Proxy Voting

Jo Swinson Excerpts

Thursday 13th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

I am very glad that I can contribute to this debate, as it falls in the period when I am briefly back in the saddle before going off on a further period of leave in October. Colleagues will not be surprised that I, having introduced shared parental leave as a Minister, and Duncan have chosen to share caring for our new baby.

I want to put on the record my sincere thanks to you, Mr Speaker, and in particular to the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), for enabling me to speak early in the debate. The slight changes to its timing, with the urgent question and the statement, have made the feeding and expressing schedule slightly difficult. Gabriel will be arriving in the House in half an hour or so, so I really appreciate colleagues’ help in enabling me to make my speech at this point.

I do wish that I could say I welcomed this debate, which for some of us it is too little, too late. This House first resolved that Members with small babies should be able to vote by proxy seven months ago. Since then, Gabriel, Elijah and Solomon have been born, whom, instead of calling “honourable”, we might call the “adorable” babies for East Dunbartonshire, for Lancaster and Fleetwood and for North West Durham. Two more Commons babies are on the way, and I am sure colleagues will join me in sending good wishes to the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch), whose baby is due next week, and the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who says she wishes she could be here. Unfortunately, she is experiencing heavy morning sickness, but she has been a strong campaigner for proxy voting. I very much welcome the contribution from the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) and members of his Committee, who, to their credit, have produced an excellent report. They carried out the inquiry swiftly, and it is almost four months ago that they published their report recommending motions to be put to the House to make proxy voting on baby leave a reality, yet here we are having another general debate.

I can absolutely see the merit of looking at proxy voting more widely than in cases of baby leave, not least after the atrocious treatment of the hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) back in June. She travelled hundreds of miles in an ambulance from hospital, and was wheeled through the Lobby with a sick bucket on her lap. This does need to be looked at, but that is no reason to delay cracking on with the vote on introducing proxy voting for baby leave along the lines suggested in the report. It is better to take a step forward now than wait for perfection that may never arise.

I want to share the message one of my new fellow parly mums has sent me. She said:

“I am sick of being asked to vote on this and that by constituents and having to reply about pairing. People either don’t know what it is or they do because of how you were done over by the Tories—not a great advert!”

I have to say she puts it very compellingly. A cynic might conclude that, because all five pregnant or new mum MPs sit on the Opposition Benches, the Government are trying to kick this issue into the long grass. After what happened to me in July, I think I might be forgiven for being cynical about the Government’s motivations. I am sure the House can imagine my fury when I found out that the right hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) had voted in those two knife-edge Brexit Divisions, despite being paired with me, as I nursed my two-week-old baby.

[Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady find it mysterious, as I did at the time, that the right hon. Gentleman actually remembered the pairing system on the other votes, which were not so close?

[Jo Swinson]

That really gave the lie to the line that this was some kind of honest mistake. It was, quite simply, a shameful act for the Government Chief Whip to ask a Member to break a pairing arrangement and for him to agree. It clearly was not an honest mistake, especially when it emerged that other MPs had also been asked to break their pair in those Divisions. I would say that, whether for reasons of maternity or illness or anything else, there is nothing honourable about deliberately breaking a pairing. It is cheating, plain and simple. What a sign of desperation!

However, on a more positive note, I want to put on the record my thanks to MPs from right across the House, and I include the Leader of the House in this, for the support they gave me when that happened. In particular, I say to those Conservative MPs who told their Chief Whip to take a running jump when he asked them to break their pair—unnamed, but they know who they are, whoever they are—that that is the behaviour of an honourable Member.

Despite the support of lots of people in the House, not quite everybody was supportive. On Twitter, I was told that

“duty comes before your health, happiness or family, if you’re not up to that, resign”,

and

“she should decide whether she wants to be a mother or an MP”.

A journalist wrote about

“whingeing women MPs who are not serious about parliamentary work”.

I have to say that one Member of this House questioned why on earth I could not spend five hours voting in Parliament in the evening with a two-week-old baby, because I had managed to spend 45 minutes in the afternoon at an anti-Trump demonstration a few days earlier. Well, I wonder why.

Maternity leave is a hard-won right, and no new mum should have to justify her activities when she leaves the house with her baby. Any parent of a newborn knows that just leaving the house is an achievement in itself. I do want to use my voice to help people who do not know what it is like and to understand the challenges so that they might be a little slower to cast judgment on new parents in future, and I want to talk frankly about breastfeeding.

When our first son was born, we tried everything to get him to latch on properly. We searched endlessly online for advice. We went to breastfeeding support groups, and we attempted every possible position to get a good latch. All the while, we were desperately trying to syringe enough expressed milk into his mouth, every couple of hours, so that he would not get ill. That was for only eight days, but it felt like an eternity. I am glad we persevered, because once you get the hang of it, breastfeeding is lovely, and frankly much less hassle than formula. Sleep deprivation can make people forget things, but if they are breastfeeding, that is one less thing to have to remember when they leave the house. Of course, not everyone can breastfeed, and the whole breast and bottle debate is just one more stick that is used to beat new mothers with. Parents need much more support and much less judgment.

This time round it was much easier to establish breastfeeding, but it still takes some time before mother and baby are confident and practised enough to get a good latch quickly at every feed. People are often less comfortable feeding in public in those early days—after a while, they can get up and answer the door while still feeding the baby and not break the latch, but at the beginning, they might find themselves staying perfectly still during a feed so that they do not disrupt the latch. A four-month-old can easily finish feeding in 10 minutes, but a four-week-old might take 45 minutes or more. Small babies can get confused switching between nipples and bottle teats, which is why the advice is not to use the bottle as well as the boob for the first four to six weeks. I doubt that such details have been discussed much in Parliament previously, but when we are considering how MPs can combine being a new parent with their responsibilities as an elected representative, it is important context.

[Luciana Berger]

I thank the hon. Lady for highlighting the challenges of feeding a baby, whether by bottle or breastmilk. I had to bring my baby in for a vote when she was around three months old. My baby was unable to latch on properly, even at that point, and I sat in the tea-room with a cover over me, trying to feed my baby and vote. I ended up feeding her in the Lobbies behind us, because I was determined and she wanted to eat. I do not think that is an appropriate setting for a baby of that age, and I welcome the hon. Lady’s comments. These are the realities for mothers across the House.

[Jo Swinson]

Absolutely, and that is part of the challenge. What should someone do if they are in the middle of a feed and the Division bell rings? Do they stand up and try not to disrupt their baby, or do they feed in the Lobby, as the hon. Lady did? When babies are a lot older it is easier to manage those things, but there is a reason why proxy voting would be so helpful for parents of very young babies.

Above all, newborn babies are unpredictable. Duncan put it well to me the other day when he described being on parental leave by saying, “It’s like you need a bottomless well of contingency.” I just thought, absolutely. Someone can try to plan their day according to when their baby might respond best, when to go out, and when the baby is likely to sleep and be happy and not to fuss—in Gabriel’s case, that is early afternoon. Someone could be ready to head out, but then all of a sudden there is an up-the-back poo explosion, which means not just a change of nappy, but a change of vest and babygro. By the time they have cleaned all that up, the baby is hungry again, and by the time they have fed and winded them and are ready to go, they are more than an hour late for whatever it was they were doing.

That is not a massive problem if it means that someone has missed baby rhyme time, or if they have had to text an apology to a friend, who is also a parent and will totally understand that they will be late or miss the coffee they were going to have. Indeed, if someone does not manage to make it to an anti-Trump protest after all, nothing bad will happen. However, if it means that someone has missed a key vote in Parliament, that is an entirely different calculation, which is why it is so important to have a proper system for proxy voting.

Expressed milk is a lifeline for breastfeeding mums who go back to work, but it is not necessarily easy. As Gabriel is still just 10 weeks old, my diary has to accommodate slots for expressing or feeding several times a day, and I sit doing paperwork as the pump whirrs away noisily in the background. I am lucky; I have advantages that many mums do not enjoy. I have both a private office to express milk in, and the ability largely to control my diary. One member of parliamentary staff has been in touch with me to tell me of her frustrated attempts to find somewhere private to express milk when on the parliamentary estate. Although this debate is about voting, we must do better for breastfeeding mums who work in Parliament, whatever their role, and I hope that the House of Commons Commission will respond positively to that challenge.

We legislate here for the employment rights of new parents, but far too often those are flouted. In our country, 54,000 women a year lose their jobs because of pregnancy and maternity discrimination, and that is a huge disincentive for men who want to be more involved as fathers when they see the consequences and what happens to mothers. We must do better at enforcing those rights, and we must set the tone for this issue. To put it simply, we must put our own house in order and make this simple change to enable new parents to fulfil their responsibilities to their child and their constituents. We should get on with it.