Baby Leave for Members of Parliament

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

May I echo Members’ good wishes to you on your birthday, Madam Deputy Speaker? Of course, you have a great deal of first-hand knowledge of this issue. Although I know that you are not able to participate in the debate, I am sure you are sitting there thinking fondly of your own experiences of being a pregnant Member of Parliament and your wonderful son, who I have had the pleasure of meeting on a number of occasions.

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman). She characterised this as a joint enterprise. I am not sure whether it is the sort of joint enterprise that we have talked about in the Chamber in a legal sense, because that is a crime in which more than one person is involved, but I understand the point she makes, because this has to be a joint enterprise if it is going to be successful. I sense from the good will we have heard today that that joint enterprise will be a very positive thing. I pay tribute to her as Mother of the House. She has done so much to set the tone on these issues over many years.

I also pay tribute to those who have rolled the pitch for this and made it easier for us to bring the debate forward. Professor Sarah Childs has been mentioned. Her work has been a foundation of much of the modernisation we are talking about. I would thank Mr Speaker as well, if he were here, because he has helped to set the tone.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, who is doing a sterling job of ensuring that this is a modern place for us all to work in. That is important for not only our staff, but Members. The Commons Reference Group on Representation and Inclusion, the Select Committee on Women and Equalities, which I have the pleasure of chairing, and others have been instrumental in slowly sowing the seeds of change.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Speaking as another member of the Speaker’s Commons Reference Group, I want to say how important this debate is. It is rooted in real and new evidence about Members’ experiences. By bringing the House into line with the policies of other workplaces, we will set the right tone and precedent for the future, particularly in this week, when we will be celebrating 100 years since women got the vote.

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Through the Commons Reference Group, we are not only uncovering some important ways in which this place is changing, but identifying ways in which it needs to change. It is a great pleasure to work alongside her on that group.

Being a Member of Parliament is a unique position, a unique honour and a unique responsibility that requires complete commitment, but that cannot mean that only those without caring responsibilities can apply. Indeed, the experience we have as carers can make us much better Members of Parliament, and that is why I wholeheartedly support the motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

Forewarned is forearmed is what I think in these situations: “You’re not dying,” is what I would say to my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), but we all thought that we were.

The idea that I would have had to get up at that moment, terrified, suffering real fear for the first time, and go to a constituency party members’ meeting is absolutely horrifying. The thought of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East doing that is absolutely terrifying to me—so massive, massive credit to all the women who have had babies while they were MPs.

Because I quite like a row, I want to head off at the pass some of the things I have heard in this place about why what is proposed in the motion cannot happen. I think we are pretty much all here to support it today, but I have heard quite a lot of mutterings—and they are mutterings, because they sound like this: “Mutter, mutter, mutter, amazing idea, mutter”—and I want to address them. Some of them have been from women in this House; I have heard squeamishness about asking for a right, because we as MPs are criticised for talking about ourselves and accused of being insular. We all know about the fake news on the internet when sites show a busy Chamber when we are supposedly talking about our salary and an empty Chamber when we are talking about something else—which are, I say just for the public outside, all a total lie. The idea that we should be asking for a right for ourselves is totally and utterly acceptable.

I am chair of the women’s parliamentary Labour party and I have had to talk to women and say that I will not feel afraid about asking for rights for the people in this building. When I worked at Women’s Aid, I fought for the rights of the women at Women’s Aid to better parental leave. No matter where I worked, I would be fighting for the women there to have better rights, and we should not be embarrassed about fighting for them here, either. So I want to put to bed the idea that this is somehow selfish. It is not; it is a right that we should be entitled to.

The other chuntering I have heard is about the proposals being the thin end of the wedge: “Where will this lead?” It will lead to being exactly like every other employer in the country. As the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) said, the big end of the wedge is that we are kind and nice employers; the big end of the wedge is decency and humanity. I am all right with the proposals being the thin end of the wedge, but the reality in this situation is that we are asking for something for a very specific reason.

Some people say to me, “You can’t have other people voting for you!” as if we have the divine right of kings when we come into this place and our vote is handed to us by God and is so special that nobody else could say how we might feel about, say, fisheries industries. That is, frankly, ridiculous. The idea that people feel they are so special that nobody could ever cast their vote for them, because they have never followed the Whip and are always deciding exactly what they will vote for all by their little selves, I find highly unlikely. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) might be the only person who could say that.

[Seema Malhotra]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that the thin end of the wedge is not a thin end of erosion of our democracy, but a thin end of how we balance work and family life when circumstances might be unpredictable? Two months ago my mother had a stroke. While she is a lot better now, I was in a position of having to put in place, with my sisters and brother, 24-hour care for someone we were used to having caring for us. While I know and understand the issues there will be with parents, for those in that position to have to struggle for the flexibility to manage that alongside being a Member of Parliament is something I would want to see us change, and have the courage to change.

[Jess Phillips]

I could not agree more. As someone who cared for my own mother when she was dying, I know how much pressure gets put on, and it is largely the women in society who are in the middle, and are caring for children and for dying or very sick relatives. As a nation, we have got to get better at dealing with that. Why not start here?

I went for lunch with a gentleman yesterday—my husband is listening; it was not him. That gentleman told me that he had intended to take the shared parental leave that other colleagues have spoken about. He said, “As soon as I had said, ‘Okay, I am going to take three months off,’ it started to creep in: what if my clients get given to somebody else, and what if people judge me for leaving?” I thought, “Oh, really! My heart bleeds for you, here’s my tiny violin, because that is what we have all had to put up with forever.” I do feel total sympathy with what he was saying, because I have lived that life.

The truth of the matter is that we have got to make sure that when we make these changes, it is not only the women in this building who take this leave, and that the men in this building take it, too. Frankly, given some of the backtalk I have heard when I have talked about this, I think some of the men in this building should be ashamed of bragging about being here at the moment when their babies were born, and of standing up and saying in Committees, “Point of order: my wife just had a baby.” I say in response, “Point of order: I would divorce you if you were my husband.” There is one place a man should be when their baby is born, and that is by the side of their partner.

This is not about the women in this place getting something better; it is about the parents getting something better. We have got to lead by example. I know, not just from my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East but from the opposite side of the Chamber, that there are husbands in this building who are starting to take that leave, and we have got to stand as an example of that. So, basically, I say to the men in this House, “When this comes in, I am coming for you, to make sure that you take it.”