I would suggest, to a lesser extent, at least here in the UK. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned disability. We are light years behind the progress made by women. Disability discrimination is still embedded in our culture. Nowhere is it more normalised—more institutionalised—than in the way that a human being diagnosed before birth with a disability such as mine is devalued on account of their disability, to the extent that they are regarded not just as worth less than a non-disabled human being but as worthless, disposable right up to birth, specifically for being diagnosed with a disability.

So why do I, as a severely disabled person, draw hope from this centenary? I do so because it reminds us of a simple but fundamentally important lesson which the experience of the past 100 years teaches us, which is that, as my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, highlighted, attitudes change; that how we look at each other and how we value each other can change so radically as to be revolutionary; and that progress which once seemed inconceivable can be achieved and enduring cultural change can follow.

I will always remember reading as a teenager about someone I do not think has been mentioned so far: Emily Davison, a suffragette who tragically lost—many say gave—her life when she ran in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby 105 years ago in 1913. I ask that while we reflect on her sacrifice for the right to vote, we also reflect on all those human beings diagnosed as female and disabled before birth, whose equal right to exist, to become women, to vote and to contribute to public life has been denied on account not of their sex but of their disability. Their potential contribution—perhaps one of them could have been our first disabled woman Prime Minister—has been lost for ever because the diagnosis of disability before birth denied them the most basic right of all, the equal right to exist. That is our tragic loss as a Parliament and as a people.

I close with this question for the Minister: would it not be wonderful to have as a clear goal the election of many more disabled women to show by their example, as their non-disabled counterparts have done, that being born with a disability need not prevent a woman—or, for that matter, a man—making a significant contribution to public life in the service of our great country? What better way to build on the progress of the suffragettes and since, and thereby disprove enduring discriminatory attitudes that so devalue disabled human beings, male and female alike, before they are even born?

20:37

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, like many other speakers in today’s debate, I took inspiration from a couple of women I know of. The first was my great-grandmother, who got up before dawn to make sure that she was the first woman who voted in her mining village in Scotland. The second was called Elizabeth Downie. In 1948, I understand, she proposed the resolution to the NALGO conference to get rid of the married women’s work bar. Within her family, she was known as “Red Betty”. Some years later, when I started to go out with her daughter, who is now my wife, I am not sure what alarmed her more: the fact that her daughter had taken up with a woman or the fact that I was a Liberal Democrat.

The theme I want to explore this evening is hidden history. I was inspired in part by going to a lecture at the LSE library last week. It was about Sapphic suffragettes. It is possible that they were not all straight. It is a bit more difficult to assert that some of them were lesbians, but there is a fairly reasonable case to be made that they could have been, and there is a very good case to go back and take away some of the myths that have grown up around the suffragettes, particularly about the First World War being the reason legislative change came around. There is a case to be made that these women were so well organised and so strategic in what they did that it became apparent to people such as Lloyd George that they absolutely were responsible enough to vote.

But I want to talk about these hidden giants on whose shoulders we are standing. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, was absolutely right that it did not all start in 1918: this was the culmination of something that had been going on for a long time. Noble Lords and noble Baronesses will have walked through Westminster Hall and seen that wonderful artwork “New Dawn”, which marks John Stuart Mill’s presentation of the first petition for women’s franchise. What your Lordships probably do not know is that he was heavily influenced by a wonderful woman called Harriet Taylor, whom he ultimately married. It was she who campaigned away against the prison that marriage was back in the Victorian era and against the harm that happened to women because they had to be economically dependent on men and were treated as no better than chattels.

Another person I doubt very many of your Lordships will have heard about, but who ought to be an inspiration, is Viscountess Rhondda, an amazing woman from south Wales. She inherited her father’s business and, during her lifetime, was a director of more than 33 companies. Extraordinarily, she and her father survived the sinking of the “Lusitania”. After inheriting his business, she went on to set up Time and Tide, the famous progressive women’s magazine. She campaigned tirelessly for women to inherit their titles and sit in this Chamber. She tried to argue this on the 1918 legislation, which talks about women not being barred from any public office, but she did not succeed. We heard the quote from Earl Ferrers earlier, about the admission of women in the 1950s. My other favourite quote from that same debate—the clincher that the men put forward to keep women out—was that to admit women would play havoc with the plumbing. In light of restoration and renewal, maybe they were right. Sadly, Lady Rhondda died moments before that legislation came in. But she was a brilliant woman and, what is more, a lesbian. There are all these people who have parts of their lives and inspirations to what they do that have been hidden for a very long time. We quite often miss the diversity of women’s experiences, inside and outside Parliament, in this fight.

There are so many women who have been truly inspirational. This place is one of immense privilege, but none beats being a colleague of Shirley Williams. She was an absolute inspiration to me when I was a kid and has worked tirelessly to inspire women to come forward, to get their elbows out with the men in the room and to argue for equality.

We have some considerable way to go. We are extraordinarily lucky to be women who live in this country. I know, as a woman from my community, that I am extraordinarily lucky to be who I am at this point in time, when I can be open about being a part of my community and can bring that to discussions in your Lordships’ House. We are not fully there in terms of diversity yet. I hope that before too long, somewhere in Parliament, we will have representatives of the trans community. I hope they will be elected in another place. Would that not be a slap in the face to that woman on the Times who is giving that community a real battering at the moment? They really do need some support.

I will end with a couple of points. Many have talked about statues today. I understand why your Lordships want to do that and why it is important to increase the visibility of women. But I am much more interested in our passing on a different legacy to the next generation, and that we inspire them to be involved and to follow us and tear down some of the walls in this building. I was really pleased during the last election to take part in the “register her to vote” campaign that was happening on Twitter, to get young women registered to vote. I hope the Government will support that and other initiatives. A terrifying statistic is that in 2015, 9 million women who could have voted did not. A number of noble Baronesses will, like me, have stood on doorsteps over the years listening to young women saying, “I really don’t see why I should vote”. Fortunately, it has been a long time since I heard, “I don’t know how we’re voting; my husband hasn’t told us”. It is really important that we inspire young women to vote. I hope Peers will go out and actively support the work of organisations such as the Patchwork Foundation, which seeks to demonstrate through role models to young people from disadvantaged communities that they too have a place in public life and a valuable contribution to make.

I have been inspired to go back and read history and learn the lessons from wonderful women such as Eleanor Roosevelt. She inspired me to look again at that very dry subject of human rights and to ensure that in all that comes before our Parliament—especially in everything that will come before us in the next few months—we never lose sight of women’s rights and human rights, and that we never assume that they have been won and are safe. We have to continue to work for them. We have to recruit and inspire new generations of young men and women to come and join us in the battle.

20:46

[Baroness Byford (Con)]

My Lords, as one of the last Back-Bench speakers speaking today, I thank my noble friend Lady Vere for introducing this important debate. We have heard some deeply moving speeches, reflecting the contribution that women have made over the past 100 years.

I will begin with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, already mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. Not only was she the first female mayor in England but she established a new hospital for women in London in 1872 that was staffed only by women. It was an all-women organisation. She had struggled to qualify as a doctor because she was not accepted as she was not a man. Instead, she became a nursing student, later going on to train in Paris and eventually gaining her Society of Apothecaries certificate to become a doctor.

Elizabeth had a very clear vision of what she wanted to achieve—as did Alice Hawkins from Leicester, whose seven-foot statue was unveiled yesterday in the new market square. Alice left school at 13 and became a shoe machinist. She was actively involved in the Equity Shoes trade union, fighting for the rights of women. She attended the Women’s Social and Political Union rally in Hyde Park, which has already been mentioned, and over the following seven years she was arrested seven times and jailed five—the last time in Holloway, when they thought they had managed to persuade her otherwise.

My noble friend Lord Lexden spoke of Millicent Fawcett and the work done by the Fawcett Society and its members. Indeed, I believe that it is a combination of the approaches of both women, and their determination, that has led to the changes that we are celebrating today. It is true that both Elizabeth and Alice understood the inequalities of life at that time and fought long and hard to change attitudes—although I suspect that others will have come to the fore in very different ways.

One such woman was Rosa Parks, born in America 105 years ago yesterday. She is probably among the top 100 women recognised worldwide. I do not know where she got the confidence to do as she did and withstand the consequences, but she was the girl who, aged 15, refused to give up her seat and get off the bus. In her book, Standing up for Freedom, she said:

“You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right”.


Last week was the bicentenary of the Institute of Civil Engineers. I wondered whether even one of those founding fathers envisaged a future where the person directly responsible for the infrastructure of the 2012 London Olympics would be a woman. Louise Hardy was just that woman. She masterminded the installation of the roads, cables, telephone wires, broadband, water, sewage disposal, heating and everything else that went with it to make it the mammoth achievement that it became.

I have also chosen to talk about women in public life outside Parliament—those working in business and others serving in their communities, both locally and nationally. In the business world progress is being made—although it is slow, as others have indicated. In 2016 women occupied 35% of all managerial and senior positions, but in 2015, a year earlier, 25% of directors of FTSE 100 companies were women, which was an improvement, and I know that the target is now to increase this to 33% by 2020. In many small and medium-sized companies, women are taking the challenge to start their own businesses and become entrepreneurs in their own right. However, it is in bigger companies that women still struggle to reach the top.

I have been intrigued by Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, already referred to by my noble friend. Sheryl is chief operating officer at Facebook. She describes the inbuilt barriers to success. It is a fascinating read and I recommend it. She acknowledges that women in the developed world are better off than ever, but reflects that until women have supportive employers and colleagues, as well as partners who share family responsibilities, they do not really have that chance.

I turn to the City of London. I must admit that I was surprised that the name of Lady Donaldson was not included in the very good list of firsts for women in public life, as Lady Donaldson was the first woman Lord Mayor of the City of London back in 1983. She was followed by Dame Fiona Woolf in 2013. They are the only two women to hold this post. The role of Lord Mayor is not simply one of great occasions and grandeur but is much more about promoting UK business abroad: during their year the Lord Mayor will probably visit 50 countries, giving more than 900 speeches.

I have spoken about the contribution that women make to local government and the many hours they give to their communities. All of us here started somewhere. I began my public life with the Women’s Voluntary Service and continued with other organisations and charities. However, I pay great tribute to my noble friend Lady Seccombe, who was at the helm when I became involved with the Conservative Women’s Organisation. My noble friend is a good example of encouraging others to achieve their goals, and looking around her this evening she must reflect on the many hours she spent promoting and helping some of us women who are lucky enough to sit in this House. In the same way, my noble friend Lady Jenkin continues to help and inspire women to become parliamentary candidates.

I cannot let this occasion pass without mentioning the late Baroness Thatcher. Her total commitment, courage and belief inspired women of all parties, and some of none, to have confidence to take up the challenge and achieve their personal goal.

Finally, we continue to have the experience of women who are leaders in their sectors. I think of Stella Rimington, Anita Roddick, Ellen MacArthur, Rosalind Franklin and Marie Stopes, to name but a few. Their contribution to society should be recognised. Ellen MacArthur broke the record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe back in 2005. She was not just the best woman, but the best. Her achievements helped squash prejudices about women’s inferiority in sport, and her trust helps young people with serious illnesses.

Listening to the contributions today, one cannot fail to be moved by the achievements over these past 100 years—but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, said, there is so much more to do. For me, equal opportunity is not equal unless everyone receives the encouragement that make seizing the task possible.

20:55

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, may I say how much I welcome the debate in your Lordships’ House today, and compliment the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, and my noble friend and sister Lady Gale on their wonderful opening contributions? About the only partisan thing I intend to say is to the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, and the other women on the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Benches—and it is not the first time I have said this in this House. It is possible that the Labour Party at the next general election will achieve a 50:50 gender balance in its representation. Frankly, if the women and sisters in your parties do not do something other than the encouragement that the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, talked about, it will be a long time before we get gender balance overall in our Parliament. We in the Labour Party will not be able to do it all on our own.

It is said that history belongs to the victors, and that is true of who won the vote for women, as in everything else. As noble Lords have said, the smaller voices get drowned out. The history of how women won the vote tends to belong to the famous, the better educated, the most well-off families and leaders of the suffragette movement. Like my noble friends Lady Corston and Lady Massey, the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock, and Lady Byford, and others, I want to reflect on and pay tribute to the women who were less well known, less well off, and particularly those from Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield and other places in Yorkshire. It is said in my family that one of the women in our family was an active suffragette, and I would not be at all surprised. We are not known for our modesty and our quietness in my family, but I have no proof. In a way, that makes my point.

I am indebted to Jill Liddington, senior research fellow at Leeds University, to the women’s history project, and the contemporary articles from Bradford’s Telegraph and Argus. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, is quite right. In November 1881, St George’s Hall in Bradford was the location of a huge meeting—3,000 strong—at which Bradford’s provisional women’s suffrage committee was established. It presented the first petition to Parliament demanding the vote in 1882. As my noble friend Lady Kennedy put it, for almost 20 years, women and the men supporting them—I think of Keir Hardie, for example—more or less politely asked for the vote. In October 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst gathered a group of women in Manchester to form a new franchise campaign, the Women’s Social and Political Union, marking the end of what might be called the Victorian campaign. The next 10 years were to be very different, and sprinkled with the names of women whose part in the struggle gave them an indelible and honoured place in our history.

We all know that in 1913 the suffragette martyr, Emily Davison was killed beneath the King’s horse at the Derby. Less famous was Dora Thewlis, a 16 year-old Yorkshire mill worker who, in 1913, despite her impoverished upbringing, was moved to join a suffragette mission to break into the Houses of Parliament. She was thrown into prison and catapulted on to the front page of the Daily Mirror, which said, “Suffragettes storm the House”. The reporters and paparazzi christened her the “Baby Suffragette”. Indeed, in her clogs and mill dress she secured vital publicity for the cause. Again in February 1913, an elegant woman entered the Jewel House at the Tower of London. She removed an iron bar from her coat and threw it at the glass showcase containing insignia of the Order of Merit. Wrapped around the bar was a statement: “This is my protest against the Government’s treachery to the working women of Great Britain”. That was Leonora Cohen, a seamstress from Leeds.

It is only relatively recently that research has uncovered how Thewlis and other poor, often self-taught, Yorkshire women are among the forgotten heroines of the long struggle for the vote. They include Lilian Lenton; Edith Key, a mill worker born out of wedlock and given away by her mother; Lavena Saltonstall, a self-taught journalist; Elizabeth Pinnace, a rug weaver; and indeed, Leonora Cohen. Miss Newton—I do not know her Christian name—was distributing leaflets when a mob of boys picked her up, carried her round the town centre and dumped her on the town hall steps. It must have been terrifying. The local paper reports that she did not let go of her leaflets.

These women fought despite minimal schooling and the risk of censure and ridicule. During this time of the fight in Yorkshire, the organiser was none other than the youngest and least well known Pankhurst—Adela Pankhurst—who ended up in Australia in 1914, a casualty perhaps of the early splits in the suffragette movement. She was the Yorkshire organiser, known for being disruptive in public meetings. In Pudsey, she and fellow speakers were pelted with rotten oranges, eggs and peas. In 1908, as the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, said, she was the one who organised the Shipley Glen rally, attracting 100,000 people. Christabel Pankhurst’s contemporary account says:

“For weeks past all Bradford has been talking about the Yorkshire Suffrage Sunday held in Shipley Glen on May 31st … The vast audience of orderly and attentive persons prevented any effective disturbance, and at 5 o’clock a resolution calling upon the Government to enfranchise the women of this country … was carried with practical unanimity. The Prime Minister expects us to show a popular demand for votes for women. We offer to him the demand of the people of Bradford, which has already spoken officially through its City Council when it adopted some months ago a resolution similar to the one carried at the great open-air meeting on the Suffrage Sunday”.


Several other militant actions caught my attention. In 1910, when Winston Churchill came to a meeting at the same St George’s Hall, his visit ended in chaos, thanks to a handful of suffragettes, who secreted themselves under the platform and leapt out, apparently,

“thirsty, dishevelled and unwashed, but with hearts on fire for their cause”,

as the Telegraph and Argus said. The women waited until the hall filled up, then launched into their protest before being swiftly thrown out.

In 1913, the Bradford suffragettes dug up and scorched the second and 12th green at Bradford Moor golf club, replacing the flags with purple, green and white flags, and then went on to leave a trail of burning letter boxes across the district. Also in 1913, the reservoir at Chellow Dene turned a rich shade of purple, having been discoloured by wool dyes. It was believed to be the work of suffragettes, but it was never proved. Millions of gallons of water had to be drained. I am pleased to report that they had fun, too, turning up to see Ellen Terry at the Bradford Alhambra in full suffragette costume and getting a standing ovation. I pay tribute to these brave women. Indeed, we stand on their shoulders.

21:01

[Baroness Morris of Bolton (Con)]

With the leave of the House, I am grateful to the Front Benches for giving me just a moment before their closing speeches to apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull. During my contribution earlier, I took her to task about remarks that I thought she had made regarding my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and her so-called lack of support for other women, and was rather incensed. I now realise that, of course, she was talking about our other Prime Minister. Of course, it is rather confusing when you have had two women Prime Ministers—although, as the noble Baroness will have heard from my noble friend Lady Byford, Margaret Thatcher was also a great supporter of women. But I apologise to the noble Baroness for taking her to task for comments that she had not made.

21:02

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a director of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which has given grants to, among others, WASPI, Make Votes Matter, and other organisations that have been mentioned already during the debate, as well as to many other political reform campaigns. I congratulate the noble Baronesses, Lady Williams and Lady Vere, for introducing this debate. We have had the most extraordinarily unified views about the success over the last 100 years, but also recognise that there are many problems.

I want to move back well over 100 years ago to John Stuart Mill. My favourite quotation from him is:

“The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves”.


He said that in a letter to Alexander Bain in 1869. A lot of the rest of his political life was spent helping women to be able to do that.

The woman who stirred up my own zeal was Baroness Stocks of Kensington and Chelsea, who started life as a Brinton and was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Norton. She had an extraordinary life. I did not know that—I knew a doughty old lady who came to lunch on Sundays. She was principal of Westfield College, just around the corner from where I lived. My Conservative father, though not an MP at that time, won every argument at the dinner table, except when Mary was there. She taught me, by my watching the way in which she debated and engaged, that it was perfectly possible for women to do what they wanted. I can remember her saying to me on one occasion in the late 1960s, when I was still just at secondary school and so a bit behind the revolution that was going on around me, “You know, you can do exactly what you want to do. You just have to set your mind to it”. This woman did set her mind to it. She did an extraordinary range of things, as did many of the other women who were suffragists and suffragettes. They took that into other parts of their lives. But her passion and deeds started early. In 1907, aged 16, she was on the Mud March, one of the first big marches of the suffragist movements. I quote her voice at that time from her autobiography, My Commonplace Book:

“I carried a banner in the 1907 ‘mud march’ at the head of which walked Mrs Fawcett, Lady Strachey, Lady Frances Balfour, and that indomitable liberty boy, Keir Hardie. As we moved off through the arch of Hyde Park Corner we met a barrage of ridicule from hostile male onlookers. ‘Go home and do the washing,’ ‘Go home and mind the baby’ were the most frequent taunts flung at us. As we proceeded along Piccadilly it was observed by some of the marchers that the balcony of the Ladies’ Lyceum Club was crowded with members looking down from their safe vantage. Some of the marchers looked up and shouted: ‘Come down and join us.’ I do not know whether any of them did.


It was a great adventure for a sixteen-year-old; and on returning to school on the following Monday I was uncertain how my public exploit would be regarded by authority. I need not have worried. All the mistresses were suffragists, as indeed were all salary-earning professional women”.


She went on in this autobiography to include some of the pictures from her journal at the time. There is a glorious cartoon dated 1913 of three versions of herself. The first is of a glorious young Edwardian lady in the full panoply, hat and social get-up of the upper middle class in London. Underneath, it says, “What Mary’s mother would like Mary to wear”. The next picture is of a young utilitarian girl about town—at this point she was an undergraduate at the LSE—and underneath it says, “What Mary’s mother thinks Mary wants to wear”. But the next picture is the most poignant. It is of a woman prisoner and underneath it says, “What Mary would really like to wear”. That is why I wear these colours, because she was not allowed to become a suffragette. She and many others would have been utterly shunned by their families if they had done so. Therefore, I wear these colours in her memory and that of many women who wanted to do more.

Lest noble Lords think that Mary felt stifled by being a suffragist, I should tell them that she did not. She had many friends who were suffragettes and she acted as a link between them. In her chapter on votes for women, she talks about how both the suffragettes and the suffragists understood that both sides were absolutely vital to winning the argument, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, referred to earlier. The suffragists had the ears of politicians. They were perhaps too patient, especially in the face of Lord Asquith’s opposition. I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, is not in her place when I refer to her great-grandfather, but it is true that Lord Asquith was the major block to suffrage happening earlier.

Other noble Lords referred to those who 100 years ago led the way. As others have said, the failure of the Liberal Government was moved on when David Lloyd George ousted Asquith and attitudes changed. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, was right when she talked about the strategic positioning of both the suffragists and the suffragettes. All the right conversations had been had in the background. It is also interesting that the suffragettes’ militant action stopped the moment the war started and all women put their shoulders to whatever task they were asked to do to demonstrate that they were worthy of changing those men’s minds.

Many noble Lords did not want women’s suffrage. On observing the debate in the Lords that night, Mary Stocks said:

“The course of the debate made it clear that a majority of its members regarded even a limited measure of women’s suffrage with distaste, amounting to horror. But in view of the movement of public opinion outside, as demonstrated by an overwhelming vote in the House of Commons, the House of Lords was not prepared to flout democratically expressed public opinion. The anti-suffrage peers abstained from voting in sufficient numbers, thus enabling the vital clause to go through. In fact the Upper House was not in 1918 prepared to frustrate the clearly expressed will of the people. Nor should it be so prepared”.


That has relevance to the debates that we are undertaking at the moment on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and I have been encouraged by listening to the debate we had last week. Despite the fact that this House recognised that it has the opportunity and right—nay, the duty—to challenge and scrutinise, we also recognised that there is a will elsewhere. It does not stop any noble Lords whose political views are that they want to remain continuing to fight for that, but I have not heard that view changed. I am encouraged, though, that even the men who opposed suffrage were prepared to abstain to allow the voice of the people to go through.

The quote from the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne, from 50 years later was also interesting. Mary Stocks became a Peer in the mid-1960s. She was somewhat scathing about coming into the House but she also loved it. She reckoned that she was brought in as a broadcaster. For many years, she was the token woman on “Any Questions”, “The Brains Trust”, and the predecessors of “Prayer for the Day” and “Thought for the Day”. She was also an excellent interviewer. The interview to which the noble Lord, Lord Norton, referred is really engaging and the parliamentary archives still have it. Mary Stocks, who was not a Conservative, interviewed Nancy Astor, who was definitely not Labour. If any noble Lord gets the chance to see it, it is fascinating; it certainly was on Parliament TV some time ago.

There have been other notable women in the Lords. I am reminded of Nancy Seear, the first Liberal leader in this House, who was an indomitable woman. If you ever met her, you would never forget it. Shirley Williams was my mentor; many other women in my party and the Labour Party had her support. She guided me for 10 years when I was standing for Parliament and trying to decide what to do, and when I came into your Lordships’ House. I also note some of my current heroes. My noble friend Lady Thornhill was the first woman elected mayor in this country and is about to stand down after 16 years’ service in Watford. My noble friend Lady Benjamin is a role model, and not just in broadcasting. Since she took her place in your Lordships’ House she has become an absolute advocate for the safety of children and we listen to her with great care and attention. I was amused by her stories about the BBC. She and I worked together on “Play School” when I was a floor manager. At the same time as she was being put under pressure for expecting her first child, I got engaged. I was hauled in to see the personnel officer who asked, “So when are you leaving us?”, because married women did not work. I had a colleague who did work after she got married. She came back from maternity leave, having made arrangements for her very small baby. The first thing the floor management team did was send her to Thailand for six months to work on “Tenko”. She resigned.

An experience of my own of being a woman in that field was filming in a men’s club. I was the only woman on the team; the actors in the show and the other people there were all men. I was urinated on as I was trying to cue actors in the corner. My story is personal to me and shaped the way I view things, but every other woman in this House has experienced similar things.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

Me too.

[Baroness Brinton]

I am glad that there are others who are prepared to affirm it.

On business, I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, talked about the need for deeds not words. She referred to the work of the coalition Government, and I particularly want to highlight the work of my honourable friend Jo Swinson, who steered through parental leave. This is important, and it is not just about maternity leave. My son and daughter-in-law have two very small, premature babies. He works for L’Oreal, to which he moved just as the babies were born. He was told that there were no meetings after 4.30 pm because all young parents should have the chance to be at home to put their babies to bed. With examples like that, we have the pipeline that other noble Lords have been talking about. The responsibility for helping women move on entails an understanding that all parents, regardless of their gender, have a role in helping to bring up their children. Parental leave will take off as soon as organisations start asking young men what they are going to be doing when their baby is born.

The other fun person who I just wanted to raise briefly in the last couple of minutes—I think she has been mentioned in passing—is Marie Stopes. It is not fashionable to recognise her as a heroine but she was. I think her true recognition came in the 1960s, when her contribution was finally recognised for what it was. Mary Stocks wrote—I do not have enough time to quote her—that Marie Stopes did not just want contraception, she clearly changed women’s views about sex. One woman, speaking to Marie Stopes, said:

“He’s a good husband, he only troubles me once a week”.


In the 1920s, that was the common view. We talk about the outside and external achievements, but we must remember that the suffragists and suffragettes who went on to run birth control clinics also changed the lives of women around us—the entire world.

I must correct the view from some noble Lords on the Labour Benches that the Liberal Democrats have not introduced all-women shortlists. We have. Some 58% of our target seats in 2015 and just over 50% in 2017 had women in them. Unfortunately, when you lose seats, the chance of moving forward in other areas is somewhat difficult. We remain committed to that for exactly the same reasons as the Labour Party, because we know that it will improve diversity in other ways. It will improve the representation of disabled, BME and LGBT women in Parliament.

In conclusion, we have talked a lot this evening about deeds, not words. I ask every one of your Lordships to make your own deeds about what you will take out of this debate today. Write yourself a postcard with your top three actions, give it to your Whips Office and ask them to post it back to you in three months’ time to see what you have done. I will tell your Lordships why. I spoke about my granddaughters; they will be two this summer. At the current, glacial, rate of change they will be in their ninth decade before we have parity in the House of Commons. That is not good enough.

21:17

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to be able to participate in this historic debate and an honour to close on behalf of the Labour Party, which has done much over more than 100 years to promote and advance the cause of women’s rights in many areas.

I pay tribute to the noble Baronesses opposite for achieving this debate—it is of course entirely appropriate that they should—and to all those people, as well as organisations, who are recognising the significance of 100 years of votes for women by organising or taking part in such a wide range of events, some of which were mentioned by my noble friend Lady Massey. Our Parliament is well to the fore with its Vote 100 programme of events, and there are special exhibitions at the People’s History Museum in Manchester and at the Museum of London, where the shadow Cabinet will meet tomorrow to mark the centenary. Noble Lords may also be aware of Beyond the Ballot, a free online course which begins today, tracing women’s rights and suffrage from 1866 to the present. It has been produced by the Royal Holloway University of London and the Open University’s FutureLearn digital education platform, and I highly recommend it.

From this distance it seems barely credible that in the early years of the 20th century women felt driven to acts of violence simply to achieve the basic human right of casting their vote for the Government that would pass laws affecting their everyday lives. Violence can never be condoned, but in the circumstances I can understand why it was resorted to as a tactic. Let us not forget that the violence was by no means one way. The shameful events of Black Friday in 1910, when women campaigners were brutally assaulted by police and then imprisoned, where they were force-fed—an act, it should be said, that today we call torture—is not mentioned often enough when the suffragettes are recalled.

Noble Lords mentioned many of the most prominent women whose campaigning culminated in the 1918 Act. I planned to mention two, but my noble friend Lord Davies has left me with nothing to add to his excellent tribute to the remarkable Annie Kenney, one of many working-class women who fought for the right to vote. My noble friend Lady Thornton reeled off an impressive list of other working-class women, together with some beguiling and very interesting anecdotes.

I thought I would be the only person to mention Margaret Mackworth, the 2nd Viscountess Rhondda—but the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, stole my thunder. However, I will say one or two things about her, because she seems to have been a remarkable woman in many ways. She was involved in militant action with the Pankhursts—activities which saw her thrown into jail, and she was released only after going on hunger strike.

Neither the 1918 Act nor the one that followed it a year later satisfied Margaret Mackworth. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 ended most of the existing common law restrictions on women, with marriage no longer legally considered a bar to the ability to work in the professions. But Mackworth realised that much more remained to be done, and you can understand why when I quote from the Times of 1920. I dare say that the Times regarded itself then, as it does now, as the newspaper of record, but it issued grave warnings about the dangers of extending voting rights to women under 30. Mature females might finally be allowed to engage with politics but the,

“scantily clad, jazzing flapper to whom a dance, a new hat or a man with a car is of more importance than the fate of nations”,

must never be entrusted with a vote. So in 1921 Margaret Mackworth founded the Six Point Group, a feminist campaign group focusing on equality between men and women and the rights of the child. It was instrumental in winning support for the change to all women getting the vote in 1928.

After her father’s death, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, mentioned, Lady Rhondda tried to take his seat in your Lordships’ House, citing the 1919 Act, which, in theory, allowed women to exercise “any public office”. The Committee of Privileges voted against her plea and she never did enter this Chamber, although she very nearly lived to see the first women do so in 1958. That was when women were first admitted under the Life Peerages Act and, as many noble Lords have pointed out, a total of only 294 women Peers have been created since—that is less than five a year.

In the debate, noble Lords from all sides have welcomed the all-women shortlists introduced by the Labour Party. I think that generally there has been a great deal of agreement on that across the House. I would say that all-women shortlists are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, and I saw them operate effectively in the Scottish Parliament. So perhaps, as my noble friend Lady Kennedy said in her typically forthright contribution, the time has come to consider quotas to lift the number of women Peers to 50%. Such a move could not be regarded in any way as ground-breaking in your Lordships’ House. After all, for the first 600 years of its existence it operated a quota—of 100%. Of course, as many noble Lords have said, 100 years ago it was not just in terms of the right to vote that women were held back. In many spheres of life—not least in terms of improving themselves—quite artificial barriers were placed in their way.

This year also marks the 150th anniversary of women being admitted to higher education. That was at the University of London and they were able to sit only for “certificates of proficiency” rather than being awarded degrees. It was a further 10 years before that threshold was crossed, although that still left women far apart from men, and it was not until the 1919 Act to which I referred a few moments ago that women were allowed to enter the professions.

In the years since, opportunities for girls and women have advanced considerably, but young women continue to experience gender stereotypes which prevent them reaching their full potential, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, said. It runs a bit further than Peppa Pig; none the less, those are influential children’s television programmes, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, will know. Only one in three girls who take maths and science at GCSE progresses to take a STEM subject at A-level or equivalent, compared to eight out of 10 boys. Many schools still restrict the educational achievement of girls through gendered subjects at school and in apprenticeships. The Royal Society reported two months ago that only 20% of GCSE uptake in computer science in England is by girls; at A-level the figure is 9%. That is an essential tool for our economic future, yet so many females are excluded.

Even when they do well in attainment in education, it does not necessarily transfer to the workplace. There is a major shortfall in the number of women in senior positions, while, as we know only too well, gender-specific roles at work and the glass ceiling persist widely. According to the House of Commons Library, in 2016-17 54% of apprenticeship starts were by women and 46% by men, and more women than men have started apprenticeships each year since 2010. But the Fawcett Society analysis of BEIS data on apprenticeship starts and achievements reveals that men continue to dominate those with the best earnings potential. In 2014-15 nearly 17,000 men started engineering apprenticeships, while only 600 women did so.

The divided labour market is a key cause of the major issue in the working environment—the gender pay gap. This is a national scandal, and we knew that long before the BBC forced it into the spotlight. I have had an interest in this issue for a considerable time. Indeed, my university thesis in 1974 was on the implementation of the Labour Government’s Equal Pay Act. Of course, although that Act got on to the statute book in 1970, there was a five-year lead-in period for employers to make the changes necessary to accommodate the legislation. That was always an optimistic aim but, almost 50 years later, more than a quarter of the gender pay gap remains to be filled.

In 1975, women earned 36% less than median male hourly earnings. The latest available figure issued in April last year in the Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings is 9.1%. That represents the comparison between full-time workers and excludes overtime earnings, but of course more men than women work overtime and more women than men work part time, so the 9.1% figure gives a distorted view of the gap in actual take-home pay between men and women. Taking all employees into account, the gender pay gap in 2017 was 18.4%.

That brings me to the BBC. Various noble Lords, not least my noble friend Lady Crawley and the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne, highlighted the recent events. I am one of the organisation’s biggest supporters and have defended it often from attacks by Governments of left and right, as well as by the right-wing tabloids. But I have to say—and I would do so were the noble Lord, Lord Hall, in his place today—that the BBC has got it very wrong on pay. As an organisation it has been slow, even reluctant, to take meaningful action for far too long. Who could have listened to the brave and hugely impressive testimony of Carrie Gracie to MPs last week without experiencing anger? That anger was not assuaged by the frankly risible conclusions of the PWC report on pay that there was,

“no evidence of systemic gender discrimination”.

Really? That message would have been no more credible had it been tattooed on the body of a pig flying past Broadcasting House.

Of course, we know what we know only because the BBC is publicly funded and has a duty of transparency. What about private companies in the media, as well as other sectors of employment? Anybody who does not believe that systemic gender discrimination in pay exists widely needs to get out more, probably from the comfort of their men-only club.

The Labour Party is proud to have a gender-balanced shadow Cabinet and to have more women MPs than all other parties put together, but we acknowledge that there is no room for complacency. We have yet to see the first female Labour Party leader elected at national level, although there is at least the fine example of Labour in your Lordships’ House, where we now have our fifth woman leader.

Women’s right to vote was achieved by determined and committed groups of politically motivated women who sacrificed much for their struggle. A record 208 women were elected to Parliament last year. But 100 years after the law was changed to allow women to become MPs, they still account for just 32% of the House of Commons, which simply is not good enough. Only in 2016 was a landmark of sorts reached, when the total number of women MPs ever elected reached 455—the same as the number of men then sitting as MPs. Were the suffragettes and suffragists able to express an opinion on events since 1918, I suspect they would be disappointed that the advances they achieved have not spurred more extensive gains bringing greater equality to the lives of women—and, as many noble Lords have said, a greater presence of women in senior posts in the law, business and the media, to name but three sectors.

My noble friend Lady Kennedy was undoubtedly right when she said that the game can no longer be played by men’s rules. We men must make it our duty, too, to change attitudes. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, there must be a culture change. It is surely the collective duty of all of us, men and women, to ensure that the progress achieved thus far is extended until its natural and only acceptable conclusion of true equality is solidly embedded in all aspects of life.

21:28

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. It has been not only very good humoured but humorous, and so varied in the number of absolutely fascinating and informative stories that we have heard.

I am very proud of the history that has allowed me the opportunity to stand here and speak. The campaign for women’s franchise started a chain of events that did not stop at the vote and enabled women to take their seats in this House. Before I respond to the particular points raised today, I want first to acknowledge those who made it possible for me to be here, some of whom are in the Chamber today. My noble friends Lady Morris of Bolton and Lady Jenkin, and in the other place the right honourable Lady the Prime Minister, and David Cameron before her, have all been pivotal in my journey here today.

In a wider sense, I have heard so much about the history of brilliant women that I did not know before and I want to go home and read about them all. To name a few, Jessie Stephen sounds fascinating and feisty, as does my noble friend Lady Jenkin’s granny and my noble friend Lady Seccombe’s mother, and who could forget Annie Kenney? Some of the women came from quite ordinary circumstances and went on to do extraordinary things. Those are the most powerful messages that we can deliver in this centenary year.

We must never forget that those women made remarkable sacrifices so that the sight of women here would be unremarkable. They faced criticism, abuse and defamation—one noble Lord told a story about oranges with razor blades in them. Their opponents rebuked them for stepping outside of their domestic environment. Little did those opponents know that it was in just those spaces from which women ran their households and raised their children that they also built their campaigns. It was in a Manchester parlour in 1903 that Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters established the Women’s Social and Political Union. The noble Lord, Lord Desai, might like to know that there is a small room in Manchester underneath the Women’s Aid building where you can find the Pankhurst Centre. We also have the People’s History Museum in Manchester, which tells much about women’s suffrage.

As so many noble Lords said today, it took many decades—you could say hundreds of years—of meetings, petitions and debate to achieve women’s suffrage, led ably by Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which relied on the volunteering and tireless campaigning of women up and down the UK.

I have also listened to the challenges that women continue to face to enter Parliament, have a fulfilling career and survive the daily aggressions and harassment that can restrict women’s freedom and right to safety. As my noble friend Lady Jenkin said, the UK has made great progress, but there is so much more to do. All young women should be able to see Parliament as a place that they actively want to come to and make a real difference to people’s lives.

To answer a point raised by my noble friend Lady Eaton, we are commissioning evidence of what works from evaluated programmes in the UK and internationally. We know that there are many barriers to participation, but it is vital to understand what is effective and whether it is effective for only some women. Our aim is to offer political parties a range of options that they can draw on and adopt depending on their own needs.

Many noble Lords talked about legislating to commence Section 106 of the Equality Act. We welcome all actions by political parties to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, but we do not believe that further legislation and regulation is the best way forward. We have heard about what political parties are doing, and we believe that they are responsible for their candidate selection and should lead the way in improving the representation of women.

When Nancy Astor took her seat in the other place in 1919, she represented the women who protested, picketed, fought and died in a long campaign to be heard. Once elected, she received up to 2,000 letters a week from women all over the UK who trusted her to take their concerns seriously. Too often, many belittle the inequalities that continue to affect women and girls as “women’s issues” instead of society’s issues. These injustices should continue to shock and prompt action.

We have heard particularly about the barriers that women face to enter Parliament. Some of these are about the practicalities of life working in Westminster—working between multiple locations, balancing caring responsibilities with long working days or ensuring financial stability while pursuing election. I would like to commend Parliament, particularly the work of the Commons Reference Group on Representation and Inclusion, for its work to make this a more family-friendly working environment, through practical solutions such as childcare facilities and changes to the parliamentary schedule.

The Government are also acting to ensure that women can play an equal part in the economy by giving them valuable skills and opportunities, encouraging girls into STEM subjects, introducing coding lessons from the age of seven, and delivering high-quality apprenticeships to challenge the notion that there are men’s jobs and women’s jobs. We want women to have equal access to higher-paying sectors and careers. We are investing £5 million in returners schemes so that people who take time out for caring responsibilities can return to work in jobs that match their skills and experience. We are also determined to address the gender pay gap through new regulations on businesses with more than 250 employees to report the differences in median earnings between women and men. The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, talked about that. These actions are helping to level the playing field so that women are free to make choices about their lives and their aspirations, including politics, while ensuring their financial security.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Donaghy, talked about the WASPI ladies. We should recognise the skills, talents and experience that older women bring to the workforce by equalising the state pension age and eliminating gender inequalities in social security. However, the Government did introduce a concession that is worth £1.1 billion which means that no one should be made to work more than an additional 18 months as compared with the previous timetable to retire as a result of the change in the state pension age.

My noble friend Lord Sherbourne and the noble Lord, Lord Watson, talked about the BBC in relation to its pay issues which have been so prominent in the press recently. We welcome the publication of the BBC’s review into on-air pay and the plans to establish a new transparent pay policy for presenters and journalists. That is long overdue. The BBC must ensure that its pay arrangements are rooted in fairness and equality, and we expect it to act quickly to resolve any outstanding issues. It remains a matter for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to consider whether to investigate pay at the BBC as the regulatory body for enforcing equal pay. We understand that the EHRC has already approached the BBC following the concerns raised by Carrie Gracie, the former China editor.

I have also heard very clearly how women are held back by outdated beliefs that they are unsuited to taking on positions of authority. I am proud that enough people challenge those norms so that we now have our second female Prime Minister, the first of course being Mrs Thatcher, but recent events and revelations remind us that we still have a long way to go.

The noble Baroness, Lady Gale, asked about the closure of the Women’s National Commission. I had not heard of the Women’s National Commission and am pleased to be educated about it. The Government Equalities Office continues to work closely with the women’s sector following the move to bring the work of the Women’s National Commission into government. In preparing the UK’s eighth periodic report to the CEDAW committee, the Government Equalities Office conducted a targeted engagement exercise with a cross-section of women’s organisations and we intend to build on that.

My noble friend Lady Hodgson made the point that no women have been appointed to the United Nations. A range of factors are explored when considering the nomination of a candidate for an election to a body such as the CEDAW committee, and a decision on whether to nominate a UK candidate for the next CEDAW committee membership will be made by 7 March.

The Prime Minister has updated the Ministerial Code to state that, as well as maintaining the highest standards of personal conduct, Ministers must,

“be professional … and treat all those with whom they come into contact with consideration and respect”.

This Parliament often sets an example to the world with ground-breaking legislation and open debate on the pressing issues of the day, but clearly it also reflects the obstacles facing all of society. The Government acknowledge that a gender-balanced Parliament is long overdue and we share the aspirations of those on all sides to make it happen. Parliament should be a place any person can aspire to work in.

My noble friend Lady Eaton talked about local councils. Women make up 33% of local councillors in England, but only 17% of council leaders. I recall that when I became a council leader I was the only female leader in Greater Manchester—in fact, the only Tory leader in Greater Manchester. That is an interesting form of 100% representation. Government and other administrations should reflect the constituencies they serve and gender parity is long overdue at all levels of governance. In December, the Department for Communities and Local Government held a round table with local government representatives, women’s organisations and others to identify barriers to women and to understand what support the Government can provide.

The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who I cannot believe is 69 years of age—I have some major repair work to do to myself—talked about greater discrimination against women of colour. I am proud, as I am sure she is, to be part of the most diverse Parliament in history, but we welcome all moves by political parties to remove barriers that limit anybody’s ability to participate in it. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, and my noble friend Lord Shinkwin made the same points regarding having more trans and LGBT candidates, and indeed elected and appointed representatives in Parliament. My noble friend Lord Shinkwin talked about having not only the first female Prime Minister, but maybe the first female disabled Prime Minister. That time may well come.

As I have said, we do not think that legislation and regulation is the way to make this happen. We believe that political parties have the primary responsibility for doing this. Different parties take different approaches. The histories of political parties also mean that some of their internal structures differ enormously. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. As time goes on, the public will dictate that both the elected and unelected Houses will look far more representative. That is why the Government Equalities Office is commissioning the review that I talked about. Its aim is to provide political parties with a range of possible solutions that they might want to draw on.

There is other positive activity happening to move the debate forward. In March 2017, the Chancellor announced a £5 million fund to mark the centenary of women’s suffrage. Through it we aim to celebrate, educate and encourage more women to participate so that they have an equal voice. With the fund, we have developed an exciting national programme that includes education projects, a £1.5 million grant scheme for local communities and organisations that are supporting women’s representation, and the commemoration of two important figures of the suffrage movement so that a new generation can be inspired by their story. I have had several suggestions for several statues in several parts of the country. It will keep the DDCMS busy for quite some time to come.

The noble Baroness, Lady Janke, made a point about lowering the voting age. We set out a manifesto commitment to maintain the voting age at 18. We have every intention of doing so. It is widely recognised as the age at which one becomes an adult. Full citizenship rights, from drinking, to betting, to voting, should be gained at adulthood. It is important that children and young people feel engaged in the decision-making process. We do this in many different ways, from the Youth Parliament to gaining the views of children and young people on specific areas of legislation.

We are funding the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, the first woman to be honoured in this way. Manchester, as one of seven centenary cities and towns in England with a strong suffrage history, is receiving a portion of £1.2 million for projects that extend the legacy of their story. As someone who has spent all my adult life there, I am delighted that Manchester is using funds to honour the work and life of Emmeline Pankhurst with a statue. The noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, requested a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft; she was mentioned by several noble Lords. I know there are lots of calls for statues and campaigns such as Mary on the Green are actively campaigning and fundraising for memorials to mark the achievements of British women.

The presence of women in Parliament has, without question, altered social policy and legislation, and focused Parliament’s attention on gender equality. What is more, I believe we can benefit only from a Parliament, from business and from laws that represent the beliefs and make-up of the UK in its entirety.

Before I conclude, I pay tribute to the Fawcett Society, to Helen Pankhurst and her family, and to the countless organisations that continue to advocate for women in the UK and internationally and press for an end to inequality. I encourage noble Lords to take part in this year’s celebrations to mark the suffrage centenary and to celebrate the many women who have made their mark on Parliament and this House. The Representation of the People Act will be on display in Central Lobby from tomorrow so that any noble Lords who would like to see it can do so.

I shall end on someone I have not mentioned but who was very influential on me: Mrs Thatcher. I know she commands a wide range of views. She became Prime Minister when I was 11 years old and showed what women could achieve. Women might not agree with her, people might not agree with her, but everyone was always clear about Margaret Thatcher; she knew exactly what she wanted and she went out and got it in what was a very male world at the time. No, she did not promote many women to her Cabinet because there were not many women in Parliament in those days, in 1979, but she paved the way for women to know that they could get there—it was possible. I shall end with a quotation from Mrs Thatcher given by my noble friend Lady Hodgson: “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman”.

Motion agreed.

House adjourned at 9.48 pm.