NHS: Single-sex Spaces for Staff

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am involved in the Employment Rights Bill and have been looking to put an amendment to guarantee that all NHS and healthcare employees have the right to access separate-sex changing rooms. Because of the awful experiences of the Darlington nurses and Sandie Peggie in Fife, who were forced to take their NHS trusts to tribunals just to assert their right to get changed in single-sex areas without the presence of male colleagues who identify as women, I had completely forgotten that there are already statutory health and safety laws and regulations that mandate that provision, dating back to 1992. Single-sex changing rooms are also part of NHS England’s good practice guidelines.

It is a story of our times that, right across the NHS, those legal rights have been flouted. The Health and Safety Executive, usually so quick to complain about breaches, has failed to make the law clear or enforce it. Trade unions have stayed shtum. Even worse, it is bad government guidance that has allowed NHS trusts and boards to adopt politicised ideology in the guise of transition at work policies that, I am afraid, have misled trans people by describing privileges as rights.

Now the Supreme Court has ruled with such crystal-clear clarity, you might assume that all private and voluntary organisations, care regulators and, of course, the NHS, would voluntarily want to issue statements making their enthusiastic commitment to implementing the law. Instead, too many are at best fudging and some wilfully misunderstanding the ruling. The problems seem to be that institutions have internalised all these rainbow-badge schemes and the LGBT Consortium and Stonewall’s EDI training, so that unlawful policies are now embraced as kind and progressive rather than unlawful and wrong. Women’s rights have been sidelined as a consequence.

That is why the Government must proactively ensure that NHS bodies act decisively. It should not be left up to Sex Matters to have to write to the likes of Matthew Taylor, CEO of the NHS Confederation and my erstwhile “Moral Maze” colleague, urging him to urgently withdraw guidance that is incorrect and unlawful. Ministers need to help. While the BMA junior doctors have announced that biological sex is scientifically illiterate, I would like to remind them and other trade unions that nursing is a stressful front-line job. What female nurses need is some privacy when getting changed into their uniforms. The last thing they need are some HR apparatchiks denouncing them as bigots, their unions, RCN and Unison, throwing them under the bus, or bosses suspending and shaming them. I think those were the bad old days and I am hoping that, now we have the Supreme Court judgment, the Government will proactively ensure that women’s rights are rightfully restored and nurses can get changed without having to look over their shoulder all the time.