International Women’s Day

Debate between Charlie Elphicke and Fiona Mactaggart

Thursday 8th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I have just explained why I am not giving way.

We are told that the proposed universal benefit will make work pay, but for whom? It will end the tradition, built up in the Labour years, of paying family benefits to the main carer in the household, who is usually a woman. Men will be the default recipient. As a result, women and children will get less.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I have explained why I am resisting. I want to give more people a chance to make the contribution that they want to make. I think that that is right in this debate. I am talking about the real situation for women today. I would like to be able to celebrate the progress that women have made; I am explaining why I fear the situation is going backwards.

As I was saying, women are paying 70% of the cost of deficit reduction, with £13.2 billion coming from women and £5.7 billion from men. Women are being squeezed out of the labour market. Record numbers of women are jobless. The biggest jump in unemployment has been among older women aged 50 to 64—up by 20,000 in the last quarter. At the same time, unemployment among younger women went down.

We are facing a crisis for this group of older women. They have faced the shock that their pensions are to be deferred and they need to use these crucial years to build up their pensions. However, they will find it hard to find a new job. Often, women are losing jobs in the public sector, where there is a better record on equal pay than in the private sector. That means that women’s snail-like progress towards equal pay risks sliding backwards. Older women are sandwiched between supporting their children, who are staying at home longer, saddled with university debt, because they cannot afford their own housing, and supporting their elderly parents, who are being failed by a health service made increasingly chaotic by Government reform. The next debate will focus on carers, so all I will say is that this Government’s failure to grasp the challenge of care has delegated responsibility for it to the nation’s women, which just is not fair.

If the prospects for women at work and for women’s income are gloomy, what about elsewhere? Everywoman Safe Everywhere, a commission chaired by the former Member of Parliament for Redcar, shows how women have become less safe. There has been a 31% cut in refuges and services that tackle domestic violence. Some 230 women are turned away from a refuge on a typical day. The suggestion that housing benefit will no longer cover the service provision in refuges is a further threat to refuge provision. When women move on, they will be entitled only to the single room rate of housing benefit.

I will never forget the Iraqi woman refugee in Slough, a qualified radiographer, who was slowly being made mad because she was so scared by living in a house, and sharing a kitchen and bathroom, with young men who had no respect for her religion or her privacy. We are about to do that to women who are leaving refuges.

Removing from the DNA database the samples of men who have been accused but not convicted of rape, when we know both that convictions are hard to secure and—