Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Thursday 11th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab) [V]]

I congratulate the Attorney-General on her pregnancy and on being the first Cabinet Minister to take maternity leave. It is 20 years ago this summer since I was the first Minister to take maternity leave, and it is quite astonishing that it has taken two decades for a Cabinet Minister to be able to do the same. Three male Prime Ministers and a Chancellor have had new babies in recent years, but no women in the Cabinet have done so until now. So this is a step forward, and of course Ministers should be able to take maternity leave and have maternity cover, and if we want it to be normal across the economy and society, we have to show that it is possible in Government.



I welcome this legislation, but it is limited. Even within Government, it does not provide for fathers to do their bit in the family in those early months or cover adoption leave. It does not cover parliamentary issues and, really importantly, it does not cover councillors, with the Fawcett Society saying that just 7% of councils have a maternity policy in place. Of course, importantly, it does not deal with the ongoing and unfair discrimination that still happens in practice against women in so many different workplaces across the country, because the systems for protecting maternity rights are still too weak.

When I needed to take maternity leave as the Minister for Public Health in 2001, I asked the Health Secretary what I should do. He did not know, and said, “Ask the Prime Minister.” He did not know, and said, “Ask the Cabinet Secretary.” He had absolutely no idea, and as Ministers are Crown appointments, he said it was really a matter for the Queen, but nobody thought we should be asking Her Majesty. We then tried to work something out that was similar to civil servants’ arrangements. We did not get it all right, and the lack of proper cover arrangements caused difficulties, and while the Health Department was really supportive, that informal approach proved inadequate a few years later when I took maternity leave again. The Communities Department was not as supportive, and I had to struggle to get basic arrangements in place.

When we were drawing up those arrangements, no one had thought about this before. That was bad enough 20 years ago, but we have no excuse for a short-term, reactive approach now. The rushed and limited nature of this Bill shows that Government are still doing the same, despite the fact that many Ministers and many parliamentarians have needed to take maternity leave since then. This kind of reactive approach is, I think, still discouraging women from coming forward into public life, and that is bad for democracy. It still risks being discriminatory, particularly for councillors, but perhaps most importantly of all, it shows that at the heart of government, the civil service and Parliament, maternity arrangements for everyone still are not really being taken seriously enough.

It is great that the first Cabinet Minister is taking maternity leave and it is good that the Government have brought forward legislation to make it happen, but it is time we had a more comprehensive approach to make sure that maternity and paternity leave can be a normal part of everyone’s lives. We need a timetable from the Government about when they are going to address some of the political and Government issues in relation to Parliament, but also to look at councillors. Most importantly of all, we need action against the maternity discrimination that is still taking place, often highlighted during the covid crisis, but also deeply rooted in too many workplaces right across the country, so that many more women can properly be able to keep on working and support their families, and many more fathers can support them in doing so as well.

Economic Update

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point: not only are we leading in the world in reaching our net zero targets but we are a global financial centre, and we have combined the two to lead the greening of the financial system, which is an opportunity for us. We are going to issue a sovereign green bond this year and will be the first major economy to make mandatory the climate-related financial disclosures recommended by the international taskforce, which will help to cement our global leadership. I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend the other things that we can do in this vital year for our journey to net zero.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab) [V]]

A Castleford constituent—a single mum who works at a major company’s distribution warehouse—has been told that her employer will not furlough her while schools are closed and that she has to take six weeks’ unpaid leave that she cannot afford. The school has said that she cannot have a place as it is overwhelmed with key worker applications. Does the Chancellor agree that the employer’s response is completely unfair? What should my constituent do now?

[Rishi Sunak]

I am more than happy to receive a letter from the right hon. Lady about the particular situation that she describes, but I hope she will understand—she will know this, having been in a similar position—that it is hard for me to comment on the specific circumstances between an employee and employer. The furlough scheme can be used for the circumstances that she described. Obviously, the school will be better placed than I am to determine whether the constituent in question is a key worker, but if the right hon. Lady writes to me, I will be more than happy to follow up on her questions.

UK-EU Future Relationship Negotiations and Transition Period

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 7th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I agree with my hon. Friend. There has to be a point to all the upheaval that we have been through together as a nation over the past few years, and we can look forward to many positives with those new-found freedoms, including being able to make the right choices for this country. I say again: this is not just about the interests of the United Kingdom; I think that the negotiating position of the UK is also of benefit to the remainder of the EU.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has said that losing access to criminal information if there is no negotiated agreement would have a “major impact” on counter-terrorism and serious organised crime. Obviously we all hope that a full agreement is imminent, but if an agreement is not reached on fish or level playing fields, have the Government drawn up proposals for a fallback security agreement? Does the Minister agree that if the UK and EU negotiators fail to secure arrangements that protect our citizens’ security, that would be highly irresponsible of both?

[Penny Mordaunt]

The right hon. Lady makes an excellent point, and that is one reason why a deal is in everyone’s interest, and why I have always thought that nations would not compromise on the security of their citizens. It is the responsibility of the Government on every aspect—whether on those issues raised by the right hon. Lady, freight transport, or whatever—to have thought through the consequences and prepared for them. That is the case for all issues, including the ones she raises.

Spending Review 2020 and OBR Forecast

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

We will publish further details on how the levelling-up fund will work in due course. It is for those smaller, deliverable, everyday infrastructure projects that I have talked about. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to champion technology, innovation and digital adoption by small and medium-sized enterprises. He will be pleased to know that the spending review confirms just over £50 million to support the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to deliver productivity-enhancing programmes for SMEs. I think that one of those does involve the use of digital technology, in which the UK lags behind its peers.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

We know that families are really struggling right now. The Bank of England has said that the inflation forecast next year is 2%. Can the Chancellor guarantee that the 2.1 million public sector workers he referred to will not face a real-terms pay cut next year? Will he also explain why on earth he is still going ahead with the appalling £1,000 cut in universal credit, which will hit millions of families across the country at this incredibly difficult time?

[Rishi Sunak]

Those in the public sector who earn less than £24,000, which is the UK national median wage, will receive a fixed increase of at least £250. That is 2.1 million people—38% of the workforce. [Interruption.] Well, it will depend on each worker’s exact salary, but there will be a fixed increase of £250 for all of those 2 million workers.

Economy Update

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend is a fantastic champion for his local area and his local small businesses. I know how important tourism and hospitality is to his local economy. He will know that I am also a champion of that industry, and I would be delighted to meet him and other colleagues.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab) [V]]

Only a week ago, the Government told West Yorkshire to go into tier 3, with pub and bar staff in my constituency told that their jobs were being completely stopped—it was to be the same for them as under national lockdown. When we asked the Government to give them the full furlough scheme because their jobs were being stopped, the Chancellor said no. The facts show that when the jobs being stopped by covid restrictions were just in the north, he decided that they were worth only 67% and he treated them as second class. We need a guarantee that he will not do the same again. We have heard his defensive explanation that he got all the decisions right all along the way up to now, so can he explain why one week ago jobs being stopped in my constituency were worth 13% less?

[Rishi Sunak]

I say to the right hon. Lady, as I have said before, that all the interventions we have made apply on a UK-wide basis; they treat people the same, equally and fairly, wherever they happen to live. That was the case, is the case and always will be the case, and I can give her that assurance.

Protection of Jobs and Businesses

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

As the hon. Gentleman will know, my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary to the Treasury has regular discussions with the financial institutions; he will have heard the concerns set out by the hon. Gentleman and will be happy to take them forward in terms of how the banks respond. In some of the other measures the Government have taken—for example, on mortgage holidays—we have seen a recognition of and response to the concerns we have heard about from our constituents.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Haribo in Pontefract has announced that it is consulting on over 200 redundancies and proposing to move some of its production back to Germany. This is devastating for the hard-working workforce. Will the Chief Secretary urge Haribo to work with the GMB trade union and Wakefield Council to look at alternative plans to prevent huge job losses in the middle of a recession, and will the Government stand ready to help them to do so? Does the Chief Secretary accept that manufacturing industry needs support if we are to prevent deeply damaging mass redundancies?

[Steve Barclay]

I absolutely share the concern set out by the right hon. Lady. From conversations that we have had in previous roles, I know how much she advocates for her constituency, and I support that business engaging with her, the council, trade unions and others. I will come on to a number of measures that the Government have taken, and some further measures that we will take, regarding our wider support package to the business community.

This should be set in the context of the three-phase approach. In the first phase of this crisis, the Government introduced measures to halt the spread of the disease. That included protecting our public services with more than £49 billion of funding for the NHS, schools, local authorities and other front-line services. The Chancellor said that he would do whatever is needed to support our NHS, and that is what he delivered. Our plan supported people, with the furlough scheme supporting nearly 10 million jobs—jobs that might otherwise have been lost.

The self-employed scheme provided 2.6 million people with £7.6 billion of support, and mortgage and credit payment holidays helped 1.9 million people to manage their finances—the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) referred to that earlier. For those who are out of work, we made welfare support more supportive and easier to access, and we introduced a hardship fund to help up to 3 million of the most vulnerable people. Of course our plan backed business, because we know that only by supporting businesses can we create sustainable jobs.

Economic Update

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

The Culture Secretary is working through the detail of how the money will be distributed, so I direct my hon. Friend to him on the precise question she raises. I would say that it is important that that funding is not just for our crown-jewel assets, famous and important as they are, but will benefit the local cultural institutions in all our communities across the country.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Having introduced the future jobs fund and the wider youth job guarantee as Work and Pensions Secretary in 2009, and having been appalled when they were cancelled a year later under the coalition, I very much welcome the reintroduction of those measures now. The Chancellor will know that speedy delivery is crucial, and the scheme will have to be bigger because the crisis is bigger. We achieved it last time by involving local councils, working with the local private sector and third sector, to deliver jobs speedily. We could do that again. Will he confirm whether this is a job or training guarantee for every young person, as we had last time? If so, from which month will the guarantee apply?

[Rishi Sunak]

The right hon. Lady knows this area well, and I enjoyed reading of and learning from some of the things she did at that time. In terms of a guarantee, what we have put in place is a comprehensive suite of interventions. She will know from the evidence that we want to encourage young people into work or some kind of work-based training. In the hierarchy of interventions, that should come first. However, we do have a classroom-based offer. She will have heard me talk about increased funding for level 2 and 3 training for school leavers especially, if they cannot avail themselves of traineeships, sector-based work academies or other interventions. More broadly, I would be very happy to sit down with her to get her advice and thoughts on how we can ensure that the kick-start scheme is as successful as it can be.

Covid-19

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 11th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab) [V]]

I agree with the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and others about how much we have sadly lost by not following the South Korea example on testing. We must be ready to follow the best examples from all over the world in the second phase.

In just a few short weeks, tens of thousands of people in the UK have died as a result of covid-19. It is unbearable to think of so many families grieving and in pain. Those who have died or have suffered most are more likely to be poor, more likely to be black, Asian or minority ethnic, and more likely to be working-class men. At a higher risk are the cleaners, security guards, hospital porters, nursing assistants and, most of all, care workers—people who had to keep going during the crisis. That makes it even more important to get protection in the workplace now, as low-paid workers are more likely than professional workers to be asked by the Government to go back into the workplace.

Our key workers have been heroic and should be rewarded, and so too have our communities. In our towns, we have set up hubs of volunteers to help with shopping and food parcels, and we have run a community book programme to deliver books to kids. I want to say a massive thank you to Paul, Denise, David, Lorna, Cath, Saney, Michelle, Ash and many more who have done that.

There is much more that we need to do to prevent a second peak. First, we need clearer messages and answers. Half an announcement yesterday, before the regulations and guidance were in place, has caused considerable confusion. In a public health crisis, confusion can cost lives and put the police in an impossible position over what to enforce.

Secondly, I agree that more action is needed in social care, where the virus is still spreading. We should prevent any patients with covid-19 from being moved from hospital back into care homes. They should stay in hospital or dedicated intermediate care. We need higher standards of PPE, higher pay and sick pay in care homes.

I want to mention two other things that have come up before the Home Affairs Committee. The Home Office has rightly promised a free visa extension for foreign national doctors and nurses, and, if they tragically die from covid-19, a guarantee that their families can remain, but it has not done so for NHS porters and cleaners, who scrub the door handles, floors and sinks in the covid wards, or for care workers, whose lives are at the greatest risk. That is not fair.

Finally, on international travel, other countries introduced self-isolation rules or screening many weeks or months ago. The UK unusually did not. Our Select Committee has been asking for the science behind that since early April, but those SAGE papers have not been published. If the Government now recognise that those measures are needed to prevent the spread, it makes no sense to wait many more weeks before bringing them in.

We need greater transparency if we are to get decisions right, greater clarity so that everyone knows what is going on, and greater determination to tackle the hardest problems we face. We have a long road yet to travel, and we have to do this together.

Economic Update

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I very much appreciate the strains that business cash flows are under, which is why, today, we have already taken steps with the announcement of new cash grants of £10,000, £25,000 and an extension of the business rate holiday to thousands more businesses.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The health action that is being put in place is essential to save lives, but does the Chancellor accept that that also means that some of the jobs that are going this week and the redundancies that are being made will not come back in a hurry, because many hospitality, leisure and tourism jobs simply cannot be done at a social distance? Does he accept that there is a gap between the employment support package that he is rightly working on, I hope, as fast as possible and the welfare support that is simply not adequate for the huge numbers of people who are going to be urgently losing their jobs and who will be terrified of losing their homes as well?

[Rishi Sunak]

We have strengthened the security and the safety net for those in that situation, but the right hon. Lady is right that we are urgently working on measures to do more.

HMRC Impact Analysis: Customs

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think that in due course it will come to be seen that Brexit was a moment of change in which we moved ourselves to a global position in which we were able to change many of the rules and regulations governing our international and domestic trade for the better—to make them more streamlined, to lighten the burden and to increase our economic efficiency and productivity.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Given that these are HMRC’s own assessments—the Government’s own assessments—of a multi-billion pound cost, the Minister could have given HMRC any credible assessment of mitigation if he had any. Can he instead confirm that these costs do not even include tariffs, and that they are in fact the costs not simply of no deal but of refusing to have a customs union at all? Given that a proposal for a deal including a customs union only lost by three votes back in April and that such a deal would, according to his own figures, have saved British businesses billions, why have the Government continually refused even to explore a deal that includes a customs union?

[Jesse Norman]

I could wish that the right hon. Lady, who is widely respected across the House, had used her influence to bring Labour Members into the Lobby to support the deal that was offered—[Interruption]—and, still more, the deal that we are currently exploring, when that is placed before the Chamber. [Interruption.] The impact analysis is a careful piece of work that reflects dozens of statutory instruments that have been placed before the House. It is a composite of all the impact assessments in place, and should be seen as such. Before Members become too enervated, they should reflect that although the number has gone up somewhat, the unit cost of a declaration has not gone up. The increased number reflects the increase in trade in the last couple of years, and in the period to 2017, which is interesting, because it does not look as though trade has been headed off by the threat of Brexit.