Draft Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017

Debate between Seema Malhotra and Melanie Onn

Wednesday 25th January 2017 General Committees

[Seema Malhotra]

It is a pleasure, Sir David, to participate today and to serve under your chairmanship.

I will say a few words following the excellent speech that my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling has just made. If he was looking for a part-time advisory role to the President of the United States of America, I would certainly be willing to support him in that endeavour.

First, I thank the Government again for introducing the regulations. However, building on the points that have already been made, I encourage the Government and the Minister, who laid out her case for the need for the regulations powerfully, to think about the wider issue of economic equality for women, particularly in the run-up to the March spring-statement-stroke-Budget. Keeping the issue going and mainstreaming its implications is an important part of how we can move forward in achieving equality for women across all areas of the economy, which is essentially the backdrop to this debate.

I was struck by some of the analysis of the gender pay gap, and I want to put a couple of suggestions to the Minister. My concerns are around the implementation of the regulations. On one level—the transactional level—that is about how they are implemented within a corporation and how the data are collected and reported on. That can stay within a very small sphere of people: maybe the head of human resources and the chief executive officer. Culture change and the players involved in it are an important part of what a company or organisation owns at the highest level.

I know from my past work on equality in companies, on public boards and in politics and public life that it is important to have wider stakeholder engagement to ensure that people understand the responsibility we can all have in making a shift. That helps to create a context and environment within which there can be actors who will act on the messages that come out from the reports and from transparency more widely. They will have a sense of their own responsibility in making that shift.

I am keen to understand how the regulations will be implemented and whether messages and communications will go to chairmen and women on boards, heads of HR, management networks or other networks. We must look at how to mainstream thinking about jobs and pay much more widely, so that we can pre-empt and reduce the problem and see the results coming through.

[Melanie Onn]

On implementation, I am interested to see that in the devolved Administrations in Wales and Scotland, the measures will be implemented under the regulations. I wonder how the Government will monitor that implementation at devolved level, to ensure that these measures are being implemented fairly across the whole United Kingdom.

[Seema Malhotra]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The public expectation will be that the regulations go beyond administrative boundaries and that the Government take a lead to ensure that they are effectively implemented. It would be helpful if the Minister responded to that point.

It might seem like it is just a small Committee putting the regulations forward today, but I worked in the Government Equalities Office on a different project at the time when the Equality Bill was going through Parliament, and I pay tribute to the civil servants for their work and engagement and to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham for leading that work. It was near the close of the Labour Government’s time in office—it was pretty much the last Act that went through Parliament.

To return to the point about the meaning of these measures and those for whom they could make a difference, I was struck by the analysis of the gender pay gap by age published by the House of Commons Library. The gap is much greater for older women, who are hit in other ways as well. They might lose their job and find it harder to get another. We know that they are often the poorest pensioners and the least likely to have pensions in their own right to sustain them in older life. That compounds the problem of the economic wellbeing of older women and poverty that can become entrenched. Awareness of that within organisations would be an important part of tackling economic inequality for older women, particularly when we look at differences by decade of birth.

There is another important issue, which is the relationship, or otherwise, between educational attainment and the pay gap. When we look at the analysis, it is striking that although there is sometimes a link between a better-educated workforce and a reduced pay gap, that is not always the case. There is still a strong gender dimension. We can try to distil the pay gap down to contributing factors such as people leaving school earlier or not having certain educational qualifications, but the data do not suggest that those are the key issues. Rather, the gender dimension remains the key point. That suggests there is a wider cultural inequality issue, which it is important to address. Whether women have GCSEs, A-levels or degree-level education, the analysis shows there is still a gender pay gap for them.

That leads me to my final point, about how we can work much earlier in schools to create role models and a sense of confidence and aspiration. The Fabian Women’s Network, of which I am the founder and president, undertakes deep thinking about that issue. We need to ask what tone we are setting as a nation for the girls, and we need to give them confidence that any future they may want is a future they should be able to achieve; that any profession they want to be in has a door open to them; and that any sky they want to reach is available to them.

The regulations are vital for women who are currently in the workplace, and they can also help us achieve a culture change if we implement them effectively, think about the factors that will support better understanding of the pay gap in organisations and make sure that the issue is cascaded down through management levels in organisations.

I hope the Government will not just encourage organisations to keep data at senior management level but encourage directorates or departments to understand what the gap is in their own departments. That will help to create wider appreciation of these issues lower down the management chain. As those managers then become the senior leaders of tomorrow, they will have begun to appreciate and been engaged with these issues as they become embedded within management life.

I hope that as the regulations are implemented, we will look at the immediate implications and at how we can shift our culture through the opportunity that the regulations will enable. Achieving that shift now will not just help the generations of women in the workforce today but set a completely different tone for our country and benefit the young women coming forward through the schools and in the workplace of tomorrow.

Domestic Abuse Victims in Family Law Courts

Debate between Seema Malhotra and Melanie Onn

Thursday 15th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friends on bringing this debate to the Floor of the House of Commons. I acknowledge Women’s Aid for the protection and support it provides to women and children, and for all the vital work it does to highlight the suffering caused by domestic violence. In particular, I pay tribute to Denise and all her staff at Grimsby Women’s Aid, and all the women I have met there. They are amazing and, despite some real tragedies and difficulties, they continue to face life with bravery and extraordinary good humour.

Several victims of domestic violence have come to my surgeries in Grimsby looking for help because they feel they have been let down. They feel that the whole system is stacked against them. They are the ones who have to move out of the area they lived in. They are the ones who have to provide the burden of proof; that all falls on them. They are the ones whose parenting is constantly questioned. They are the ones who live in fear of abuse and in fear of losing their children. They are the victims, but too often they feel that they are treated with suspicion rather than compassion, and that they are made to feel as though they are the guilty party.

The way in which family courts operate reveals a real lack of understanding of the situation in which victims of domestic violence find themselves. As we have heard in so many testimonies today, victims clearly should not have to share a waiting room with their abuser, and they should not have to face cross-questioning from them. As the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who has just left her place, mentioned earlier, it is too difficult for individuals to be faced with their abuser in a small space.

I want to thank Rochelle, one of my constituents, for allowing me to use her name—in fact, she was insistent that I use it—to highlight her very personal and individual difficulties, which represent the difficulties of so many women. She fled her abusive partner, yet she has been forced to face him in court several times during the last six years. He is using the court system to gain access to her, and as a means of getting around the restraining order. The courts have failed to provide security at their meetings. She has been made to sit at the same table as her former partner in a small room, and he has taken such opportunities to make horrendous sexually derogatory comments to her. This man had twice put her in hospital while she was pregnant. She should never have to be in the same room as him again, but she feels that the family court forced her back into the perpetrator’s presence and under his control. In addition, she has had no access to social housing, because the local authority deemed her to have made herself intentionally homeless, after having fled her home. That is incredibly common. As we have heard, she is not alone in being in such a situation.

[Seema Malhotra]

I thank my hon. Friend for her speech. She has highlighted a very important issue, which has certainly become increasingly apparent to me from my casework, about the training given to local authority teams—sometimes in social services and sometimes in housing—that deal with family issues involving domestic violence or domestic abuse. Does she agree with me about the importance of awareness, training and leadership in local authorities on such issues?

[Melanie Onn]

Absolutely. I agree with my hon. Friend that training plays a big part, and there is a lot more that could be done with cross-agency working and understanding.

When I visited a school in my constituency recently, I was really shocked to hear a support worker—she has worked in a school for nearly 30 years, and lives in the community in which she works—say she believed that about one in five children at that school were in families that had experienced domestic violence. The figure is shocking in itself. On the positive side, however, she said it was very important in a school environment that children should feel they have a safe space, where they feel they have good relationships with and can open up to the staff. My hon. Friend’s point about training applies to schools as well.

I believe that a lot of this is unreported violence. Will the Government consider how they can give people greater confidence in the system? People also need to recognise violence in the household as a problem. I think some people accept it as part of a volatile relationship and may not even recognise it as domestic violence. That is where the coercive element also comes in. That makes me believe all the more that good relationships education in schools can help children to realise that those are not normal relationships, and that that is not how loved ones behave towards one another.

Before the summer, I tabled some parliamentary questions relating to the effect of domestic violence on the children who are subject to it or who witness it, and I am very concerned that the Government do not seem to be sufficiently interested in that subject. I asked how many children the Government estimate live in homes where domestic violence occurs, and how they believe the educational attainment of children who experience domestic violence is affected. The answers I received from the Department for Education stated that, although it counts the number of referrals to children’s social care in which domestic violence is a factor, its figures do not include all children who experience domestic violence, and it does not publish attainment data for children who have been referred. Would not greater cross-departmental work ensure that domestic violence is better understood, highlighted and prevented? I worry that those answers show a lack of urgency in tackling this problem.

Finally, and quickly, I want to raise an issue that another constituent brought to me in relation to the Concentrix debacle that is currently being uncovered. A women with two children had her tax credit money stopped two weeks ago because she had been subject to a random check. She was told she was suspected of living with a partner. Concentrix would not disclose the name of the person it suspected to be living with her, and it would not make any home visits. She is a single parent, and she has been left to evidence the fact that she is single. She has now been forced to use food banks and to have meals at her parents’ house, and she has received assistance with her children’s school uniform costs. This is particularly difficult because my constituent is a victim of domestic violence. She has had to set up her life again from scratch to make sure that she and her children are safe. Again, it feels as though the state and all the agencies involved are working against her having a fresh start.

The lack of sensitivity, awareness and preparedness across state agencies—from the welfare system to family courts, as well as the police and the education system—lets down children and victims of domestic violence, and leaves them feeling as though the whole system is working against them.