Leaving the EU: Women’s Rights

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) for calling this debate on a subject which she knows we both share a great deal of interest in and are passionate about: ensuring not just that the rights of women are protected but that we flourish in our country in future.

May I give the hon. Lady a slightly different perspective on the 2015 election? She may not have been asked about Europe in Ealing Central and Acton, but I promise her that that was a subject of constant conversation in Lincolnshire. As we saw in the referendum, perhaps different parts of the country took different views. I am grateful to her for taking us through the history of legislation to enhance the rights of workers, people with protected characteristics and so on, both before we joined the European Union and during our membership. I am committed to continuing that journey, and I know that the Prime Minister and the Government are too.

If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will not be drawn into a re-enactment of the referendum debate—I suspect that will be to the relief of many people watching. However, I am delighted that she, I, the hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens) and my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately)—I congratulate her on being appointed as the Conservative party’s new vice-chair for women—and our other female colleagues can shape the law as it affects women in this country. My constituents in Louth and Horncastle voted strongly in favour of Brexit, and one of their key asks is that, in respecting the result of the referendum, we ensure that Parliament and our Supreme Court are sovereign in shaping and determining the laws under which we all live. That is the essence of the Government’s approach to reshaping our relationship with the EU as we withdraw.

Let me pick the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton up on chlorinated chicken. Given that my constituency feeds the country, I take a great interest in food standards and animal welfare. As a Back Bencher, I asked the Prime Minister—this was at Prime Minister’s Question Time soon after she was selected as Prime Minister—to ensure that we maintain food standards and animal welfare. She has been absolutely clear about that, and I hope that Members across the House can coalesce around those very good intentions.

Let me start with some essential reassurances. As the Government have said on numerous occasions—I hope the hon. Lady will forgive me for repeating this—there will be no reductions in protection under the Equality Acts of 2006 and 2010 and the equivalent provisions in Northern Ireland as a result of our exiting the European Union. She rightly asked about ensuring that every measure is gender audited as we leave the EU. The Government not only agree but have acted on that. Thanks to provisions in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, which we passed only a few months ago, every piece of EU exit law will include an equalities impact statement.

As a starting point, I hope that that demonstrates our commitment to these incredibly important issues. That commitment applies to all protected characteristics, including sex and gender reassignment, and in all fields covered by the Equality Act 2010: employment, the provision of services and the exercise of public functions, education, housing, transport and associations.

More broadly, our key EU exit White Paper notes:

“Existing workers’ rights enjoyed under EU law will continue to be available in UK law on the day of withdrawal. The UK already exceeds EU minimum standards in a number of areas…and is a leader in many others.”

I will come on to a couple of those in a moment. The White Paper continues:

“Given this strong record, and in the context of the UK’s vision for the future relationship with the EU, the UK proposes that the UK and the EU commit to the non-regression of labour standards.”

Not only are we setting out our stall, but we are setting out our expectation and hope that the EU will mirror our actions.

During the passage of the withdrawal Act, we also published a right-by-right analysis of the EU charter of fundamental rights. We ensured that that set out exhaustively and comprehensively how each right in the charter is covered by domestic or existing legislation.

[Jo Stevens]

Will the Minister explain why, in the so-called impact assessments that I read in the reading room, there is reference to the “opportunities” that leaving the European Union brings in relation to the working time directive? Those sound to me like opportunities to water it down.

[Victoria Atkins]

I will ask the relevant Minister to write to the hon. Lady. We put EU law into domestic law through the EU withdrawal Act, which means that any debate about which EU laws apply and which do not will go through the House, so that will have the scrutiny of 650 Members of Parliament.

[Dr Huq]

The Minister just said that any change would have to go through the House’s 650 Members. That is not strictly true, is it? It is possible to do lots of things by statutory instrument.

[Victoria Atkins]

I very much accept that point, which I thank the hon. Lady for making. As I said, I will not be drawn into the detail of that specific issue because I do not know whether primary legislation would be required to change that. In any event, statutory instruments are still open to scrutiny by the House, as I suspect we are all about to find out.

We are proud as a country to have long been a trailblazer on gender equality and tackling discrimination. Even after we joined the EU, Britain led the way on pre-empting protections that were later introduced through EU law, with legislation such as the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. We go beyond EU minimum standards in a number of areas, such as entitlement to annual leave, paid maternity leave and parental leave. We do not need to be part of the EU to have strong protections for workers or high standards in the workplace. We lead the world with our gender pay gap regulations. We would like the EU to follow our lead. For the first time, 10,500 businesses had to discuss at board level how they pay women. That groundbreaking work was led not by the EU but by the UK Government.

We are doing more to try to help women flourish in our economy and our society. It is not just through legislation that we can help advance the interests and participation of women across society. A record number of women are in work, which gives them the financial independence in their families and their home settings that we worry about so often in this place, ensuring that they can control the direction of their lives.

Of course, that does not affect our commitment to, for example, changing the personal tax allowance and higher-rate threshold, which means an estimated 700,000 women have been taken out of income tax altogether and 13 million women will see their income tax bill reduced. The hon. Member for Cardiff Central mentioned women’s income. Increases in the national minimum wage and the national living wage are expected to benefit more women than men. We have announced investment in childcare of around £6 billion every year by 2020—more than ever before—which will help women with their responsibilities in that field. We are encouraging employers to introduce flexible working, as well as trying to open up opportunities for women who perhaps left work because of caring responsibilities to get back into work and develop their careers.

At the other end of the spectrum, since 2010 we have strengthened the law on violence against women. We introduced new offences of domestic abuse and failing to protect a girl from female genital mutilation, and we want to do far more. I very much look forward to the introduction of the draft domestic abuse Bill this year. The Prime Minister herself set introducing the Modern Slavery Act 2015 as a personal priority. Sadly, in some parts of the world, women are trafficked to the UK or elsewhere to be used as sex slaves. All those measures have helped in the darker recesses of humanity. They are helping us improve the lot of women in this country. I look forward to tomorrow’s debate about upskirting, as well as to work on sexual harassment.

The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton asked me a number of questions. I have already mentioned the transparency of equality statements. I will write to her about the other matters. This is a Government run by a woman for women, and I look forward to women flourishing in the future of this country.

Question put and agreed to.