International Women’s Day

Baroness Prosser Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for placing this debate on today’s agenda. I look back to when I came in to the House some 15 or so years ago. At that time, the International Women’s Day debate was always placed on the agenda by Baroness Gould. There were just a tiddly few of us in the Chamber speaking on this subject, almost all on these Benches. I am glad that Members on other Benches, and particularly Members of the Government, have come to recognise the importance of having a good, solid debate about the ways in which women’s lives are affected throughout society, by government legislation, relationships—all sorts of things. I am grateful that the debate has been placed, but I do remember the time when it was only us few talking about it.

I want to continue the points I made earlier this afternoon and yesterday about equal pay. The Minister mentioned my Bill: I entered the ballot for a Private Member’s Bill amending the equal pay legislation and my Bill came out as number 56. I was tempted, when I introduced the Bill for its First Reading, to sing the old song, “And It Was Never Seen Again”, because it is very unlikely that there will be any government time for a Bill that comes out at number 56. However, I have decided, along with the Fawcett Society, which has helped me enormously in this work, to continue to bang the drum about equal pay, because if we do not keep banging the drum, it will never get better.

Alluding briefly to what I said earlier, there are couple of major points in this Bill. One I mentioned earlier is about the right to know. The Minister said today that which she did not say yesterday, which is that the Government are not overly happy about possible legislation on the right to know. I absolutely accept that it is tricky; lots of things are tricky. Building the Forth bridge was tricky, but it got done, so where there’s a will, there’s a way: if the Government want something to happen on this, we can make it happen. I welcome the Minister’s offer of a meeting to discuss this question and to try to find a way through some of those slightly sensitive points.

Another main point in the Bill is the assessment of damages when a woman wins an equal pay case. This currently does not take account of lost pension rights, and for many women in good pensionable jobs with decent pay, the loss of pension rights adds up to more than the loss of their income. We want to promote that aspect as well, by whatever means are available. The other side of equal pay, of course, has nothing to do with the legislation but has to do with society’s expectations of women and girls, the constraints of family life, the high cost of childcare, attitudes to girls at school and many other such things. Many years ago, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, I chaired a commission of inquiry into the continuing reasons for the gender pay and opportunities gap. We did not look at the legislation at all; we looked at all the things that make life difficult for women.

I have mentioned in this House the lack of access to decent-quality part-time employment: almost all part-time employment is at the bottom end of the pay scale. Women who trained in the National Health Service, for example, to become radiographers or to fill other highly skilled, very professional roles, have found themselves unable to continue in that work, or may not want to continue to work full-time when they have children. There are so few such jobs available part-time that those women end up working in Marks & Spencer, Tesco or Waitrose, and given that all those shops are going off the high street, those jobs will go as well, so women will be in an even more difficult position.

We also find women who start off in a workplace at one level and there they stay. Nobody says, “That woman has something about her, let us give her a bit of training.” We introduced, apropos of the report back in 2006, systems through the sector skills councils for reskilling women, giving them new skills and retraining them, helping them to move up the ladder, and it went right across a whole range of sectors of the economy. More than 25,000 women benefited from that training. I go back to the point that where there’s a will, there’s a way. If the Government want this to change, if they want women to be able to move on and up, they have to do something about it.

The noble Baroness, Lady Rock, mentioned the small number of women in information technology. There was an organisation called Computer Skills for Girls, which trained girls up and down the land, in various schools, in computer skills, taking account of the ways that girls want to learn. It was not about war or people killing each other—there was a whole range of other skills, and it was very successful.

There are many tried-and-tested ways of improving the situation and it need not cost a great deal of money or effort. The retraining of women went through the sector skills councils and employers spend far more on it than the Government did. There are people out there who are prepared to join in and want to see these changes come about, but it needs a government lead. Without a government lead it will flounder, it will be bitsy and it will not be coherent.