Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 1st March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con) [V]]

Let me briefly try to set the context in which these amendments are being considered. This is an issue that goes to trans and women’s rights. It is a year since I was elected as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on global LGBT+ rights, which is the only LGBT rights APPG. While the title of the group is not meant to exclude the domestic LGBT rights agenda, it is a statement about where the focus should be, given our astonishing legal and societal progress for LGB people in the UK over the last two or so decades—progress of which I am a personal and fortunate beneficiary.

When I put it in the language of my first profession, the war on these issues had been won, and we were really in the business of rounding up the prisoners—tidying up. Much of that tidying related to the complexities generated by enabling trans people also to be able to enjoy the freedom to live their lives as they wished. The trans agenda understandably became the dominating issue for the British LGBT rights lobby in our civil society. By 2018, with the publication of the LGBT action plan and the consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the direction of travel looked set fair for trans people to be able to enjoy those rights and live their lives as they wished.

However, to say that there has been a change of climate for trans people since my right hon. Friend the Paymaster General, who is guiding this Bill through the House, lost her responsibilities for equalities is something of an understatement. There is going to be no change to the Gender Recognition Act; self-identification, which is the global gold standard for rights in this area, is going to have to wait; and gender identity services, now acknowledged to be grossly underfunded, with enormous demand on them, are now under well-funded legal assault as well.

We currently face a situation where trans people feel under a full-on attack, yet if one listened to their lordships who were making the case for this amendment, one would have thought it was the other way round. The proponent of these amendments said in the other place:

“We are currently faced with a full-on attack on women’s sex- based rights—a misogynistic and bullying campaign which seeks to diminish women’s rights in the name of the rights of trans people.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 25 February 2021; Vol. 810, c. 962.]

I want to gently suggest that my noble Friend Lord Lucas turn the board around and see what the perspective is from the other side. The context is wild and exaggerated threats about the position of women’s rights from trans people. For example, his colleague in the other place, the noble Baroness Fox of Buckley, said:

“What is a threat to women is a particular brand of trans identity ideology. That does threaten women, but that is not the same as trans people.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 25 February 2021; Vol. 810, c. 945.]

I look forward to hearing the explanation of that, because what trans people are seeing is The Times newspaper —the newspaper of record in the United Kingdom—carrying 250 stories of this kind, generally without satisfactory supporting evidence.

We have this amendment in a Bill that deals with the maternity leave arrangements of one woman who happens to be the Attorney General. A debate in this House and the other place suddenly came out of nowhere, generating the most extraordinary amount of interest and passion for an entirely technical correction of an anomaly in ministerial maternity leave arrangements. Sitting behind the passion engaged on this are agendas, which are in public for those who are taking an interest—principally the trans community—of the Heritage Foundation and the LGB Alliance, which, if one examines its followers on Twitter, does not seem to have a huge wider interest in the subject of LGBT rights. They are hearing an agenda being used, which we heard only yesterday from Donald Trump in his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, exploiting the issue of a potential threat to women’s sports, which need to be rescued from this threat. We know that, under the Equality Act 2010 in the United Kingdom, it is for sports administrators to make reasonable decisions to protect the integrity of their sports. These threats, in reality, do not exist.

What I want to say to trans people and their supporters is that today is not the ground on which we should stand. An innocuous sounding amendment in a tiny, technical Bill aimed at resolving the Attorney General’s maternity leave is not the place to have the fight around the principle. But there is a principle engaged here about gender-neutral language, and we have work to do to make it clear that trans rights do not come at the expense of women’s rights. We can perfectly well have both. Women’s rights must be protected, and reasonable provision must be made to protect women from threats that are real and evident. In reality, trans women pose no threat to women, but we do have those issues to address.

I therefore support the Government in accommodating this amendment, which has, to a degree, been forced upon them. But this necessary compromise must not undermine the position of the Government and what I believe to be the decent, caring majority in both Houses of Parliament who want to see trans rights properly established.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP) [V]]

I am mindful that the Bill is in front of us today because the Attorney General is about to have a baby, and I wish her and her family all the best. Maternity leave is a right—it should not be a discretionary benefit—and that should no different for Ministers or MPs. More broadly, though, we are not in the best place on maternity either in this House or, more importantly, outside it. Many of us have spoken at length about the issues that the Bill does not tackle but ought to. None of that has anything particularly to do with the Attorney General’s leave, so I would not suggest putting any barrier in the way of that, but it is my firm intention to secure from the Minister some clear commitments as to what she will do next.

It is absolutely right, and not before time, that Ministers are able to go on maternity leave. Despite the protestations from those on the Government Benches when we discussed this before, I still think it is unacceptable that the Prime Minister of the day is the ultimate arbiter of whether this can actually happen. I have said it before and I say it again: it should never be necessary for women to seek the potentially grudging consent of a boss to take maternity leave. If it is beyond our wit in 2021 to find a more satisfactory way of dealing with things like that, it is a poor show.

That is because what we do here and what we do with this makes a difference to how other people deal with their maternity leave, be they MPs, where the status quo is not much use, either to MPs or to their constituents; our staff, and perhaps the Minister can say something about what changes could be made to Short money to support proper maternity provisions for staff members; or all the people outside the political world, who are just trying to get by and will rightly wonder why we can manage to press ahead with such haste in this situation—again, I am pleased to get this sorted for the Attorney General; it is right that we do that—but have not been able to make such progress, and at such speed that would make all the difference, for ordinary families.

The statistics from Pregnant Then Screwed say it all. Its survey of 20,000 women in July last year found, among other things, that 61% of women believe that their maternity leave was a factor in a redundancy decision, and self-employed women who have taken maternity leave in the last three years saw their Government support cut by a third, or even by two thirds, if they have taken two maternity leaves, compared with dads, who are not impacted at all financially by maternity leave.

Let me touch on the amendments to language that have emerged from the Lords. The Minister gave a pretty concerted defence of gender-neutral language previously, so I am interested to see the change of tack here, given that it is perfectly normal to draft in gender-neutral terms. I am not convinced that this change is either progress or progressive. That is relevant, first, because the Bill is far too narrow in scope and deals with only this one issue and, secondly, because our representation here is just not reflective of who we are more broadly; we are far less diverse as a political group than the people we represent, and the lack of proper provisions for maternity leave illustrate that well. The Bill, as far as it goes, only makes provision for maternity leave for birth mothers. It does not make provision for all the different types of leave we have talked about—parental leave, paternity leave, adoption leave, shared leave and so on. So I ask the Minister to reflect further on the fact that everyone should have access to decent parental leave, not just some new parents.

On that note, I would be grateful if the Minister could say exactly when she intends to come back to the House with concrete proposals to deal with all these other pressing issues, so that we can see improvements to maternity, paternity and parental leave provisions far more broadly. That is particularly important as we move beyond the lockdown phase of the pandemic and caring and work responsibilities need to work together, rather than against one another. For example, the right to request flexible working from the start of employment would help so many people, with women bearing the disproportionate burden of caring responsibilities being particularly in need of that kind of progress. That is often an issue post maternity leave.

While we are dealing with this one narrow Bill, we need to appreciate that the status quo is far from good enough. The UK has the second lowest payment rates for maternity leave of OECD countries, with less than a third of gross average earnings replaced by maternity payments. Despite lengthy maternity leave entitlements, full-rate equivalent paid maternity leave lasts for only 12 weeks and a maternity allowance of just £151.20, which is worth about half the national minimum wage for a full-time worker, is obviously completely unacceptable. The fact that that is increasing by a grand total of 77p a week in April is shockingly inadequate. The Minister has to recognise that. She also has to recognise that we really need legislation to expand eligibility for statutory maternity leave and pay for workers who still do not qualify, including people on insecure contracts such as agency workers or zero-hours contract workers.

Much needs to be done. We need action on those insecure workers, maternity leave, parental leave and paternity pay, and we need policies that take account of the different shapes of families and different kinds of support that will be necessary. All these matters have to be addressed with some urgency. I realise that they are not the specific issues in front of us today, but it all fits together into a lack of care and direction from the UK Government.

Although the SNP supports the Bill, there is no getting away from the fact that the UK ranks very poorly in terms of maternity provision, and the very particular narrow nature of the Bill does nothing to remedy that. In fact, it just demonstrates how archaic Westminster can be. It is worth reflecting that an independent Scotland could do so much better on maternity and parental leave—not just for Ministers, but for everyone.