International Women’s Day

Lord Monks Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Lampard, on her speech, and look forward to many future contributions from her to the work of this Chamber.

We have just heard a moving account of how bad the conditions can be in some of the worst parts of the world for women. International Women’s Day is a day of celebration, when we celebrate advances that women have made in nearly every walk of life, while facing the fact that, in too many other ways, women are still treated as second-class citizens. Our campaigns must continue and be redoubled as we seek a better deal, inspired in this House by many courageous women, from those in our history—such as the suffragettes and Millicent Fawcett, who gave her name to the Fawcett Society—right up to the widely acclaimed Lady Boothroyd, whose recent passing is being mourned widely in the Chamber today.

I was born in 1945. I have been thinking about the remarks that I would make today. I thought first about the changes that have taken place and the strides forward that many women have made. There are many more women not chained to the kitchen sink but who instead have decent pay and a decent job. Employers and unions are much more switched-on to the equality agenda than they ever were in the days of “Made in Dagenham”, that excellent film set in the late 1960s that I hope most of your Lordships have seen.

Important too is that women have got some rights to control family sizes, which obviously were a major problem in earlier times in this country and still are in the developing world. However, progress has not been universal or comprehensive. Many women get left behind in low-paid, low-skilled work. They experience desperate family conditions and can be vulnerable to abuse. When I started my first job as a hospital porter, I got £10 per week. It was common for my fellow male workers at the time to give their wives £5 to cover family food and rent while they spent the rest, in too many cases in the pub or on the horses. Many women were trapped, supplementing the family earnings with what was widely called pin money. There is no respectable word for the miserable salaries that they got. Of course, there was also dependence on benefits from the welfare state.

For many people, it is not history that I am recalling now but today’s reality, because it still exists for too many. That is why I term the progress made as not comprehensive nor universal. However, we celebrate the progress that women have made, while we are certainly not complacent. If there was any complacency, the publication this week of research on the pay gap by the University of Kent should jolt that. It found that the pay gap between post-school-educated mothers and fathers has increased a bit since the 1970s. There is a motherhood penalty which has got bigger in those 14 years. While the pay gap generally has narrowed, this is an area where it certainly has not.

I welcome today the concerns of the Government in this area. The Minister will gladly tell us in a few minutes what is going on, but there is a lot beginning again—a new surge both in government circles and in the Labour Party, which has taken an initiative to look afresh at narrowing the gender pay gap, in an exercise to be led by my noble friend Lady O’Grady, whom many of your Lordships will have met in the last few weeks.

In my remaining remarks, I want to focus on one factor which has been widely discussed in the media over the past few days and has just been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins. It is childcare, which, let us face it, has to date been an area of national failure. It is crying out for new solutions. For a couple earning the average wage with two children in a full-time centre, the cost amounted to 29% of their combined income. That is after any benefits designed to reduce childcare fees have been taken into account. These are the highest figures in the OECD, apart from those for Cyprus and the Czech Republic. The already high costs have been rising quickly—in some cases by up to 60% since 2010, while average earnings have gone up nothing like as much. The rise is also much higher than the 24% rise in overall prices over the same period.

These high costs have meant that many women are unable to work because they cannot afford childcare. I note agreement between the CBI calling for action to repair the UK’s broken childcare system, and the TUC calling for high-quality childcare to be available to all from the point that maternity or parental leave ends. These are important alliances that are being formed to see progress in this area. Today, I ask people to reflect on what has been achieved and take pride in that but to renew their efforts and commitment to get more done.