Women: Contribution to Economic Life

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise if my voice waxes and rasps, but I am suffering from a severe case of man flu—let us be honest: is there any other kind? But it is a great privilege to participate in this debate and particularly to hear the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Palumbo, which will be interesting. We should all listen to it with a bangin’ drum ‘n’ bass dance track underpinning everything that he says.

In preparing for this debate, I looked up the variety of international days that exist. They are rich and varied and all incredibly important. It is worth mentioning a couple of them alongside 8 March, which is obviously the purpose of this debate. In two weeks’ time, 20 March is International Day of Happiness. I think that we will all enjoy that one. I was born on the International Day of Rural Women—an incredibly significant day. That was lucky and auspicious in many ways in that I only just, marginally, avoided being born, with more than a degree of irony, on World Sight Day.

I will limit my comments today to three areas of my experience: the law, London 2012 and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, for which my interest is declared in the register. The first is the law. I started many years ago as a solicitor in the City of London, where there were many schemes to try to get more females into the profession. There were many schemes but there was not much outcome at that stage. There were very few women as senior associates and even fewer as partners in City firms. I found out an incredible fact when I started: only a few years earlier, women solicitors were actually prevented from wearing trousers in their profession. That was extraordinary in the 1990s in this country.

Now, the picture is incredibly different. The figures between the genders are far more positive. There are female partners and many more female senior associates, and the work that the Lord Mayor of London is doing in her mayoral year with the project on diversity can only be a further positive action in this area.

When I went to London 2012, I had a clear approach and understanding of diversity and inclusion, and we embedded those right from making the bid, even before we had won the right to stage the Games. The key is for this always to be led from the top. My noble friend Lord Deighton was completely committed to equality, diversity and inclusion across the piece, not least in the area of gender. Look at our director team at LOCOG. Our HR director, comms director, strategy director and general counsel were all extraordinary and phenomenal females. Perhaps more significantly, our director of sport, that traditionally very male Olympic role, was Debbie Jevans. It was an absolutely extraordinary move. She took the sport programme for 2012 from the bid right through to Games time. We drove down into the heads, managers and assistants the need for gender equality throughout the organising committee, and it made a difference. Both in the organisation and at Games time, it absolutely made a difference.

Similarly, we wanted our volunteers, the Games Makers, to be truly representative of Great Britain, and gender was at the heart of that. Not only did it lead to the scenes of the fantastic Games Makers that we are all so well aware of, it gave more than just a nod to the phenomenal work done by volunteers up and down Great Britain, many of whom—the majority, in fact—are female.

I shall move on to those who were centre stage in 2012: the athletes. The first gold medal for Team GB at the Olympic Games was won by Helen Glover and Heather Stanning. I was lucky enough to be at Eton Dorney Lake to experience that golden morning. The person who became the face of the London 2012 Olympic Games was Jessica Ennis. What a phenomenal female she is in terms of sporting performance and her personality. She did not just focus on potentially winning gold at London 2012, she was part of driving ticket sales and maintained people’s interest in and connection with the Olympic Games.

For the first time female and male Paralympians were seen to be on an equal footing with their Olympic counterparts. Ellie Simmonds was such a draw for the crowd that the swimming pool was packed for all her finals. The roar for her final in the 400-metre freestyle event was as loud as it had been for anything during the Olympic Games. Ditto Sarah Storey, a phenomenal swimmer who turned to cycling. I was lucky enough to be in one of the technical cars down at Brands Hatch for the road race and I heard our chief technical officer come on to the radio and say, “She’s not only beating the girls, she’s whipping the boys”. Those were phenomenal performances.

Let us come right up to date with Sochi 2014. Team GB’s gold medal was won by Lizzy Yarnold, and Jenny Jones’s bronze medal was not just a medal—she is the first Briton ever to win a medal on snow. I am sure that the whole House would like to wish our women and men who are to start their Paralympic campaign tomorrow at the Sochi Winter Paralympic Games every success.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

And so on to my time at the Equality and Human Rights Commission. I joined the new board last January. It will be a phenomenal challenge for us across the piece. The board is ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve. I sit on a board of 10 people, two of whom are men.

[A noble Lord]

Hear, hear.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

I knew that the House would enjoy that. We are facing a challenge, not least in the area of enabling the opportunity for women to participate and punch through in the labour market. We are doing a big piece around what is happening with maternity arrangements and how they are shaping up in modern Britain. We are working wider than just the FTSE 100 around board-level appointments. But, as my noble friend Lady Bottomley said, it goes beyond that. It is not just about the board, so we are also going to look at what is called the sticky floor. It is one thing to look, quite rightly, at not just going through but smashing the glass ceiling, but you also have to look at that sticky floor—people, often women, stuck on minimum wage and unable to get up that next rung of the ladder. It is a crucial piece of work.

Again, we should not look at this area without putting 100% focus on education; what it does and all the influences and impacts within it. On that point, the importance of role models can never be overestimated or overstated. That is the case in sport but also in business, art, science, technology and music—right across the piece, and not least in your Lordships’ House. On a day such as today it would be invidious to single out particular Members, but I will. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, have blazed a trail through our courts for others to follow. It is so important to have role models so that people can say, “I could do that; there is someone doing that—that is a realistic opportunity for me”. While looking into this, I was surprised that the great win for the law of having the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, might not have happened as, when she was a young woman, apparently she considered becoming a nun. Many of your Lordships may not know that she is also an excellent rollerblader.

I should also mention my noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint, who did so much for women’s cricket. She was absolutely a trailblazer at the time, putting women’s cricket right at the centre of the stage and enabling others to get involved with the game and for it to get to such a level that, this winter, England’s women won the Ashes. Let us be honest—England’s men fell somewhere short. That was phenomenal work.

Finally, it would be wrong not to mention the legendary noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington. Who could have done more, not just for the economy but for our freedom, than all the women who were involved at Bletchley Park? What a phenomenal thing, which we should all feel not just such pride in but tremendous gratitude for, because it enables us to be the nation that we are today.

There it is: 8 March, International Women’s Day. It is a great day and one well worth being marked. It is a day to reflect, respect, celebrate and champion and, crucially, a day for us all to push ourselves even further to think what more we could do to enable every single person in this country to achieve their full potential—be that in sport, art, technology, science, maths or whatever it is—and to ensure that everybody, regardless of gender, class, background or belief has that opportunity to play their full part in our economy, in our society and in our United Kingdom.