Women (Government Policies)

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry]

I wish to make a little more progress, and then I will be happy to give way.

We are hearing a lot of hypocrisy about spending cuts and about pension ages. Let us not forget that the Labour party commissioned the Turner review, which recommended a rise in the state pension age for men and women, and pointed out that the disproportionate longevity figures for men and women meant that the age for women had to rise more quickly. We must ask whether there is an alternative proposal. Does something need to happen about state pensions? We would love to hear Labour’s plans, but we never do.

The Labour party also missed more than 50% of its own equality targets. We know that the Labour party loves targets, but we do not hear very much about the fact that it missed 50% of its targets in this important area. We have also not heard much from Labour Members about Sure Start. I love Sure Start, and I am incredibly proud of the three Sure Start centres in my constituency. They are doing incredibly good work, particularly in places such as Tidworth, an area to which dozens of soldiers and soldiers’ wives come. The centre provides a real lifeline there. We have just opened the Sure Start centre in Pewsey, and thanks to the financial management skills of Wiltshire council it will remain open and funded.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Can the hon. Lady, or any of her colleagues who wish to contribute, tell us why previous Conservative Governments never introduced anything like Sure Start? Sure Start is an amazing achievement of the Labour Government, and she should bear that in mind.

[Claire Perry]

One might just take the hon. Lady’s intervention back a little. Sure Start was invented in the United States in the early 1990s, where it was targeted, as she knows, at the children who needed it most, and it was a great success. If I had been in Parliament when Sure Start was introduced I would have supported it in its early incarnation. It is a very sound idea, but of course it had to grow from something that was very useful when targeted to something that became a universal political point.

Let us hear what happened. In 2010 the National Audit Office found that

“there was no reduction in inequality between child development achieved in the 30% most disadvantaged communities and in the rest of England, against a target to reduce the gap by four percentage points”.

We must remind ourselves that Sure Start was introduced to intervene in the lives of the most vulnerable and needy children and families, and that that target was completely missed. Did any discussion take place about how to target Sure Start better? Was there any acknowledgement that one of the huge issues related to the lack of trust going out and reaching in to the most disadvantaged communities? We know that more than half of the Sure Start centres were failing to reach out to vulnerable families. What should people do in those circumstances? Should they think about how to change that, or should they keep spending and criticise a Government who want to target the money better? The 4,700 extra health visitors jobs—almost 5,000 of them, which will largely be filled by women—represent the way to get from the Sure Start centre out into the community and really help the most disadvantaged children, who absolutely need that intervention. That is what we are planning to do, but we hear no support for it. Again, that is because of the rank hypocrisy that we are hearing from Labour Members today.



The other thing we are hearing today is that the Government have no policies in the area of equality. This is a House of very intelligent people—I keep saying that so it has to be true. There are Members in all parts of the House who work on a cross-party basis on unbelievably important issues, be it child protection or trying to stop the pernicious influence of pornography on the lives of our families. We should be working together on how to make Sure Start centres more effective —on what we can actually do to make a difference—instead of getting involved in this bandwagonism. I find it incredibly demeaning for the House to be participating in that.

We are dealing here with unbelievable hypocrisy, given that it is coming from a party that maxed out on the nation’s credit card. Its approach means that we are spending 39 times the annual operating budget of Sure Start on servicing Labour’s debts. That is the legacy that we are having to deal with. Do we hear any innovative or sensible suggestions about how to deal with it? No, we do not.

We have a benefits system has been created to trap many women in the sorts of poverty from which we would all want them to get out. We know that the benefits system is costing everyone £3,000 a year, but do we get any positive recognition and support for our welfare reform policies and the universal credit that we are proposing? I do not think so. Let us put aside this bandwagonism and hypocrisy, and let us talk about what this coalition Government are actually doing.

First—this is obviously the elephant in the room—the Government are taking action to pay off the previous Government’s crippling debts, which did not pop up overnight as a result of the credit crunch. The Labour Government spent more than they took in taxes every year from 2002, wishfully thinking that post-endogenous growth theory—I went to Nailsea comprehensive school and do not have a clue what that means—would somehow bring us out of the mess. Well, guess what: it does not. A Government have to live within their means if they are not to burden our children with debts, as the profligacy of the Labour Government did. This Government will live within their means. We are making the spending reductions that the Labour party left us with in a way that focuses the scarce resources on those who need them most.

We are facing a public sector pay freeze, and that is tough. Some 35% of the employment based in my constituency is in the public sector, so Members should not think that I do not get a lot of letters about that. However, I also hear from the women, many of whom work part time, who are grateful to be excluded from the pay freeze because they are low earners. They recognise that in these scarce times things have to change, but they think that it is important that the pay freeze excluded the lowest paid, and so do I. The Government have also taken 880,000 people out of taxation completely and definitively with a one-off move—it was not the fiasco of the 10p tax rate—and that benefits lower-income women and families in this country hugely.

We have heard a lot from Labour Members about child tax credits—I am confused, because I thought that the Government were raising child tax credits in absolute terms and ahead of indexation for the most disadvantaged families, who need them the most. I believe that that benefits 4 million of this country’s poorest families. We are examining Sure Start centres, ring-fencing the funding and investing in 5,000 additional health visitors, who can stop Sure Start centres being a nice thing thrown on the wall and make them work.

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[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth). He was passionate about his constituency and warm in his praise of his predecessors and colleagues in the city. May I thank him for his support for Salford Reds? Among the many football and rugby clubs in his constituency that he could have talked about, he still remembered Salford Reds. I hope that he will enjoy visiting the clubs he mentioned in his own constituency and he will always be welcome in my constituency, where the new Salford Reds stadium is fast taking shape. Each week when I go back there is more of it. He is very welcome to come back to Salford.

On a more serious point, let me refer to a letter from a constituent affected by the pension age change. My constituent wrote:

“Recently I applied for a pension forecast and found that I will not receive any pension payment until I am 64. I am worried and appalled. I have worked full time since leaving school, progressed my nursing career so I could remain employable and reared 2 children. I do not drink or smoke and I have paid for our children’s university fees so that they could enter ‘the big society’ with something to offer, ensuring their employability. I have not been given any time to plan for receiving my pension at 64. Successive governments have encouraged people to save for their retirement which I have done with the view of retiring at 60. I cannot stress strongly enough how I feel let down by people who are supposedly managing our country. I will certainly join in a campaign opposing this”.

She also said:

“How can I stop this happening? It is unfair and penalises all those people who are loyal and hard working.”

Women such as my constituent are worried and appalled and it is time that Ministers listened to them.

[Harriett Baldwin]

Is the hon. Lady talking about a constituent whose retirement age is rising to 64? Is that not a policy that her Government brought in?

[Barbara Keeley]

I did not intend to touch on that, but wanted to take the opportunity to read out my constituent’s comments so that Ministers understand the worry and concern.

I want to focus more on women and jobs and social care. I share the concerns expressed by many organisations and individuals about the disproportionate and unfair impact of the Government’s policies on women. As we know, women make up 60% of the public sector work force. Nationally, 40% of women’s jobs are in the public sector compared with 15% of men’s jobs. In my constituency, women’s jobs in the public sector are in local government and the NHS—in the primary care trust and in local hospitals. Local councils are now having to manage the swingeing front-loaded budget cuts made by this Government and thousands of jobs are being lost. Salford council, my old council, will have to cut 500 jobs this year. Wigan council will lose more than 800 jobs and Manchester council 2,000. All the interventions made by Government Members have not made much mention of those swingeing front-loaded cuts to council budgets, but they are very important and they are affecting things.

[George Hollingbery]

Will the hon. Lady illuminate the House with how many of the job cuts to the various councils she identified are redundancies or post eliminations rather than straightforward compulsory redundancies? Can she tell us about the profile of those people? Are they at the top, middle or bottom level of the organisations?

[Barbara Keeley]

It hardly matters, I think. We are talking about three or four years of cuts and this year’s cuts will be followed by similar cuts next year and the year after. I am surprised that Government Members can look with such equanimity at something such as the 2,000 job cuts that are happening in Manchester.

The hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) talked about protecting the NHS, but in reality hundreds of jobs are being lost in the NHS, as they are in local councils. Jobs are being lost through the abolition of our primary care trust in Salford and that change is also causing turmoil to local services and decision making. At Salford Royal hospital, 720 jobs are being cut, including those of 146 nurses. The Christie, our regional county hospital, is to reduce its staffing by 213—one in 10 of the current work force—including 40 nurse-grade jobs and 50 health care support or assistant jobs. I am sure that none of us would look with equanimity at that level of job loss.

[Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady not accept that her own party did not campaign on the basis of ring-fencing or protecting the health budget? Does she not accept that it is highly likely that the situation would be far worse had her party been elected?

[Barbara Keeley]

No, I do not accept that. The turmoil that has been caused by the unnecessary top-down reorganisation, as well as the £3 billion cost of that reorganisation, is not helping.

Finally, and close to home in my constituency, Royal Bolton hospital is losing 60 posts, including 32 nurses, with 92 jobs going next year and 95 the year after. At Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh hospital, 533 jobs are going—a 13% reduction. These are the jobs and careers of my constituents, and women’s jobs are disproportionately affected because all those organisations employ significantly more women than men.

In recent months, there has been quite a focus on women’s jobs that are being lost, but the cuts also mean the loss of services that women use more than men. Women, as we know, are more likely to use libraries and health services and they need support from social care for family members and themselves as carers. Women will carry a disproportionate burden of the spending cuts that are affecting social care services as 58% of carers are women, and of those carers who combine caring with part-time work, 89% are women.

Next week is carers’ week, which has great support across the House, and the theme will be the true face of carers. Carers are being asked to talk about the reality of their lives as carers—how hard they can find it to be a carer and what could really make a difference to their lives. A report by the Care and Support Alliance in March showed that levels of unmet need were increasing even before the cuts to local council budgets. That is a great cause for concern. In the alliance’s survey of 1,000 people, nearly seven out of 10 respondents felt that they needed more support, more than two in 10 said that services had been cut back even though needs might have been increasing, and more than two in 10 said that the person cared for needed support but was not receiving any services.

That is not surprising, given that councils have been cutting their eligibility criteria for social care for some time, increasing charges for services and removing caps on charges. I am proud of the fact that, despite the swingeing 27% cuts to council budgets at Labour-run Salford city council, it has managed to retain eligibility criteria for social care at a level to help people with moderate needs as well as those with substantial or critical needs. Salford is now one of only 15% of councils that provide that level of care. That is in great contrast to councils such as coalition-run Birmingham city council, which recently tried to set its eligibility criteria to a new level of “personal critical”. More than 10,000 people would have seen their care packages downgraded and more than 4,000 people would have had no care services or support whatever.

My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) reported the distress of constituents who came to him for assistance: people who were extremely vulnerable themselves or caring for someone who was elderly, ill or disabled. Women carers were disproportionately included. The Care and Support Alliance survey revealed that changes to services that happened even before the cuts had led to

“a negative impact to the person with care and support needs.”

The report quotes one female carer talking about the impact on her life. She said:

“I am unable to go out with my husband because one of us needs to remain at home with my mother. Unable to go out with my sister (also disabled) because if I go out she needs to stay home to support my husband in caring for our mother. Unable to visit friends, have a weekend away or take a holiday. Feel abandoned by the state—Carer’s Allowance withdrawn when I reached 60 last year, Carer’s grant reduced by Local Authority from £400 pa to £100 pa this year, top-up fees now payable for the 3 hour respite per week, no extra help available.”

Of course, such extra stresses also put further pressure on the health of many women who care. Another female carer is quoted in the Care and Support Alliance report as saying:

“I care for two and I am disabled myself. Although they have increased the care for my father, he still needs extra care from me. I get no help with my husband, who is also becoming more demanding and no help for myself. So my life gets harder and harder and my health is deteriorating as a consequence.”

Women who are carers are also worried about the Government’s plans to cut £1 billion from disability living allowance over five years by reducing the number of people who are eligible. Tightening the eligibility criteria for DLA will mean that many carers will not be eligible for carer’s allowance, which will be available only for those who look after someone who is in receipt of the middle or higher level of DLA. As three quarters of the recipients of carer’s allowance are women, that is yet another area in which women will bear the brunt of the cuts.

Carers UK has estimated that seven out of 10 women will be carers in their lifetime. We know that social care services for older people are underfunded and that the number of over-80s is increasing, so the pressure on family carers, who are mainly women, is bound to increase. Once again, women will be disproportionately affected.

Women are more reliant on the services that the public sector provides and therefore stand to lose more from cuts to services and from the loss of jobs that I have talked about. That affects my constituents and women who are carers. I have campaigned since I have been in the House to improve services and support for carers, six out 10 of whom are women. More could always be done, but Labour gave primary care trusts extra budgets to fund respite care, introduced the carers grant and provided £770 million in new funding for disabled children.

[Claire Perry]

Let me pay tribute to the hon. Lady’s work in this area, which many of us recognise. Surely she will welcome the £800 million commitment that the Government announced last year to provide really important respite care for parents with disabled children.

[Barbara Keeley]

Of course, every move to provide extra respite care to help carers is beneficial, and all those moves were started by the previous Government in support of the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign. As I said earlier, there has been very little mention of the fact that the swingeing cuts to council budgets cancel out everything else being done. Perhaps that is not the case in places such as Wiltshire, but it certainly is the case in the north of England.

Finally, let me mention some things that were going to happen but will not now happen.

[Claire Perry]

Will the hon. Lady give way on that point?

[Barbara Keeley]

I am just about to finish.

The Government have abolished the measures in the Personal Care at Home Act 2010, which would have helped 400,000 of the people in the greatest need, and they have cut the budgets to local councils, as I have mentioned, which will potentially have a great impact. Those changes come at a time when we know that more services are needed given the horrendous cases we have heard about in recent months. It is time to develop unanimity across the House. I know that many hon. Members on the Government side are concerned about social care, but the impact of the changes that I have mentioned will cause a loss of quality of life for carers, as I have outlined.

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[Lorely Burt]

I agree, and I am sure my hon. Friend the Pensions Minister listened to every word that the hon. Gentleman and I have said.

Let me move on to Sure Start centres. I am amazed that the Opposition have the temerity to accuse us of closing centres, when the centres that have been closed were predominantly in Labour-run council areas. The Government are not cutting Sure Start centres and have made sure that there is enough funding in the early intervention grant to retain a network of Sure Start centres. Not a single Liberal Democrat council has closed a Sure Start centre, and in my own patch, in Solihull, we have extended their remit from the narrow strictures prescribed by Labour.

[Barbara Keeley]

Does the hon. Lady think there might be a connection with the fact that many Labour councils, particularly in the north, had seen cuts of something like £100 million in their budgets? It is hard to protect any services in that situation, and no services can be left out.

[Lorely Burt]

Perhaps it is a matter of priorities. Economic inequalities still abound in this country. Despite the good old Equal Opportunities Act now reaching its fifth decade, women working full time still earn, on average, 15.5% less than men. That is not good enough. Raising the tax threshold has helped women, who made up 60% of the 900,000 people lifted out of tax altogether. In the spending review we ensured that the lowest paid public sector workers, 65.5% of whom were women, were protected from the public sector pay freeze, as the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) mentioned.

The world of work is therefore one area of public policy that we can use to try and level the playing field between men and women, but let us also consider self-employment and women-owned companies. We know that a third more women-owned start-ups fail in the UK than in the US; we know that 20 years ago the US took affirmative action on procurement; and we know that today there are proportionately twice as many women-owned businesses in the US as in the UK. One area where the Government have taken action is in the field of procurement, with reference to small businesses. We aspire to achieve 25% of goods and services procurement for Government Departments from small businesses.

But women-owned businesses are not even on the Government’s radar. If we are spending taxpayers’ money, should we not know who we are procuring from? If we are measuring how many small businesses we are procuring from, how much more difficult would it be to measure how many women-owned businesses we are procuring from? It makes good business sense to procure from companies run by people who look like those being supplied to. It makes good business sense for boards of directors to have a critical mass of people who think with the left side of their brains, as well as those who think with the right side—I caricature.

We have had the Davies report on women on boards, and I wait with bated breath to see whether companies will respond. The Home Secretary said that the early indicators are positive, but companies had better shape up, otherwise I will be pressing the Government to get tough with boards that think that certain people have a monopoly on innovation, creativity and plain old common sense.

I have already mentioned flexible working. I want to commend the Government for their work on flexible parental leave, for facilitating better solutions for parents and companies in how that leave is taken and for modifications to the working time directive affecting the interaction of annual leave, sick leave and family-friendly leave. It is good news that the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 100,000 more women started work, compared with 18,000 men, so it is not all doom and gloom.

There is probably no single aspect of Government policy that does not affect women in some way. We are short of time so I will refer to only one more point: the suggestion in the media today that we are to rethink the proposal to reduce sentences by half for those who plead guilty to rape charges. I worry about that policy. Of course it is good to have a confession that avoids the added trauma for rape victims of having to testify and be cross-examined, but halving a rapist’s sentence just for confessing sticks in my craw. We must consider why only 6% of rape reports result in a conviction. There is no glory for any Government in this respect. We must do better and there has to be some kind of cultural change.

We all want the same thing: a more even playing field for women. The Government are striving to maintain and increase fairness in the most difficult and trying circumstances. I certainly do not think that we have everything right, but with a little good will on all sides we can work together to do this. I will be lobbying my hon. Friends to do the right thing.

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[Lynne Featherstone]

The point is that we are dealing with the structural deficit. If we do not get our house in order now we never will, and it will be future generations who suffer because of Labour’s failure to address it—[Interruption.] Chuntering away at me will not help the right hon. Lady.

Fairness is the reason why in April we lifted 880,000 of the lowest-paid workers out of income tax—and it does not stop there, because more will be added to their number every year of this Parliament. It is why we are protecting the lowest-paid public sector workers—the majority of whom are women—from the public sector pay freeze, and they will get pay rises. It is why we are increasing child tax credits for the poorest families by more than the level promised by the last Government. And it is precisely why we are getting to grips with the deficit so that we do not fritter away more and more on debt interest, and destroy the crucial public services that so many women need and depend on.

Cuts—and the impact that Opposition Members say they have—are not all that we care about for women. We care about being ambitious and about taking them out of poverty. We care about giving them the tools to lift themselves out, not just continuing what went on before. If fairness were simply a matter of benefits, taxes and snapshot comparisons of income, it would be easy to achieve—

[Barbara Keeley]

Will the Minister give way?

[Lynne Featherstone]

No, I do not have time.

I echo the Home Secretary when I say that it is extremely patronising, and frankly absurd, to lump together 31 million women in this country as the prime victims of the deficit reduction. Women are not a homogenous group, but different individuals affected by different experiences and coming from different walks of life. So no matter how well intentioned, packaging out prescriptive solutions that fail to recognise that reality will not work. What do work are policies designed for all the roles that women play, tackling not just the symptoms of inequality but its causes. I shall try to address some of those points.

First, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Leicester South, who made his maiden speech. I thank him for his kind words about Parmjit Singh Gill and congratulate him on being in the Chamber while he has a two-week-old baby. When shared parenting comes in, that could have been his wife, if she were able to walk. And as for Engelbert Humperdinck and “Quando, quando, quando”, I would have liked to say that I did not know what the hon. Gentleman was talking about, but sadly I did.

The hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East mentioned impact assessments. I have to say that Labour never published equality impact studies for its Budgets, and I do not think it did one on the 10p tax or the 70p pension rise. She also mentioned the gender pay gap. Yes, we are introducing voluntary pay reporting, but that was started under Labour in the Equality Act 2010. However, we will also impose mandatory pay audits on anyone found guilty of discrimination, if it is appropriate, and we have introduced the gagging clauses in the Equality Act. She also asked about trafficking and the Olympics. Work is being undertaken by the Metropolitan Police Service, which has a specialist unit that has received extra funding to prioritise activities to disrupt and monitor trafficking in the run-up to the Olympics.

Hon. Members asked about whether we were opting in to the European directive on trafficking. Well, we are opting into the directive, but we wanted to consider the matter and get it right to ensure that we could deliver on it. However, the coalition Government are going even further with our own human trafficking strategy, which will be announced shortly, and which will aim to disrupt activity in the country of origin, and then on our borders and in this country. As we have heard from many hon. Members, we are putting that support in place. We have also extended the Sojourner project