International Women’s Day: Progress on Global Gender Equality

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an absolutely fascinating afternoon. With so many wide-ranging and varied speeches, it is almost impossible to summarise them and I wish the Minister well in doing so. We have had speeches from “men Lords” as well as “women Lords”, according to the daughter of the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld. The noble Baroness talked about how we bring up our daughters and our sons. Several noble Lords mentioned that hugely important point and it is incumbent on all of us to be aware of it.

I apologise to any noble Lord whose speech I do not mention but I have enjoyed every single contribution this afternoon. They have all taught me something that I did not know before. We have had contributions from my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece and the noble Baronesses, Lady Uddin and Lady Flather, who talked about the challenges facing BAME women. My noble friend Lady Barker talked about the challenges facing LGBT women. Young women and gender stereotypes, particularly as they affect young women taking up apprenticeships, were covered in great depth by the noble Baroness, Lady Gale. Several noble Lords mentioned sexual harassment and the fight back—the #MeToo movement—notably my noble friend Lady Northover.

Health and education have rightly featured strongly in the debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, talked about decriminalising abortion by updating the Abortion Act 1967 and the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, said that education was the key to health, happiness and wealth. The noble Baroness, Lady Healy, talked about the plight of detainees in Yarl’s Wood, and good for her in speaking up for some of the most disadvantaged people in the worst position in British society today.

There have been a lot of personal tributes to mothers, including from the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, and the noble Lord, Lord Brooke. I pay tribute to my mother, who encouraged me to believe that I could be anything that I wanted to be. However, I do not think she ever thought that I would end up in this place. She is still pinching herself.

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, spoke warmly of the contribution of the trade union movement in this area. I pay tribute to the long service that she has given to that movement and to this place. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, in that respect. The noble Lord, Lord Loomba, talked about the work of his charity in helping widows and tackling violence against women and girls. Many noble Lords have spoken about that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, talked about the work of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the CPA. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response to the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, who asked why the Government have not sent a nominee to the CEDAW meeting.

We have heard a lot about women’s sport. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about the drama and professionalism exhibited in women’s sport and the soft power that it can wield. The noble Lord, Lord Pendry, talked about the This Girl Can campaign. My noble friend Lady Barker can, and I can too. I am still dead slow—but still lapping everybody on the sofa.

We have had a lot of discussions about other areas. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, talked about Albania and the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, about Pakistan. Last December I went as a volunteer to Karachi to support the work of VSO and its celebration of Women of the UN’s 16 days of activism against violence against women, working with the police and others to publicise efforts to encourage abused women to come forward and report their abusers. There is a whole culture change going on, particularly in Sindh province, where I was. I met some incredibly inspirational characters, such as Majida Rizvi, a Supreme Court judge who succeeded in getting the laws on rape changed. Before her long campaign to secure a conviction for rape, there had to be four male witnesses. That just shows how far they have come.

We in this place are in a highly privileged position. We can open doors and use our diplomatic skills to put pressure on those who have power over women’s lives, at home and abroad.

A country which is arguably much worse in its treatment of women is Papua New Guinea and the surrounding islands, where families who want marriage for a son are exhorted to pay the bride price. The presence of companies extracting mineral wealth has distorted and inflated the bride price market. Where once, payment would have been in shells—a beautiful way to trade before other forms of currency were introduced—today the monetary wealth that working for refineries has brought has caused the bride price to skyrocket. Leaving aside the lack of say that a girl is likely to have in the matter, many families, having laid out a huge amount of money to “buy” their bride, feel justified in treating her literally like a slave.

Our parliamentary group, extremely ably led by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, was treated with great honour, but I fear our entreaties and remonstrations fell largely on deaf ears. What people say and what they do are sadly often different things when it comes to relinquishing power.

How bad are things in the world today? The noble Baroness, Lady Browning, referred to the international measure of the gender gap, which incorporates disparities in health, education, economy and politics. It has assessed the global gender gap at 68%. In Britain it is 33% and we are ranked 15th out of 144 countries for overall gender parity. Women in Britain are treated twice as well as in the average country but a third less well than the men here. If we are meant to be grateful for this statistic, I can tell you, we are not. Never mind for a moment about the rest of the planet. On this little part of it, which is under our control, we are failing women.

So what should we be doing about it? The first thing that I believe will effect change is to have as many women sitting around the table making the decisions as men. In Parliament we are making great strides in increasing the number of women parliamentarians, as several noble Lords have mentioned. Labour’s policy of all-women shortlists has helped enormously and I am delighted to say this is now being introduced in the Liberal Democrats—and about time too. However, despite the remarks of the Minister, currently there are still only six women in the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister, which is 26% of 23 Cabinet posts; so we have a way to go, is all I am saying, although I applaud all the strides that have been made. It would be very churlish not to do so. Having a woman as Prime Minister is not quite good enough when only a quarter of the Cabinet is female. I note that Mrs Thatcher did the same, with only one woman in her Cabinet apart from herself.

In the workplace, women are still severely underrepresented in any job that involves decision-making, and receive less pay than their male counterparts even when they do succeed—usually at great personal cost—at breaking through the glass ceiling. One piece of government legislation conceived in the coalition and implemented by this Conservative Government is making companies look very seriously at how they reward talent. I speak of the requirement to report on the gender pay gap, which has been mentioned several times. I am already being approached by companies that want to tell me all about their pay gap results and get them out there and justify them before being forced to publish them in April. Our overall gender pay gap stands at 18.4% in favour of men, but I know of at least one large construction company that has been prompted to fundamentally rethink its pay structures and how it values work.

What should Parliament do? Women are held back by the lack of affordable childcare—that is nothing new; we all know that—and that is probably the number one issue for us. In recent years strides have been made in the provision of free childcare and making fees tax deductible. However, that is still not enough. For women in lower-paid occupations, the economics of working while having small children just do not stack up—even when the children are of school age, the benefits can be marginal. We have to do something. It is the fundamental thing that would change the balance.

I have talked already about shared parental leave in the context of what business should do. Really, it is up to businesses to change their culture. Parliament, however, can give them a nudge, as has proved so successful in pay gap reporting. Naming, and by implication shaming, companies has two functions. First, it makes companies think about the policies they are operating compared with others, and a bit of healthy competition—“We’re a better, more compassionate and enlightened employer than you are”—works wonders. Secondly, of course, what you do not measure you cannot manage. For a start, what about requiring that companies over a certain size publish their maternity and paternity pay policy?

The Liberal Democrats have put forward several proposals, including that “upskirting” should be made a criminal offence. Several noble Lords have worked on proposals dealing with period poverty, and we look forward to a response from the Government on that. Other proposals include gender-neutral school clothing, making sexual harassment outside of work illegal and improving knowledge among employers—for example, it is illegal to ask women whether they plan to have children but a lot of employers do not know that. What about changing the rules so that men can register children’s births if they are not married to the mother? To me, that seems a sensible and sane thing to do, and it would be especially helpful if the mother is unwell—it is a partnership, after all. What about changing the name of this place from the House of Lords to the House of Peers? That would make it a lot more gender equal. Finally, we should set a date to look at the Gender Recognition Act, so that we can see changes and progress following the completion of the consultation.

If I can pray the patience of the House for one moment more, I want to talk about my lapel badge—for anyone who cannot see it, it is a spoon. My lot know all about it because I have been on about it for a while, but the charity Karma Nirvana works very hard against forced marriage. Part of its charitable work is to advise the police, airport authorities and schools. If someone is absolutely desperate and fear that they are being taken abroad for a forced marriage, they should pop a spoon in their underwear. That way, they will be stopped when going through security and taken into a separate room on their own where they will be able to express their concerns. If anyone would like to know more about Karma Nirvana and the wonderful work of Jasvinder Sanghera, please see me afterwards.

Women: Economic Freedom

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My noble friend is absolutely right to point out that what girls do today at GCSE and A-level will determine what the women’s workforce of the future looks like. She is also right to point out that only 20% of girls do computer science at GCSE and 10% at A-level. One thing that I know my children are absolute wizards at—far better than me—is computer science. If girls are very conversant with computer science and STEM subjects generally, that will make them really equipped for the workforce of the next generation.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

The Institute for Fiscal Studies found recently that by the time a couple’s first child reaches the age of 20, the mother’s earnings are almost a third less than the father’s. Take-up of shared parental leave is disappointingly low; I have crossed swords with the noble Lord, Lord Henley, in discussing the reasons why. However, we cannot just put this problem in the “too difficult” box. Too much is being lost to the economy and to families.

[Noble Lords]

Too long!

[Baroness Burt of Solihull]

Will the Minister please agree to meet me to discuss some out-of-the-box ideas that I do not have time to outline here?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I am sorry; I missed the last part of the noble Baroness’s question but I shall certainly be happy to meet her.

Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 (Consequential Amendments, Savings and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2017

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for that thorough and clear explanation by the Minister of what these regulations do. It took me a while to ponder them in order to reach the same kind of conclusion. It seems that everything in the instrument is technical and is required to smooth out the problems that can arise when there is insolvency in relation to financial services. I can understand how the legislation will benefit institutions with many creditors, such as a building society, a mutual or, indeed, a bank.

I have two questions for the Minister. No impact assessment has been produced for the regulations. I would be interested to know the reasons for that because if removal of the requirement for physical creditors’ meetings and allowing creditors to opt out of certain notices was explored in the insolvency red tape challenge, surely the conclusion must have been that this would make savings, otherwise why would you do it? Secondly, there are no plans to review these amendments. My question is this: how will the Government know that they have done their job and whether they are working? I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about that because we should always look back at legislation to see whether it has in fact done its job. To some degree we have built in things like sunset clauses where it is clear that legislation is no longer required. If we are seeking to reduce red tape, I point out that assessing whether our legislation is working is a good way of enabling us not to have any extra red tape. There is plenty of it in HM Treasury, that is absolutely for sure. I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on those points.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, before I start I should apologise for what is going to be a rather scrappy and rambling speech. The reason for that is that rather lazily I started to look at this instrument only on Saturday, and I have to say that I pretty much regret that I did so. I had great trouble in trying to understand it, particularly the Explanatory Memorandum. Either these regulations are important or they are a trivial tidying-up exercise, but I could not work out which. They seem to centre on meetings and notices. I shall quote from the Explanatory Memorandum:

“insolvency law reforms enacted in sections 122 to 126 of, and Schedule 9 to, the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015”.

Paragraph 7.4 sets out what the principal changes are. As the Minister said, they concern the removal of physical meetings for creditors and allowing them to opt out of receiving certain notices. That seems unobjectionable until one reads, together with paragraph 7.5, paragraph 7.6:

“This instrument therefore takes a staggered approach to the amendment of the Treasury’s financial services legislation, disapplying the reforms for the majority of its special insolvency regimes”.


The special insolvency regimes are enormously important. They culminate in the Bank of England’s approach to resolution, which is a combination of several Acts. I see the noble Lord, Lord Young, in his place. We have battled over the bits and bobs of these Acts—well, battled is not quite fair, but sought to understand them and how they fit together. Of course, the consequence of the Bank of England’s approach is that banks do not become insolvent. They are resolved before that. It is already quite complicated.

I thought, “Well, why don’t I break the normal rule and look at the regulations?”. It is pretty desperate when you have to look at the regulations because they are, as usual, pretty indecipherable, especially as they run to several pages, despite an apparently simple purpose of disapplying something in a particular place. Since it was so long I thought I would pick on something that I think I know a little about. That took me to page 5 of the regulations on the Banking Act 2009. Regulation 6(3)(a) requires that,

“the entry for section 141, in column 3 at the beginning insert … ‘Ignore the amendment made by paragraph 36 of Schedule 9 to the 2015 Act’”.

This is a form of legislation that I have never come across before. I am used to instruments changing the law and so on, but to say to disapply a law, or to read it as though it has not been amended, which is what this says, creates immediate problems. You can get into the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act and find out what is to be disapplied, but you then have to try to find what disapplying the Act means. It means going back to the Insolvency Act 1986 to see which particular amendments to that Act were in force before April came along and it was changed to something that these regulations want to change it back to. I failed. I could get a copy of Section 141 as enacted in 1986 and I could look up the section that now exists until these regulations become active. It proved why I am not a lawyer: while the words are different, I could not find any difference in the meaning.

It seems that the essence of this is: what is the damage if we do not approve? I hope that smiling and shaking of the head from the Minister means that he will write to me rather than try to answer me. I would like an answer to this in writing if the Minister cannot provide it tonight: what damage to the insolvency regime—particularly in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, the Banking Act 2009 and the other Acts mentioned in the regulations—would occur if we were not to approve these regulations? If the damage is trivial, that is fair enough. If the damage is that it puts in doubt the working of the special resolution regimes which the Treasury has developed and put into law, it is very serious. If those regimes are seriously damaged, the resolution approach which the Bank of England thinks it has may be at risk

One problem with bank resolution is that it is something that one never does. The trick is for the industry to know about it and think, “That is going to be so painful, we will be careful enough not to get into that position”. So we do not have any case law. However, we nearly had some case law: the Co-op Bank was within a whisker of going broke. The resolution regime worked in that the creditors, those who were owed money by the bank, thought that they would get an even worse deal under the resolution regime than by putting together their own deal, so they put their own deal together within hours of the point at which they would have run out of money. The resolution regime therefore worked by virtue of its existence, but is it fatally flawed until we approve this instrument?

If that is the case, it means that the 2015 Act contains a serious flaw, and we need to know how that happened. Was there not proper consultation in developing the Act? I assume that the original parent of the Act was BIS, as it was known then. The developer of the special resolution regimes is the Treasury. It seems to be either some trivial tidying-up or a serious mistake, for which I would look to the Minister to apologise. One thing I think I can ask him to apologise for is the Explanatory Memorandum. As a politician of average intelligence—you might call that a bear of little brain—I found it impossible to work out just how important this instrument is or is not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Burt of Solihull]

I am interested to know, since the Minister says that BEIS did quantify the costs, why that quantification was not included in the legislation itself, in this instrument.

[Lord Bates]

I shall double-check, but my feeling is that those impact assessments were published earlier in the sequence of legislation and reforms that I mentioned. I shall double-check but if that is not the case, impact assessments are normally a matter of public record and they will therefore be made available. The noble Baroness also asked how the financial sector will benefit from these changes. Where these regulations apply the reforms, firms in the financial sector will benefit from a modernised and streamlined insolvency process. The benefits include removing unnecessary burdens, such as requiring a physical meeting of creditors. Financial institutions will not be directly affected by these. As to the impact these regulations will have on the financial sector, these regulations apply the reforms where appropriate, ensuring that the benefits of the reforms are extended to the financial sector. Where the regulations do not apply the reforms, there will be no impact on the financial sector. As I mentioned, an impact assessment was undertaken.

I come to some points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. He focused on recalling the impact of the Banking Act 2009 and asked what the impact might be on the Bank of England’s resolution of banking problems to ensure smooth working. The insolvency regimes for financial sector firms that we are discussing today sit alongside the Bank of England’s powers under the special resolution regime established by the Banking Act 2009. Today’s regulations are required to update and maintain consistency in the legislation that concerns these special insolvency regimes. The regulations do not affect or amend the Bank of England’s powers under the special resolution regime.

The noble Lord also asked about the drafting of the statutory instrument, basically saying that it is not acceptable because you need to see the Banking Act 2009 before it was amended. Today’s regulations are consequential amendments that amend the financial sector insolvency regimes to take account of the April 2017 reforms. Given the limited amount of parliamentary time available, as I mentioned earlier, there are currently no plans to consolidate the regulations.

Domestic Abuse: Clare’s Law

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Baroness highlights an important point. She is absolutely right to raise it and that is why, in my initial Answer, I said that the Home Secretary sees this as so important that she chairs the oversight group to review the progress being made in this area. The noble Baroness is right that we need consistency across police forces in tackling this issue. The new licence to practise will ensure that police officers have the skills they need to tackle this type of abuse—something they have perhaps not been sufficiently trained in previously.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, the implementation of Clare’s law in this country is a postcode lottery, as the noble Baroness pointed out. This is totally unacceptable when two women a week are killed by their partners or ex-partners. What is being done to ensure that the public always receive an answer to their requests, and to make them aware of Clare’s law and their right to make such a request?