Beauty and Wellbeing Sector Workforce

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it is to see you back in the Chair, Sir Roger? You have been much missed.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for her phenomenal work, both as chair of the APPG and in repeatedly highlighting the hair and beauty sector in the main Chamber, emphasising, as she has done again this morning, the particular challenges that it has faced during the pandemic. She has also given us a really healthy reminder of what a strong sector it has been, which is important to reflect on.

We went into the pandemic with somewhere in the region of 300,000 employees in the sector, the vast majority of whom were women. Hon. Members would expect me, as Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, to emphasise that we are talking about a sector that employs women, but it does not simply employ them; it trains them and gives them opportunity. Many of them will do years of training in college or an apprenticeship, then move into working in a salon or studio. They might then consider taking the plunge and going self-employed; that is always a risk, but many of those brilliant and brave women do exactly that. After a few years of being self-employed, perhaps on a mobile basis, they rent their own salon—an enormous financial commitment, involving business rates and rent. For all of them, it is about risk and a cost-benefit analysis. They are brave and ballsy—as I have previously said and established, that is not unparliamentary language—women, who go out, take the risk and benefit from it, and in turn they become employers of other women. That is a model that we should absolutely be encouraging, celebrating and promoting.

I will tell a little anecdotal story. As Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, I get all sorts of interesting panels with fascinating people, including one gentleman who is one of the leading educationalists to whom the Government turn when they are looking for advice and interesting reports on everything to do with education. He talked to me about the veterinary profession and said that the veterinary profession was full of clever white girls. Then, he said, “But when educationalists find not-so-clever bright girls, they shove them off just into the beauty industry,” at which moment I had one of my moments of rage. Through the medium of Zoom, he undoubtedly got the famous death stare, because the reality is that the beauty and wellbeing industry is not “just” anything. It is a fantastic, thriving industry that provides training, employment and the opportunity to go off and become an entrepreneur.

Over the course of the last 12 months, I have been blown away by the stories I have heard from young and not-so-young women who have told me how their boyfriends, fathers or brothers have regarded them as “just” beauty therapists. I have always gone back to them and said, “You are not ‘just’ anything. You are an entrepreneur, and you know what? This country thrives on the entrepreneurial spirit of people like you, who have the guts to go off and become self-employed, to set up your own business, to rent your own studio, and to contribute to the economy in myriad ways.” I have got that off my chest, and I feel lot better about it.

The hon. Member for Swansea East mentioned that the industry sometimes gets ridiculed and people laugh at it, which makes me really angry, because they are laughing at the hard work of women who have skill, ability and the determination to give back to others the confidence that some of them may have lost. I know there is nothing more boring than somebody who stands up in this place and says, “When I was a Minister,” but I am will say it. When I was a Minister, I spent a very happy year at the Department for Work and Pensions. We talked about the challenges of getting women back into employment, perhaps after a long career break, and the thing that was missing from so many women was confidence. I would speak to women in jobcentres up and down the country, and I learned that they did not have the confidence to go back into the workplace; they felt their skills were lacking and they were old and past their sell-by date. These were women of 40. For the record, let me say that no woman in her 40s— I declare an interest—is past her sell-by date. It is crucial that we look at this sector, which can give the female workforce confidence.

The hon. Lady mentioned some of the services that can be provided, but I always highlight services such as ayurvedic facials that help with migraines, or the ability of specialist—indeed, brilliant—cosmetic tattooists, who put eyebrows back on people with alopecia or tattoo nipples back on women who have had breast reconstruction surgery. All these things give people the confidence to go back into the workplace, go back to work and take up a productive and useful role in society, in the community, and of course—I would say this to a Minister at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—in the economy. That is crucial, because ultimately these are people who will pay tax and help the rest of us to recover from the hideous fiscal crisis caused by the pandemic. I recognise and want to reinforce the comments made by the hon. Lady about the promotion of the sector. This is not just “hair and beauty”; it is a really important sector, worth £28 billion, which can give women back their confidence.

I have a specific plea, which I hope the Minister will listen to and act on. The thing that struck me after talking to the National Hair and Beauty Federation and the British Beauty Council, among other organisations, and perhaps specifically after talking to individual providers of beauty services both large and indeed very small, including one-woman-band enterprises, is that they talk about the VAT break that was given to hospitality. Treasury Ministers always say that it was very easy and straightforward to do that because hospitality was on a separate VAT code and could be easily and distinctly hived off from other sectors, but the same does not apply to the beauty sector. Well, it should, and it would not be difficult to give it a separate VAT code. Will my hon. Friend the Minister undertake to have a conversation about that with the Treasury? We do not know whether covid will be back, or what the next pandemic is coming over the hill will be, or indeed what future financial challenges will arise. I think that it would be of benefit to the sector to have a separate VAT code, so that we will not be in the same situation in the future.

This is a very competitive, enterprising and determined sector, and one that is phenomenally good at self-promotion. What is lacking is regulation. We need a way of making sure that people are accredited, that training is understood and recognised, and that we can understand who is providing what to whom. I remember having a fantastic conversation with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on this subject. He rang me on a Sunday to talk about it and I explained to him there and then that he and I could set ourselves up as a pair of beauticians with absolutely no training, no accreditation and no regulation—although we would not survive in business very long, because we would be very bad at it. The reality is that there is not the sort of oversight that one might expect for an industry that uses, in some instances, interesting and even challenging chemicals and machinery, and all sorts of products that need to be used by expert hands, particularly in services such as cosmetic tattooing. I say that because we can all open the Daily Mail’s Sidebar of Shame and see some of the horrors that have been carried out on people’s faces.

Fundamentally, it is vital that the Government recognise that, as we come out of the pandemic, there is a challenge in female employment. My Select Committee, the TUC and the Women’s Budget Group—a range of experts, up and down the country—have reflected upon the fact it is predominantly women who have been employed in the sectors that have been locked down longest and hardest. The hon. Member for Swansea East mentioned the fact that the beauty and wellbeing sector has rightly had to put in all sorts of provisions to prevent covid spread, but increased gaps between chairs reduce capacity, and businesses must have 15-minute breaks between customers so that facilities can be wiped down and disinfected, taking hours out of a day that could instead have been productive, income-generating hours.

We have seen the same in retail. We know that 58% of non-essential retail workers are women, and my horrific prediction is that when furlough comes to an end, we may well see a massive increase in the number of women being made redundant. That will have a consequential impact on the work of the Department for Work and Pensions to make sure that interesting, challenging and sustainable opportunities are found for those women in the future. It is crucial that we look at our recovery and how we build back better in a feminine way.

I will leave the Minister with that thought. When we look at how we build back, we have to make sure that we do not forget the female workforce, who are so vital in the hair and beauty sector, and indeed in other sectors.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Scully]

The hon. Gentleman, as ever, predicts the next few paragraphs of my speech. Yes, we want to encourage and work with the sector, and incentivise it to take on more apprentices. I am aware of how highly skilled and valued practitioners are, but they are tempted to start careers in different industries because they have lost confidence in the sector’s future viability. That is why it is important that we talk about it, support the sector and demonstrate how viable and flexible it is, and how it very much has a key role in the high street ecosystem that I talked about earlier.

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend was quick to respond that he wishes to support apprenticeships and demonstrate how important they are in the sector. Can he outline what specific work he is doing with the Department for Education to make sure that it, too, promotes them?

[Paul Scully]

I can indeed, and I will come to that in a second. We also have to examine why apprenticeships were in decline before the pandemic began. We can look at it holistically across Government with the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions and BEIS.

We have provided a range of support for the beauty and wellbeing sector. For example, the sector is eligible for the kickstart scheme, which provides a fully funded six-month job for 16 to 24-year-olds on universal credit and at risk of long-term unemployment. I am pleased to say that 600 high quality industry-designed apprenticeship standards are now available. I want to work with the sector to increase the number of small and medium-sized beauty businesses offering apprenticeships.

The Government have recently increased the cash incentive to £3,000 for every apprentice that a business hires, and that helps to maintain and attract the sector’s future workforce. It is good to see sector initiatives aimed at upskilling the workforce. For example, I commend L’Oréal on its education platform, Access, which I am told 54,000 hair professionals have used. We will continue to work with the sector to advance the reputation of beauty and wellbeing as an invaluable, skilled and highly rewarding career path.

I have talked about some of the issues that the hon. Member for Swansea East raised in her speech. I was pleased that she was forthright in mentioning the benefit of holistic treatment to the menopause. It is important that we do not shy from talking in this place about a treatment that can be of so much benefit to so many women across the country. It is great to see that issue highlighted.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North talked about the entrepreneurial spirit, as did the hon. Member for Strangford. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that we should not talk about just beauty therapists and just the beauty sector. As we have heard, the hospitality sector, for example, has a low bar to entry, but that does not make it a low-skilled sector. The hair and beauty sector does not have a particularly high bar to entry, but someone cannot just pick up a pair of scissors and expect to walk into a hairdresser’s and say, “Can I start work, please?” It is really important to demonstrate the skills required in the sector.

The hon. Member for Bradford South talked about regulation, and we are working with the Department of Health and Social Care to look at regulation and what needs to be done for particular treatments. We will continue to make sure that we can work with the Department, the APPG and the sector to ensure the safety of customers. They need to see not just a certificate on the wall, as she said, but that there are skills behind it. We have to be really careful in those areas.

The hon. Member for Strangford talked about people—specifically, women—setting up businesses. We have talked about the fact that this is largely a female-led-business sector. He is absolutely right when he talks about female entrepreneurs. This fits into a wider piece of work that we are doing in my Department. What are the barriers to female entrepreneurs? They include access to finance, peer-to-peer networking and mentoring. The issue there is not just having the big beasts—the Deborah Meadens, the Richard Bransons and all those people. It is how you get mentors for people who have perhaps just opened their first salon, having been a mobile worker for a number of years; perhaps they have just taken on their first employee—it is about all those kinds of things. That is the kind of example that women want to see—someone in their mould, speaking to them about their issues. It is a question of getting consistency across the country, but also, as I have said, access to finance.

Alison Rose, the chief executive of NatWest, led the Rose review a few years ago. I chair the Rose Review Board with her—we have a meeting next week—and we talk about access to finance. We have 100 signatories to the “Investing in Women Code”, which involves a number of venture capitalists as well as lenders. We are trying to get them to change their teams so that they can get diversity of thought in their investment decisions. That will lead to having diversity in their investments and ensure that they are investing in more women, and that has to be brilliant for the UK economy.

We also have the start-up loans, available for anybody to set up a new business, of up to £25,000, alongside free mentoring. That is run by the British Business Bank and has been since 2012, and 40% of those loans are going to women. That is clearly far lower than the percentage of women in the population, but compared with some other lenders, it is going in the right direction. We still need to do more, so I am pleased to be able to encourage that. The Budget in March from my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer was focused on helping those most affected by the pandemic, including small businesses and vulnerable groups such as young people, women and those from disadvantaged groups in our communities. It is really important that we continue to do that.

In conclusion, we will continue to listen to the sector to understand its views and concerns. As we move to step 4 on the road map, we will work together to address the key problems facing the beauty and wellbeing workforce, discussed in the debate today. We will keep on reviewing the data; we will keep on making an assessment against the four tests at least a week in advance and will announce whether we proceed to step 4 on the new date of no later than 12 July. I want the sector to fully open as soon as that is safe, so that it can bounce back and recover from the restrictions and the financial pressures caused by the pandemic. That will help to address the issues relating to jobs and the skills gap. There is clearly more to do, after we reopen, to address the longer term challenges for the sector, but we need to keep making the point that the beauty and wellbeing sector is a fantastic industry to work in because of the people and the skills that they bring.