Coronavirus Act 2020: Temporary Provisions

Baroness Clark of Kilwinning Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Clark of Kilwinning (Lab) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to be able to speak for the first time in this House and to thank noble Lords on all sides for their courtesy and assistance during my first few days here. In particular, I would like to put on record my gratitude to all the House staff for their professionalism and for the risks they are taking in these difficult times. I thank my noble friend Lady Healy, whom I have only met in the last few days but who is now my mentor and has shown me great kindness over that time.

I also thank my two sponsors, whom I have known for a considerably longer period of time. My noble friend Lord Foulkes met me when I was a young child and, as I like to remind him, he has now known five generations of my family, including my grandmother, Agnes Davies, who was chair of his constituency Labour Party when he was the Member of Parliament for South Ayrshire. I met my other sponsor, my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, in 2005 when I was first elected as the Member of Parliament for North Ayrshire and Arran and she was lobbying and advising on civil liberties aspects of legislation going through the other place. I suspect that her skills will be of great use in today’s debate.

My election as the Member of Parliament for North Ayrshire and Arran was the biggest honour of my life. It is a beautiful and diverse constituency. I come from Ayrshire, so I am well aware of many of the challenges that Ayrshire, and indeed the whole of the west of Scotland, faces due to deindustrialisation and a lack of investment over many years. I hope to have the opportunity to speak about some of those issues in this House. The advice that I got from the clerks was to make an uncontroversial maiden speech. Given the nature of some of the legislation coming before the House, that has been very difficult to do.

My first employment was in the Scottish legal profession, where I took civil actions based on human rights breaches. I then went on to work as a criminal defence agent and was an executive member of the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties before I headed up a legal unit for the trade union UNISON. All my instincts would normally be to strongly oppose legislation with some of the draconian provisions included in the Act which is before the House today.

However, as has been pointed out, we live in unprecedented times and the pandemic we are faced with means we have to look at the legislation in that context. The legislation is very wide-ranging—it is 360 pages of legislation, including schedules—ranging from making it easier to force compulsory treatment on individuals under the Mental Health Act to postponing elections and provisions relating to potentially infectious persons.

In the short time available, I am going to focus on only one aspect, which is statutory sick pay. Approximately 2 million people in this country are excluded from statutory sick pay. They are mainly women, but those on zero-hours contracts and the self-employed are particularly affected. The TUC says that, in this country, statutory sick pay is the equivalent of only 29% of average pay, compared with, for example, 100% in Germany and 93% in Belgium. I suggest to the Minister that, given that the state is requiring people to self-isolate and asking them to shield, perhaps this is something that we can look at this again. We need to make sure that we put people in a financial position where they are able to comply, to keep all of us safe.