Net-Zero Carbon Emissions

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. Given that I will focus on education throughout much of my speech, I remind the Committee of my education interests in the register, particularly relating to my work with Purpose on climate education.

I also welcome yesterday’s government announcement of putting into law the target to cut emissions by 78% by 2035, as recommended by the Climate Change Committee. This morning I read with interest the news of the Mark Carney-led initiative to bring together 160 firms from the global finance sector—including Barclays, HSBC and Axa—with over $70 trillion in assets to meet new targets to cut the carbon content of those assets by 2030. It occurred to me: if the finance sector can come up with a plan, what is the plan for the public sector?

Clearly, we need leadership from central government and, as others have said, this year is a great opportunity. Tomorrow is Biden’s summit; the biodiversity COP is next month in China; the G7 is in Cornwall in June; there is the G20 meeting in Italy; and COP 26 is in November in Glasgow. This is the time to set an aggressive, ambitious course with such a focus on climate change to drive national momentum and public opinion.

The cynic in me, as with others, warns that this is a Government who love an announcement and a Prime Minister who craves the attention and will glory in the UK’s leadership role this year. But do they have a delivery plan to make this happen? Will the Chancellor change the Treasury’s long-standing hostility to green spending and fund a road map to carbon zero? Incidentally, rather than a separate Cabinet Minister for climate change, I would prefer to make the Chancellor accountable for the delivery of climate change plans, as part of a shift of emphasis in the Treasury from money to well-being.

Fundamental to that is investment in local government-led projects to enable place-based change. This is not just about the obvious local authority functions of housing, transport or waste. These are crucial, but we also need to see beyond a transactional approach of investment in X technology to achieve Y reduction in carbon emissions. That will not always deal with the ingrained political problem of there being parts of the population who are not ready for the change.

The importance of a place-based approach is that success is first and foremost about behaviour change in the whole population. We have seen how hard that is through the pandemic. Despite the best efforts of “hands, space, face” as a slogan, and billions in spending, plenty are still struggling to shift their behaviour to make our communities safe from the virus. How then will we get the whole population to change the food we eat, how we move around, how we dress and how we fuel our lives so that they are sustainable and affordable?

I believe that one of the biggest mistakes in the Government’s thinking in their handling of the virus is that they have not sufficiently engaged local government as an ally. Localities are different and need different solutions to create behaviour change. A national approach will always struggle to account for the rich diversity of our nation. Our impoverished councils urgently need more resources to invest in climate change mitigation projects that will effect the behaviour change we need.

The place I would start is in schools and colleges. Almost half of all households in this country contain school-age children. Children and young people are already engaged with this issue. We saw that with the Friday school strikes. According to the OECD, 78% of students in its member countries agree that the global environment is important to them and want to do something about it. The opportunity is to stand alongside those children and young people to shift our behaviour at a household and community level. The majority of schools in this country are still local authority schools, either directly or in partnership with faith groups. There is an urgent need to enable and empower local authorities to take a leadership role on this.

I commend to your Lordships the work of the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. It recently published a powerful analysis by Christina Kwauk and Rebecca Winthrop, which says:

“Recent research shows that if only 16 percent of high school students in high- and middle-income countries were to receive climate change education, we could see a nearly 19 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide by 2050. When education helps students develop a strong personal connection to climate solutions, as well as a sense of personal agency and empowerment, it can have consequential impact on students’ daily behaviors and decisionmaking that reduces their overall lifetime carbon footprint. Imagine if 100 percent of students in the world received such an education. New evidence also shows that the combination of women’s empowerment and education that includes everyone—especially the 132 million out-of-school girls across the developing world—could result in an 85 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide by 2050. By these estimates, leveraging the power of education is potentially more powerful than solely increasing investments in onshore wind turbines … or concentrated solar power”.


It goes on to say:

“Emerging research suggests the ‘sweet spot’ for climate action is at the scale of 10,000-100,000 people. This is not only because the collective ability to make meaningful action is rooted in local relevance, but also because we reach a certain degree of cost-benefit optimization when it comes to the global impact of our local actions. If we apply this to the education system, this is equivalent to focusing efforts at the school district level—or the equivalent school administrative cluster, depending on the population size of cities and counties. School districts are the perfect network of institutions that exist in every country in the world that has enough community connection potential to effectively scale green civic learning. Focusing efforts at the local level enables educational interventions to be community-driven, which is aligned to what we know about effective climate action and effective climate change education: that is, it needs to be locally-relevant, tied to local environmental justice issues, tied to local community challenges with climate change, and it needs to be tied to action and ownership at community level.”


Here I commend the work of Ashden’s Let’s Go Zero campaign, which a sixth of county councils are supporting, along with the Anglican Church. So far it has got more than 200 schools to pledge to be carbon zero by 2030. The smart thing about this campaign is not just the carbon impact but the educational one. It aims to get school and college leaders to stand alongside their students and pupils in making this pledge one institution at a time.

It is critical for the behaviour change for this to be owned by the school itself and to have the work to move to zero led by young people. That way, they learn about the consumption of energy and water on the site, the carbon impacts of the food they consume in school, the carbon capture of what they can grow on the estate, and the importance of the choices they make when they travel to and from the school or college. They can then apply that knowledge with the skills they need and, most importantly, develop the carbon-zero mindset we need in the whole population if we are serious about the 2050 net-zero target, let alone the new 2035 one.

This is because, of course, we want schools to reflect the future we want for our communities. That has to be a carbon-zero future. By starting with schools and colleges, we are nurturing the skills and mindsets needed in the labour force as we shift to the sustainable future we all want. Young people need a strong knowledge base in the causes of a warming climate, but also a strong set of skills that will allow them to apply their knowledge in the real world, including problem-solving, critical thinking, teamwork, coping with uncertainty, empathy and negotiation. Indeed, these very transferable skills are needed equally to thrive in the world of work and to be constructive citizens. There is such a win-win to be had here.

In this country, 77% of adults support teaching about climate change in schools and 69% of teachers agree that there should be more teaching on this subject than what is focused on in the non-compulsory subject of geography. My ask, therefore, is for central government to prioritise climate education in schools. Would the Minister like to join me in visiting a school to meet its school council, and to lobby it to make the Let’s Go Zero pledge? The Minister should be inspired by Italy, where every school-age child, by law, must have an hour each week of sustainable citizenship education. Here, we should mandate time, resources and training for teachers in this area, and then work closely with local authorities on the delivery of all our schools becoming carbon zero by 2030.

This is our chance to move on from children and climate strikes to children leading climate action. We can use our leadership position at COP to get others to do the same and, in doing so, drive the behaviour shift across the population that the world needs.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the next two speakers have withdrawn from the debate, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale.

Trade Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 6th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sheikh (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I speak in favour of Amendment 23, to which I have added my name as a supporter. I spoke on this issue in Committee. As we have now left the EU, we must outline our priorities as a nation, and protecting children online must be high on the list.

Amendment 23 would offer significant protections for UK children online by effecting UK laws relating to online safety in future trade deals. I have been impressed by Her Majesty’s Government’s ambitions and efforts to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. I support the regulatory framework outlined in the Government’s response in December 2020 to the Online Harms White Paper, which is ground-breaking in creating a new duty of care that will make companies take responsibility for the safety of their users.

This amendment is an important part of this new strategy and should be supported. As set out in proposed new Clause 2(a) in Amendment 23, international trade agreements must be consistent with other international treaties and domestic laws on the protection of children and other vulnerable groups using the internet. This would refer to treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognises the special safeguards that children need in all aspects of their life, including protection from all forms of violence, and the right to privacy.

Proposed new Clause 2(a) could also refer to the Digital Economy Act 2017, which prevents under-18s in the UK accessing pornography on the internet. During the pandemic, digital technologies have helped us to work and connect with loved ones, but they have also opened up greater risks for children. For instance, during the first lockdown, the Internet Watch Foundation and its industry partners blocked at least 8.8 million attempts by UK internet users to access videos and images of children suffering sexual abuse. At the same time, research by the British Board of Film Classification shows that 47% of children and teens had, during lockdown, seen content that they wished they had not seen.

The risks to children online are growing by the day, and we need to be proactive in tackling these harms and encouraging others to do so by supporting this amendment. In Committee, I was pleased that my noble friend the Minister said,

“we stand by our online harm commitments, and nothing agreed as part of any trade deal will affect that.”

This is reassuring, and I welcome his support. However, protecting children online is such an important issue it needs to be guaranteed in legislation, so that it is not accidentally traded away. This amendment will make sure this cannot happen by ensuring our online protection is a necessary requirement of any future trade deal.

In Committee, my noble friend also said that

“our continuity programme is consistent with existing international obligations, as it seeks to replicate existing EU agreements, which are themselves fully compliant with such obligations”,—[Official Report, 1/10/2020; col. GC 140.]

to protect young and vulnerable internet users. Although I welcome this continuity, my concern is with countries such as the US, which may not have the same standard of protection as we do in the UK and the EU.

As has been mentioned previously, the trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada has effectively created a legal shield for tech companies in line with US domestic law. In this agreement, service providers are not liable for content on their platforms or the harm it may cause to users. This fails to hold social media companies to account and risks protecting the big tech firms over children online. Rather than just replicating the existing legislation on online harms in future trade agreements, the amendment will also apply to updated or new legislation. For example, proposed new subsection (2)(c) of Amendment 23 refers to

“online protections provided for children in the United Kingdom that the Secretary of State considers necessary.”

This means that future legislation, such as the upcoming online harms Bill, will be protected in international trade agreements.

The digital space is continually changing and growing at a rapid pace. I am sure that, over the next few years, more legislation will be created for new technologies that we may not even know exist at present. With this amendment, we will ensure that protecting children goes hand in hand with technological innovation.

In Committee, my noble friend the Minister reaffirmed the UK’s commitment to international obligations on protecting young and vulnerable internet users. Supporting this amendment is the best way to strengthen this commitment and make it truly enforceable, as it means that children online will be fully protected within future trade deals, regardless of the make-up of the negotiating team of the day.

Data protection is also central to protecting children online, and proposed new subsection (2)(b) will ensure that the age-appropriate design code is also properly honoured. The code came into force in September 2020, and is a code of practice that explains how online service providers can ensure that they appropriately safeguard children’s personal data.

Data is essentially the building block of the digital world and affects how we use it. Although data is important and useful, it can also be dangerous in exposing children to age-inappropriate content, such as material on self-harm, sexual abuse, bullying, misinformation and extremism. As data travels across borders, it is important that future international agreements are consistent with our leading online protections.

In proposed new subsection (3) of the amendment, a child is defined as

“any person under the age of 18.”

This is consistent with existing UK law and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is important, as the age of a child differs between countries. For example, US domestic consumer law has created the de facto age of adulthood online as 13. I am sure your Lordships will agree that a 14, 15, 16 or 17 year-old is still as much at risk of sexual exploitation, misinformation, grooming, bullying and harmful content online as a 13 year-old. For instance, in a survey by Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2019, 79% of 12 to 15 year-old internet users claimed that they had had at least one harmful experience in the past 12 months. It is important that this amendment is supported, so that any person under the age of 18 can be protected, as, even at 17, a young person is still developing, and harmful experiences online can impact them for the rest of their life.

I applaud the Government’s use of digital technologies to power economic growth across the UK and abroad. This is exciting, but we must exercise caution. To quote the response to the online harms Bill White Paper:

“we must be able to look parents in the eye and assure them we are doing everything we can to protect their children from harm.”

By supporting this amendment, we are making a true commitment to create a safer digital world for our children.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am an enthusiastic supporter of this cross-party amendment to the Trade Bill.

The Government do not have that much to be proud of right now, but they should be rightly proud of their moves to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online, especially for children. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has done great work, both through the 5Rights Foundation and in this House on this issue. Her efforts to persuade the Government to bring in the age-appropriate design code in the Data Protection Act were hugely important and ground-breaking. Ministers should be proud that they listened and acted to ensure that technology platforms put the interests of children first.

Although I have been critical of the delays from the Government in bringing forward the online harms Bill, we are finally seeing movement. Again, Ministers should be proud of what they are doing to make the online world safer for children in the UK through the measures they are bringing forward this year. But we know that the large US tech companies hate the “duty of care” idea at the heart of the Bill and have an equal dislike of age-appropriate design. We know that they have successfully persuaded the US Government to write into trade deals with Japan, Mexico, Korea and others that tech companies should not be liable for the harms they cause. And they do cause harms.

Just this week, I was followed by someone on Twitter. When I checked her Twitter account, I was faced with a highly graphic image of her genitalia. I blocked the user and reported the account, and have heard no more from the user or from Twitter. This is just an everyday example of what we all have to navigate.

Of course, for children, this is much more serious. I was talking yesterday to a leading researcher into children’s mental health. We agreed that, for primary-aged children, it is reasonable—and, I think, desirable—to ban online devices from bedrooms, but she advised me that her research shows that secondary-aged pupils will get a device into their rooms, whether parents like it or not. A study published last year found that 75% of parents did not believe that their children would have watched pornography, and yet the majority of children told researchers that they had.

Of course, we know that this goes way beyond porn to grooming, bullying, radicalisation and so on. We must protect our children as best we can. Parents have a responsibility, and education has some responsibility, but so do we as legislators, and so do the technology companies that profit from our engagement with this content.

Parental Bereavement Leave Regulations 2020

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Grand Committee

In conclusion, this legislation is an important change in the law which will support bereaved parents to take time away from work to grieve, in the tragic event that their child dies or their baby is stillborn. We will also be sending a clear message to employers and providing a helpful framework for supporting an employee in these incredibly difficult circumstances. I commend these regulations to the House.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his introduction to these regulations, which I support. I am grateful to the department, and the Government, for bringing them forward. Their importance was brought home to me yet again last year when a work colleague at TES—my interests are in the register—lost a child through stillbirth at the moment of delivery. Having been a part of these discussions for nigh on 10 years, I felt better equipped to provide what support I could. I am happy to say that TES acted as a responsible employer, as the vast majority are, in giving Tara the support that she needed.

These regulations bring into effect the law that we brought through and mark the end of a campaign. It may be unfashionable to say so these days, but it is affirming to note that an individual, Lucy Herd, whose son Jack died 10 years ago, was able to campaign and then use the democratic and parliamentary process to effect a change in the law. She did so by securing all-party support of Members in both Houses. As noble Lords know, I first met her, and discussed her campaign, in a TV studio relatively soon after Jack died. She used the system for No. 10 petitions, as well as change.org, a slightly more sophisticated petitioning website to capture more data and more stories, which were really helpful. I introduced her to the then MP for Glasgow Cathcart, Tom Harris, who introduced a 10-minute rule Bill. That was the first time the issue was introduced in Parliament as part of a campaign.

Lucy was then able to contact those who had signed the petition to let them know that that was happening. I was then able to bring it to this House for the first time, with the Children and Families Act 2014. I am delighted to see the noble Viscount, Lord Younger of Leckie, in his place. He was good enough to meet Lucy and me to discuss the issue then and, in the end, we agreed that we would accept his kind offer that ACAS would issue guidance to employers on this and we would see how it went.

After the 2015 general election, when Will Quince was elected as a Member of Parliament, he raised the issue through an unsuccessful Private Member’s Bill. Mr Quince was able to help get it into the Conservative manifesto for the 2017 election, and then Kevin Hollinrake was able to secure a Private Member’s Bill slot and get it through. The goal was then wide open and I was able to put the ball in the back of the net, thanks to support from Front-Benchers, who are all here today.

I am delighted that when the previous Secretary of State announced that these regulations were forthcoming, the department used Lucy as part of the PR; she had another moment with the media to remember Jack and mark the success of her campaign. It was a nice bookend to the whole experience.

It is worth saying that Parliament and democracy can work. When a case is made intelligently, when all the systems are used well and when politicians on all sides in both Houses are willing to listen—that is not necessarily always the case—we can get great things done. This is a significant thing that we are doing.

I want to say one other thing, almost in parentheses. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has a point to make on benefits and the Department for Work and Pensions. I will not steal her thunder, but I am fully supportive of what I think she is about to say. I want to make sure that Ministers who are listening on this issue hear that. With that, I reiterate my support for the regulations and look forward to them being implemented next month.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations. I pay tribute to Lucy Herd, who as we have heard has been campaigning for nearly a decade. When I first learned of the campaign, I knew that it would take a while because the issue is not one that affects many families. Not many families or their wider circle of friends will know somebody who has lost a child or are aware of a stillbirth. I give credit not just to Lucy but to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, Will Quince and Kevin Hollinrake for all the work they have done to ensure that this never lost the eye of Ministers. We may all collectively have been a thorn in their flesh, including myself over the past four or five years, but I am delighted that we have now got to the point where these regulations are coming into play.

I note particularly that account has been taken of the definition of “parent”. I was an informal foster parent. I was not a kinship carer but I had parental responsibility for two children after their mother died, so I am very grateful for that. It is because of such funny modern-day family situations that we need a regulation broad enough to recognise that when people are personally involved and have a responsibility, no employer or state system should say that they do not have the right to receive parental bereavement leave.

I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, who kindly gave me an in to the issue that I want to raise, which I appreciate is not within the remit of BEIS. However, I raised this repeatedly during the passage of the Bill and I want to do so again.

I understand why the decision was made that self-employed parents will not be in receipt of this benefit because they are not in receipt of many other benefits. However, there is a serious inequity for parents, especially those who have stopped working, often for many years, because of the serious medical difficulty that their child has had. They have done so knowing that their child will die. The fact is that under our current system, the day after the child dies, they lose their disability benefit and carer benefit and, shockingly, they have to apply immediately for benefits. I remind the Grand Committee, because I raised this on the Bill, of the words of one parent who wrote:

“The day after, I applied for jobseeker’s allowance, wanting to buy myself a little extra time to grieve before returning to some sort of work, only to be told that because I hadn’t worked in 10 years, I was ineligible, despite the fact that in those 10 years I had worked harder and for many more hours than the average person. The fact that I had saved the Government and the NHS hundreds of thousands of pounds by providing my son with hourly complex medical care counted for nothing. You are told to man up, move on, get a job, pay the bills. Provide for your remaining family.”


That inequity still remains. The noble Lord, Lord Callanan, referred to unemployed parents not being covered but said that the DWP will keep this under review. It will do more than that because the campaign for these parents starts today.

Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th July 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

That the Bill do now pass.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for taking through this very important piece of legislation, which provides at the very least two weeks of guaranteed time away from work for those employees who have suffered the tragedy of losing a child before that child has had the opportunity to reach adulthood.

I am grateful to the noble Lord for ensuring the rapid progress of this Bill through this House. I am conscious that, in doing so, the Bill has overtaken the progress of the Government’s response to the recent consultation, which will now be published after the Bill completes its passage through Parliament. I had hoped to be able to set out in detail the response to the government consultation. However, important work is still ongoing with this. We have had a very welcome, large and detailed number of responses to the consultation —some 1,448 in total. I was pleased to see that high level of engagement on such an issue. We need to make sure that we get this right. If taking a little extra time is what is needed to achieve this, that is the right thing to do.

However, I assure the House that, once the Bill receives Royal Assent, we will work to bring forward the necessary regulations as soon as possible with a view to laying them before the House as early as possible in 2019. That would also keep us on course for our ambition for the new right to come into force in April 2020. I hope that that commitment today will reassure the House that the Government remain committed to delivering on this manifesto commitment.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am most grateful to the Minister for that update and for his assistance and that of his officials, led by the assiduous Shelley Torey. I thank other noble Lords for their assistance and the MPs in the other place—and, finally, to Lucy Herd for her inspiration and assiduous campaigning ever since her son Jack died eight years ago.

Bill passed.

Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 29th June 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank Kevin Hollinrake MP for steering the Bill through its various stages in the other place. It is a good Bill, which addresses the significant hole in our legislation that means there is currently no specific legal entitlement to time off in the event that a person loses a child.

When I was no more than 12 years old, I was sat down on the sofa at home by my mum and dad. My mum held my hand and told me that Louise, a friend younger than me, had died. She and her brother Martin were away on a trip and the three girls had slept in a separate room at the end of the dorm. They had shared a room with a faulty boiler and all three died overnight of carbon monoxide poisoning. I spent part of the following summer with Martin and his mum and dad, Anne and Mike, on a caravan holiday. We had fun but I also witnessed first-hand the acute effects of the tragic loss of a child on parents. I also saw the burden they bore in supporting Martin through his grief. Through this Bill we have an opportunity to put a measure in place that will ease that suffering in the event a parent suffers the loss of a child in the future.

It is evident that most employers already go beyond what the Bill seeks to achieve—why would they not? How effective will a member of staff be when going through the turmoil of such a loss? Most friends and colleagues I have spoken to about today are shocked that a legal entitlement does not already exist to underpin what those good employers already do.

I have been campaigning on this issue for the past seven years. One Friday afternoon I was on set for the “as live” recording of the regional segment of the “Sunday Politics” programme. I was in the BBC Southampton studio and discussing the political stories of the week with a local MP. As always, there was a non-political guest; in this case her name was Lucy Herd. She sat on the sofa under the bright, hot lights and told her story. She was nervous and vulnerable but spoke clearly and strongly. She had just moved down south from living in the north-west. The previous August she had been at home in Cumbria, distracted and busy with her household chores; her two-year old, Jack, was playing around her feet, and the back door was open to let in some air. Moments later she looked up from the washing up through the kitchen window and saw Jack face down in the garden pond. She dropped everything and ran out but, despite all her efforts and those of the emergency services, Jack died. Lucy’s husband was away working in Australia and she had to cope for the first day or so without him and with the support of her parents. Her husband hurried back but his employer gave him only three days’ bereavement leave, including time for his son’s funeral. Lucy’s story demonstrated the lack of any entitlement to bereavement leave for parents in these unimaginable circumstances.

Like the majority of parents in such circumstances, by the time I met Lucy she was no longer with her husband. I kept in touch with her and her campaign, Jack’s Rainbow. She petitioned Parliament and worked with my friend Tom Harris, then the MP for Glasgow Cathcart, on a 10-minute rule Bill. She captured many stories of parents being even more harshly treated by employers. I was particularly shocked that many were NHS workers. I could assume only that some managers were under such pressure to hit targets that they had lost touch with their own humanity.

It was clear that something had to be done, so when the Children and Families Bill went through Parliament in 2014, Lucy and I spotted an opportunity. I was able to tell then of examples of company policies specifying only two days’ leave; of another with a similar policy that ended in the father committing suicide; and of the high number of marriages that end following a child bereavement. On that occasion we were not able to persuade the coalition Government to allow a legal entitlement. However, we did manage to persuade the noble Viscount, Lord Younger of Leckie, to agree that ACAS would issue guidance to employers on the issue. I knew that this was progress, but I also knew that ultimately we would have to return to the issue. I was therefore delighted when Will Quince took up the issue in the last Session through a Private Member’s Bill. This raised its profile in the Commons and resulted in a Conservative Party manifesto commitment, with Kevin Hollinrake MP now taking the Bill through Parliament with government support.

The Bill will introduce a baseline minimum for all employees who are parents and lose a child below the age of 18. The provision will allow for two weeks’ leave for all employees who lose a child below the age of 18 or have a stillborn child. The latter provision is thanks to Will Quince’s amendment in the other place, which improved the Bill significantly. This leave will be a day one entitlement, available to all employees irrespective of their length of service with their current employer. Those exercising the right to leave will have a legal protection against being subjected to any detriment for doing so, consistent with other family-related leave entitlements, such as paternity, maternity and adoption leave. It is worth your Lordships noting that the Bill is constructed to be in harmony with these other related entitlements, which is why it may appear overly complex in its construction at times.

Time off, however, is not enough if lack of money forces you back to work. Under the Bill, bereaved parents will be entitled to two weeks’ parental bereavement pay provided that they meet the normal eligibility criteria, such as having 26 weeks of continuous service with the same employer the week before the date of the child’s death and meeting an average earnings test. The Bill allows the rate of pay to be set in regulations so that it can be uprated regularly in the normal way. I understand it is the Government’s intention that parental bereavement pay be paid at the statutory flat rate, which is currently £145.18 per week, or at 90% of the employee’s average weekly earnings where that is lower. Again, this is consistent with other family-related statutory pay entitlements, such as paternity pay, shared parental pay and adoption and maternity pay after the first six weeks. Consistency with similar entitlements is important from the perspective of familiarity and understanding for both parents and employers—which I know Kevin Hollinrake MP was keen to achieve—and lowers the risk of having to make a claim for these rights in a tribunal.

Obviously, this is just a high-level overview of the Bill, which is to some extent an enabling framework. Some of the details of how the provision will work will be set out in secondary legislation. Your Lordships will no doubt have noticed that there are a number of delegated powers in the Bill. Noble Lords are often rightly concerned that we should be clear about the need for delegated powers and how they will be used. I am therefore delighted that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s report simply said:

“There is nothing in this Bill which we would wish to draw to the attention of the House”.


I take great comfort from this and hope that noble Lords do also.

As to how the powers will be used, I welcome the Government’s recent consultation on several of the key questions that the Bill leaves to be settled in regulations: the definition of “the bereaved parent”; how to take the leave; the window within which to take the leave; and any notice and evidence requirements. I hope the Government may be able to respond to the consultation before the next stage of the Bill, setting out the policy direction they intend to take on these key points.

I am taking the limited attendance here on a Friday as a sign of consent with this Bill and its drafting. Plenty of your Lordships have come to me to express support from across the House, and I am grateful to the Minister and his officials for their help as it has been put together. I do not believe in perfection as a normal possibility, but I believe that the Bill is in a good place thanks to the work of those in the other place. I want the Bill to succeed, not least because I am sponsoring it in this place, but more so because we have an opportunity here today to make a real difference to the lives of those who will seek to rely on this entitlement in the future. Ever since hearing Lucy’s story, I have been determined to show her that constructive engagement with politicians and the parliamentary process, although slow, can deliver. I hope that, with the support of your Lordships, we can deliver a piece of legislation that she, and other parents who have been through similar torment, can celebrate. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have spoken. I am grateful for everyone’s support. This has been a small but perfectly formed debate for Second Reading of the Bill. I particularly pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for sharing her story and those of other bereaved parents, such as Nikki. I have great sympathy with the points she made about the benefits system and carers, which are beyond this Bill, but the points were well made and I hope they are heard elsewhere. Like my noble friend Lord Stevenson, I think this Bill is, as I said in my opening speech, a framework to allow us to move forward. I was grateful for his comments about wanting to see it on the statute book as soon as possible. I have sympathy with the points both noble Lords made about the 58-day window, particularly in the context of inquests, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the concerns about the definition of parents. We look forward to the Government’s response to the consultation so that we know how they will be treated in regulations. I am very grateful for the direction of travel indicated in the Minister’s speech. I am grateful to him for his agreement to have a meeting with us to find a constructive and speedy way forward. I was particularly drawn to his sense of the imbalance in our treatment of the birth and the death of children. This measure can catalyse, to some extent, a much more healthy conversation at work about bereavement as part of moves as a society and a culture towards being more open about discussing bereavement issues.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

House adjourned at 1.04 pm.