Redundancy Protection: Women and New Parents

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Angela. I congratulate the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) on securing today’s important debate on extending redundancy protections for women and new parents. I can assure her that simply going back to how things were, as she talks about, will not be the case, as I will outline. As we get through to the Employment Bill and further consultation and discussions with businesses and other groups, including Pregnant Then Screwed, I hope we will end up in a far better place to ensure that we can tackle some of those issues.

From the correspondence I receive as a constituency MP and as a Minister, I know what a crucial issue this is, and the pernicious effect that discrimination can have on both the immediate and the longer-term prospects of women in work. More generally, there is the drag that that can put on equality and productivity. Last month, the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) brought a number of representative organisations to talk to me about the challenges that pregnant women and new mothers are facing as a result of covid, so I am aware of the many issues that some women face.

I will start by being crystal clear about two things. First, there can be absolutely no excuse for discrimination against pregnant women or women on maternity leave. There is no excuse for any form of discrimination; it is unlawful. It can have absolutely no place as we start to build back better after the pandemic. We cannot effectively level up if we continue to allow some groups to be treated poorly simply because of who or what they are.

Secondly, I will not hide from the fact that there is a real issue here. The research that we jointly funded with EHRC has been cited and makes for uncomfortable reading. It is worth reminding ourselves of some of the key findings. Around one in nine mothers reported that they were dismissed, made compulsorily redundant when others in their workplace were not, or treated so poorly that they felt that they had to leave their jobs.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) for setting the scene so well. From his comments, I understand the Minister is sympathetic to this issue. Overall, three in four mothers, 77%, said they had a negative or possibly discriminatory experience during pregnancy, maternity leave and/or return from maternity leave. They have an issue that needs to be addressed. I understand that the Government will respond in a positive way but even though the Government are indicating welcome measures, such as extension of time protection on return from maternity leave, there are wider aspects that need to be addressed, such as shared parental leave, and the stigma that still attaches to a father taking that essential leave. When the Minister makes his good points, will he also address that?

[Paul Scully]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. There are plenty of wider issues to be considered, including the right to request flexible working that we have heard about. Making that a default option is something we have talked about significantly and want to ensure is at the heart of the Employment Bill, when parliamentary time allows that to come forward.

We still need to do plenty of work with shared parental leave. We have collected a lot of data through the consultation as part of the formal evaluation of the shared parental leave and pay scheme. That will give us a fuller picture of how well the current system of parental leave and pay overall is working for parents and employers. Some of the examples that we hear time and again in the Chamber and Westminster Hall indicate that it is not working, so there is plenty more that we can do.

To return to the findings I was talking about before the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, if they are scaled up to the general population, it could mean as many as 54,000 mothers a year are losing their jobs, in many cases simply because they have had a child. Furthermore, our research found that one in five mothers said they had experienced harassment or negative comments related to pregnancy or flexible working from their employer or colleagues. If scaled up, again, to the general population, that could mean as many as 100,000 mothers having similar negative experiences. That can never be right.

The case for Government action is as clear as day. That is why we consulted on measures to improve redundancy protection for pregnant women and new parents. Following that consultation, the Government’s formal response said that we will: ensure the redundancy protection period applies from the point the employee informs the employer that she is pregnant; extend the redundancy protection period for six months once a new mother has returned to work; extend redundancy protection into a period of return to work for those taking adoption leave, following the same approach as the extended protection provided for those returning from maternity leave; and extend redundancy protection into a period of return to work for those taking shared parental leave. We have been clear that we will introduce these measures as soon as parliamentary time allows.

The ten-minute rule Bill from my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) was raised. I am aware of calls for us to do things differently. Indeed, I met my right hon. Friend and other colleagues to discuss her proposal, which follows aspects of the German approach, and my predecessors held similar meetings. It is not the objective that we disagree on but the means of achieving it, and even then we share a lot of common ground. The key difference is that the Government’s preferred approach retains and extends the current position of giving the pregnant woman or new parent preferential treatment so that, in effect, they are first in the queue for suitable remaining jobs in a redundancy situation. Others suggest removing the current framework and replacing it with a comprehensive redundancy band with some very limited exceptions so that, in effect, that a pregnant woman or new mother could only be made redundant when a business is closing down. The Government have not yet been convinced by that argument.

At its simplest, taking that approach could require employers to continue to employ people even when there is no work for them to do if the business continued to exist. That burden would fall particularly heavily on small businesses. That is why we continue to believe that extending the existing framework remains the right approach. We believe that we are more likely to promote the culture change we seek by placing a slightly more flexible requirement on employers for an extended period. The six-month extension of additional redundancy protection into a return-to-work period will provide a period of up to 27 months when pregnant women and new mothers will be first in the queue for suitable remaining jobs in a redundancy situation. I believe that will represent a considerable and significant step forward in redundancy protection for pregnant women and new mothers.

I have heard the arguments that there ought to be a role for state enforcement in redundancies involving a pregnant woman or new mother. We need to tread carefully when looking at state roles within those sort of areas. All redundancies should be fair, and it would not be rational to treat one group within the workplace any differently from another by giving them a different arbiter in the redundancy process. I appreciate the pressure and strain that the employment tribunal system is under and will be under owing to the covid pandemic, but none the less it has considerable strengths. For instance, it allows for careful consideration of employment disputes, which are often complex or may not be clear-cut, by those with appropriate expertise. Case law from employment tribunals allows our laws to evolve and develop to reflect changing working practices.

However, I am only too aware that improving redundancy protection only goes so far. The majority of employers report that it is in their interest to support pregnant women and those on maternity leave, with the main reasons being to increase staff retention and to create better morale among employees, but we know that many employers feel that women should declare up front during recruitment whether they are pregnant. EHRC and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills research back in 2016 put a figure of 70% on this. Further, the same research found that a quarter of employers felt that it was reasonable during recruitment to ask women about their plans to have children, so clearly there is some way to go.

Tackling the challenge of pregnancy and maternity discrimination will require action on many fronts. That is why we committed to set up an employer and family representative group, which I want to make recommendations on what improvements can be made to the information available to employers and families on pregnancy and maternity discrimination. Rather than focusing on the end of the process, redundancy, I want the group to look at earlier stages of the employment lifecycle, because we need to shift the whole focus of the debate on pregnancy and maternity discrimination so that employers get it right in the first place, rather than focusing only on what happens when things go wrong. I want the group to develop an action plan on the steps organisations can take to make it easier for pregnant women and new mothers to stay in work and for them to progress throughout their careers.

We are having final discussions with business and family representative groups. Indeed, only the week before last, Maternity Action wrote to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on behalf of a number of trade unions and family groups to set out views on areas that might usefully be covered. This discussion is therefore very much a live one, and I hope to be able to announce the group’s membership and first meeting date soon.

I congratulate once again the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire on securing this important debate and for keeping this issue in the public eye. I started off by talking about how most employers realise the value of investing in their workforce and supporting them throughout their career. There are clearly actions that we need to take and issues we must address, as she and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) outlined eloquently. I look forward to working with the taskforce, seeing what it has to offer, listening to further debates both in this place and in responding to it and tackling many of these issues, as parliamentary time allows.

Question put and agreed to.