Dawn Butler
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Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I, too, would like to seek your advice. On 23 November, the Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities misled the House in her response to my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Gerard Killen). She referred to a joint report by the Runnymede Trust and the Women’s Budget Group, “Intersecting Inequalities: the impact of austerity on BME women in the UK”, but it does in fact take into account the impact of the national living wage, and of spending cuts to services such as childcare. The Minister also cited the Institute for Fiscal Studies, but its quote came from a report that it had produced in 2011 and does not refer to the WBG and Runnymede Trust report. How can I establish whether the Minister was deliberately misleading the House, or if she just does not know the damage of the Budget to women, particularly black, Asian and minority ethnic women?
Mr Speaker
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for that. I blame myself, because I was so in thrall to the eloquence of her flow, and the flow of her eloquence, that I did not interrupt as quickly as I should have done to say that she certainly should not—and I have to believe would not—accuse a Minister of deliberately misleading the House. She can accuse a Minister of inadvertently misleading the House, but no more than that.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Lady nods in acquiescence to my point and I will leave that matter there.
The hon. Lady is obviously dissatisfied and she has put her dissatisfaction on record—indeed, she has done so for a second time as, if I remember rightly, she had a go on Thursday at topical questions and received a similar answer. The hon. Lady is nothing if not consistent and persistent. I also say to her that what Ministers and others say in the House is a matter for them; it is not for me to act as the corrective to Ministers who might be thought to make a mistake, and nor am I a policeman in such matters. The hon. Lady’s dissatisfaction will have been noted by those on the Treasury Bench and I am sure she will find other parliamentary avenues to pursue this matter—there is nothing to stop her doing so over and over and over again, although I suspect that she will require no encouragement from me to do so.