Maternity Discrimination

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Wednesday 15th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Chope. I thank the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) for securing this debate. It is not the first time we have debated this issue in Westminster Hall or other parts of this building. In July last year, we had a debate on this issue. In January, I spoke at an event with the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) hosted by Maternity Action.

It is with some frustration that we are here today, having seen so little progress on the excellent recommendations by the Women and Equalities Committee and so many other campaigning groups. At the event in January, Maternity Action previewed some excellent videos that it had produced to highlight to women the actions they can take. The videos put it very well. It was ordinary women in ordinary jobs facing up to the issues that every pregnant woman must face about what will happen with their job and what will happen when they become pregnant in the first place and when they have their baby. I encourage all women and, indeed, men watching this debate to take a look at those videos and to share them widely, so that women know what their rights are and that they can come forward. It seems clear that women are not aware of their rights and are not being encouraged to exercise them.

It should not be down to charities such as Maternity Action and grassroots campaigns such as Pregnant Then Screwed to highlight to women their rights. The Government should be letting women know what their rights are and encouraging them to take them up. They should be cracking down on employers who inhibit women from doing so, and they clearly have a role in that.

The Alliance for Maternity Rights has a 32-point action plan to put an end to pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. It makes a great number of excellent recommendations, one of which is about access to information. When women come into contact with officials, that should be used as an opportunity to get information and reinforce what their rights are and where they can seek advice and seek help. Some of those things are being done in Scotland. Point 10 of the action plan is:

“Reintroduction of the ‘Pregnancy’ and ‘Birth to Five’ books…in translation and accessible formats…for new and expectant parents”.

In Scotland, we have the “Ready Steady Baby” books and a great deal of information is available about women’s rights within pregnancy and once they have had the baby. It is important that women have every opportunity possible to get that information.

The action plan also has good recommendations about improving employer practice. Point 3 is:

“Commit to working with employers to encourage them to evaluate the retention rates for women one year after returning to work following maternity leave, as part of their gender pay gap analysis.”

When they go back to work, some women find it just too difficult to juggle all the things they have to juggle, whether it is childcare or trying to get to work on time or to leave on time to pick children up from whoever is looking after them. It is incredibly difficult and stressful, and some women find that far too difficult and that flexibility is not built in.

Point 4 is:

“Work with employers and third party organisations including recruiters to encourage a ‘flexible by default’ approach to all roles (working hours are flexible unless there is a genuine business case against).”

As the right hon. Member for Basingstoke mentioned, that is good for men, too. My hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) encouraged me to point out that only 2% to 8% of men take up their right to shared parental leave. That is tiny. If maternity leave and paternity leave are made more accessible, more normal and more mainstream—something that everybody has a right to take up—that has to be good for men, as it is for women. Employers are obliged to consider requests for flexible working, but they are under no compulsion to act on that. Sometimes getting up the courage even to ask for flexible working can be incredibly difficult.

The issue around stress in pregnancy is also significant. I had a briefing from the Personal Social Services Research Unit at the London School of Economics, which highlights the costs to society of perinatal mental health problems. That is a serious issue made worse by the stress of pregnancy when it comes to dealing with employers. The briefing states:

“Taken together, perinatal depression, anxiety and psychosis carry a...long-term cost to society of about £8.1 billion for each one-year cohort of births in the UK. This is equivalent to a cost of just under £10,000 for every single birth in the country.”

How much of that is down to the stress of dealing with unsympathetic employers who do not help and support women in those circumstances? If we can do something to reduce that stress and the impact it has on those women and their unborn children, we should definitely do it.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and I apologise for being late. Ironically, I was dropping my daughter off at nursery, which is why I came in a bit late. The hon. Lady is making a passionate speech.

I want to raise a point about Parliament when I was pregnant last year. It may surprise some Members to know that there is no maternity leave here in Parliament. I raised the issue several times and was met with hostility across the board from people of all political parties. The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) was one of the few who listened and said she would try to make some changes. Does the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) agree that if we are preaching about maternity discrimination, perhaps we should think about the fact that Members such as myself have had to come back to Parliament almost immediately after having an emergency C-section.

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree. I know the hon. Lady has tried very hard and has been in the Chamber with her baby at times. I am glad to see babies in the Chamber, but that speaks to the fact that there is no other provision in this building. There is no alternative for people to look after their babies other than perhaps leaving them with a member of staff. The nursery across the road is not a crèche. We need to think better about how we encourage women into this building in the first place and how we keep them here. There is not enough support.

The hon. Lady’s point about maternity leave for women in the House is right. It is also true for councillors across the country as well. There is no provision under the Local Government Act 1972 for councillors to have maternity leave, and lots of councils do not have any provision, either. I know because I breastfed both of my small children when I was at Glasgow City Council, and I just had to make the best of that. The council was very supportive at the time, but I know that it is difficult and a challenge for women in politics, and we need to think about how we support women in that field.

Access to justice is a serious issue as well. The EHRC, an organisation at serious risk right now, has been mentioned. It does not have enough funding and cannot support all the women it would like to support. The Government need to give serious consideration to making their role in this real, because if they cut funding as well as having tribunal fees, they really are denying women access to the justice that they deserve.

Pregnant Then Screwed has a campaign called “Give Me Six” to highlight an issue that the right hon. Member for Basingstoke raised about having six months to make a claim. There is a petition with 50,000 signatures. I encourage people to sign it, because it is incredibly important that the Government recognise that three months is a barrier. There are so many things going on that people cannot access their rights under employment tribunals, and six months would give them a little more breathing space.

It would be remiss of me not to mention breastfeeding in this debate, as I always tend to do. As Maternity Action has highlighted, one in five women who stopped breastfeeding say that returning to work influenced that decision, and more than half would like to have breastfed for longer. That is a difficulty. Employers need to be aware of what they can put in for breastfeeding mums. The Alliance for Maternity Rights recommends that the Government

“Ensure...breastfeeding is covered in....HSE template risk assessments”,

and calls on them to

“Introduce a statutory right to time off and facilities for breastfeeding”.

Such facilities do not need to be complex. We simply need a private room with access to a plug point for a breast pump, so that there is time and space for that, and fridge facilities for putting the milk in. Those are not difficult asks for employers, but women have to have confidence that they can ask and not be misunderstood, dismissed or laughed at, and that employers are able to provide such facilities as easily and as quickly as possible.

I will close by giving some examples from constituents of mine who got in touch with my Facebook page after the event in January. I was shocked at how quickly these examples of people’s experiences came in and how commonplace they were. The women told their stories almost casually. The first woman said:

“I was made redundant at 3 months pg. I was one of 5 HR Managers doing exactly the same jobs. (Not) surprisingly none of the others were even in the consultation process.”

The right hon. Member for Basingstoke mentioned Germany as an example. Such examples might stop such practices. The second woman said:

“I worked for a company that got around laws by describing its workers as freelance. They told me to go on benefits when I was pregnant, a few months later they were made to make their freelancers paid employees, but I was just left pregnant on benefits. Very stressful all round, I was told I had no legal come back on them as I had had to leave whilst still freelance.”

The third woman said:

“My gran’s neighbour was two weeks away from leaving on maternity leave meaning she would get maternity pay when they said to her they didn't need her any longer and let her go.”

The fourth woman said:

“This happened to me. I got a job and when I told them I was pregnant they withdrew the...offer claiming I wasn't suitable for the post and that I'd only ever been a candidate. I took them to tribunal and lost, but I wanted to hold them to account. It’s awful that companies can and do get away with treating expectant and new mums like that and if you want to take them to court you need to pay for it.”

That woman was actually applying for a job in a nursery, so we might expect them to have some appreciation of babies and childbirth and suchlike. Another woman said:

“I had to quit my job. They gave me less hours as I had hyperemesis gravidarum but not less duties or even breaks when I was on shift.”

That speaks to the understanding of pregnancy. Some employers, male and female, go with their own experience on this. If they did not have morning sickness or particular experiences in pregnancy, they will often think that is true for all women—“If I was able to get up and go to work while I was pregnant, you should be able to, too.” Employers need clear advice on such issues.

When I was coming here across from the main building, I noticed a buggy sitting outside the Labour Whips Office. I assumed it belonged to the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner). That speaks to the point that we need to make sure that babies are visible. The lives of ordinary people involve having children and the different compromises that we need to make in life. So many babies are born every single day and each person has an individual story to tell. We need to make pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood visible. We need to think about how we support people and how Government can take a leading role in making sure that the rights of women and families are respected and taken forward by all employers across this country. Those who do not adhere to such laws should be cracked down on.