Houses of Parliament (Family-friendliness)

Tom Brake Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

rose—

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

rose—

[Jess Phillips]

In the spirit of gender solidarity, I will give way to the right hon. Lady.

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[Jess Phillips]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her intervention. I could not agree more. The two issues are potentially distinct but have an enormous crossover, and much of what I will go on to say today is about how there are so many barriers to so many different people coming into this place that Parliament is not a particularly healthy working environment for anybody: people with families and people without families; older Members and younger Members. An awful lot goes on in that place that acts as a huge barrier to people working here.

[Tom Brake]

First, the hon. Lady is right to say that things have moved on slightly. When my daughter was born 18 years ago, during Divisions I had to leave her in the Lib Dem Whips Office with members of staff in their early 20s who did not have the foggiest idea of what they were supposed to do with a six-month-old. Things have improved slightly since then.

I apologise for not being able to stay for the duration of this debate, but I would like to take this opportunity to say how appalled I was by the abuse that the hon. Lady received recently. However, the point of my intervention is to say that I sit on the House of Commons Commission and clearly there is work under way, with which she will be familiar, which Sarah Childs is doing in relation to a gender-sensitive Parliament. I will make sure that, on Monday, when the Commission meets, this debate is taken into account, to see if there are issues that the hon. Lady and other hon. Members have raised that the Commission should examine.

[Jess Phillips]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his support in regard to my own experiences during the last few weeks of what it is like to be a woman in this place. I also thank him and the other members of the Commission for its continued work, and for offering to take back to it anything that is discussed here today. I very much hope that this debate and any debates on this subject become part of the bigger picture of the Commission’s work.

I will now say why this issue is so important, before going on to talk about some of the specific problems and some of the possible ways to address them. I am not trying to present any one possible solution as a silver bullet that will make us a family-friendly place. I am contributing to a debate that has been going on for decades and that I am sure will continue in the future.

Next spring is particularly important. As has been highlighted, Professor Sarah Childs will be publishing her final report on delivering a gender-sensitive Parliament, and there will be a parliamentary debate on the implementation of the recommendations of the Speaker’s Conference on Parliamentary Representation, which reported in 2010. That seems to me to be an excellent opportunity to debate this issue, and to build cross-party consensus to achieve real change. I stress again that we will get such changes only when we work hard together and not combatively, so that everyone in this place feels that they have been involved in this process.

First, why is having a family-friendly Parliament so important? I am not sure if I have made it particularly clear yet—I can be a bit shy about it—but I am a feminist and this is a feminist issue. However, that should not make anyone think that it is an issue that affects only women. It directly affects all people in Parliament who have families, and it indirectly affects every single person up and down the country. Parliament not being family-friendly affects MPs and parliamentary staff immediately and directly, but it also has a wider effect and impact in terms of representation.

On Saturday night, I was having a chat with my husband, who is and has always been the primary carer of our children, and a friend of ours, who is a single mum. We mulled over some of the ideas about how to make this place a more family-friendly parliament. Very quickly, they turned to the idea that, “Well, you knew what the job was going to be like. You don’t expect family-friendly oil rigs. It is just the nature of the job.” That is a fair point and one that I am sure will be expressed to me in the below-the-line comment sections of any newspaper that chooses to report this debate.

However, Parliament is fundamentally different. Yes, there are many jobs that are still not that family-friendly. It is the nature of jobs with a predominantly male workforce—something, of course, that we should challenge. However, it is not the job of oil rigs to reflect society; it is not the job of oil rigs to push for laws and regulations to improve families’ lives; and the world does not look at the people who work on oil rigs for an example of what our culture should be. But it is the job of Parliament to do those things.

My friend concluded our discussion on Saturday by saying that, as a single mother and sole provider for a young child, for her to be a Member of Parliament is virtually impossible. That statement alone should highlight the fact that we still have such a long way to go before this place truly represents the world outside.

The immediate impact is easy to see. Think of the large number of MPs who are mothers who stood down at the last election. Often, debate on this issue has mainly focused on female MPs, which is quite understandable, as the current situation is a huge contributor to the under-representation of women in Parliament. However, all too often we do not recognise that it does not affect just women MPs. It affects all MPs with care-giving responsibilities, and not just MPs who are parents. It affects those of us who have sick relatives, including husbands who have been unwell or ageing parents who we have to look after. All those factors should be considered in the round.

Male and female parliamentarians with young children or dependent family members undoubtedly need extra help, but they are only part of the story. The issue does not affect only MPs. Every MP has staff, as does Parliament itself. There are thousands of people who protect the building, work in the kitchens, sort the mail and do the research in the Library—there are even people who write down every word we say. Those people keep this place going. If it were all left to MPs to do, I am fairly certain that the place would grind to a halt in just a few days, if not hours.

Problems with the availability and affordability of childcare, parental leave, unpredictability, and unsocial hours affect everyone in this place who has family responsibilities. When a Parliament is structured in such a way as to make balancing work and family difficult, it excludes people with families, and the wider effects of not being family-friendly are hugely troubling. The best people are put off applying, and we want the best people shaping the laws and opposing and supporting the process. Ultimately, that is what is best for the country, but someone with family responsibilities would definitely think twice about working here.

I come from working in a women’s refuge where all the staff were women and most of the service users were women and children, and I often joke that when I first walked into Portcullis House it seemed to me as though it were staffed entirely by young men called Will, Tom or Ben. I am sure that the huge workforce of young men is absolutely brilliant, but we must be more reflective of society. In my old job, we used to joke that we could employ a full-time obstetrician such was the pregnancy rate among our staff, but here weeks will go by without anyone seeing a pregnant woman walking around the estate. This is about our wanting the best people, and if we want fair competition and to attract the best, we should remove the barriers that prevent those exact people from applying to be Members and to work in this place.

In many ways, normal workplaces are much more family-friendly than Parliament. We have an awful lot of catching up to do. If at some point in the future we go beyond our current work practices, that will be good. We should be leading the way and setting an example. Not being family-friendly sends the wrong message to the country. We are a highly visible workplace—I feel like waving at the cameras now. The only jobs in which there are more cameras and microphones are those on chat shows. So what we do here matters. We should be a beacon of a proper 21st-century family-friendly workplace.

While we are thinking about scrutiny—the eyes and ears of the world on us—no one could fail to notice when glancing up at the benches in the Press Gallery that women are grossly under-represented in the press lobby, and I will wager—I do not have any empirical research—that mothers are even more so. I remember introducing the previous leader of the Labour party, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), to the press pack on the day when he talked about how he was going to change the Labour party’s rules and make it so that more people could be involved, so that we could reach out and, essentially, reflect society a bit better. After he spoke, the press lobby grilled him and grilled him: “Do you really think that your party, or any party, or Westminster, is particularly reflective?” After he had walked out of the room, I sat in front of the press lobby—I was not a Member of Parliament then, just a woman called in to introduce the leader of her party—and I chastised them. There was not a single woman among them—these opinion formers, the people who tell others what happens in this place—and they dared to have a go at him about not being representative. The way in which this place is run undoubtedly changes what gets reported here—how the world sees us—and we cannot go on like this.

While we continue with the status quo and push back at any challenge, we are guilty of huge hypocrisy. I have spent all morning with the members of the Women and Equalities Committee discussing, for example, the barriers employers put before women who are pregnant, and thinking about the best strategies for reducing the gender pay gap caused by women having children. But how can we lecture others when our House is not in order? If we look around at this place, with its fancy history and ancient carvings—and the rather glam curtains in this room—we can see that are in a huge glass house. Yet we are chucking stones. We should sort ourselves out so that I and the other members of the Women and Equalities Committee have a leg to stand and do not look like fools when we make recommendations. What business do we have asking big business and big employers to do something we are simply not willing to do ourselves?

Almost everyone in this place, I think, gets this. There are still a few dinosaurs in Parliament, gradually hardening into fossils, but most people in here want this. So, what is standing in the way? What are some of the aspects of Parliament’s dominant culture that hold us back, and what can we do about them?

The week before last, my children ran around these halls and in the canteen. There was a notable singing—or rather screaming—competition between my youngest son and the little boy of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell). It was half-term and, for some reason, the recess in the House does not marry with that occasion. My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby has raised the good—and seemingly obvious—idea of making recesses coincide with school half-terms. That idea has been proposed by men and women from all parties, and it is an idea whose time has come.

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[Jess Phillips]

I spend an awful lot of time in this place, particularly with the Women and Equalities Committee, learning that there are many areas on which we could learn from Scotland and how it runs things. There are many, many things about how the Scottish Parliament is run, such as how the Members vote—the Divisions are held in a completely different way—that seem to be much more family-friendly. I encourage any commission that is taking place and the Deputy Leader of the House to consider how we might be able to mirror some of the existing models in Scotland. Scotland, much like Sweden, is some sort of panacea of all the good things that happen in people’s lives.

[Tom Brake]

I hope that I am not stealing the hon. Lady’s thunder, as she might be about to come on to this, but has she considered the idea of job sharing for MPs as a way of ensuring better representation of women, for instance, and people with disabilities?

[Jess Phillips]

It is something that I have considered, and I was going to ask the Deputy Leader of the House what she thought of the idea. I am not entirely sure how it would work. I feel that if I were to job share, I would still end up doing exactly the same as I do now, which incidentally was what happened to me when I worked part time—I was paid for three days a week and worked for five. I therefore have some concerns about the idea. Constituents will want their MP regardless of whether it is their day. I know that Professor Childs has been looking into that, and it should be part of the debate.

When looking at a gender-sensitive Parliament, as opposed to a family-friendly Parliament, there is certainly an argument for considering the idea of job shares for those with Government positions. That would allow people with children—this largely affects women, I suppose—to take up positions in government from which they might otherwise be barred. While there might be an argument for that, I cannot see how job sharing for MPs would work, although I am willing to be proven wrong.

Work on timetabling would be a far less complicated way of making things a little easier. Why do we not find out about future business further in advance? Things have definitely improved in terms of hours, as I am sure we will hear from people who have been Members for a while. If we knew further in advance that we would have to be in Westminster or to stay late, it would make it easier to combine work and family responsibilities. It would make it easier to organise childcare in advance and would stop me constantly making promises to my sons that I often cannot keep when it comes to the day.

What does the Deputy Leader of the House think of giving us more warning in the business statement of future business, albeit recognising that issues can emerge that we cannot predict? Does she think that MPs or Ministers should be allowed to job share? What models could be considered around proper systems of parental leave, maternity leave, paternity leave and carers leave for everyone who works in Parliament, including Members, and what are the Government’s proposals?

The all-party group on women in Parliament produced a report last year that asked the House to reconsider the age at which children are allowed in the Lobbies. I think that some Members might be breaking that rule already, but does the Deputy Leader of the House agree the age should be raised from one year to cover all pre-school children—those aged from nought to four? Childcare costs are recorded and published as individual MP’s expenses, while disability allowances are aggregated, but that effectively disincentivises MPs from claiming for childcare costs, as they will have higher expenses claims than other MPs. What does she think about changing the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority system to deal with that?