International Women’s Day

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill]

Today we look forward to International Women’s Day on 8 March and the contribution of women to economic growth. I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for this opportunity.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures”. The most important message we can give girls is that we support their hopes and aspirations, even at this time of mass youth unemployment, not only because achieving their ambitions will bring them a decent job and with it independence and, one hopes, a feeling of self-fulfilment, but because the future of our economy depends on women’s intelligence, skills and creativity. Women are vital for economic growth. They are the key to growing our way out of the recession.

One of the most extraordinary changes in women’s lives in the past few decades that I have witnessed has been the growth in educational and career opportunities. In 1971, women’s employment rate was 56 per cent; by 2008, it had risen to 74.7 per cent. As the Resolution Foundation has argued, the rise in living standards among low to medium-income families over the past decade is due to women’s employment. The statistics prove the point. In 1968, 86 per cent of household gross employment income came from men and 14 per cent from women. In 2008-09, 63 per cent came from men and 37 per cent from women. As the Resolution Foundation warns, the future prospects of millions of families now rest heavily on what happens to women’s employment, but the future does not look promising. After such an extraordinary period of change in women’s lives, women are in danger of seeing that progress seep away. A combination of forces is making it much more difficult for women to raise a family and contribute to its economic survival.

The Government’s austerity programme will shed 710,000 jobs in the public sector by 2015. Women make up 65 per cent of the workforce in the public sector, rising to 75 per cent in local government, according to the TUC. Job losses will fall disproportionately on women, particularly older women, many of whom are already caring for children, grandchildren and elderly parents. This level of redundancies is about much more than the public sector; it cuts to the heart of the employment system in the UK. Public sector job losses will have a major impact on the private sector and on demand in the economy. Growth in the British economy is led by wages, so the recovery will be led by wage growth. The loss of women’s spending power will not only drag thousands of households to the brink of poverty but slow down the rate of growth when the upturn begins.

The emerging markets in health, leisure, education, childcare and eldercare, are the sectors which employ large numbers of women. They are the vital parts of the infrastructure we will need to develop our economy and a civilised caring society. Women in Britain deserve better. Young girls deserve a future. If we want to see a society that is moral as well as efficient and wealth-creating then we will need to invest in women’s emotional and intellectual skills, and build a new infrastructure that supports people and develops social capital. We need to develop a properly paid, well educated female workforce delivering dependable, resilient and high-quality services in the markets of the future, but we cannot achieve that without developing a better, more affordable system of childcare.

One of the most important reforms Labour made in office was to double the number of childcare places, but now this trend is being reversed. According to Aviva, more than 30,000 women have given up their jobs because childcare and other costs mean they cannot afford to work. We need to learn lessons from our European counterparts. In Norway, parents can access childcare from birth to age five at a cost that is half the OECD average. In Denmark, childcare is free to the lowest income families. Denmark and Norway have 10 per cent more women in work than the UK.

Here in the UK, it is estimated that parents with young children pay on average £100 a week for childcare, a huge pressure on household budgets for all but the most affluent families. For many, the increasing high cost of childcare prevents parents, mostly mothers, returning to employment. Research for the Department for Work and Pensions found that almost six in 10 mothers with young children who had not gone back to work cited a lack of childcare or flexible working as the reasons.

This country needs to make progress towards a system of universal childcare that we can be proud of. The IPPR has argued that a higher employment rate is an absolutely essential foundation for long-term fiscal sustainability and the only way we will be able to afford a strong welfare state and good public services in the years ahead. Combined with a return to sustained growth, moving towards a system of universal childcare would make a real contribution to that effort. It would mean women in this country had something really to celebrate on International Women’s Day.