Women: Contribution to Economic Life

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the speakers in today’s debate. I thank the Minister for landing us this debate and getting it extended to cover the whole world. We have benefited from her contribution about her brief and that of my noble friend Lady Royall, and indeed from the experience of women across the world. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Palumbo, on his excellent maiden speech; we look forward to hearing more from him, as I am sure we will as time goes on. I also congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester on giving us, as it were, an update on the position of women bishops. I certainly look forward to sharing a glass of pink champagne with him—that is probably the best offer of this debate, actually. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, that I very much enjoyed his speech and was very inspired by it, and I do not think that I was alone in that.

I shall be concentrating on the contribution of women to our economy and the barriers that we face. I will be looking at what the Government could and should be doing to make the world a better place for women and make it easier for them to work. I come from a background where there was really never any question that women worked, as the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, mentioned. We had to go out to work in our family. When I grew up, it was only really middle-class women and those who lived in salaried families for whom the choice was available to stay at home and be homemakers and full-time mothers.

Although I agree with the Minister, who was quite right to say that our lives have been transformed and are quite different from those of our mothers, guess what—I do not think that that much has actually changed in the past 60 years regarding the economic imperatives for going out to work. Going out to work is not a choice for millions of women in the UK or indeed for millions of women across the world, working in factories and fields and from home. The noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, rightly paid tribute to the work involved in childcare and caring, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin.

My grandma Edna had 11 children. During the Second World War she worked on the railways. She had to work, and was able to because of the provision of proper state-run nursery care. Her eldest daughter, Jean—my mother—had seven children. Leaving aside the contraception and family planning issues in my family, which have kept us all entertained over many years, she also worked. She ran two successful businesses. The option of being a full-time homemaker and mother was never open to her—and I am not sure she would have dreamt of taking it if it had. In this 2014 International Women’s Day debate, I pay my tribute to Jean and to Marie, Eileen and Alma, who are her sisters, for their contribution to our economy over the whole of their lives, and it is on their shoulders that I stand today—to use the image used by my noble friend Lady Royall. I do have a granddaughter. She is only six months old, but it is also for her future that I speak today.

Sometimes when we say from these Benches that the Government seem out of touch with the lives of women, it is because of this component. There is sometimes a lack of understanding of life as it is lived by millions of women for whom going out to work is not a choice and for whom childcare is essential. Today it is very expensive. Almost all women will have caring responsibilities at various times in their lives. We do not have to look very far to see the lives of ordinary women. I know that some of the women who clean our offices have other jobs. They go from here to work in supermarkets and other places to support their children through school and to pay increasing rent and travel costs. Their hard-working life is very typical and very common today, which is why, for example, the national minimum wage, which was fought against and opposed by the Conservative Party at the time, is so important. It is why trade unions have an important, vital role to play in supporting women in their fight for decent pay and conditions and in protecting their rights at work.

As the Minister said, there are more women in work today, which is indeed a cause for celebration. There are also more women who want to work who are not able to do so because jobs are not there, or they are too badly paid or, as my noble friend Lady Prosser said, training opportunities do not exist. Women Like Us is a brilliant organisation, and it is also a social enterprise—noble Lords may remember that I am very keen on social enterprises. More social enterprises than small businesses are headed by women, and they have a better survival rate than small businesses.

Women often have to look after their family and undertake other caring responsibilities. There are millions of women who give up their jobs to look after sick and ageing partners, parents and relatives and whose reward for their unpaid, loving care is not celebration or gratitude but to find it more difficult to re-enter the job market and often not at the level that they left it. I am glad that my noble friend Lady Bakewell celebrated our millions of carers.

The question I shall address today is what the Government are doing to make it easier, better and more equitable for women to work and how they match up to those challenges. It will be a bit of a report card. On Tuesday, we saw a headline story which asked the question: “What does childcare really cost?”. A report by the Family and Childcare Trust suggested that the cost of having two children looked after, even part-time, is more than the average mortgage. Over recent weeks, there has been mounting evidence of the impact that increasingly high childcare costs are having on family budgets and our economy, yet the Government seem to be in denial about this.

I dispute the rosy picture painted by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, about the childcare situation. The cost of sending a child under two to nursery part-time—for 25 hours—is now more than £109 per week in Britain or £5,710 per year. The cost of a full-time—42 hours per week—nursery place for a child under two is almost £10,000. Over the past five years, childcare costs for under-twos have risen by 27%, meaning that parents are paying £1,214 more in 2014 than they did in 2009, and I remind noble Lords that wages have remained the same. This is a good example of the cost-of-living crisis facing ordinary families. Ironically, I heard yesterday of a nursery in south-west London which is putting up its fees and citing the cost-of-living crisis as the justification in the letter that it sent to parents. Perhaps it has missed the point there somewhere.

The average cost of an after-school club is now £48.19 a week, or £1,830 a year. Despite the legal obligation in the Childcare Act 2006 and Scotland’s early years framework to ensure enough childcare, only half—49%—of local authorities have enough childcare for working parents. Only a third—33%—of local authorities have enough childcare for children aged five to 11, and this has worsened in the past five years. Three-quarters—75%—of local authorities do not have enough childcare for disabled children; that was more than adequately amplified by my noble friend Lady Uddin.

Even Fraser Nelson of the Spectator, not someone I would normally quote, asked whether:

“Expensive child care is robbing Britain of its female talent”.

He says:

“In this way, the British economy loses out on the talents of a significant chunk of our high-skilled female population. It’s a form of economic self-harm. Making childcare tax-deductible would, in a great many cases, be a game-changer”.

Of course, it is above my pay grade and that of the Minister to comment on matters of tax and spending. However, it is interesting if even a right-wing commentator thinks that the inadequacies and costs of childcare are robbing the UK economy of female talent. My honourable friend Lucy Powell MP said recently:

“Early years places have fallen by 35,000 since 2009 and just half of local authorities report they have enough childcare for working parents”.

Last month, the IPPR highlighted that high childcare costs are stopping many mothers from working and that increasing maternal employment rates would benefit families and the economy to the tune of £1.5 billion a year. It is not cost-effective not to have effective childcare. There is also a question of flexibility of working practices which support working fathers. In Germany and Scandinavia we can see fathers changing the working culture so that they, for example, take the Friday off to undertake childcare responsibilities, even at a very senior level. Would the Minister care to tell us what the Government are doing to encourage working fathers to take their fair share of childcare among the Civil Service?

The Government are reducing work incentives for the lowest earners by cutting tax credit support and creating a two-tier system in universal credit. The Resolution Foundation has reported this will see the poorest families lose £1,000 a year to help pay for childcare. Unlike the current Government, on these Benches we completely understand how important it is that we address the issues with childcare and enable more parents, especially mums, to return to work or work longer hours.

Turning to older women, I think that there is much to celebrate about the labour market position of women over 50 in the UK. The employment rate for women in this age group is high compared with many other European countries, and it is increasing. The employment rate for women aged between 50 and 64 has increased by 14 percentage points over the past two decades, the greatest increase in any group. However, many older women will not recognise the rosy picture painted by these headline statistics. Half of the women aged 50 to 64 work in the delivery of public services, which means that they have been hit by the cuts disproportionately. Redundancies, pay freezes and increased contracting out of services feature prominently in the stories the TUC gathered from older women as part of the Age Immaterial project. Part-time work is prevalent among women over 50 and the majority of them earn less than £10,000 per year. The problems of low pay, lack of job security and weak employment rights are exacerbated for those in precarious forms of work such as zero-hours contracts, as has already been mentioned by my noble friend Lady Crawley.

I very much welcome the fact that the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, recognised that women are experiencing disproportionate effects of the austerity agenda. Indeed, the coalition Government have removed support for childcare, capped maternity pay and have chosen to give a tax break to married couples where one spouse does not work or works a few hours. I do not think that there is any evidence that less than £4 a week is a good or appropriate way to encourage people to marry. In five out of six cases the benefit will be paid to the husband. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, many families will face a £200 penalty if mum returns to work full-time. In December the official figures revealed that the gender pay gap had increased in 2012-13 for the first time in five years. Under Labour, the pay gap fell by 7.7%.

I will glance at our record. We introduced the national minimum wage, which has had such a disproportionately positive effect on low-paid women. We opened 3,500 Sure Start centres to support parents and young families. We increased maternity leave to nine months and extended total maternity leave to a full year. We doubled maternity pay, and from 2009 gave millions of parents with children under 16 the right to flexible working. We introduced working tax credit and child tax credit and legislated against maternity and sex discrimination in the workplace.

What will we do when we are elected next year? Under David Cameron, one in four women earn less than the living wage, but I am happy to tell noble Lords that we will make work pay for women by allowing firms to claim back a third of the cost of raising their staff’s wages to a living wage. We will strengthen the minimum wage and tackle the abuse of zero-hours contracts. We will give every working family 25 hours of free childcare for their three and four year-olds, 38 weeks a year—an increase of 10 hours on the current offer. We will deliver a primary childcare guarantee, which will ensure that the parents of primary school pupils are able to access breakfast and after-school clubs through their school between 8 am and 6 pm. We will back more women to start their own businesses, which my noble friend Lady Crawley mentioned. Private firms will be able to claim back a third of the cost of raising their staff’s wage to a living wage. This evidence shows that we still think that the Government are out of touch with the lives of many women.

We have had some magnificent and fabulous speeches today, from my noble friend Lord Haskel, the noble Baronesses, Lady Seccombe, Lady Howe and Lady Afshar, and my noble friend Lady Howells. On the issue of parliamentary selections I say to the noble Baronesses, Lady Fookes and Lady Jenkin, that we tried a woman on every shortlist in the 1980s and it did not work. It was tokenism. The only way to increase the number and representation of women—I say this to the Liberal Democrats, and I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Smith, agrees with me on this—is to have all-women shortlists. That is the only way that you will persuade your parties to select women and increase the number of women. We would welcome that and would support noble Lords in doing it.

I struggle to give better than five out of 10 for the Government’s support for working women and their families. That five is because the Minister has great words to say and very good intentions, which I hope will be translated into the policies of her party. However, on this International Women’s Day 2014, the UK Government need to do better.