Promotion of Women in Business

Brandon Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) on securing this debate. Ever since I left university, I have worked in business, and over the past 10 years I have run a couple of businesses. I was not sure what I, as a man, could bring to the debate, but when I spoke to my hon. Friend yesterday, it suddenly occurred to me that for 10 years I have run a business with about 80 staff of whom more than 90% are women. That had not occurred to me in the context of this debate, because we did not go out looking to recruit women or in any specific area. I fully agree with the comments about discrimination made earlier by my hon. Friends. Discrimination is not acceptable, but equally, we do not want positive discrimination.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) that we should not seek Government legislation that makes work more difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises. It is already difficult enough to employ more people under the existing regulations, which put companies off. The Government can set an ethos, however, and perhaps I can add my experiences to the debate, and say what it is we do that means we attract more women, and why that works so well.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that there is a limited role for Government in terms of imposing rules. Does he agree that it is important to encourage mentoring? A lot of studies show that all people benefit from mentoring, and women do not get as much of that as possible. Organisations such as Enterprising Women do a lot to try to promote that aspect, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman will mention it.

[Brandon Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman is right. People across the board benefit from mentoring, and men are sometimes afraid of saying, “Look, I need a bit of help.” Some women I have worked with do that better and have benefited from it. Women hold top positions across my business. As declared in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, my business involves a couple of schools and a nursery in which the head teachers are women. My administration team that runs the business is also made up of women. I have to say that they do a far better job now that I am not there interfering than was the case when I was. As an employer, we have appealed to women partly because primary education, on which we focus, tends to attract women. The tougher part of our job has been recruiting men into primary education, which is important because of balance.

When I was a council leader, I was always proud that I had a council group with very good balance. My hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald made the point that for any business or organisation, it is balance that makes it work. The balance of men and women in my council group was about 50:50. I was very proud of that and made a big point of it, because we achieved it before many authorities could get anywhere near it. We also had people from different walks of life and different business backgrounds. They ranged from a councillor of 18—the youngest councillor in the country—through to councillors in their 70s. It was the balance of members—members who agreed with one another and members who did not—that made it a more powerful team.

In my business, it is the balance that works, and flexible working also appeals. As we are an educational establishment, we have a slight advantage, in that we can advertise jobs for people who want to work only in term time to fit with their families. More men might consider that, too. This is a time when we are looking for more opportunities for men, and men are sometimes afraid of admitting that they want to spend more time with their families. I am sure that many of us in the Chamber would fall into that category, if we could. However, the ability to work in term time—the ability to work part-time hours—has meant that we have attracted women, which is benefiting our business. Our turnover of staff is extremely low. I think that in the 10 years that I ran the main administration team, we lost only one member of staff, who went on to a promotion elsewhere and has been very successful as a result. Business can consider those issues. This is about achieving a good balance across the board, with different types of input from people with different backgrounds, from men and women, from different age groups and from people with different professional backgrounds.

With regard to being flexible about work, the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) made the point about “coat peg hours”—a phrase that has stuck with me for many years. When I first qualified in law, I spent some time in a law firm and it always struck me as bizarre that the lawyers, particularly in the corporate law departments, seemed to feel that they had to be in the office from 8 am until 10 pm or later just to prove that they could be there. They were sitting in a square box, staring at a wall, doing work that they could easily have been doing at home, probably more productively.

Therefore, I have always taken a different view with people in my company, whether they are men or women. What interests me as a boss is that the work gets done and is of high quality. Unless there is a particular time demand, I am not interested in whether it is done at 8 am in an office or at 8 am in someone’s home. With the way communications work these days, businesses should think outside the box and be more open-minded about allowing staff, of whatever background and sex, to do their work to the best of their ability and not be so focused on “coat peg hours” and sitting in an office for the sake of being seen to be there. That in itself would be a big step forward for business.

If we can do nothing else in the next few years but encourage businesses to be more open about their working practices to allow people to be more flexible in that respect, we will see more women in business and certainly more production for business, without the need for legislation. I agree wholeheartedly with what hon. Members have said about how business has an opportunity now to make progress on this issue and to have more diversity across the board. Otherwise, we will end up having to look at more legislation, something which all of us who have been in business agree that business can do without.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

Many of the points that I might have made have been made already, given that I am speaking towards the end of the debate, but perhaps I can dwell on a couple of them and give them a little more thought.

In an intervention earlier, I raised the idea of flexibility over career timing. The ability to start a career later—perhaps after having children—is often not open to those of us who work in the City or the professions. I agree with other speakers that that is perhaps not something that can be legislated for; rather, it is about creating the right environment. We need to look at the issue, however, because we will all live longer and need to work longer. This is not, therefore, just a women’s issue, but a cross-gender issue.

[Brandon Lewis]

I am sorry to delay my hon. Friend, but having had two children, my wife has gone back into work and successfully set up her own business, in exactly the way my hon. Friend has described. Does my hon. Friend agree that part of the issue is the need for us all to highlight the fact that such things can be done? More women, and indeed men, would then realise that being a certain age does not mean that they cannot achieve something and do something new. Highlighting such things would raise the profile of this issue in the way that my hon. Friend has.

[Anne Marie Morris]

I absolutely agree. That is absolutely right. However, the real challenge is changing that culture.

My second point builds on the idea of confidence and experience. I welcome the idea of a Select Committee, which would be a first-class way of encouraging more thought on this issue. I was delighted to hear about the FTSE 100 mentoring programme, which sounds like a first-class initiative. The challenge is to have more role models and better mentoring programmes—I agree that they should be for men and women—and to help rebalance individuals, so that they have the broad suite of skills that we all need.

In that respect, perhaps I can dwell on men for a minute. If we look at what is happening in schools, we see the reverse of that. Boys’ results are not as good as girls’. Girls are tenacious and exam focused, and they are good at the process involved in passing exams. More and more women are going into the professions, and more women than men are going into the junior level—not the top level—of medicine and law. Leaving aside the leadership issue, we therefore also have a problem with the gender balance in those professions. We need to help men to go into those professions and to compete, just as we need to help women to go into the corporate world and compete there. The gender balance in the professions and corporate life is completely different.

One of the challenges facing us is that the skills that make people successful in the corporate world are not embedded at school, and I suspect that that may be an issue for the Secretary of State for Education. The issue is which skills we need people to gain at school to help us right the imbalance that I have described. Another challenge is to ensure that we have better integration between school and the workplace. One of my frustrations is that the children we talk to about the requirement to do work experience talk about it as if it were a tick-box exercise; there is no real sense of the role they will have in the workplace. Indeed, there is still a bit of a sense that the expected option is to stay at home.