Parliament as a Workplace

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ellie Reeves]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for pre-empting my next point. The cancellation of recesses this year will no doubt have had negative consequences for the work-life balance of those who help to facilitate the work of Parliament. Without the Clerks, Committee specialists, librarians, catering staff, security personnel, cleaners or the many others who make up the Westminster family, Parliament would grind to a halt and cease to work effectively. Many are restricted to taking time off when the House is in recess. The cancellation of two weeks of recess will no doubt have seen annual leave revoked, holidays cancelled and valuable time with friends and family postponed.

Moreover, I am aware that many of our recesses, although designed to coincide with school holidays, often reflect only London term times. While that is helpful for those who live in London, there are many MPs whose children’s school holidays clash with when Parliament is sitting, placing additional pressure on those Members to arrange suitable childcare for those times. Parliament is often accused of being too London-centric, and although that is not always warranted, we should perhaps be more mindful of that in future when deciding recess dates.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I think that my hon. Friend knows that I fully support what she is saying, having brought up a very large family when the hours here were pretty terrible. Before she finishes, will she address the challenge we face in wanting to make this place more attractive and somewhere that a woman thinks it is possible to have a family and a proper life? A lot of women are being put off by the daftness of our routines.

[Ellie Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention; I know that he cares strongly about these issues. Parliament is a fantastic place to work, and being a Member of Parliament is a real privilege. There has been lots of change but, as I have said, we should not stop there. We should always be looking at how to break down barriers, make this a more accessible workplace and encourage more and more people to enter.

Parliament has to work for everyone and be open to as many people as possible. For our representative democracy to be truly representative, we have to look outside to make sure that our practices fully reflect society. When I show constituents around Parliament, we often get on to the topic of prayer cards. Many are surprised that we still participate in daily Christian prayers. While I find the process of prayers at the start of the parliamentary day a calming influence and the support of the Speaker’s Chaplain invaluable, by limiting that part of our procedures to Christian beliefs only we are missing an opportunity to widen the appeal of Parliament and better reflect the country. I would fully welcome bringing other faith leaders into Parliament to offer a selection of readings that reflect the make-up of the communities that we represent. Likewise, for those of no religion, an apolitical “thought of the day” could be introduced. There is an opportunity here, too, to improve our customs better to reflect the world around us.

As I said earlier, while appetite for change varies from Member to Member, and while no one person has all the answers to improving how our parliamentary democracy works, it is clear that we must have more debates such as this to give Members a platform and an opportunity to express their views on how Parliament can best operate. It is undeniable that Westminster is often an outdated place. I am thankful for the previous efforts made by so many people to enhance and modernise our Parliament, including the Whips, who are always so understanding, particularly on childcare, but I acknowledge that they have to work within the existing frameworks.

As I hope I have made clear, this debate is not just about the work of Members. It is about making Parliament more modern and accessible for the thousands of other people who work on the parliamentary estate and those who wish to come here in future and make our democracy even more representative of those we seek to serve. Just as we needed the full transparency of proxy voting for those on parental leave, if we are to make Parliament a more modern, family-friendly and accessible workplace, we now need to make Divisions more straightforward and bring a degree of certainty to people’s work routines. If we can continue these conversations and set about enacting positive change, we will see our democracy flourish and reach our goal of becoming the Parliament that truly reflects society as a whole.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) on securing this important debate, and I look forward to hearing the other contributions. I commend the work that has already been done, particularly, as she says, by the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), Mr Speaker and many others, including the former Leader of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom). I am sure that the new Leader of the House will be a valiant champion of the need to ensure that this is a good place to work in future.

We have to start this debate with some cold, hard facts. We know that we are a group of people who are hugely committed to our communities, and that we are professional, sensible people, but all too often this place can be portrayed as chaotic because of the way that we do, or do not, organise ourselves. That is not only down to the Government’s motions and the Order Paper. We have to start to look at how this place looks from the outside if we really are to resolve the problems that we face in respect of this place, not only as a workplace for Members of Parliament, but as somewhere that represents our constituents.

Winston Churchill once said that

“we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Never a truer word has been said of this place. I love this place and would never want to see Parliament move out of it, but we have to take it into account when we try to understand why it currently does not work as a workplace for so many people. The building was built for a time when this country was a very different place and very different people became Members of Parliament. How many people were wheelchair users back when this place was first built, or rebuilt after the fire? How many people were women? We know the answer to that one: absolutely none. This building was built and our procedures were set out when women and disabled people were not considered, and when dads had few responsibilities compared with those they have today. We have to take all these things into consideration as we move forward.

[Mr Sheerman]

The right hon. Lady is making an excellent point, as did the previous speaker, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves), but both are MPs quite close to London. The Speaker once came to Huddersfield and spent a lovely day with me. When he got off the train, he said, “This is a long way, isn’t it?”. It is 192 miles. In some senses, the perspectives of those of who come to work here from a long distance away are qualitatively different from the perspectives of people who represent London and south-east England.

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Gentleman has brought up an important point. Part of the problem we have is that each one of us is very different. I am a commuting MP, and my journey to and from this place takes an hour and 40 minutes. I am sure it does not take the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge an hour and 40 minutes to get home—I hope it does not; otherwise, she needs to have a chat with her Mayor of London. It is wrong to sweep us all into a “London and the south-east” bag and assume that we all have the same challenges. It is different for each of us.

[Mr Sheerman]

It is fundamental, though, is it not? We start at 2.30 pm on a Monday because people have to get here from Scotland and the north of England, flying, using rail and so on, and these days we finish early on a Thursday because people have to get back to their constituencies. We are moulded a bit by the distances that many of us are from Parliament.

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that those are factors to consider. In fact, one reason why I was not going to talk about start and finish times was that it is a specific discussion. If he will allow me to take issue slightly with what he said, I feel that certainty is far more important. We can all cope with a lot of things in life as long as we know what is going on. All too often, the chaos that I mentioned feels very real, not just to us and staff in our parliamentary offices, but to members of staff here. I have been asked a number of times in the Tea Room, “Ms Miller, do you know when the vote might come?”. People want to be able to plan their days. The way in which this place is organised, and particularly the use of urgent questions, is a real problem for us, but I will come on to that in more detail in a moment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend is right. I suppose I am suggesting that we would sit from half-past 9. Moving towards a more nine-to-five approach to our day here would not only be better for people who live in London; this place would then look a little bit more like everybody else’s workplace. I do not know whether the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington experiences the same thing, but when I am on the train in the morning, my constituents say, “Why were you on the train at 20 minutes past 10 on Monday night? That can’t be a very effective use of your time.” I am not particularly suggesting that we should have urgent questions when the House is not sitting. I am just suggesting that we need to think about organising them into the day, so that they do not continually create a sense of chaos, with no one knowing when debates will start or finish.

[Mr Sheerman]

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way again; she is being very kind. She has paid a lot of tributes, but I hope she does not mind me saying that she has missed one. Having been in this place a long time, I know that it became civilised because women came here. I do not want to use the “B” word too often, because I will get a bad reputation, but Tony Blair made a hell of a difference to this place. He helped to increase the number of women in this place, and women have changed it a lot since 1997. There is much more to do, but we should put it on the record that women have already civilised this place almost unrecognisably from when I was a young MP.

[Mrs Miller]

That is an interesting reflection. Having a broader range of people in Parliament, regardless of gender, would also have a civilising effect, but I tend to agree. It is nice to have a Parliament that resembles the constituencies we represent.

This is such an important debate—perhaps even more so than the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge intimated. It is about trust in this place, because if this place does not look like anything else and does not act in an apparently professional and organised manner, we undermine our constituents’ trust in a place that is there to represent them and their views. Parliament enables us to serve our constituents, and we need to ensure, in planning for the future, that this is a place they can relate to and is accessible for them. Right now, we can make real change quite quickly and create far more certainty in our days by stopping the use of UQs at the beginning of the day to delay, amend or sometimes even obliterate debate completely because of the number that have been granted.

I will close my remarks there, but reflecting what the hon. Member for Huddersfield said a few moments ago, let me say that when I first met you, Madam Deputy Speaker, you said: “Women in this place have to work twice as hard as men, because we are still not 50% of the people here.” You are absolutely right, and hon. Ladies will know that. Part of my contribution to the debate was really to reflect on the comment you made to me all those years ago. We do need far more women here to have the civilising influence that the hon. Gentleman was talking about.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

First, I ought to mention that when I applied to speak in this debate, I told Mr Speaker that I might have to leave the debate slightly early, and I apologised for that—ironically, for family reasons.

I want to speak mainly about the accessibility part of this debate, but I will mention one or two other things briefly. When the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) mentioned that there are no ethnic minority portraits in the Palace, she said somebody would stand up and correct her, and that is what I am going to do. I have seen one, and that is Shapurji Saklatvala, who was the MP for Battersea North a long time ago, before the war. He is one, but what about David Pitt or Learie Constantine, who were both Members of the House of Lords? I have seen no illustrations of them. In particular, Learie Constantine was a giant of 20th-century politics. His actions led to the first Race Relations Act in the 1960s, among many other things, and he was the first non-white peer to be appointed, again in the 1960s. There is no recognition of Learie Constantine or, for that matter, of David Pitt, who equally made a great contribution.

I want to mention one other thing before I move on to accessibility. To this day, it is more difficult for women to be MPs, particularly if they are travelling from a long way away from Parliament. I can remember one example. I will not name this particular individual because she is a friend of mine, and I have not warned her that I was going to mention it. When I was first elected in 1997, I remember one of the many women elected in that intake, who was a terrific MP and a great speaker. If anybody in this Chamber saw her speak, they would have thought that woman was going places—that she was going to be in a future Cabinet, or whatever. She had small children and a constituency about 100 miles from Parliament, and within weeks she said to me, “I’m going to do one term, and then I’m off. I just cannot juggle everything I’ve got to do with the hours.” Some things have improved, but many of them still have a long way to go.

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend, because of his family history, knows about this subject better than almost anybody I know. I was a friend of his father and I am still a friend of his mother, who had adjoining constituencies to mine. He will know, because he has that dual perspective, how different it is being a Member of Parliament with a constituency in, say, Yorkshire—a long way away—and being a London MP. If we are going to modernise this House, we have to balance the two very carefully indeed.

[John Cryer]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think things have changed to a large extent. He mentioned my dad, who was an MP here in the 1970s, when there were all-night sittings. From 1974 to 1979, just on our side of the House, we lost 17 MPs in five years from heart attacks, strokes, haemorrhages and all the rest of it. Things have changed, but as I have said, they still have a long way to go.