International Women’s Day

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Deech (CB) [V]]

My Lords, we have heard many complaints this week about the effect of the pandemic on women’s potential. The men who have made the relevant decisions are likely to have non-working wives and nannies, and have been oblivious to the reality. However, there is also much to celebrate. There has been a surprising coming to the fore of women’s skills in science and leadership, previously unseen but present. History may look back on this pandemic era as one that was a turning point for women.

If Captain Tom deserved a knighthood for his support for the NHS then Professor Sarah Gilbert, the Oxford vaccine pioneer, should be beatified. She took up her post in 1994, looking at the genetics of malaria, and became a professor at the Jenner Institute, researched flu, then Ebola, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and now Covid. Her team is two-thirds female and she, a mother of triplets, is now working to understand the barriers to promotion to senior levels that women face at Oxford. I also congratulate Dr Jenny Harries, and Kate Bingham, who was responsible for the great vaccine procurement.

Then there is Özlem Türeci, co-founder of BioNTech, which produced the Pfizer vaccine. Women make up 54% of her total workforce and 45% of top management. She is reported as thinking that being a gender-balanced team has been critical to developing the vaccine so quickly. The WHO chief scientist is a woman, Soumya Swaminathan, and the senior vice-president at Pfizer is Kathrin Jansen, who also worked on an HPV vaccine. Time does not permit me to mention many others who have taken the lead, despite the fact that Covid restrictions have impinged on women’s research and publication time. Happily in this past year more women have applied to take science, technology, engineering and maths courses. The number applying to higher education for health-related courses rose by 27%, mostly women, and it is the same for nursing.

Mostly, but not in every case, countries led by women have handled Covid better than those led by men: Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, PM Jakobsdóttir in Iceland, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and Prime Minister Marin of Finland. Of course, this is not universal: we have the walking disaster of Ursula von der Leyen, and vaccine has been Mrs Merkel’s nemesis. However, the typical female approach of caution, care for the elderly, empathy, appreciation of schooling and risk aversion have certainly proved winners for some. Those women are in countries that expect women to be independent and to have careers, which has to be contrasted with the default position in this country, especially in family law, that once a woman has found a partner she is exempt for ever more from supporting herself.

In the future we need to highlight how well women scientists have done and that the career is compatible with family life. We need to concentrate on how diseases may affect women differently from men, a topic explored in Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women. We need affordable—ideally free—childcare to be at the top of the list. We must give women free rein, which historically they have been given only when there is a war and they are needed or can work at home. Covid is a war and women have won it.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, has withdrawn, so I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly.

Schools: Relationships and Sex Education

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Tuesday 12th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, Ofsted has welcomed the department’s guidance on RSHE and, when it is implemented in the next academic year, Ofsted will use it as a guide for assessing part of the personal development section of inspection. As my noble friend outlined, the guidance is clear that secondary schools should include LGBT content but,

“primary schools are strongly encouraged and enabled”,

when teaching about different types of relationships within families, to include families of same-sex parents. That is clearly a move from mandatory to permissive language. Obviously, the Equality Act is also enforced in schools and schools are required to take into account the other protected characteristics, including of course the religious background of students in the school.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

Does the Minister share my anxiety that the opting-out provisions of the new law are so wide that children in faith schools may well be taken out of the sex education classes that they sorely need? All children need to learn to respect a variety of lifestyles, and learn how to look after themselves and avoid harmful practices such as FGM. Children in very religious schools are the ones most vulnerable to ignorance and prejudice. What steps will the Minister take to avoid large numbers of parents removing their children from this education, and how will the Government help teachers contend with protesting parents?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, as relationships education in primary schools does not usually include sex education, there is no right to withdraw your children from that provision. However, at secondary school, when sex education is part of the content, parents have the right to withdraw their child from that education up until three terms before the child is 16, and the school is required to outline that right to parents. The balance is struck by allowing this only until three terms before the child is 16. Obviously, at that stage, when approaching the age of legal consent for sexual relationships, it is appropriate to provide some sex education if the child wishes to have it. The balance is between supporting parents’ rights and giving children their own right to request sex education as they develop.

Trade Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 20th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow a fellow campaigner and the sole Green Party representative in this place. I congratulate the Minister on taking her first Bill through this House and thank her for the graciousness and openness that she has demonstrated in the meetings and exchanges that we have had. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Henig, for supporting my amendment and for reaching common ground on this issue, as we have witnessed today. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for showing his support, for his charm and graciousness and for not roaming in the gloaming as we did last week on the mobile phones SI. Above all, I acknowledge the work of the Minister in this regard.

I hope the Minister will not think me churlish of the spirit that she has shown in the text of the amendment, but it would be remiss of me not to say why I have tabled Amendment 4 for the purposes of debate today. I accept that it is a matter of language and semantics but, in the law, language is important. I understood her to say that guidance would be issued once the Bill had received Royal Assent, but guidance does not have statutory effect and I wonder what its legal status be. I do not take issue with her as much as the parliamentary and legal draftsmen in this regard.

As the Minister said in moving her amendment, we wish to maintain domestic standards when we leave the European Union. I point to the retained EU law—which I think we now call primary or principal law—on sanitary and phytosanitary requirements, in which it is generally understood that standards of food safety are paramount. That has been reflected in the campaign carried out by all the farming organisations, not least the NFU. However, the wording of the World Trade Organization and its committees states that:

“For all of these agreements, the WTO encourages international standards as it believes they are ‘less likely to be challenged legally in the WTO than if it sets its own standards’”.


That is the reason for tabling the amendment. It is a serious omission.

My noble friend said that proposed new subsection (4B)(a) to (d) covered food safety but, having seen epidemics almost every 10 years such as BSE, foot and mouth disease and the horsemeat scandal that could easily have been a food safety issue, I think that it is better to get it on the statute book.

I reiterate what the Minister said: there have been constructive discussions which have permitted us to coalesce around her Amendments 1 and 2. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, has done, I put down a marker that we will return to this issue when the Agriculture Bill reaches this House. However, I again thank the Minister and congratulate her on getting us so far to Third Reading.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps I may make what I hope are reassuring noises about food safety. There has been much discussion here about the fear that our food safety will decline once we have left Europe. Across Europe there are 23 million cases of food poisoning a year and 5,000 deaths.

In the global food security index we tie, at number three, with the USA. Only Ireland and Singapore are ahead of us. Most European countries are way down that list, including, for example, Poland and Bulgaria. In other words, they should be keeping up with us. We would have an awful long way to fall before our food safety record could be compared with the very low standards prevailing in much of Europe. While one welcomes this amendment, in practice there is very little to worry about.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, this is the first time I have intervened on this Bill and I do so without any interests to declare, although back in the 1980s we had great discussions about the criteria for dealing with protected areas in the United Kingdom. This was because in the classification of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, UK national parks were regarded not as category 1 protected areas but as multi-use areas. The meaning of national park here was different from what it was in the United States, Australia or many other countries.

There used to be a three-legged approach to what happened in protected areas in the UK, based on the principles of environmental, economic and social balance. It seemed to me then—and still does—that that encapsulates all that one might expect without skewing the outcome in one direction or another. None of the four items in proposed new subsection (4B) in Amendment 2 refers to business economics or to the leisure and cultural activities of those who may be living and working in protected areas. This is an omission of some significance in regard to protected areas in the UK. Can the Minister say, therefore, whether the three-legged approach is still meant to be encapsulated in the four-legged one in proposed new subsection (4B)?

Trade Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad): House of Lords
Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I have only one brief point to make in response to our noble colleague the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. He said that this is an extraordinary procedure. That is because we live in extraordinary times. No one in this country would have imagined even two or three years ago that we would be standing on the eve of the biggest act of self-immolation in economic terms in some 80 years and yet have no plans for the future. I was going to say that the continuity of which has been spoken is a vacuum, but that is too substantial a word for it. It is the most extraordinary set of circumstances that we have seen in my memory, having been involved in politics for over 40 or 50 years, and every day it gets more extraordinary.

Quite apart from the Bill, this morning Downing Street was apparently briefing that the solution would be for Downing Street to amend the Good Friday agreement—forgetting that even if that course of action might commend itself to this House, the Good Friday agreement is the product of two sovereign nations in a bilateral agreement, along with an American President and eight parties in Northern Ireland itself. Yet they speak as though they are ordering a pizza—as if they can just phone up and suddenly the order will be changed. If the noble Lord worries about extraordinary measures taken by this House, he should seek to remove the Government from the extraordinary position of incompetence and blindfold Brexit in which they find themselves.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I would not pretend to know a great deal about trade, but this I do know: we live in extraordinary times, and it is all the more important that one sticks with constitutional procedures and the rule of law. Imagine if we had a different Government; it is extremely dangerous to play fast and loose with our established procedures. At this moment, we should be clinging to them; it is really important.

We cannot take back control until we leave on 29 March. Taking back control has always meant that we do so in relation to other countries, not that we fight internal warfare in this House and in the other House. We would not be in this position if the leadership of the party of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, who moved the amendment, had been more co-operative and constructive. We would not be in this position if the EU itself had been more constructive and co-operative. Its failure to do so is a sign of a lack of confidence in its own future.

It is absolutely essential that we stick with our constitutional procedures and do not play fast and loose with them, because imagine what would happen in a future circumstance with a future Government. That could be far worse, and we must proceed as our procedures require us to do.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords—