Equality: EC Policies on Women on Corporate Boards

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

There are lots of statistics to show that progress is being made. As far as I am concerned, business needs to show that it wants women and not just that it is willing to put up with them

[Baroness Thornton]

My Lords, notwithstanding the party opposite’s visceral hostility to all things European, I think the Minister concedes that the fact that the European Commission has initiated this discussion will have focused the minds of many FTSE 350 companies on the need to address this problem. What are the Government doing to address the presence of women on public bodies, for example on health boards and clinical commissioning groups? Are the Government monitoring the number of women who are coming forward and are being appointed to those bodies as well?

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

Just to be absolutely clear, while we do not support the quotas or the European legislation, we feel very strongly about this issue. I think that I am right in saying that we have a target of 50% for appointments to public bodies by 2020. If I am wrong I will write to the noble Baroness, but we are definitely ensuring that as much effort is made in that area as it is in the corporate world.

Unemployment: Older Women

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Baroness Thornton]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to address unemployment among older women.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud)]

My Lords, the Government, through universal credit, the Work Programme and Jobcentre Plus flexibilities, are reforming the welfare system to improve incentives and provide more effective support to those without work. Advisers now have the flexibility to offer all claimants, including older women, a comprehensive menu of help which includes skills provision and job search support. All claimants who are long-term unemployed can access the tailored, back-to-work support on offer from the Work Programme.

[Baroness Thornton]

I thank the Minister for that reply. Indeed, this Question is by way of my 60th birthday present to myself—

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

[Baroness Thornton]

—asking the Government what they intend to do about the fact that older women are losing their jobs at a much faster rate than men. Indeed, unemployment rocketed by 27% last year. This is further evidence that this Government really do not understand the issues which are important to women. Does the Minister acknowledge the disproportionate and negative impact that the austerity agenda is having on the lives and employment of all women, but particularly older women?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I must congratulate the noble Baroness on her birthday. However, I must also commiserate with her as she has been completely bamboozled by her colleagues in another place. I have never seen a more misleading use of data for years, not since the 1970s when Denis Healey discussed inflation. If you take a very small figure and add 27% to it, you will find that it is still a very small figure. The actual level of unemployment of women in the 50 to 64 age group is 3.9%. That is the lowest rate of unemployment of any group of women. It is the lowest rate of unemployment of any group of women or men. Therefore, I do not think that the noble Baroness has pinpointed a particular point of concern in terms of unemployment.

Disabled People

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 27th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, DLA has grown from 1 million people in the early 1990s to more than 2 million at the beginning of this decade to more than 3 million now, which is a huge expansion. Many of those people were self-referred. Clearly, we need to ensure that the money which we spend on people with disabilities is directed at those who really need it.

[Baroness Thornton]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that many disabled people are helped back into employment by a variety of organisations, including charities and social enterprises—some very small and at very local level. The Government now propose to pay those who provide this support in arrears and by results. Does the Minister accept that many of these organisations will not have the reserves to see them through this important work and that therefore the one size fits all, that is being proposed here, will not work? How is that compatible with big society support for the voluntary sector?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, if the noble Baroness is referring to the work programme, clearly that is a structure in which consortia will come together and help people right across the spectrum with differential pricing—something which is not currently in existence and means that people concentrate on the easier to help. The work programme will not. The capital is a key ingredient of the work programme. Clearly, capital must go in to support not just the prime contractor but the whole consortia. That is how the smaller organisations will get the resources in order to help the people who need help the most.

Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970: 40th Anniversary

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Corbett on introducing this debate. I join other noble Lords in paying tribute to my noble friend Lord Morris for the very many wonderful achievements he has to his name over his long and distinguished career—of course, it is still not over—not least his achievements concerning the subject of today’s debate. It is 40 years since the passing of the first ever legislation for disabled people, the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970. I join my noble friend Lady Gale in saying that I thought that the manifesto read out by my noble friend Lord Morris when he introduced that Bill is as relevant today as it was then.

For the second time this week, I am substituting for my noble friend Lord McKenzie and, like the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, I intend to address the future. Yet again, I shall be seeking assurances from the Minister that the Government, perhaps in their enthusiasm for downplaying or finding fault with the work of the past 13 years, do not lose sight of the progress which has been made on disability rights, much of which has already been mentioned.

In preparing for this debate, I was sent the link to the transcript of the debate which took place in your Lordships' House 10 years ago, referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham. That was obviously on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Alf Morris Bill. I commend it to the Minister if he has not already read it. Some noble Lords who spoke then have also spoken today, including the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, the noble Lords, Lord Ashley, Lord Addington and Lord Rix, whose debate it was and, of course, my noble friend Lord Morris.

Sadly, some who spoke then are no longer with us, such as Lady Darcy de Knayth, who was beloved and respected across this House. In that debate she berated the Government—my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath was answering the debate—on the proposed reforms in disability benefits. The Minister might want to take heed of the effectiveness of the disability lobby on that occasion. She also spoke about mobility, which had been the subject of her maiden speech 30 years before when the original Bill was discussed in the House. The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, also made her maiden speech in the original debate. It was a debate of enormous significance.

Noble Lords might wish to know that two Earls spoke in that debate, the noble Earl, Lord Snowdon, and Lord Longford. Lord Longford said:

“When I find myself before St Peter in the near future, he may say to me, ‘Did you do any good down there?’ I shall be able to murmur a little bit about the honours I have received. And he will say, ‘I do not want to know about that. I want to know, did you do any good?’ I shall be able to say, ‘I played a small part in helping to carry the Alf Morris Bill through the House of Lords 30 years ago’. He will probably say, ‘OK, you can take a day off purgatory for that’”.

I say amen to that. The noble Earl, Lord Snowdon, reminded the House:

“Fifteen years ago I objected in the strongest possible terms to disabled passengers being shoved into the unheated luggage van with no facilities, not even a lavatory”.—[Official Report, 19/4/00; cols. 737-40.]

I reflect that we have come a great distance. Many noble Lords have ensured that disabled people get treated with dignity and have facilities where they need them. A great deal of progress has been made in the 10 years since that debate. I know from my recent experience as a Minister in this House taking through the Equality Act and the Personal Care at Home Act what an important voice the disability lobby is in your Lordships' House and what a valuable and influential role noble Lords have played in shaping and improving both those Acts, and many before.

The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, and I shared what I think can be described as a glance when the right reverend Prelate referred to the lack of portability of assessment for the disabled. We got that into the free personal care Bill, but this Government are not enacting it. I urge the Minister to bring forward proposals to this House as soon as possible at least to bring forward that part of that legislation.

It was the Labour Government who legislated to protect people who may be unable to make decisions for themselves under the Mental Capacity Act, which provides safeguards to help people to make decisions about their daily lives and be supported where they need it. It was the Labour Government who gave new rights to disabled people through the Disability Discrimination Act and signed the United Nations convention on the rights of people with disabilities, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Low. It was the Labour Government who made families with disabled children a priority, with a total of £770 million in new funding for local authorities and primary care trusts to support disabled children and their families, as was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Rix. I join him in urging the Government not to cut that important money.

The Access to Work budget has been increased from £15 million in 1994-95 to £69 million in 2008-09 and £81 million in 2009-10. Access to Work is likely to help about 35,000 disabled people to take up and stay in work in 2009-10. Will it be safe?

The Labour Government introduced free nationwide off-peak travel on local buses for the over-60s and eligible disabled people in England. Will that be safe? We established the Equality and Human Rights Commission to act as a strong and independent champion to tackle discrimination and promote equality for all. Labour in government was determined that the UK should always be a world leader in disability rights, and we legislated to provide protection against discrimination at work while offering new support for people to get into work. We will be carrying forward the campaign to strengthen the rights of disabled people to access to services and work and to be supported to make choices about their lives. Where the Government are also doing that, they will have our support.

The independent living strategy was published in 2008, written jointly with many disabled organisations. It is jointly owned by six government departments and details more than 50 government commitments to deliver choice and control for disabled people. Will the Government be taking forward the independent living strategy and, if so, what progress is being made? Is the disability living allowance to be reviewed? It supports people into work. It is paid to people irrespective of whether they are working. Will the Government honour the previous Government’s commitment, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Low, to raise the disability living allowance above inflation this year and, from April 2011, to extend the higher rate of the mobility component of DLA to more than 20,000 severely visually impaired people, allowing them greater freedom to get out and about, either socially or to find work?

As I mentioned, the DWP offers a range of specialist disability employment provision designed to help disabled people with high support needs to find and stay in employment. Remploy will have helped about 10,000 disabled people in 2009-10. What will happen to the new specialist disability employment programme for disabled people with the highest support needs, the work choice programme, which was due to start in October 2010, replacing the specialist disability employment programme? Between 1979 and 1997, the number of people on incapacity benefits trebled and people were left without the support to help them ever return to work. The number of working-age people on employment and support allowance and incapacity benefit is now down by 148,000 since its peak in 2003. What does the future hold for the employment and support allowance?

The Labour Government had planned that, by 2015, £370 million would have been spent on the railways for all schemes to improve the accessibility of our railway stations, including £35 million for immediate improvements to the busiest stations. Will the Government continue to deliver this programme?

We strengthened the Disability Discrimination Act in 2005, fulfilling the then Government's commitment to a comprehensive and enforceable set of civil rights for disabled people, and in 2006 we introduced a duty on public authorities to promote equality for disabled people, known as the disability equality duty. We further strengthened disability discrimination legislation through the Equality Act. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, is completely correct. These initiatives take disability rights to another level. The Equality Act imposes a new duty on all public organisations to consider the needs of disabled people and actively to seek to promote equality. It will allow public organisations and businesses to take positive action to diversify their teams, including by appointing a disabled candidate where that candidate is equally as qualified as a non-disabled candidate, if the disabled are underrepresented. I hope the Minister will be able to assure the House that the Government will be enacting all the provisions of the Equality Act in the timescale that was intended.

This has been a wonderful debate, and it is an honour to respond on behalf of the Labour Opposition. I can pledge our continuing determination to extend disability rights and our determination to join other noble Lords across the House to ensure that the Government do not lose momentum and do not slip back.

Poverty

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton]

My Lords, I realise that I am a mere stand-in for my noble friend Lord McKenzie, who I know would bring his usual incisive, knowledgeable and charming ways to the Dispatch Box, but he is unable to be in the House today, so I will do my best. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for initiating the debate.

Many of the questions that I would like to ask have been put by other noble Lords. During the Queen’s Speech debate, I predicted that the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, would hold his Government's feet to the fire on the issues that are dear to his heart and about which he is an acknowledged expert, but I did not appreciate that the first foray would be quite so soon. I feel a little sympathy for the Minister as, during the debate, a large number of very important questions have been addressed to him. The Minister might take some comfort from the fact that this will be the first of many debates on these kinds of issues, so he might be forgiven for not having all the answers immediately—perhaps that is no comfort at all.

Yesterday, Dr John Philpott, chief economic adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, predicted that the coalition Government's deficit reduction measures will stall any recovery in the UK jobs market this year, resulting in a post-recession peak in unemployment close to 3 million, and slowing any subsequent return to low unemployment. He went on to say:

“Given what we know historically about the way in which the social burden of unemployment and stagnant average income growth is shared across individuals and communities, the prospects for those already suffering the most disadvantage seem particularly bleak”.

I turn to two issues to which reference has been made in the debate. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, for his loyalty, but I thought I would add a few statistics of my own to his. Today there are 353,000 fewer people on inactive working-age benefits than there were in 1997. The number of people on incapacity benefit almost tripled under the Tories from 800,000 in 1979 to 2.5 million in 1997. At 5 per cent the claimant count is half the level it was in the 1980s and 1990s. The proportion of workless households is still lower now than in 1997, despite the recession and a big increase in the number of students. As a result of Labour’s welfare reforms, investment in childcare and family-friendly working policies, 365,000 more lone parents are in work than in 1997. Why have the Government announced that they intend to save £320 million by cutting some unemployment programmes, including the future jobs fund? How many jobs will not be funded through that and what will be the impact of the Government’s proposals?

I remind the House that under the previous Tory Government, child poverty doubled and the UK had the worst level of child poverty in Europe. Since 1999, we have made progress in tackling child poverty, halting and then reversing the upward trend. So I join other noble Lords—for example, the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne—in expressing my anxiety about the suggestion that the Government might drop our target for cutting child poverty. I join the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn in his concern about the future of Sure Start.

The coalition agreement, which I draw to the right reverend Prelate’s attention, states:

“We will take Sure Start back to its original purpose of early intervention, increase its focus on the neediest families and better involve organisations with a track record of supporting families. We will investigate ways of ensuring that providers are paid in part by the results they achieve”.

How will they know, as Sure Start is intended to be a long-term investment in the future of those children, so the results of the success of a Sure Start programme are known not within a year, two years, or three years, but after 10 years, 15 years or 20 years? We know that from the experience of the United States. I also ask the Minister about the intention not to fund free school meals. Again, that is a direct investment in the health and welfare of our children.

Clearly, it is important that we take care to disentangle the causes and consequences of poverty, and some of what I have heard from those on the Government Benches during the Queen's Speech debate and last week during a debate on these issues in another place suggests not a little confusion on that front. As my honourable friend Kate Green MP—a new and very knowledgeable addition to the Opposition Benches in another place—said:

“It is certainly true that lone parents face an exceptionally high risk of poverty, but it is also the case that poverty and the stress of trying to make ends meet can contribute to family and relationship breakdown. It is important that we help to sustain relationships and keep families together, and ensure that they have adequate resources to remove that stress and concern”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/6/10; col. 544.]

The Government must demonstrate that they have taken account, for example, of those who face a particular risk of poverty and why they do so—disabled people and people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, with their unequal access to the labour market and unequal experience within it. Those are the structural drivers of poverty and it is important that public policy addresses them.

My concern is that both my honourable friend Frank Field, for whom I have the utmost respect, and the Minister, Mr Iain Duncan Smith, sometimes give the impression that they have a view of the “deserving” poor and the “not so deserving” poor, as already mentioned by the right reverend Prelate, which sometimes does not take account of the fact that life for those out of work and on benefits is not a life of luxury. I challenge the House to consider how any of us would manage on a disposable income of £65.45 a week. I suggest that when the axis of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, Frank Field and Iain Duncan Smith are creating their policy they learn from what has and has not worked in the past. I am sure that they will want to do that.

As I said, during the 1980s and 1990s, child poverty doubled, but since 1999, the number of children in poverty has been reduced by 500,000. That is not by accident. Child poverty reduced in the years in which the Government invested in family incomes through benefits and tax credits, and increased in the years in which Governments have not. The Labour Government's policy of seeking to reduce poverty through increases in tax credits and benefits is not a failed policy.

I therefore caution Ministers carefully to consider what the evidence tells them and to take careful account of the significant expertise that exists outside the House and on the Benches in this House. I refer to the noble Lords, Lord Kirkwood and Lord Adebowale, and my noble friend Lord McKenzie. I was pleased by the almost entirely cross-party support that the Child Poverty Bill secured during its passage through the previous Parliament. The Child Poverty Act 2010, as it became, put in place a recognition of the need to sustain the poverty reduction targets, confirmed the importance of the relative income poverty target and set it once more at the 60 per cent median line.

What are the Government going to do to redefine poverty? Will they, for example, be taking the definition of the Prime Minister when he said that he was concerned about a definition of poverty as,

“people with less than 40 per cent of average household income”,

or “severe poverty”? That definition excludes 2.5 million children from targets of child poverty. The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that such a definition is “not particularly accurate” because some people might have low incomes but enough wealth to have a purchasing power well above the poverty line. Indeed, the Child Poverty Action Group called the statistic “dodgy” and pointed out that under that definition poverty increased by nearly 500 per cent under the previous Conservative Government.

The coalition Government appear set to water down our commitment to end child poverty by 2020 by changing the current definition of poverty. It is clear to us that this will be a disaster for low-income families who need help and support so that they are not left behind and will condemn some children to falling further and further behind their peers. The Government have already announced the abolition of child trust funds and have hinted that they may cut tax credits and other benefits further than was promised in their manifesto. Will the Minister comment on whether that is the case?

Everyone in this House is very concerned about the effect of the Government’s proposals on the most needy and vulnerable in our society so, along with many noble Lords around the House, I suspect we will be watching carefully and will be returning to this vital issue.