That this House has considered International Women’s Day.
May I say how great it is to see you in the Chair for this now annual event on the Floor of the House of Commons, Madam Deputy Speaker? I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting us this time, and also members of the all-party parliamentary group on women in Parliament, who yet again proposed the debate.
It is a great privilege to be able to open today’s debate. I will start by recognising the incredible achievements of every single female Member of Parliament in the House of Commons and every female parliamentarian, not just in this Chamber but at the other end as well. I have been fortunate to have so many women helping me throughout my life: family, friends, work colleagues and fellow parliamentarians. I would particularly like to say how inspired I am by my colleagues on both sides of the House—their tenacity, their ability to make change happen and their resilience, getting anything that gets in their way out of the way so that they can get things done. I salute them all for what they have already achieved, and for what they will go on to achieve in the future.
I pay a particularly fond tribute to two women in my party: my right hon. Friends the Members for Epping Forest (Dame Eleanor Laing) and for Maidenhead (Mrs May). Both have gone out of their way to make sure that they encourage women in my party to be the best they can be. It would not be proper to not also remember the late Cheryll Gillan. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] On the Conservative side of the House, she was the mother of our party, and we miss her greatly. She was an amazing colleague.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) is one of my inspirations in this House, but I think it is really important that we are able to talk openly about how much respect we have for colleagues across the House. I can see a number of women on the Opposition Benches whose work I have followed, not only since I have been in this place, but before I became an MP. I remind everybody that, as much as we see the ding-dongs on the tellybox, a lot of us get on and are trying to make big changes here together.
That is an excellent friend— I mean that is an excellent comment from my hon. Friend, and she is absolutely right. I should at this stage point out that there are a couple of us on the Government Benches who have not slept overnight, so please forgive us, Madam Deputy Speaker, if we stumble over our words. [Interruption.] No, a lot tamer than that; we flew back on the red-eye from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I am moved to intervene because the right hon. Lady mentioned Cheryll Gillan. While there might have been many things we disagreed on, there were many things we did agree on. She did incredible work on autism and championing neurodiversity. Also, when I joined the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, she was a very supportive member and helped to show me the way. She is much missed across all Benches.
I thank the hon. Lady for those kind comments. It demonstrates how we work together and have shared interests. Just to refer back to our venture to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women earlier this week, I chaired a panel of young women, and they were asking about how we work together, and where the political divides were. I have to say that I used Jo Cox’s words that there is more that unites us than divides us. That is another thing I would like to remember fondly today.
Having women in Parliament and in leadership really matters—we know that—because it changes the conversation, the discussion and, above all, the decisions that are made both here and in organisations across the country and around the world. To mark International Women’s Day, at the start of this week I led one of four delegations of UK parliamentarians to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. My delegation was from the all-party parliamentary group on United Nations women. We thank the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association for its support in helping that delegation happen.
At the CSW in New York, thousands of women from around the world met to discuss the status of women, with four delegations from our Parliament. There were 18 hon. and right hon. Members and noble Members of the House of Lords at that global event. The event was at times harrowing, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) will draw later on some of her work while she was there. It was harrowing in particular to hear directly from women from Afghanistan, Ukraine and other parts of the world, including Colombia and Mexico, about their own personal experiences, particularly around sexual harassment and worse. The Afghan women we heard from talked about the brutal beatings, the torture and worse, but they are still there, prepared to protest to regain the hard-won rights of the past two decades. We also heard from women in Iran living with a brutal regime. We must continue to play our part in this Parliament, as we have a proud tradition of doing, in keeping these women’s plight at the fore and ensuring that their need for support and change is never forgotten.
It has been difficult to watch as women’s rights have been stripped away in Afghanistan since the withdrawal of troops. Now, Afghan women who were divorced and able to escape abusive marriages under the previous Government have found those divorces nullified and found themselves at risk under adultery laws. Does the right hon. Member agree that the Government must pick up the pace with the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme to make sure we can offer sanctuary to those women?
In bringing this matter up, the hon. Lady is doing what we all must do, which is to raise these issues in public. That is what the Afghan women I met were pleading for—to make sure that their plight was not forgotten—and they were enormously grateful for hon. and right hon. Members raising these issues, so that not only does the world media not forget, but our colleagues on the Treasury Bench do not forget either.
I commend the right hon. Lady for bringing this debate forward. Unfortunately, I have a meeting today so I cannot make a speech.
This is not just about the politicians across the world; it is also about the likes of my mother, who is 91 years old —soon to be 92—and still gets up to make fresh scones, drives a car and looks after my brother, who is disabled. It is also about my wife who runs the home, volunteers at an animal shelter and cares for the grandchildren, giving childcare to help make ends meet. I am a grandfather of three beautiful and wonderfully sassy granddaughters, who I believe will change the world, and I am the proud employer of six fiercely strong, independent and intelligent women. My point is clear: does the right hon. Lady not agree that on this day, and indeed every day, we have much to be thankful for with all the women in our lives who have shaped us and who continue to shape our world and make it a better place?
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. He is always a great supporter of women. He raises an important issue, which is that women have many different roles in this country and in our national life, and we should celebrate all those roles in this debate. But, above all, we need to ensure that women have a choice as to what role they take on, and we should never allow barriers to get in the way of them succeeding and reaching their potential in life. I am sure his sassy granddaughters would agree with that.
The Commission on the Status of Women, as well as being harrowing at times, was also enormously uplifting. It was empowering to hear from other female parliamentarians, NGO leaders and activists about how they are working and campaigning for change. I had the great pleasure of meeting the Speaker of the Belize Parliament, the honourable Valerie Woods, who is also deputy chair of Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians. The Inter-Parliamentary Union had many meetings at the CSW, which serves to remind us of the importance of organisations such as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the IPU, in the light not only of our Parliament, but of Parliaments around the world. They are incredibly useful organisations for women to be able to drive change and learn from other Parliaments.
As I said, the UK Parliament had four delegations—the biggest group ever to be at the CSW—demonstrating that the significance and importance of women’s rights among colleagues across the House has never been more heightened. At the UN this week, thousands of women from across the world saw laid bare the global erosion of women’s rights since the Beijing declaration was adopted in 1995: the reversal of Roe v. Wade; 4 million women and girls out of education in Afghanistan; women in Ukraine rendered victims of sexual violence at the hands of aggressors. Closer to home, two women are murdered by their partners each week in the UK—I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) will be talking about that in her contribution to the debate.
The right hon. Lady is generous in giving way. I was at a Balfour Aviation event last week, where it was pointed out that women remain significantly under-represented in more senior roles, with only 6% of pilots being women. The training is incredibly expensive and we have heard about the barriers to becoming a high earner that many women face. Does she agree that the Government could be providing more financial support aimed at encouraging women into industries such as aviation where they are under-represented?
The hon. Lady raises an important point about pilots. I know her point is slightly broader than that, but pilots face issues in staying qualified to fly, if they have children. That is one of the reasons— I met that sector of the industry a number of years ago—it sees such a haemorrhaging of women out of the industry. But she makes a broader point. Over the last decade and a half, we have made some important progress in getting in place the idea and notion that having more women in senior roles in organisations is important. On STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths— I actually think those on the Treasury Bench should be singing much louder than they do on their success in putting STEM first and foremost in young women’s minds. When we compare STEM graduates coming out of our universities now with the graduates who came out of our universities in 2010, there are now more women than men coming out with STEM degrees. We do not shout about that enough, but she is right that those women are still on a junior level. We need to ensure that the barriers have been removed so they do not, as we see in the case of pilots, end up having to move out of the industry because barriers are in the way. She makes an important point.
As I say, in the business world, research from McKinsey found that gender diversity increases earnings and that companies in the top quartile for diversity outperform their industry mediums. McKinsey believes that that is because diverse companies are better able to win talent to improve customer understanding, employee satisfaction and decision making, leading to what it calls a virtuous circle.
If diversity can improve our businesses, it can improve our Parliament, too. Where our performance metrics are not found on balance sheets, they are found in the decisions we make for the future of our country. Diversity and deliberative processes, by which I mean voices from more backgrounds bringing new ideas from different life experiences, are foundational to what we do here. The Center for Talent Innovation identified that 56% of leaders do not value ideas they do not personally see the need for. Given that we know that women have experiences of life that are very different from those of their male counterparts, we can see from that figure how important it is that we have more women not only in this Chamber but at the decision-making table of Government.
Will the hon. Lady forgive me if I do not? I do not want to incur the wrath of Madam Deputy Speaker.
The point of gender sensitivity is to create environments in which both men and women can operate equally. There are seven key aspects, which include: the numbers and positions of women; the legal and policy framework of the legislature; mainstreaming of gender equality; the culture, environment and policies of Parliament; the role of political parties; and the position of parliamentary staff. All those aspects can tell us a lot about how men and women are faring in their Parliaments. The House of Commons conducted a gender-sensitive audit in 2018, which was welcome, but that feels like a long time ago. Some colleagues were not even here. Our audit of how Parliament works for people today, not three or four years ago, should be foremost in our minds.
It is clear that there is more to do. I refer to the Fawcett Society’s report “A House for Everyone: The Case for Modernising Parliament”, published in December, which I am sure colleagues are familiar with. It brought into focus the problems around retaining female parliamentarians, which I know concerns colleagues on both sides of the House. The number of women in Parliament taken as a snapshot is all well and good, but Fawcett’s work reveals that, because women face disproportionate challenges, they tend to stay in Parliament for one fewer term than men. That means that those women do not get the opportunity to reach the seniority or level of experience of their male counterparts.
On what we do next, the all-party parliamentary group on women in Parliament will produce a workstream to ensure that we have a clear plan to get an equal Parliament by 2028, to coincide with the centenary of the Equal Franchise Act 1928. When that work plan is put into place, I hope that we can share it in Parliament through further debate.
It is a great pleasure to open the debate. On behalf of those colleagues who are still at CSW in New York, I wish a happy International Women’s Day for yesterday to everyone in the Chamber and those who are watching at home. I encourage everyone to ensure that the legacy from our time in Parliament is encouraging and achieving the objective of having more women on the green Benches, to make this place a fairer and even stronger parliamentary democracy.
I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) for opening the debate and for all her work for women over the years. I share her comments about celebrating our wonderful women parliamentarians and all their achievements. It is very good to see you in the Chair this afternoon, Madam Deputy Speaker, and our excellent female Clerks at the Table, too.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) will read out the list of UK women killed this year, which is truly heartbreaking and a reminder of the dangers that women and girls face in our country. Three years ago, my constituent Libby Squire was on that list. She was a young woman studying at Hull University whose life was taken in 2019 by a predatory man who had been prowling the streets of Hull looking for a victim. But Libby’s murder was not an out-of-the-blue attack: in the 16 months before Libby’s rape and murder, the perpetrator had committed a string of sexually motivated offences, including indecent exposure, masturbating in public, spying on women through their windows and stealing sex toys and underwear.
Very sadly, we know that the behaviour of men who expose themselves is devastatingly everyday, common and normalised. When I asked women MPs earlier this week about their experiences of men indecently exposing themselves, everyone had a story, whether it had happened outside their sixth-form college, on public transport or on the way to school. Just today I received a letter from an 80-year-old woman who recalls being a victim of indecent exposure when she was 18. She still lives, 62 years later, with the impact of that assault.
We found out at Libby’s killer’s trial that many of his earlier crimes had not been reported to the police. Why was that? It was because victims often feel that they will not be taken seriously by the police and that reporting will not actually trigger any action. We know that these crimes are committed by predators and can be a precursor to more extreme violent behaviour. We ignore these warning signs—these red flags—at our peril.
Is it not true that most people underestimate what an assault on a woman is like? It is really only when it happens to you that you understand the impact. It is so important that we listen to the women who have been through an assault and understand the trauma that it has caused them.
Absolutely. I am very grateful for that intervention. I think every woman in this Chamber or watching this debate will fully understand the impact that it can have.
I return to the statistics. Since 2018, almost 250 men found guilty of indecent exposure have subsequently been found guilty of rape. Indecent exposure and non-contact sexual offences are gateway crimes that are still not taken seriously enough. In the years since her daughter’s murder, Libby’s mum, the formidable Lisa Squire, has fought to raise the importance of reporting these “low-level” sexual offences. She has been working with Humberside police on the Libby campaign to urge women always to report them to the police. Her call on women is, “These offences are not trivial. They are not harmless. If you are the victim, please report it to the police. It could save another woman’s life.” She has already managed, alongside Humberside police, to reach 17,000 young people in the Humberside area. She is also working with the Metropolitan police and Thames Valley police. I spoke to Lisa this morning; she is a formidable woman, and I have no doubt at all that we will see change because of the work that she is doing.
Of course, reporting is not the only hurdle. This week, we heard from one of Couzens’s victims, who said in her impact statement:
“Four months after you exposed yourself to me, you raped and murdered an innocent woman. There were opportunities to identify you and they were not taken. I did not feel that, when I reported your crime, it was taken as seriously as I felt that it should have been.”
If women are to report crimes, they must have faith that they will be believed and respected, that action will be taken, and that, most importantly, the police themselves are not a danger.
A recent analysis found that of the 10,000 indecent exposure cases logged by police in 2020, only 600 reached court. That is simply not enough. I have tabled amendments to Home Office Bills to try to tackle the issue, but sadly the Government did not accept them. I met Home Office Ministers, with Lisa Squire, to talk about what more the Government could do. As Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, I raised the issue directly with the previous Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel).
It is absolutely wonderful to be back in the House today—if I am a bit bleary, it is because I have just got off the all-night redeye and have had only a couple of hours’ sleep—and it was wonderful to be present at the annual conference of the Commission on the Status of Women, along with Members in all parts of the House, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller), and to see much joy among so many thousands of women. This was the first time the commission had met in person for four years. There was a particularly moving moment yesterday when a very informal lunch was attended by a handful of British parliamentarians from both Houses, a Canadian senator, two young Mexican Members of Parliament, three Afghan women’s rights champions, and two Ukrainian MPs. Madam Deputy Speaker, the sisterhood is strong.
There is so much that I want to say that I thought I would try to keep myself ordered by giving the House an A to Z, so here it is: some of it happy, and some of it sad.
A is for Afghanistan, with 4 million girls not at school, women not allowed to work, and women subjected to public floggings, rape and torture. It is gender apartheid at its worst. As the Afghan women said to me yesterday, if an Afghan girl cannot go to school and an Afghan woman cannot leave her home, why can the Taliban send their daughters not just out of their homes but out of their country to go to school in other countries? What they ask of the UK Government is that we and our allies impose travel bans on the Taliban, and do more to sanction their assets.
B is for a network of paths in Chelmsford called the “Bunny Walks”. It used to be overcrowded, overgrown, dark and dangerous—a no-go zone for women—but, thanks to the Government’s safer streets fund, it now has lights and CCTV, the undergrowth has been cut back, and it is being enjoyed by women and men and, indeed, people of all ages. I would encourage colleagues, if they have dangerous parts of their constituency, to look at the safer streets funding, because it makes a huge difference.
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There is no doubt that in the UK over the past decade a huge amount of progress has been made. I pay tribute to the Minister for Women and her predecessors—of which I am one—for all they have done to ensure that we continue to see momentum in women’s rights. The Minister has done so much, particularly on women’s health, and I pay tribute to her work in that area. Although I will speak about some of the challenges that we have to face, and ways to address them, it is important to keep at the back of our minds that huge progress that we have made as women, and the huge contribution that women make to public life, making this place, and other places, better as a result.
How do I know that this place is better for having women in it, and why it is important that we continue to push for more women to enter public office? True representation is the answer to that question. Representation—good, strong, diverse representation—is vital in political life because it encourages trust in political bodies. Engagement in democracy is stronger when people see themselves in their elected representatives. Representation tends also to result in diversity. That in turn results in a greater range of ideas, which for a deliberative system such as our democracy is hugely important to improve our decision making.
In the business world, research by McKinsey found that, for every 10% increase in gender diversity in senior executive teams in the UK, earnings in that company before interest and tax rose by more than 3%. There is a dividend not just for commercial organisations, but for organisations such as ours in ensuring that that diversity is in place.
What is the solution? We need diversity in leadership, and having women central in our debates adds legitimacy to our democratic process. It means that our work in scrutiny is done in a more rounded and full way, and policy can be made that more fully encompasses the needs and dreams of the people we serve. The UK electorate and all electorates are half women, so representing women’s voices here is directly important to at least half of our constituents. Gender equality in Parliament is all about democracy and improving our democracy. It is clear to see why it is important that we make an ever-increasing effort to ensure that diversity can thrive in this Parliament.
Our Parliament has come a long way and we have a very reforming Speaker, who has put the role of parliamentarians front and centre in this place and picked up some of the issues that are incredibly important to women not only coming into Parliament but staying in Parliament. I am thinking particularly here about personal security. However, our Speaker has also inherited an enormous backlog of issues that have not been tackled for a variety of reasons in recent years. It is my belief that the House of Commons must continue to renew its energies in this area to ensure that it is not only the political parties that are working hard to get more women into the House of Commons, but the House of Commons itself that is appealing and is a place where people want to come and have a career. The women who have the capacity, the capabilities and perhaps even the personality to come into Parliament have a lot of choices and different ways they can use their lives. If we do not make sure that the people who have the best capacity are attracted to come to Parliament, as well as have a vocation, we are going to miss out on the brightest and the best, a phrase that is often mentioned to me by Ministers who are responsible when I talk about this issue.
One of the ways we can ensure that we increase the appeal of our Parliament is through gender-sensitive audits, to ensure that we have an understanding of what makes our Parliament strong, and where we can improve it and make it more appealing for women. I pay tribute to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which developed the concept of gender-sensitive Parliaments in 2010. Since then, multiple Parliaments around the world—including our own—have conducted gender-sensitive audits to see how they fare. That was developed further by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, which put together a toolkit to make it easier for all sorts of Parliaments to implement such an audit.
Earlier this week, Wayne Couzens was sentenced to 19 months for indecent exposure, having committed a string of non-contact sexual offences in the years before his arrest. One of those incidents, when he exposed himself to staff at a McDonalds drive-through, happened just days before he kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard. In handing down the sentence, Mrs Justice May reported that Wayne Couzens’s ability to commit these deeds with impunity only
“strengthened…the dangerous belief in his invincibility”.
Very sadly, as with Libby’s murderer, the offences escalated.
A review of evidence from 2014 found that a quarter of men who exposed themselves went on to reoffend, with as many as 10% going on to commit serious sexual offences.
I believe that the Government must do much more about tackling violence against women and girls. The Prime Minister declared this to be a national emergency back in November, but he did not make it one of his top five priorities. Why not make it the sixth priority? If this Government will not accept this as a national emergency, I hope that the next will. Indecent exposure is not a minor crime—we know that it is frequently a stepping stone to escalating violence against women by predatory men—and perpetrators, although pathetic, are not harmless; they are often very dangerous. We must take this issue far more seriously, doing so for Libby, for Sarah, and for all the women taken from us. Just like women down the years fighting for a cause—the suffragettes, the Bow match girls, the Ford Dagenham equal pay strikers, and Hull’s own headscarf revolutionaries—we will persevere and we will see change.
C is for contraception. Some 257 million women want access to contraception, but cannot get it. If a woman cannot control her own body, she has no control over the rest of her life. Women’s rights to sexual health and reproductive services are being pushed back across the world. Yesterday I visited the United Nations Population Fund, which does amazing work to prevent maternal mortality and to ensure that women have access to contraception. That vital organisation would like to pass its thanks to the UK Government for our leadership in the support that we give it.
D is for domestic abuse, the most hideous of crimes. But there is really good news from Essex, where reports of domestic abuse are down 8% this year. I thank Essex police, under the leadership of our police, fire and crime commissioner, Roger Hirst, for the huge focus they have put on tackling domestic abuse.
E is for education. A child whose mother can read is 50% more likely to live beyond the age of five, 50% more likely to be immunised, and twice as likely to attend school as the child of a mother who cannot. I thank the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for prioritising girls’ education in the women and girls strategy yesterday.