Queen’s Speech

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps I may suggest to the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, that although Parliament may be stale, we in your Lordships’ House never are—we are always fresh.

Surely one of the tests of the efficacy of a legislative programme is what it does to our society and whether it offers more help to those who have not very much or to those who already have a great deal. I will be testing the gracious Speech on its effect on equality in our economy.

The government parties, not surprisingly, are very keen on a programme that appeals both to their own party members and to their electoral interests, and let us be clear: this gracious Speech is mostly about those things. On the other hand, we on this side are seeking more—much more—for families and individuals whose lives are often a struggle and who rightly feel that this Government do not have their interests at heart. How are they served by this legislative programme? What will this government programme do for the 1 million young people who are unemployed and were mentioned by my noble friend Lord Adonis in his opening remarks? I looked in vain to find anything. What in this programme will help people with disabilities who are struggling with the cruel complexities of Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms? Again, I looked in vain.

What in this programme will deal with the fact that childcare costs have risen by 77% in the past 10 years? Of course I welcome the late-in-the-day proposal that tax-free childcare worth up to £2,000 is coming on stream. However, it is too little too late, and why not this year instead of next? Just one in five families will receive help through tax-free childcare. Some 4 million families on universal credit could be waiting until 2017 or later for any extra help. That is three times as many as the number of those who will benefit from the tax-free childcare scheme.

What is in this programme for the low paid? Many of them are resorting to food banks, because high rents and fuel bills and their low pay mean that they cannot afford all the food that their families need. I looked in vain for that, too.

Figures from the House of Commons, analysed by the TUC, reveal that, nationally, one in five jobs pay under the living wage. As is so often the case, the situation for women workers is even worse. The most striking example in this research is in Kingswood, in the south-west of England, where over 56% of women employees are paid less than the living wage. I looked at this legislative programme for what would help those women workers, but I looked in vain.

Like my right honourable friend Ed Miliband, I welcome what can be welcomed, particularly where Labour set the agenda anyway, as we did on the childcare proposals. On the national minimum wage, Labour has committed to raising it to a higher proportion of average earnings and to improving enforcement, with penalties increased to up to £50,000 for non-payment. So while we welcome the £20,000 penalty that is proposed in the gracious Speech, we do not think that it goes far enough. Labour has committed to banning exploitative zero-hours contracts, including ensuring that those who work regular hours month after month get a regular contract. Of course, we also welcome the ban in the Queen’s Speech on exclusivity clauses that stop workers on zero-hours contracts from working for another employer, but it does not go far enough.

On childcare, we have announced plans to help working parents with 25 hours of free childcare for three and four year-olds. The childcare proposals in the Queen’s Speech do not match our plans, and they do not make up for the childcare crunch of reduced support. On the gender pay gap, if this Government had continued to make the same rate of progress that we have made in government on closing the gender pay gap, women would get £177 a year more in their pay packets. As my honourable friend Gloria De Piero has said:

“David Cameron likes to paint a rosy picture when it comes to women in work but the reality for most women struggling with the cost-of-living crisis is that things are getting worse for them and their families”.

She also said that,

“44 years on from the Equal Pay Act being passed, women are still earning 80p for every pound men earn”.

Why is addressing the inequalities in our economy so important? I take women in our economy as an example of how counterproductive, piecemeal, traditional, short-sighted and often punitive the economic and social programme of this Government has often been. I draw on three impeccable sources—the McKinsey Women Matter series, the TUC and the Maternity Alliance. Every year since 2007, McKinsey has produced a report about the economic value of women in business and, particularly, in the boardroom. The TUC represents millions of women workers. Both organisations agree, in their own way, about the underperformance of the UK in the economy and business due to the barriers that women face at work. McKinsey has discovered that companies in the top quartile for female representation—the top 25% of companies in terms of the share of women on their executive committees—perform significantly better than companies with no women at the top. They have on average 47% higher equity returns and 55% higher earnings before tax and interest. Companies that have no women on boards earn less and perform worse than those with women on them. Diversity leads to prosperity.

I turn to the question of women’s representation in boardrooms, which has improved partly because of the work done by people like my noble friend Lord Davies in his report. I am very pleased and welcome the support that the Government have given to this and the targets that he set. I am very pleased about the increase of the number of women on boards in FTSE 100 companies, from 12.5% in 2011 to over 21% in May this year. That is to be welcomed. However, the fact that there are only four female chief executives in the FTSE 100 is simply not good enough. In his latest report, my noble friend Lord Davies said:

“Gender balance makes good business sense. Women make up over half of the UK population, account for nearly half of the working population, outperform men educationally and are responsible for the majority of the household purchasing decisions”.

The problem is that women are basically outnumbered at all levels of the pipeline to the top. It is not so much a glass ceiling as, as the Chartered Management Institute describes it, a “glass obstacle course”. In March this year, the TUC analysis of the 10 best-paid and the 10 worst-paid occupations in the UK showed a stark gender divide. Nearly two-thirds of the 900,000 employees in the best-paid occupations, such as financial managers and medical practitioners, are male. Legal professionals, head teachers and college principals are the only top-paying occupations that employ more women than men.

There is also a lack of part-time positions in the top jobs. Employees are half as likely to work part time in top-paying professions, at a rate of 13.7%, as they are in the rest of the labour market, at 28.3%. Among chief executives and senior officials, the best-paying occupations in the UK with an average hourly wage of £43.17 an hour, just 6.6% of employees work part time and only one in four is female.

In contrast, of course, the lowest-paid occupations, such as retail assistants and cleaners, are dominated by women and part-time work. Of the 2.6 million employees in the 10 lowest-paying occupations, where average hourly wages range from £6.20 to £6.82, 1.7 million employees are female and 1.8 million work part time. The concentration of women and part-time workers in the UK’s low-wage sectors shows why fair pay remains such a big issue for women and why part-time work so often pushes working women into poverty, and thus their families too.

The virtual elimination of the gender pay gap for full-time workers under 40 years of age will be of little comfort to the millions of women who have had to trade down jobs or put their careers on hold to find work that fits round their childcare or caring responsibilities. Surely a great lack of imagination and a clinging to traditional ways are indicated by the fact that the opportunities to ask for part-time work, flexible working and reduced hours on returning from maternity leave are generally restricted to fairly low-level positions and to women who are already well established in their jobs.

That leads me to the issue of having children and what happens in the workplace. The Maternity Alliance says in its recent report that in 2005—three years before the global financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession—a landmark study by the Equal Opportunities Commission found that half of all pregnant women suffered a related disadvantage at work, and that each year 30,000 were forced out of their jobs. That is a shocking and disgraceful finding. However, eight years on, all the available evidence suggests that such pregnancy and maternity discrimination is now more common than ever before, and that as many as 60,000 women are pushed out of work each year. Faced with mounting evidence of this proliferation of pregnancy and maternity discrimination, key government Ministers have until very recently simply denied that there is a problem. In November, however, in announcing £1 million of funding to enable the Equality and Human Rights Commission to undertake a new study of this issue, the Government seemed finally to accept that such unlawful discrimination,

“remains prevalent and more needs to be done to tackle it”.

That realisation has come a bit late, however, and there has still been no action.

Unfortunately, the Government have introduced a number of measures that make it harder for women to tackle such discrimination. Access to free employment advice has been restricted and almost all civil legal aid has disappeared. The questionnaire procedure in employment tribunal discrimination claims, which facilitates the revealing of crucial information held by the employer which is otherwise not available to the claimant, is set to be abolished in April 2014. That is a great shame and the Benches opposite should think very carefully about its implications. Perhaps most damagingly of all, since July 2013, those wishing to pursue a tribunal claim for pregnancy, maternity or other discrimination must pay up to £1,200 in upfront tribunal fees. It is difficult enough to take forward a claim against your employer, but then to have to find £1,200 before you start is both shocking and discriminatory. Surely the message from the Government to employers should be that an economic recession and hard times are no excuse to flout the law.

I could give other examples, but what it all adds up to is a Government who really do not get it when it comes to women and the workplace. At best, the Government make the right noises, as the Minister did in his opening remarks. In particular, individual women inside the Government have been working hard on this issue. However the product—that is, the prospects for women—still looks like the same old same traditional way of running our economy and businesses. Just to make sure that it was really difficult to find out the equality impact of government policy, one of the first things they did was to stop counting that impact in any meaningful way.

Working women therefore need a Labour Government to tackle the scandal of low pay by substantially increasing the value of the minimum wage, end the abuse of zero-hours contracts, guarantee mums and dads in work 25 hours of free childcare for three and four year-olds, and give all parents of primary school children access to childcare through their schools from 8 am to 6 pm. Actually, we need a Labour Government.