Parliament as a Workplace

Debate between Tom Brake and Lord Cryer

Thursday 13th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[John Cryer]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think things have changed to a large extent. He mentioned my dad, who was an MP here in the 1970s, when there were all-night sittings. From 1974 to 1979, just on our side of the House, we lost 17 MPs in five years from heart attacks, strokes, haemorrhages and all the rest of it. Things have changed, but as I have said, they still have a long way to go.

[Tom Brake]

The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. Might the colleague he mentioned have benefited from job sharing for Members of Parliament, if that was something we had introduced?

[John Cryer]

That would be quite tricky to introduce—we could probably have a whole week of debates about such things, so I will not dwell on that.

Let me move on to accessibility. We all have disabled constituents—members of local associations, Liberal Democrat organisations, or constituency Labour parties—who come to see us, often in wheelchairs. They find it difficult to get in and out of the Palace of Westminster, despite the efforts of staff who work hard to make things as easy and accessible as possible for those with disabilities. A lot of community groups, particularly Afro-Caribbean community groups, tend to have an older age profile with members who often walk with difficulty or are in wheelchairs, and who find it difficult to get in and out of the supposed mother of Parliaments.

Some years ago I was not an MP but a trade union officer. I was the political officer for what was then the Transport and General Workers Union and is now Unite the union. It is the biggest union in the country, and has a large number of disabled members. I remember organising a lobby, and as usual with lobbies the meeting took place on the main Committee corridor. We were campaigning to keep the Remploy factories open, and the industrial officer who organised that lobby with me was Jennie Formby, now general secretary of the Labour party—I still work with her. There was only a small group of people in wheelchairs, but I vividly remember it taking an hour and a half to take those people from the Committee corridor to Carriage Gates where they could get in cabs. Even getting people picked up in cabs was tricky—it was not just about getting them from the corridor to Carriage Gates.

This is supposedly a people’s Parliament, but if a large section of the population cannot easily get in and out, can it really be that? We must change things. I am not sure exactly how we should change them in a building such as this, which, as the right hon. Member for Basingstoke said, was built in a different era and for very different needs, but they must change. We must be able to get people who have serious or lesser disabilities in and out of Parliament, so that they can get to Central Lobby, Westminster Hall, the Committee corridor and the upper Committee corridor. If we cannot do that when work takes place over the next few years, we will struggle to call it a people’s Parliament.