Employment Rights Bill

Baroness Prosser Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to participate in this debate.

I thank my noble friend the Minister for her introductory comments. She mentioned the clauses in the Bill that relate to equal pay. I am very pleased to hear that, but I must use words of caution to remind the House that this year marks 50 years since the Equal Pay Act was put on the statute book and, as she said in her opening comments, we still have a 13% pay gap between men and women workers. It has been my true belief for many years that, while the legislation is of course hugely important and we cannot do without it, legislation on its own does not do the trick.

My experience of the introduction of positive action programmes—which I will very briefly explain to the House—is that they have made a very important difference in a number of areas. Under the previous Labour Government, we introduced a programme, following the work of the Women and Work Commission, that worked with employers in various employment sectors where we identified women who had the ability and desire to improve their situation in the workplace. Many women take up jobs that are not necessarily at the top end of their ability: jobs that fit in with their family commitments. Those commitments may decrease over the years, as the children get older, but the women are stuck with those positions. Giving those women the opportunity to upskill, to train and to retrain—and, therefore, to move further up the salary ladder—has proved extremely fruitful.

Interestingly, in that exercise, more money was put into the delivery of the programme by employers than by government. Employers loved it. In the very short time that the programme was allowed to exist, over 25,000 women benefited from it. I would like to hear from my noble friend the Minister whether the current Government would consider looking at a positive action programme to ensure that the legislation we have on the books can benefit women and make a difference.

The other side of positive action involves looking at the situation of girls and boys in school and identifying the ways that girls learn differently from boys. A programme that ran called “Computer Classes for Girls” taught girls about computers, in big detail, in ways that allowed them to feel more comfortable about assimilating that information, thereby giving them the skills to move into work that would be more highly paid. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to tell the House that she is open to ideas on this front and that we can therefore see some true movement on equal pay.