Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Afshar Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 1 and 42. I will not repeat what I said in Committee or what has already been said today. However, I want to emphasise why the reporting duty needs to report on different groups, particularly people with learning disabilities, people with autism and people with mental health problems. The Work Programme and Work Choice just have not worked for people with learning disabilities. The disability employment gap is approaching 70% for people who would like to work but cannot find work and need specialist support to enable them to do that. That is why we need to look specifically and carefully at some groups quite separately from each other. Therefore, I support these amendments.

[Baroness Afshar (CB)]

My Lords, I support the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. In the case of minorities, mental disability is regarded as a dishonour or as a great failure for the family, and only within the formal context of education, and at early stages, is it possible to intervene. Furthermore, because the intervention adjusts a young person to the requirements of the British community, with which the minority communities are not very familiar, it is essential to bring in these potential talents by catching them early and helping them.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. I thank the Minister for meeting some of us last week to talk about why we felt that this amendment was so important. I shall outline the four key themes from my perspective. I agree that we need consistency of approach, as outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Low. We need to monitor and evaluate progress on the target. This is the Government’s target and it is laudable and very welcome. However, do they really not want to measure it and evaluate improvement? One could perhaps think that the Government do not want to measure progress towards the target, and consider that it is easier to pick off low-hanging fruit than to assess the great variations in disability and tackle those, so that more people enter employment. As has already been said, this measure is not costly and will certainly help to identify the support that employers need to help people with disabilities.

Family and Relationship Support

Baroness Afshar Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann]

I can inform the noble Baroness that the family test will be applied to all new policies that are being developed by government, and it will be strictly applied. The idea at the moment is that we transfer the Department for Education’s responsibility to the Department for Work and Pensions so that these policies are more integrated for the benefit of the families who we are trying to support.

[Baroness Afshar (CB)]

Has the Minister considered the plight of Muslim women, who are very often home-based and therefore not likely to go out to seek advice? Are there any provisions for dealing with Muslim women in their own homes in order to counter what violence there is, which in some cases could be quite considerable?

[Baroness Altmann]

The noble Baroness asks an important question. We are working with a number of different organisations to ensure that the relationship support that we deliver covers a whole variety of different types of relationship, including Muslim relationships and those where there is an element of domestic violence. I reassure the noble Baroness that that is being included.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Afshar Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Afshar]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, for putting this debate on the agenda. On this occasion I will speak on the experiences of Iranian women, whose access to education has been systematically curtailed over the past decade, and ask whether it would be possible for conditions allowing bright, qualified, English-speaking Iranian students who apply for universities and have the resources to be more easily admitted via the visa requirements. However, before doing so, I point out that the reason why the access of Iranian women to education has been severely curtailed by the Iranian Government over the past decade is the fear that, through education, they will gain familiarity with and knowledge of their Islamic rights.

Some 14 centuries ago Islam gave women rights that are the subject of discussion in this debate today. I will begin with the right of independent means. Muslim women never lose their property on marriage. As I said to my husband when I married him, what I have is mine—and what he has is mine too. The reason for that is, to follow the comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, the duty of reciprocity. That is to say, Muslim men first have the duty to pay for women to agree to sign a marital contract. Marriage is a matter of contract between consenting partners, and men must pay women to participate and sign in the first place. They can impose any condition they like, and these are contractually binding agreements.

Secondly, marriage and motherhood are not indivisible. The noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, raised questions about paying for childcare and motherhood. The reality is that Islam, 14 centuries ago, gave women the right to choose. If they chose to be mothers, they were entitled to payment, not by the state but by men—by their husbands. If they chose to do housework they were entitled to ask for payment—again, by their husbands. Therefore, essentially, rights that as a feminist in the West I have been fighting for ever since I have been in England were bestowed on Muslim women 14 centuries ago.

However, in order to exercise these rights women need to be familiar with the Koranic teachings and with what Islam offers them. This is the Iranian Government’s fear. In fact, they have two fears: the first is of women knowing their Islamic rights, and the second is the fear of the West—of West-toxification, of Iranian women being intoxicated by the West. They have nowhere to turn.

After the Iranian revolution, the post-revolutionary Iranian Government closed all universities in order to cleanse them of any kind of western influence. When they reopened the universities only 10% of university students were women, because women were deemed unsuitable to attend university. However, using their Koranic rights and the teachings of Islam, women fought, and within a decade they made up 18% of university places, eventually reaching 50% of the student population.

Far from seeing this as an achievement, the Iranian Government declared that this kind of access to education caused,

“social disparity and economic and cultural imbalances between men and women”.

This fear was exacerbated when women made further progress until they comprised 65% of students at universities, simply because they were willing to work harder; they passed entrance exams, which are set for all, and they did better than men. We all know that women often do better than men if they are given the chance.

By 2009, 68% of all graduates in the sciences at Iranian universities were women. This caused real fear on the part of the Iranian Government. Ayatollah Khamenei, the spiritual leader, ordered a second cleansing of university material—and Islamification all over again. As part of this, they felt that there had to be severe segregation between men and women; women would study particular subjects while men would study other, more suitable subjects. The result of that was that by the year 1213, 77 fields of study were considered to be male only, and therefore unsuitable for women. The one women-only subject was nursing; it was recognised that we might be good carers, but nothing else mattered.

There was also an idea that because the female dormitories were limited, fewer women would attend universities from towns other than Tehran. Furthermore, it was felt that educated women who accessed universities and read the limited range of subjects that they were allowed to study caused a very serious problem. First, they tended to marry later. Secondly, they tended to be much choosier about who they married and they preferred to marry men who were equally well or better educated than themselves, so the poor old uneducated men were left on the shelf. That was not considered acceptable. Of particular importance was the fact that educated women had fewer children. Following that, the Iranian Government have imposed draconian measures that have resulted in a number of prestigious universities, such as the Oil Industry University and Isfahan University, no longer admitting women. Those universities that do admit women limit them to a very restricted range of subjects. Human rights, English literature, women’s studies and a whole raft of subjects are considered unsuitable for women. I suppose they think that women might get interested in other subjects through reading English literature. At this crucial point it is very important to open doors for those Iranian women who are able to go to university to enable them to do so in countries such as the UK and to treat them as freedom fighters, not potential terrorists.

Unemployment: Older Women

Baroness Afshar Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, this is clearly of great concern to this Government and all Governments. We are taking significant steps to help carers. About one in six of older women who are inactive are inactive because they have caring responsibilities. Creating a far more flexible carer’s allowance and a universal credit element is one of the ways in which we are looking at that issue. We are also introducing flexibility in our conditionality regime at Jobcentre Plus.

[Baroness Afshar]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that a large number of minority older women do not register as unemployed but get employed in the black market and so do not have a pension from the jobs they have done? They are the people who are most unlikely to be employed in the formal labour market because, although they have extensive experience, they do not have the necessary paper qualifications. They are submerged in the data that are being presented.

Welfare Reform

Baroness Afshar Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, who has been incredibly involved and interested in the development of the universal credit. Jobcentre Plus is structured in such a way that there is a very light touch in the early months which becomes gradually firmer and starts being a heavy hand on the shoulder after six months. There is a reality period. Most people look after themselves and find a job, but some need to have the reality of their position in the marketplace brought home to them, so that they match what work they can realistically expect to do with what is out there. You are much better off being in work and looking for a better job from an in-work position than from an ever longer period of inactivity.

[Baroness Afshar]

My Lords—

[Lord Christopher]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

Cross Bench!

[Baroness Afshar]

Thank you very much. I am very grateful that you allowed me in. I have two related points. First, the welfare legislation that did not get final approval put the welfare of children at its centre. It was the first thing that was stated. Can we hope that the current measures will begin with that statement?

Secondly, there are minority women, particularly Muslim women, who would find it very hard to front up and be consulted by a man who told them what to do. We need to have much more appropriate arrangements, because jobcentres have targets to meet. A specific woman may not want a job that staff think is appropriate. We need leeway and I wonder whether there will be room.

[Lord Freud]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar. Children are at the heart of this. In our view, intergenerational poverty and joblessness are the basic reasons for the much too great child poverty that we have. This measure is designed with children in mind—right at the heart.

I take the noble Baroness’s point about cultural differences. One of the things I expect to see in the work programme—I know it is not in Jobcentre Plus—is quite sophisticated addressing of particular cultures. It is designed to force individualisation. In the work programme at least we will see start the kind of responses the noble Baroness is looking for.