Women and the Economy

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and record numbers of small and medium-sized enterprises are gaining public contracts. We cannot have our young women growing up in a country where they get paid less because of their gender, rather than how good they are at their job. One of the most important ways to ensure long-term economic security is to break down the barriers that still hold too many women back, which is why we have given working parents greater choice by enabling more than 20 million employees to request flexible working; why we have introduced shared parental leave; and why we will extend shared parental leave and pay to working grandparents. This will support parents with the cost of childcare and help the 2 million grandparents—unsung heroes such as my mum—who give up work, reduce their hours or take time off to help with childcare.

At the same time, nearly one quarter of women between the ages of 50 and 64 provide unpaid care for a relative or friend. We have invested £1.6 million to help carers who wish to stay in work to balance their different roles. We are doing this using flexible working and innovative technology, and there are now nine pilots around the country exploring ways to help carers manage their paid work while looking after their loved ones.

One of the most important issues affecting parents—both men and women—is childcare, which is why we are investing more than £1 billion more each year in free childcare places, including by doubling the free childcare entitlement from 15 hours to 30 hours a week for working families with three and four-year-olds in 2017. In addition, from early 2017, we will offer tax-free childcare to provide up to £2,000 of childcare support per child per year for working families with children up to 12 years old. This will take the total Government spend on childcare from £5 billion in 2015 to more than £6 billion by 2020.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Is the Minister aware that the Government’s funding offer for the additional 15 hours is inadequate and at best confusing, and that there is a risk that most childcare places will be underfunded and that many might be lost as a result, thus reducing the availability of suitable childcare?

[Caroline Dinenage]

Of course, we are raising the funding, but I will not take any lessons from Labour. I might be slightly older than many here, but I was a mum putting two children through childcare under the Labour Government, and I watched childcare prices become the most expensive in Europe. I was one of those women working to pay my childcare bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) for opening today’s debate. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond),as I hope to work with her on the new all-party parliamentary group on women and work.

Women form over half the UK population, yet their contribution to the economy is sadly not equal, and I fear that, thanks to the decisions of this Government, they will form an even smaller contribution to the economy. The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), under whom I have the honour to serve on the Women and Equalities Select Committee, said that we cannot address many of the issues raised in this debate without a stronger economy. My question is, how will the Government ensure that women benefit equally from the economic growth that they predict? Far too many women feel that they are not benefiting from whatever growth may be taking place now.

According to the Women’s Budget Group, pursuing deficit reduction on the back of women—particularly lone mothers and single female pensioners, who are the most affected—is just plain wrong. If the Government had the slightest interest in fairness, they would conduct a detailed impact assessment and a review, and, if they were prepared to do so, they would revise some of their decisions as a consequence.

Why does there need to be a women’s perspective on the economy? Let us look at pay. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston once told us about a meeting that she had had with a group of women in Camden who had recently been granted the living wage—the true living wage. One of the women had said that those extra few pounds an hour enabled her to save a bit of money each month, and that she hoped eventually to save enough to go on holiday with her family. Those extra few pounds meant a great deal to her, because she had never had a holiday before.

Moreover, the little impact of the payment of a living wage by that woman’s employer was not only good for her and for her colleagues, but good for the company for which they worked, because the resulting increase in staff satisfaction led to higher retention rates. The company had generally found that 40 vacancies needed to be filled, but this year they needed to fill only two. Moreover, the change benefited not just that woman, her colleagues and their families, but the local economy where she lived, and the economy of whatever area she visited when she went on holiday, which may have been a part of the United Kingdom that depends on the pounds that are spent by holidaymakers.

The fact that a large section of our workforce are on low incomes that the Chancellor’s changes will not address is not only bad for women, but bad for children, bad for business and bad for the economy, both local and national. As the economy is the underpinning element of the debate, I shall now quote from an important document. It states:

“Ensuring that women achieve their full potential will have a significant impact on our economy:

Equalising women’s productivity and employment to the same levels as men’s could add almost £600 billion to our economy. This could clear a third of our national debt.”

Who said that? In fact, it was in the foreword to the Government’s consultation paper on the gender pay gap, which was written by the Minister for Women and Equalities, the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan).

I am pleased to note that the Government have taken some lessons from the last Labour Government, including the lesson that, for most women—especially women on low pay—childcare is a barrier to labour market participation. However, if Members want to hark back to the awful days of previous Governments—as some did earlier—I am happy to oblige. My children were under-fives under the last Conservative Government, in the mid-1990s, and we had to pay our childminder out of our after-tax income. At that time, many women, especially lone parents, were effectively excluded from the job market. The Labour Government introduced tax credit, childcare vouchers and the Sure Start initiative.

We welcome the spirit of the current Government’s Childcare Bill, which offers five hours a week more childcare than the Labour manifesto, but, unlike the Labour offer, the Conservative offer was initially underfunded, and there are still a great many questions to which the Government must respond if they are to persuade us that that childcare will be flexible and affordable.

[Ian Blackford]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Seema Malhotra]

rose—

[Ruth Cadbury]

rose—

[Harriett Baldwin]

I will make some progress. We want to make sure that the pay gap narrows further and faster. From next year, we will require large companies to publish differences in pay.