Baby Leave for Members of Parliament

Sarah Wollaston Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Lady used to be a member of my Committee, and I have worked with her and know her well. She makes a point to which I will return, because although the motion is really important, we need to think about other aspects of this place if we are to make it work for everybody, regardless of their caring responsibilities. I will now try to make a great deal of progress, Madam Deputy Speaker, so that you do not have to remind me that we are short of time.

1 wholeheartedly support the motion in its own right, because a new addition to the family—a new baby or a newly adopted child—is a wonderful thing, but a huge change as well. When the rules and conventions of this place were established, women had no place here and men had little or no role in their children’s lives. The rules and conventions were not established on the basis of any research or facts, but reflected the way in which men lived their lives many years ago. Men’s lives have changed, and women’s lives have changed. Women can now become MPs and our lives have changed, but the demands of having a child have not changed. Allowing MPs to decide to take some time away from this place, without disenfranchising their electorate in the process, is an important step in its own right, and one that I fully support.

The proposal is, however, just one small step. I speak as the mum of three kids. When I entered the House, my youngest was three, and for me the transition was very easy. I had worked full time before, and I had the best childcare in the world—grandparents, who were there to look after my children—but not every Member of Parliament has that built in and not every Member of Parliament is as lucky as I was. That is why I believe this is just one small step.

This is one small step in a change to Parliament’s workplace culture that is long overdue. We recognise the importance of workplace culture for the people we represent, whether it is the culture at the BBC that has allowed women to be underpaid, or the culture in Hollywood and the entertainment industry that has allowed the likes of Harvey Weinstein to thrive and to abuse the people around them. When we scrutinise the effectiveness of laws, we often conclude that culture needs to change so that those laws work better. We have heard about the example of shared parental leave, which was introduced by the coalition Government, and about the right to request flexible working. They are all things that people want, but when we do the research, we find that the uptake is low, because the culture in the workplace has not changed to reflect changes in the law.

We have a duty not only to pass laws, but to influence culture. That is why it is so important that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is bringing forward a new disciplinary process on sexual harassment, and it is why we also need to show that culture change in relation to families is also important. This should apply not only to MPs with new children, but to MPs with a wide range of caring responsibilities, such as for older children, for older family members—I have such responsibilities—or, indeed, for disabled family members.

As we consider the motion—I hope we will agree it—I hope not only that we will take this small step, but that other steps will follow. I want to give the particular example of the importance of predictability in working life. Before I entered this place, I was a director of an advertising agency. It was a very difficult and challenging job, but I could do it, because I could determine how to make my working life work for me. It is very difficult to have such a level of predictability here, particularly in relation to votes. Following the motion, I advocate our looking at a voting hour to create more predictability in how this place works so that people with caring responsibilities can better work them around their overwhelmingly important responsibilities here.

To those who say that introducing baby leave is the thin end of the wedge, I have to say that they are right if that will mean that we can show compassion to a colleague who is fighting cancer, or to a colleague who has to attend the funeral of a close relative, rather than disenfranchising their constituents while they are being human beings. We need to make this change so that we can allow people to get the balance in their lives that, sadly, is so lacking at some points in the parliamentary calendar at the moment.

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech and I absolutely support the motion. I agree with her in very much hoping that this is the thin end of the wedge, because on the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, we must do more to fix the pipeline problem here so that we encourage more women at a younger age to think about putting themselves forward to become Members of Parliament.

[Mrs Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention because, 100 years since the first woman sat in this place, it still feels for many of us as though we are operating in an 18th-century model of work, and that really needs to change.