International Women’s Day

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, it is my privilege and pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. As she says, I was her first Minister. We recruited her from Shelter to deliver a very significant reduction in rough sleeping across the country, within that parliamentary term—and with Louise we overdelivered. That led to all sorts of things. Louise soon demonstrated her focus on delivery across government, not just in one department, and in the third sector. She was a fearsome champion, absolutely focused on delivery. As noble Lords have heard today, she will do things in unconventional ways and ways you are not expecting. That meant that she was noticed by Prime Ministers, and, when they had a difficult problem——whether it was rough sleeping, anti-social behaviour or troubled families—they would turn to her. On all sorts of issues, Louise was the person who was identified as being able to focus on it, find a way through and get people moving.

Whatever Louise approaches, to me she always represents, as she said herself in a different way, tough love. She is tough on all the barriers—including some of the people involved—that prevent people getting the support necessary to turn their lives around. But she is incredibly caring in support of the most vulnerable. Her most recent work, on food poverty, which she did not have time to mention today, demonstrates that in such a way that I have no doubt that, whoever is in government later this year, she will continue not only to speak truth unto power but to deliver those things that are needed for people who are disadvantaged and not getting their fair share, as well as those who need changes so that they can live with decency, dignity and opportunity.

Louise never does things in a conventional way, as I have said. She works out what is needed to secure change then goes about how to deliver it—I warn any noble Lords who are looking to be Ministers that she will be after you, and so she should. I am proud to call her my friend, and I look forward to continuing to work with her, to make sure that we make a change to the lives of those who do not get their fair opportunity in this country at the moment.

Last week, I went with the CPA to the Gambia, and met the gender equality committee, as well as others in the National Assembly. At the meeting we observed, the committee was assessing how the women’s enterprise fund was working. The fund has been introduced to create, promote and grow women’s enterprises. There was a real feeling that it was important to make sure that women were able to look after their families and be effective in their communities, particularly in rural areas. It is how a number of countries in Africa that I have been to are now working. They recognise that, unless women are empowered economically, their society will not change or move forward. Over the week, the women also talked to us about sexual and gender-based violence. Women’s economic empowerment was seen as a way of tackling these issues; as women were gaining confidence and getting assurance, they were then able to work on the issues in their communities.

I have seen it in other countries too. From my involvement with Voluntary Service Overseas I know that the concentration on gender issues and women and girls—which is reflected in the Government’s international development strategy—has become an important way of us working internationally. Unfortunately, many of the programmes have been severely cut—I was ashamed that we are no longer giving anything to the programme in the Gambia. We could and we did work on these things incredibly effectively. However, as other Members, including the right reverend Prelate, have said, our failure to maintain our commitment on that is having real effects on women and girls and communities across the world.

What I saw in the Gambia, and have seen elsewhere in Kenya and Tanzania, we can learn from—we learned a lot last week. I want to push the Government on how they are going to return things such as the International Citizen Service, so that young women from this country can, with young women across the world, understand and work on these issues together. The young woman with the lead responsibility for women’s programmes in the CPA was an ICS graduate. She had been a volunteer in Malawi and said that it totally changed her life, ambitions and what she wanted to work on. It had an effect not only on the young women she was working with in Malawi but on her. I have seen that with hundreds of young women in this country.

The women in the Gambia National Assembly really want to work with us to make sure that, with the empowerment of women economically and in other ways, they can tackle gender-based violence. Do we not need to do the same? I left thinking that, as a country and as a Government, we need to look again at how we make sure that women are economically secure and able to create their own businesses and so on. We already know that women’s small businesses are much more likely to last and prosper because they will stick with it. The Government must think about what they have seen internationally, through the funds to empower women economically, and what they have learned, so that we can benefit in this country too. That way we could really begin to change how women are looked at and enabled to be strong in our country.