Women: Economic Empowerment

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome this debate. It has become a set piece each year and it is important that we have it. It reminds me how privileged all the speakers in this Chamber are in that we have a voice. With that, comes a responsibility to speak for the women who do not have a voice at any level in our community and our society today. I think that we will see a concordat across the Chamber, as we usually do, about the principles and the purpose of this event, but that we will disagree on how we achieve it. It is important to air and discuss that disagreement. The theme for International Women’s Day this year is “Make it happen”. That is a very profound theme because we can talk all we like, but making it happen is more difficult and challenging, and we have to do it.

This week we will also have the Women of the World Festival on the South Bank, a marvellous festival that has grown in size since it began. I should like to congratulate the BBC “Woman’s Hour” programme on transferring itself to the festival and broadcasting from it each day. If we have seen any steadfast support for women over the years, it has come from Jenni Murray and her team at “Woman’s Hour”.

Some 20 years ago—it does not seem like it, but it is—as a young and new Member of this House, I asked this question: when will women achieve equal pay? We had Barbara Castle’s Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act, which is 40 years old this year, and we have still not achieved equal pay. Without that Act, I wonder where we would be—probably in an even more inferior position than we are today. I am reminded, too, that in the other place the majority of Members on the opposite Benches to the Labour Government of the day opposed both of those Acts, as indeed they opposed the 1997 Labour Government’s National Minimum Wage Act 1998. All three of these Acts have been a big help, not for women like us in this Chamber, who have enjoyed enormous opportunity and privilege, but for the women who do not have a voice.

The noble Baroness, in introducing the debate in such an interesting, wide-ranging and enjoyable way, referred to the fact that there is now a woman on the board of every company in the FTSE 100. The instigator of the policy on that was a Labour Peer, my noble friend Lord Davies of Abersoch, and all credit to him. But going back to the theme of my contribution to this debate, I will say that one swallow does not make a summer. This annual debate really gets my juices going and reminds me of years ago, when I was a bit more of a firebrand than I am today.

In 2010, we were concerned about the gender pay gap. We called for a requirement to be put on medium-sized and large companies—not small ones—to publish information about average wages based on gender in their companies. The coalition decided that they did not want any legislation or regulation, but to encourage companies to take up a voluntary code. Although we tried to get that changed, the Government did not accept it, but we have made progress: four companies are now doing it. That is an average of one a year since the year we tried to introduce the requirement. I raise this, perhaps a bit unfairly on the Minister who is to reply to the debate, to ask whether, when an amendment is tabled next week asking companies employing more than 250 people to publish their average wages based on gender, the Government will accept it. Remember that the theme for International Women’s Day this year is “Make it happen”; that would help to make it happen. The pay, opportunity and empowerment gap needs a whole range of initiatives—legislation and regulation, yes, but also a lot of others. I am not stupid enough to think that legislation is the whole answer; it is not.

I have the huge privilege of being president of the charity the Abbeyfield Society. Indeed, one of its former presidents is in the Chamber and will speak later in the debate: the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone. She did a wonderful job as president and I look forward to her contribution. The charity provides housing and accommodation for older members of our community.

Over the past week, in the lead-up to this debate, a Resolution Foundation survey has revealed that 930,000 care workers are paid less than the living wage. I have chosen this theme for the debate because it is an area that is in the public eye, it is an area that will grow, and it is one of the last big areas of employment where employees are undervalued and underpaid. We read in the press only about the abuse that takes place in a minority of cases. As I say, it is an enormous area of employment. I never thought that I would thank the Times, but let me put this on the record. Last year the Times chose the Abbeyfield Society as one of its Christmas charities of the year, and the Telegraph followed that up. I thank both those newspapers for showing the work that these underpaid and undervalued members of society provide.

The Alzheimer’s Society says that 670,000 unpaid carers are women working for people with dementia. Some 82% of older people’s care home managers are women. It is the biggest area of women’s employment that I can think of. In Abbeyfield, 85% of our staff are women, of whom 26% are in senior management roles. The average number of women working in the care sector is much higher than in most other areas of employment in Britain, so it is a very important area for us to get right. Our first woman CEO, Natasha Singarayer, is an inspirational leader. Under her leadership, in only the last 12 months or so, this smallish charity provided 8,000 older people with homes. Of our 9,000 staff and volunteers, over 80% are women. We have a responsibility for them and we have a responsibility for the people that we care for.

Last year I was proud—as I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, will be—that we were the first national care organisation to pay the living wage. Our 1,500 directly employed staff are now all on the living wage. Of course, some asked why, because in some cases it meant a pay increase of over 20%. But we asked: why not? We expect our staff to give first-class care to our people; we expect them to respect them. How can we expect that if we do not respect our staff in their own right? It was the right thing to do. We have gone a bit further than that; we have said that by March 2017 all our direct staff must be on the living wage and all our suppliers must pay their staff the living wage, too. I give this example because we will not be required to do it by legislation or, probably, by regulation. Depending on the outcome of the election, if it was the coalition’s policy, it will not be government policy either. This is where an organisation has taken responsibility itself, and it is where companies must take responsibility.

I said that today was a day of celebration: it is. In particular, I celebrate and congratulate a Peer on our own Benches—my noble friend Lord Soley. Why him? He is making it happen for women. He is the chairman of the Mary Seacole Memorial Statue Appeal, which he helped to establish. A 15-foot statue will be erected right opposite Parliament, in the grounds of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital. Mary Seacole was the daughter of a Scottish father and a Creole mother, born in Jamaica. In 2004, she was voted the greatest black Briton. The location of that statue is important and the work of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, is also important. The statue has a disc behind it that comes from the very site of a British hotel in the Crimea where Mary Seacole set up her nursing station. She applied to the British authorities five times to go there and they refused, so she made her own way, as women with determination will. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, and his colleagues managed to get the team of artists building the statue into the Crimea just two months before the Russians went in. The disc will come from the site of the British Hotel, as she called it—from the site that overlooks the valley where the charge of the Light Brigade actually happened. Although she was not born in Britain, in my view Mary Seacole is one of the great Britons.

It reminded me that we had a debate some time ago about a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst. It is still a dream of mine that we should have that, as well as a statue of the Special Operations Executive women, which we do not have in Britain. We have too few statues and commemorations of women. That is my dream—to commemorate the women who have gone. But the biggest legacy that we could have in commemoration of those women is making sure that the thousands of women in Britain today who do not have a voice are treated fairly and that the Government—whatever Government—stand up and make sure that they are treated fairly and that equal pay is not still a factor in Britain 40 years hence.