Women and Girls: Economic Well-being, Welfare, Safety and Opportunities

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lady Gale for all her work in favour of women over many decades. I also thank her for her excellent, probing opening remarks today. Most of us speaking see ourselves as second-wave feminists. We fought for equal pay and conditions and for universal childcare in the 1970s and 1980s. Some of us pitched up at Greenham Common; some of us burned our bras—not all of us, obviously. Fast-forward to the 2020s and we realise that we can never be complacent, as the status of women and girls continues to be a cause for great concern. You have only to listen to some of the extremely strong contributions made today from all sides of the House.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Labour Party has, perhaps more than any other institution, helped to feminise Britain. In 1997, more than 100 women were elected as Labour MPs. Less than a generation earlier, the number was just 10. Those years from 1997 saw the birth of the minimum wage, the rollout of tax credits, the introduction of Sure Start—all political decisions that did so much to assist the lives of women in low-paid jobs.

When Labour left government in 2010, we had made huge strides in maternity and paternity leave, thanks to a Labour Government working with EU standards. While things were never perfect in the history of Labour in government after 1997, from that year, according to the ONS, there was a steady decline in the pay gap, at least for full-time workers, to its position now of 8%. Thank goodness for the Fawcett Society for keeping alive the dream of equal pay for work of equal value.

There is so much more we could have done, but the last 12 years have seen women and girls in this country feeling more unsafe, having less trust in the police, being poorer in many cases and, in terms of girls, feeling more unsure of their identity and self-worth than ever before. Much of that is down to the unwillingness of this Government to tackle the internet giants where it hurts—in their pockets—despite the long-awaited Online Safety Bill, which of course has now been delayed.

The last 12 years have brought us to the point of being told in a recent study by Legal & General, reported last month in the Financial Times, that the average pension pot of a woman at retirement was found to be £12,000, compared with an average of £26,000 for a man. For all the talk of modern, well-off pensioners, older women earn less than their male counterparts and therefore face very weak personal pensions. They are seriously dependent on state provision to stay fed and warm. This coming winter must be terrifying for a lot of older women.

The coalition Government introduced some welcome gender equality initiatives, but the emphasis on austerity policy kept contradicting them. Most of that ongoing austerity policy in the last 12 years was directed at single-parent households, nine out of 10 of which are headed by women: the benefit cap, the two-child limit and the bedroom tax. Also, half of all single parents now receive no child maintenance at all, as Governments have continuously offloaded that responsibility. The list goes on.

The Domestic Abuse Act introduced by the present Government has indeed been an important step forward, but deep cuts to the justice system have had a hugely detrimental effect on women. We have only to look at the desperate situation with rape cases, as set out by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, to know that that is so. Covid saw millions of women taking more than their fair share of the consequences of that terrible pandemic. The Government may say they are not responsible for the arrival of the pandemic, and it cannot be blamed on them, but it is important to remember that all those years of austerity policies meant that the poorest women in the country were less resilient in coping with the pressures of the pandemic and, more recently, of this unique cost of living crisis.