Fathers in the Family

Debate between Paula Sherriff and Anne Main

Wednesday 1st March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I congratulate the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) on securing this interesting debate.

We know that families come in many shapes and sizes. Regardless of the gender of the parent, children need a safe, loving and stable environment in which to thrive and develop into healthy and happy adults. We also know that many fathers wish to spend significantly more time with their children than they are currently able to, in order to create that loving environment. However, many fathers find themselves unable to avoid working long hours or are subject to an inflexible working environment that prevents them from sharing parenting duties more equally.

Many of the underlying causes of those issues are inextricably linked to the same deep and corrosive structural barriers that hold women back in the workplace and contribute to a persistent gender pay gap of 18.9%, which, at the current rate of progress, could take 60 years to close. Occupational segregation, for example, sees women stuck in low-paid and undervalued sectors of the economy. Women make up more than 60% of those earning less than the living wage set by the Living Wage Foundation. Meanwhile, men continue to dominate the best-paid positions. Women make up 67% of the management workforce in entry-level roles, but only 43% of senior managers and 29% of directors. Those factors, taken together, often give families little choice as to whose wage they rely on.

Women continue to play a greater role in caring for children and sick or elderly relatives. According to Office for National Statistics analysis of time use data, women put in more than double their proportion of unpaid work in cooking, childcare and housework. As a result, more women—42%, compared with 11% of men— work part time, and those jobs are typically lower paid, with fewer opportunities for progression. The issue therefore becomes cyclical.

The impact of women being stuck in low-paid or non-paid caring roles has implications for fathers in the workplace too. Research undertaken by the TUC last year shows that as many as two in five new fathers are ineligible for shared parental leave, as their partners are not in paid work or they fail to meet the qualifying conditions. That prevents fathers from spending time with their newborn children. Will the Minister tell us what steps she is taking to ensure that all new fathers who want to take shared parental leave are able to?

Another solution to enable greater flexibility for parents is to provide high-quality, universal, affordable childcare, as Labour has promised to do. We believe that childcare can play a vital role in promoting gender equality, particularly by making it easier for parents to balance the competing demands of work and family life. The Government’s promise of 30 hours of free childcare a week for three and four-year-old children of working parents is looking more and more likely to collapse as each day passes. Research by the Family and Childcare Trust shows that providers and local authorities feel that the 30 hours requirement will mean either that they are forced to reduce the total number of places on offer or that they will simply no longer remain financially viable.

The Government have also admitted that the majority of children who are eligible for the current universal 15 hours of childcare per week will not be eligible for the expanded entitlement, leaving hundreds of thousands of children from working families—particularly those with parents on low or insecure incomes—shut out of the 30-hour-a-week offer. Will the Minister tell us what the Government are going to do to ensure that providers and local authorities can afford to provide 30 hours of free childcare? Does she have plans to expand the current entitlement?

Finally, the Women and Equalities Committee report on the gender pay gap recommends increasing paternity rights, particularly those around leave, to ensure that men can spend more time with a new child. Increased paternity rights for men, on top of existing maternity rights, would make both men and women’s lives better. We know that fathers want to play an active role in their children’s lives and families want to spend more time together with a new baby, which is why Labour would increase both paternity leave and paternity pay.

One of the most pervasive underlying causes of the imbalance between men’s and women’s roles in the family is workplace discrimination. Government research with the Equality and Human Rights Commission estimates that 54,000 women a year are being forced out of their jobs due to maternity discrimination. Does the Minister agree that extending paternity leave and consequently increasing workplace flexibility would be one way of addressing that appalling discrimination? Does she also agree that women suffering maternity discrimination must be able to uphold their rights, yet—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Will the hon. Lady finish her sentence and then conclude?

[Paula Sherriff]

Okay, sure. If we are to support men in taking a greater role in the family unit and, as a consequence, tackle the barriers facing women, we need to support men and women in having a real and meaningful choice when it comes to accessing well-paid and family-friendly employment.

Care Homes: England

Debate between Paula Sherriff and Anne Main

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

I recently took part in a conference organised by the GMB trade union along with carers and people who run care homes. Those who run care homes expressed specific concerns about the fact that they were aware of people—and particularly older people—sometimes being kept in hospital when there was no real medical need for them to be. If we compare the costs, it costs a couple of hundred pounds a day for them to be staying in hospital—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Lady’s intervention is becoming a speech.

[Paula Sherriff]

Okay. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should speed up the transitional process and put pathways in place, so that the move between hospital and care homes can happen much more efficiently?

Finance Bill

Debate between Paula Sherriff and Anne Main

Monday 26th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Paula Sherriff]

I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that we should do absolutely nothing about this huge inequality that affects more than half the population. We have an opportunity to take a significant step forward for women and families this evening. We turned our clocks back on Sunday. Let us not turn them back even further tonight, period.

[Mrs Main]

I am pleased to have an opportunity to discuss this matter, because we need to examine why we cannot do something about it—if we really cannot. I know that I would not be in your good books, Mr Deputy Speaker, if I brought in some props to illustrate my argument, so I will have to ask you to use your imagination, which I am sure is prodigious. Imagine that I have laid out on the Bench beside me a selection of products, including pantyliners, maternity pads, mild bladder weakness pads and incontinence pads. They would all look fairly similar and would be made from similar materials, but some would have a designed difference. In other words, they would be taxed.

I call that tax a femi-tax. I know that there has been a lot of alliteration, with references to a “tampon tax”, but it is somewhat perverse that in a selection of products that look pretty similar, and that are perhaps interchangeable, some should incur tax simply because they are associated with a woman’s bodily function. To me that seems unreasonable and totally illogical.

When I looked into the matter, I found that incontinence aids do not attract tax because they come under a different tax regime. It is assumed that they are intended for use by people who have illnesses, who are elderly or who are disabled. However, those of us who watch too much television—I am probably in that category—will have seen plenty of adverts for products for those “Oops” moments, as they have been described, and they do not show geriatric, disabled or elderly people; they show sassy young ladies and women of a certain age who are still attractive to members of the opposite sex. Therefore, let us assume that this is some sort of contrivance. Those products, should a woman choose to use them to ensure that she does not have an embarrassing “Oops” moment, do not attract VAT. I cannot see why the products a woman might choose to use, even if they might also be used by the elderly, the infirm and the disabled, are not regarded for tax purposes as the same as any other product she might choose to use. That is the illogicality we must tackle today.

I understand the alliteration of the “tampon tax”, but I think that phrase is misleading. If those products were laid out, most people would struggle to identify which ones incur VAT. This contrivance, because this only affects a woman’s bodily function, whether she has had a baby or her normal monthly period, means that it is that function that is taxed. I think that it is unreasonable that we cannot at least appear to deal with the matter.

I want this to be discussed tonight because I want to understand why we cannot deal with the matter. I would like to say that we could go to Europe and make all sorts of bluster and noise, but I would like the Minister to tell us tonight whether he agrees about that illogicality and whether he agrees that this is indeed a femi-tax—a tax on women’s bodily functions, but not on other bodily functions. If he has sympathy with that view, I would like him to explain to the public why we cannot look at these products and say, “They all look pretty similar and they all have similar functions in absorbing fluids, so why has someone somewhere decided that we cannot choose to make them all exempt?” It seems ridiculous that a woman could buy an “Oops” moment product—I do not want to advertise any particular brand—and use it for sanitary protection and that that would be cheaper. It might not be quite as effective, but it would be cheaper. I think that it is absolutely ridiculous that a similar-looking product intended for personal hygiene, such as a pantyliner, would be taxed differently. I do not understand it.

I would like the Minister to explain why we as a country would want to persist with that illogicality in taxation. If he has a reason—I suspect that my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) has hinted at this, but I want to hear it from the Minister—that is associated with us being bossed around and told what to do by a conglomeration of countries that I have never voted for, then we need to start raising these issues. If Europe insists on taxing women through a femi-tax, I would like them to explain why.