EU Report: Women on Boards

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for his comments. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, was worried that she would not be able to be here to make the points that he so adequately made, so I am sure that she will be extremely pleased by his remarks. He was quite right. I wondered how I could possibly squeeze any of those sporting remarks into my two minutes.

Lack of women on boards is a waste of talent and potential. It is a terrible waste of talent and potential right now. I congratulate the committee on its work, although it is a shame that it set its sights against quotas so completely. It is also a shame that the newly appointed Minister for Women and Equalities, Maria Miller, instead of taking a positive stance on this matter, as most noble Lords have done, chose to attack the Labour Party as being obsessed with quotas. We have not said very much recently about them. Instead of celebrating successes achieved and talking about how to make progress, she decided instead to have a go. That is a great shame.

My understanding of what is to come out of Europe in the next 24 hours or so is that member states already taking action will be exempt from quotas if they get up to 40% of non-execs by 2020. That is eight years away. Does the Minister think it possible for the UK, with the progress that we have made so far, to reach 40% by 2020? We should be able to.

I am proud that Labour took action to ensure that women are better represented in Parliament and politics, for example. We now have more women than all the other parties in Parliament put together. That does not mean that there is not a long way to go. How will the Government put their own house in order on these matters? I draw attention to research published in Sunday’s papers, secured by my honourable friend Luciana Berger MP. It is about government departments and their appointments at a senior level. I will share with your Lordships’ House the bottom five. BIS is the fifth bottom. It managed to recruit 25% of women in the last tranche of senior appointments that it made. Fourth from the bottom is Defra with 23.5% of women. Third from the bottom is the Department for Transport: 16.6% of its recent appointments were women. Second from the bottom is the Treasury, with 14.2%, or two out of 14, of the last senior appointments that it made being women. At the bottom is the Department of Energy and Climate Change, with one out of 15 appointments, or 6.6%. That is simply not good enough. It seems that the Government need to get their own house in order.

Earlier this year, the Prime Minister said that he did not rule out going further and using quotas as a way to get women into top executive jobs. This weekend, we saw the Minister for Women and Equalities say that that was absolutely out of the question. Perhaps the Minister in this House would clear up whether it is Ms Miller who is right or the Prime Minister.