Women and Girls: Economic Well-being, Welfare, Safety and Opportunities

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating and mixed debate, and I fear some of issues raised will pose some challenges for the Minister today. I start by congratulating my noble friend Lady Gale on choosing this debate, although I doubt even she could have anticipated how relevant it would be in highlighting the shortcomings of this Government in dealing with the safety and security of, and need for trustworthiness for, women in the UK. My noble friend’s introduction to the debate was a tour de force and posed many of the questions the Government need to address. I particularly appreciated the tributes from my noble friends Viscount Stansgate and Lord Griffiths. They were very welcome and positive and needed to be said. Indeed, I have a small lioness in my own family: I am very pleased to say that my eight year-old granddaughter is in the football team this evening. She sees no reason at all why she should not be playing football and intends to do so.

I intend to focus on security for women in its broadest sense: economic, physical, and for families. Sometimes, those forms of lack of security are experienced all at the same time, because there is no doubt that the evidence shows that many women are in a much less secure position than they were in 2010. As my noble friend Lady Crawley said, we cannot be complacent, and as my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley said, totally correctly, until we have, for example, comprehensive social care in the UK, we will not make women economically emancipated.

Some noble Lords have put as positive a spin as they can on the status of women and girls today, and without doubt there has been some very welcome progress in many areas since 2010. We have equal marriage and we now have equal pay statistics. My noble friend Lady Goudie mentioned the 30% Club. I pay tribute to the work she has done over many years in involving women and persuading them to play their part at a senior level in our lives; indeed, we have seen an increase in the number of women MPs, for example. I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkins, for the work she has done over many years with Women2Win.

I also commend and recognise the diversity of the now shortening list of potential candidates for the Conservative leadership—even though their politics are still the same old, same old. I also say to the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, and my noble friend Lady Gale that we all have battle scars from trying to make our parties more representative and to get more women elected. That unites us. However, we must ask if the policies and programmes pursued by consecutive Conservative and Conservative-led Governments have substantially challenged the patriarchal nature of our society and whether women and girls are able to thrive in safety and opportunity.

I particularly enjoyed the speech of my noble friend Lord Stansgate; had my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton been here, I know that he would have joined him on the importance of girls playing their part in science, maths and technology. As my noble friend said, it is the idle comments that have the deepest effect and discourage girls from taking physics to a higher level—an ill-judged quip that girls cannot do maths or physics or that it is too hard can lead to their making life-changing decisions that influence the subjects they study or the career they pursue. Noble Lords will know the person I am referring to who has made those idle comments, which can have such a devastating and negative effect.

The evidence suggests that tackling misogynistic conduct from the top of our society to its bottom has been patchy at best. I will come back to misogynistic matters and will look for a moment at investment in growth and the levelling-up agenda, which is an important political focus. The usual focus for an economic stimulus package after a downturn is on the construction industry or investments in physical infrastructure. Women make up just 11% of the construction workforce and 1% of the UK’s on-site construction workforce. When the Treasury issues a call for shovel-ready projects, it is actually saying it wants to invest in male-led occupations.

The ADASS is doing some very interesting work on the adult social care workforce, of which 82% are female. Modelling indicates that any investment in care in the UK would produce 2.7 times as many jobs as an equivalent investment in construction. I invite the Minister to pick that up and champion it, because that is how we will get growth and investment in our society and create jobs for women. My noble friend Lady Donaghy made a great case on issues of low pay; I cannot better it.

The truth is that Governments of the past 12 years have pushed women further into poverty. Noble Lords across the House have described the cost of that. I will not repeat what has been said, but one of the keys to women’s economic emancipation has always been childcare, which is important for the security of family life. The cost of a full-time nursery place for a child under two has risen by approximately £1,500 over the last five years. Some 98% of providers responding to a recent survey said cutting childcare ratios would not cut costs for parents.

This Government have knowingly underfunded free childcare hours, and Ofsted data shows that 4,000 childcare providers closed between March 2021 and 2022, limiting access to childcare and driving up price rises. Under the Conservative Government, soaring childcare costs are compounding the cost of living crisis and putting increased pressure on families while pricing people out of parenting. Labour’s children’s recovery plan would invest in childcare right now, with a more than fourfold increase in the early years pupil premium and before and after school clubs, ensuring that every child gets a new opportunity to learn, play and develop.

I turn to physical security and misogyny, which many speakers have mentioned. It is disappointing for us all—but must be particularly so for Conservative Members, the Minister and some of her colleagues—that so many Conservative MPs have been sexual harassers or worse over the last year. It would seem that the Prime Minister and his party were an outlier on misogyny and sexual harassment, if it were not so redolent of the standards recently prevailing in the Metropolitan Police.

The facts show that there is an epidemic of violence against women and girls under the watch of this Conservative Government. As my noble friends Lady Chakrabarti and Lady Crawley said, women feel threatened in both reality and the virtual world. The number of women homicide victims is at its highest level for 15 years, rape prosecutions and convictions are at a record low and victims are abandoning their trials due to delay. Although I credit the Government for publishing the very welcome domestic abuse plan a few months ago, it commits only to “considering” and “looking at” a register for serial domestic abuse perpetrators. This side of the House and the sector have been demanding this for years, so why are they now only looking into it? This is yet another example of piecemeal steps instead of the widespread reform we all need. I ask the Minister to respond to a simple question: why is there not a RASSO unit—a rape unit—in every police force in this country? Can she explain why?

I will wind up with some questions for the Minister. Does she agree that it is time that misogyny is made a hate crime? Will she commit to the Government bringing forward the victims’ Bill? I look forward in particular to her response to my noble friend Lady Prosser’s remarks on levelling up and practical solutions to women’s work. When will we get the long-promised women’s health strategy? Will the Minister give a commitment, for example, to tackling the gender bonus gap, which in 2021 was 40%?

Labour has a plan. For example, we have a new deal for working people which will put women at the heart of our economic recovery. I think I just need to say: what this country needs, and what the women in this country need, is a Labour Government, and we need the opportunity for an election to have one.