Black History Month

Debate between Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Abena Oppong-Asare

Thursday 21st October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Abena Oppong-Asare]

I am delighted my right hon. Friend has mentioned that point. It is something I am particularly passionate about as our family worked in the NHS. I am concerned about the Windrush generation, for whom the Government, I have to say, have yet to provide adequate support. I hope the Minister will be able to highlight what support he will be giving to that generation, who contributed so much to the NHS, as my right hon. Friend says.

I also want to mention Lara Alabi, based in Thamesmead, who won a community award for setting up Seniors in Touch, a weekly club for over-50s in Thamesmead, to tackle isolation issues relating to health and lack of confidence.

As well as paying tribute to under-acknowledged black Britons, I want to use this debate to highlight some of the inequalities that continue to affect black people in this country and that I believe the Government must do more to address. The first is black maternity health. There have been two important Westminster Hall debates on this issue over the last year and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) for leading them. I also pay tribute to the group Five X More, which has done so much to bring the issue up the political agenda. It has highlighted the stark disparity in outcomes that black women face when giving birth in this country.

Black women are four times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth. Black women are up to 83% more likely to suffer a near miss during pregnancy. Black babies have a 121% increased risk of stillbirth and a 50% risk of neonatal death. Miscarriage rates are 40% higher in black women, and black ethnicity is regarded as a risk factor for miscarriage. Put simply, giving birth as a black woman is considerably riskier than for women of other ethnicities. The Government know that this inequality exists and now is the time for action.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has highlighted well the statistics and she will be aware that the Government still have no target to end this. Does she agree that the fact that the Government have decided not to set a target and not to look at institutional racism in the NHS goes no way to solving the issues that she so eloquently raised?

[Abena Oppong-Asare]

I thank my hon. Friend for the work that she has done on this issue. That is completely accurate.

We need a target to end racial maternal health inequalities and an action plan to achieve it. The plan should include action to improve data collection, to improve the support for at-risk women, to implement the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ report on this issue and to identify the barriers to accessing maternal mental health services. But most of all, I urge the Government to listen to the experiences of black women, to engage with them directly, to hear their concerns and to take them seriously.

I turn to another issue that affects black women and girls: the lack of specialist training for police and other agencies supporting black women who are victims of domestic abuse. Here, I pay tribute to the organisation Sistah Space, a domestic abuse charity supporting women of African and Caribbean heritage. I met its representatives recently to discuss their petition to introduce Valerie’s law. That is named in memory of Valerie Forde, who was murdered by her former partner in 2014 alongside their 22-month-old daughter. She had previously asked the police for help after her ex-partner had threatened to burn down her house with her in it, but this was recorded only as a threat to her property.

While that story is shocking, it is sadly not uncommon. Too many black women do not get the support that they need because the police are not trained to spot and deal appropriately with domestic violence in black communities. That includes things such as missing signs of domestic violence on black skin and a lack of cultural knowledge about how threats can be communicated. We need mandatory, specialist training for the police and others on all of this and more. I hope that the Government will seriously consider that as part of the renewed focus on violence against women and girls, given recent events.

I now wish to return to the asks of the Government that I made during the Black History Month debate last year. The first was action to diversify the curriculum. As I said last year, I want our children, black and white, in every single corner of this country, to better understand our national history and our national culture. This, of course, includes the good and the bad and the full range of experiences that people have had. I am pleased to see some progress on that and I pay particular tribute to the Welsh Government, who have become the first UK nation to make the teaching of black, Asian and minority ethnic histories and experiences mandatory in the school curriculum. The OCR exam board has also recently announced that it is doubling the choice of books by writers of colour in its A-level English qualification. But more action is needed from the Government on this, and I hope that the new Secretary of State for Education, who I congratulate on his appointment, will make this a priority. Black history is British history and we need to teach it all year round.

My second ask from the Government last year was to implement a race equality strategy and action plan. There has been much discussion in the past year about the inequality and structural racism that exist in our country, not least in response to the controversial Sewell report, but we have not seen anywhere near enough concrete action from the Government.

A race equality strategy and action plan covering areas such as education, health and employment is desperately needed. It should include specific proposals to address well-known inequalities such as the ethnicity pay gap, unequal access to justice and the impact of the pandemic on black people. I fully support my party’s policy to

“implement a Race Equality Act to tackle structural racial inequality at source”,

following the excellent work of Baroness Doreen Lawrence looking at how the pandemic has impacted black and other minority ethnic groups. I say to the Government: we have seen review after review, but now is the time for action.

I want to be clear that this discussion should not become a conversation about culture wars. In those culture wars, we end up pitting poor white people against poor black people. Some may say to poor white people, “You are in this situation because footballers are taking the knee.” This place is better than that. In Black History Month, our message should be that we want to give black people hope and white people hope. Our message to white people in Black History Month is “Our history is your history too. A lot of what has happened to us involves you, too. We are not saying that you are responsible, but we are saying that we all need to better understand that.”

I will not allow us to be divided. When we are divided, extremism flourishes. I will not allow that on my watch. Black History Month tells me to tell you that we learn from our past to build a better future. We must learn from our past to build a better future.

Ethnicity Pay Gap

Debate between Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Abena Oppong-Asare

Monday 20th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Abena Oppong-Asare (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Hosie. I thank the Petitions Committee for making the time for this important debate, and the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) for introducing it. I also thank the organisers of the petition. As the hon. Gentleman said, 130,000 people signed it, including 470 from my constituency.

I thank all hon. Members who contributed to the debate. The hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar) talked about structural racism and its impact on society. The right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) talked about how reporting will not really happen unless it is made mandatory, and about her work on the Select Committee on how BAME individuals have been affected during the pandemic. That work shows issues of inequality. The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) talked about the effectiveness of mandatory reporting and gender pay gap reporting, and about how that has made a significant difference.

The past 18 months have brought a welcome focus on issues of race and ethnicity in this country and around the world, which is something I am particularly passionate about. In the context of the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter protests, we saw the petition take off. I mention that because ethnicity pay disparities do not exist in isolation; they exist within broader structures of racism that affect black and Asian minority people in every part of their lives. I have experienced it myself.

I have previously called for the Government to implement a race equality strategy and an action plan covering areas such as education, health and employment. I feel that would address the structural inequalities that exist. At the centre of that, I believe there must be action to tackle discrimination in the workplace, unequal access to training, finance and opportunities, and the ethnicity pay gap, which brings me specifically to this petition.

The petition calls for the introduction of mandatory ethnicity gap pay reporting. As the Minister will know, this is not a new suggestion or a new demand; people have been calling for it for some time. Can the Minister outline the Government’s proposals to address the suggestion? As the hon. Member for Bath said, the 2018 McGregor-Smith review into race in the workplace said:

“The Government must…legislate to make larger businesses publish their ethnicity data by salary band to show progress.”

We all know that the Government launched a consultation on this issue, which ran from October 2018 to January 2019. I am extremely concerned that we are yet to see anything published about that consultation some two years later. Can the Minister tell us what message that sends to black and ethnic minority people in this country? To me, it comes across that the Government do not particularly care about these individuals, because the consultation has been done and nothing has materialised from it.

I want to talk about issues with mandatory reporting that have been identified and how they can be overcome, but the delay is not about the practicalities of introducing mandatory reporting. Instead, the Government have gone cold on the idea. Despite the prolonged delay, this issue will not simply go away. We cannot settle for voluntary reporting. I hope that the Minister hears loud and clear that voluntary reporting is totally inadequate, and I will tell him why.

Just this week it was reported that only 13 of the largest 100 employers in this country have published their ethnicity pay gaps. As the hon. Member for Bath mentioned, this situation is similar to what happened before mandatory gender pay gap reporting was introduced in 2017. Prior to it becoming mandatory, a voluntary initiative led to only six companies publishing gender pay gap data, yet consultation shows that employers were generally supportive of mandatory reporting because it meant that all organisations would have to use consistent methods and be able to benchmark against each other. In this case too, only mandatory ethnicity pay reporting will deliver meaningful data from a wide range of businesses. This echoes conversations mentioned by hon. Members about the fact that we need to get the data.

A lot of businesses back mandatory reporting and conversations have been had. The CBI has joined the TUC and the Equality and Human Rights Commission in calling on the Government to go beyond the recommendations of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities and bring in mandatory reporting without delay.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will be aware that, without mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting, we do not truly know the full scale of the problem. At the moment people say the gap is about 2.3%, but when we look at individual ethnic groups we see there is a gap of 16% for Pakistani groups and 8% for black groups. Does she agree that until this is made mandatory not only will we not know the scale of the problem, but companies will not take steps forward to address these inequalities?

[Abena Oppong-Asare]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Unless we get mandatory reporting, we will not know the full scale of this issue. That is shown by the fact that very few organisations, given the opportunity to do the reporting voluntarily, have taken it up. That leads me to something that I will discuss later—the stats that have been collated, which are quite alarming. We need to make reporting mandatory in order to be able to address the issues that are there—the inequalities that exist.

I want to address the report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which called only for voluntary reporting, and some of the practical issues that the Government have highlighted. The commission stated that

“many employers around the country simply do not have enough ethnic minorities for the recording sample to be valid.”

That is something I have heard in this debate, but leading experts in this field—including the Chartered Management Institute and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development—have set out practical ways to overcome it. Other concerns, such as the legal basis for collecting ethnicity information or low declaration rates, can simply be overcome with clear guidance from Government. Those practical issues are what the Government have been working on over the past two years, so the information is there for us to be able to do this, rather than kicking the issue into the long grass.

I want to end by saying something about why ethnicity pay gap reporting is so important. We know that, at national level, significant disparities exist between people of different ethnicities, as my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) mentioned. In 2019, the Office for National Statistics found that median hourly pay was £12.49 for white people, £11.50 for black people and just £10.55 for people of Pakistani origin. The ONS study also found that people of Chinese origin earned on average £15.38 an hour and people of Indian origin earned £14.43. That really should lead us to caution against making sweeping statements about ethnic minorities as a whole, but there is clear evidence that people’s race and ethnic background determines how much they earn, and I have seen that at first hand. Sadly, for many people, the colour of their skin, along with their gender and class, determine the opportunities that are open to them. That is something that we really need to change.

I wanted to mention the interaction between race and other characteristics such as gender. A report was done recently by the Fawcett Society, which found that ethnic- minority women are

“almost invisible from positions of power across both public and private sectors”

in the UK. We see that around us. We know that a range of connected factors determine pay disparities. They include age, location and, of course, gender and race. It is for precisely that reason that we need to build up more data on those disparities, as my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham mentioned. Company-specific reporting is important, because it obliges employers to examine their data and to work out why disparities might exist. It does not assume that discrimination takes place, but rather provides information so that employers can make informed decisions to improve recruitment, promotion and pay policies. Without it, we will not be able to see what progress has already been made and where there is more to do.

Let me conclude. To fight discrimination, we must first see it and understand it. The Government have dragged their feet on this issue for far too long. The consensus for mandatory ethnicity pay-gap reporting is broad and the arguments for it are compelling, so I would be grateful if, when the Minister responds to the debate, he would tell us what the Government will do to bring forward legislation to implement this vital measure.