Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 22nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, we on these Benches welcome the Bill and support its proposals.

It implements proposals made six years ago by the Women in Parliament APPG. As the Minister told us, the Ministerial Code was amended two years ago to accommodate ministerial maternity leave, so the Bill should have been introduced earlier—not rushed through now. I accept its use of gender-neutral language, as recommended in the 2007 legislative guidance, but I note the sensitivity of language at stake here. This clearly needs further discussion but I suspect that it would not be helped by dividing the House at the end of this debate.

The battle to improve maternity conditions for working mothers carries strong personal echoes for me. My wife was a lecturer at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology when we were expecting our first child. At that time, there were no older married women on the academic staff and no arrangements for leave. Helen drove home every lunchtime throughout a university term to breastfeed our daughter. Thankfully, conditions for women giving birth while in work have improved immensely since then, particularly in the Civil Service. I welcome this further step in liberal improvements in the status of women.

However, this welcome comes with a number of critical reservations. As the Minister admitted, the Government are rushing this through to deal with the immediate situation that faces a particular Cabinet Minister. It is almost an ad personam Bill. It does not address parental leave for ministerial fathers. It does not cover adoption. It does not address the issue of sick leave for Ministers, even though this arose for a Cabinet Minister involved in one of the most delicate aspects of the Brexit negotiations—the Northern Ireland issue—in 2018. I regret the absence of these elements from the Bill. I thank the Minister for his pledge to set out the Government’s proposals for covering these other dimensions soon.

The Bill provides for maternity leave to enable a Minister to return to their responsibilities six months later. Such continuity offers an excellent principle for good government; it takes most Ministers a year or more to master the full complexities of their portfolio. Yet we now have a Cabinet almost none of whose members has held office for much more than a year. The current Attorney-General is the third to hold that office since 2015. She sits alongside the fourth Foreign Secretary, the fourth Chancellor and the fourth Secretary of State for Education, and the fifth Business Secretary, since 2015—and now there are rumours of a coming reshuffle. Will the Minister tell us whether his Government intend to allow Ministers to stay in their posts long enough to expect to return from six months’ leave to the same office? Ministerial churn at a rate of nine to 18 months per office is the opposite of good governance.

But my most fundamental criticism is that this is the only constitutionally relevant Bill that we have so far seen in this Parliament, apart from those on Brexit. The Prime Minister promised in the 2019 manifesto that

“After Brexit we also need to look at the broader aspects of our constitution”.


That commitment was widely welcomed across the political spectrum; think tanks even held meetings to discuss what this broad agenda should include. Instead, in the past year the Government have sacked senior civil servants, broken the Ministerial Code, disregarded the recommendation of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, attacked the Electoral Commission, strengthened the Executive at the expense of Parliament, and bypassed democratic local authorities in handling the pandemic. The constitution commission which the Government promised to set up in less than 12 months from the election has been shelved. The Minister has defended this slide from the manifesto commitment without hesitation. He has repeatedly told us that Conservative victory in last December’s election represented the “will of the people”, on 43.5% of the electorate. He has defended behaviour from this Government that John Major—whom he served—would never have contemplated as Prime Minister.

We have watched the US Republican Party slide away from constitutional democracy towards pluto-populism—rich men claiming to represent the will of the people, while breaking the spirit and the letter of constitutional democracy. We see the beginnings of a similar slide here. That is why we need to hold the Government to the manifesto commitment they want to forget.

While I welcome this Bill, I encourage colleagues across the House to hold the Government to account on their neglect of larger constitutional issues, not least because the relationship between England, Scotland and Northern Ireland has been shaken by Brexit, and will not be resolved without further constitutional changes.