International Women’s Day

Baroness Prosser Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for placing this debate on today’s agenda. I look back to when I came in to the House some 15 or so years ago. At that time, the International Women’s Day debate was always placed on the agenda by Baroness Gould. There were just a tiddly few of us in the Chamber speaking on this subject, almost all on these Benches. I am glad that Members on other Benches, and particularly Members of the Government, have come to recognise the importance of having a good, solid debate about the ways in which women’s lives are affected throughout society, by government legislation, relationships—all sorts of things. I am grateful that the debate has been placed, but I do remember the time when it was only us few talking about it.

I want to continue the points I made earlier this afternoon and yesterday about equal pay. The Minister mentioned my Bill: I entered the ballot for a Private Member’s Bill amending the equal pay legislation and my Bill came out as number 56. I was tempted, when I introduced the Bill for its First Reading, to sing the old song, “And It Was Never Seen Again”, because it is very unlikely that there will be any government time for a Bill that comes out at number 56. However, I have decided, along with the Fawcett Society, which has helped me enormously in this work, to continue to bang the drum about equal pay, because if we do not keep banging the drum, it will never get better.

Alluding briefly to what I said earlier, there are couple of major points in this Bill. One I mentioned earlier is about the right to know. The Minister said today that which she did not say yesterday, which is that the Government are not overly happy about possible legislation on the right to know. I absolutely accept that it is tricky; lots of things are tricky. Building the Forth bridge was tricky, but it got done, so where there’s a will, there’s a way: if the Government want something to happen on this, we can make it happen. I welcome the Minister’s offer of a meeting to discuss this question and to try to find a way through some of those slightly sensitive points.

Another main point in the Bill is the assessment of damages when a woman wins an equal pay case. This currently does not take account of lost pension rights, and for many women in good pensionable jobs with decent pay, the loss of pension rights adds up to more than the loss of their income. We want to promote that aspect as well, by whatever means are available. The other side of equal pay, of course, has nothing to do with the legislation but has to do with society’s expectations of women and girls, the constraints of family life, the high cost of childcare, attitudes to girls at school and many other such things. Many years ago, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, I chaired a commission of inquiry into the continuing reasons for the gender pay and opportunities gap. We did not look at the legislation at all; we looked at all the things that make life difficult for women.

I have mentioned in this House the lack of access to decent-quality part-time employment: almost all part-time employment is at the bottom end of the pay scale. Women who trained in the National Health Service, for example, to become radiographers or to fill other highly skilled, very professional roles, have found themselves unable to continue in that work, or may not want to continue to work full-time when they have children. There are so few such jobs available part-time that those women end up working in Marks & Spencer, Tesco or Waitrose, and given that all those shops are going off the high street, those jobs will go as well, so women will be in an even more difficult position.

We also find women who start off in a workplace at one level and there they stay. Nobody says, “That woman has something about her, let us give her a bit of training.” We introduced, apropos of the report back in 2006, systems through the sector skills councils for reskilling women, giving them new skills and retraining them, helping them to move up the ladder, and it went right across a whole range of sectors of the economy. More than 25,000 women benefited from that training. I go back to the point that where there’s a will, there’s a way. If the Government want this to change, if they want women to be able to move on and up, they have to do something about it.

The noble Baroness, Lady Rock, mentioned the small number of women in information technology. There was an organisation called Computer Skills for Girls, which trained girls up and down the land, in various schools, in computer skills, taking account of the ways that girls want to learn. It was not about war or people killing each other—there was a whole range of other skills, and it was very successful.

There are many tried-and-tested ways of improving the situation and it need not cost a great deal of money or effort. The retraining of women went through the sector skills councils and employers spend far more on it than the Government did. There are people out there who are prepared to join in and want to see these changes come about, but it needs a government lead. Without a government lead it will flounder, it will be bitsy and it will not be coherent.

Children and Families: Early Years Interventions

Baroness Prosser Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester for her splendid introduction to this debate. I did not disagree with a single thing she said. I also did not disagree with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson.

Prior to working in the trade union movement, I worked in community development and I agree that the involvement of local people, with their experience and knowledge, is hugely important in the proper delivery of services in local communities. However, these two matters are not mutually exclusive. Local people, no matter how well intentioned, experienced and knowledgeable, cannot deliver a service out of thin air. It needs financial support and clear policy guidelines and commitment from central government for those two interventions to work together.

Other noble Lords commented on the closure of Sure Start centres. I will repeat the point, despite it having been made several times already, because the more we say it, the more people out there may take notice. More than 500 Sure Start centres have closed since the coalition Government came in in 2010. The programme had been established by the Labour Government and was just finding its feet. Closing the centres was a completely ridiculous decision and a waste of both money and the experience and knowledge that were being built up. Some 66% of the finance for Sure Start has been taken away but the Government have the audacity to say that they support early years intervention.

I will give the House a small example I saw a couple of weeks ago that made me think that a local Sure Start centre would have been a really good thing. I got on the bus to start my journey to the House. A mother had a baby in a pram and a little boy, probably about three years old, sitting next to her. She was not one of those mothers who never says a word to her children—of which there are many—but she never said a single positive thing to that little boy. She told him to shut up. She told him to stop fidgeting. The final straw, in my opinion, that nearly made me leap up, was when she told him to stop laughing.

That poor little fellow was getting no encouragement, no language development and no assistance to know how to behave. I thought that a Sure Start centre would help that family. However, the Treasury in its wisdom has its books at the ready, adds up its figures and, like the computer, says no. The result is a family with no help, where the children will be incapable, as they grow up, of developing their full potential or being able to make a good contribution to the state. It is penny-wise and pound-foolish.

The second example that has been brought to my attention is the effect upon children of homelessness. Personally, I do not know anybody who has become homeless. I count myself as grateful for that because there are so many homeless people. Shelter tells us that, every eight minutes, a child in this country becomes homeless. We may as well be living in a third-world, undeveloped area when we think about those kinds of statistics. This particular family includes five children: an older teenager, an 11 year-old, a seven year-old and two year-old twins. The father lost his job, and the private landlord decided that he would not have a family on benefits living in his rented accommodation, so out they had to go.

They approached their local authority, Redbridge London Borough Council, and were rehoused in a room in a hotel miles from anywhere. There is no bus to go to the shops, so the mother and the twins are stuck in the one hotel room. The father takes the two other children to school on the school bus. The school bus turns up at 7 am. It takes the best part of two hours to get to the dropping-off point. Actually, he can take only one child to school, so, when I said he takes the two children, I made a mistake—I beg noble Lords’ pardon. He takes one child to school. By the time they get to the dropping-off point, there is insufficient time for him to take the two children to two different schools. The seven year-old was going to junior school; but the 11 year-old is now at senior school. It has been decided by the family that, as the 11 year-old is in more senior education, she is the one who has to be taken to school. So the seven year-old is now not at school.

Is that a good start in life? Any early years intervention that the seven year-old may have benefited from when she was smaller will soon be gone. The two year-old twins are getting no stimulation as they are stuck in the hotel room miles from anywhere. Do we think this policy is going to help the young people of this country? If austerity carries on for much longer, we may find what John Maynard Keynes always said: the more you have austerity, the poorer everybody gets and the more we go down and down. I beg this Government to reconsider their austerity programme. If we are to have young people able to grow up properly and contribute to our society and to this country, we have to invest in them. That means money.