I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
The Prime Minister believes that it is quite wrong for Ministers to have to resign in order to leave work after giving birth to care for a newborn child. The Bill before the House today will make an important and long-overdue change to the existing law. It will enable all Ministers for the first time to take paid maternity leave from their job for an extended period. Thanks to changes made in the ministerial code by the Prime Minister in 2019, there are now codified arrangements by which Parliamentary Under-Secretaries and Ministers of State can take maternity leave. Their roles will be covered by a redistribution of their responsibilities among remaining Ministers. Secretaries of State or other holders of individual offices such as Law Officers or the Lord Chancellor, owing to their constitutional role and the sheer volume and complexity of their workloads, have not been able to make use of this provision.
There has been a similar failing in the situation for Opposition office holders, where the statutory limit on the number of salaries that can be paid means that there is not the flexibility for them to take leave and for their cover to be paid. The Bill provides that it is possible for Members in those posts to take extended leave. It would apply to postholders of the Leader of the Opposition, the Chief Whips in both Houses, and up to two assistant Whips in the Commons.
I am very grateful to Her Majesty’s Opposition for their constructive engagement in the preparation of the Bill and welcome their support for this landmark measure.
I particularly thank the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) for her engagement and her commitment to the work that we wish to undertake following the Bill to address the other issues that need dragging into the 21st century.
I thank the Secretary of State for what she is saying. This has been a particularly difficult time for new parents, new mothers and new babies. During this lockdown period, I have been blessed with two grandchildren, so I have an idea of what it means. It has been a difficult time. The term is a “lockdown baby”. Will the Minister confirm whether there is an extended time for maternity pay? Are there incentives for companies to extend maternity pay? We really need quality maternity leave because of the circumstances of the past year.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but it is slightly beyond the scope of this particular Bill. In fact, the beneficiaries of this Bill are indeed very narrow and I shall comment on that further in a moment. I know that my colleagues in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and elsewhere in Government are clearly looking at a whole raft of long-overdue issues. I am sorry that the pandemic has delayed responses to consultation for very understandable reasons, but his points are well made. I am sure that, throughout the course of this debate and Committee stage, hon. Members will want to touch on the situation facing people other than the handful of individuals that we are concerned with this afternoon. On moving this Bill today, I do so with humility in recognition of that.
I warmly support the Bill, but can Her Majesty’s Government confirm that only a biological woman can have a baby? Will the Minister therefore explain to me why the Bill refers to “a person” and not to “a woman”? If we are going to adopt extreme gender ideology, why are the Government doing it by stealth and why can we not have a transparent debate on the matter? This insults the dignity of many women.
I hope to be able to go into detail about this later in the debate. I know that many Members will want to speak to this issue, and I will want to hear what they say, but I want to reassure hon. Members across the House that there is absolutely no intention of doing that. This is not a policy decision around language, and the Government will still use the word “women” in all documents, as is our policy. The issue is a particular drafting issue, and I can come on to the detail later, in Committee. I hope to be able to give all Members some comfort today about the language that we will be using. I hope that my right hon. Friend will allow me to leave it there for the moment, but his point is well made and very well understood by myself and the rest of Government. I hope that, by the end of today, people will be reassured on that front.
Although they are outside the immediate scope of this Bill, I know that there are considerable and long-standing concerns about the provision of support for hon. Members in this place who wish to take maternity leave. This has been highlighted by many colleagues across the House. There have been some improvements in this area in recent years, and I commend Mr Speaker and his colleagues and the House authorities for their continuing support for reform in this area, but clearly more is needed, and I hope that the cross-party work that follows this Bill may afford us some opportunities to address those outstanding matters.
Returning to the Bill, it would be reasonable to ask why the Government do not in such circumstances simply take on another Minister as maternity cover. The situation is that there are no fewer than three Acts of Parliament governing the issue of ministerial numbers and pay and, more pertinently, the relevant restrictions on them. Until now, the limits on the number of salaries that can be paid overall, and for individual officers, have left the Government with limited flexibility to appoint cover should a Minister want to go on maternity leave. In a nutshell, for someone to be appointed to cover, and for that individual to be paid, the temporarily outgoing Minister would have to resign. This Bill puts an end to that wholly unacceptable situation. Instead, it will enable a Minister to take up to six months’ paid maternity leave to care for their newborn child, subject to certain conditions and at the discretion of the Prime Minister, while remaining a member of the Government.
I am pleased to follow the Minister, and I thank her for the discussions we have had in the lead-up to the Bill’s Second Reading. I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman) on the impending birth of her baby, and I know that the whole House will want to send her and her family our very best wishes.
Let me say at the outset that the Opposition will be supporting the Bill, which is a small but welcome step in updating legislation in this important area. It is, of course, important that parents in the workplace should be supported in the challenging early months after the birth of a new baby, with the right to take paid maternity leave from their employment, whether they are in the Cabinet or in any other workplace. These changes should be made for the right reasons—because they are the right thing to do to support working parents, not because they are just politically expedient.
I welcome the Minister’s assurances that the Government are prepared to work on a cross-party basis to look at further reforms to bring us into line with best practice in this area. Further changes are indeed needed, because the proposals in their current form do not include, as the Minister recognised, any provision for paternity leave entitlement, those seeking to adopt or those on shared parental leave. As things stand, we are very much playing catch-up when it comes to parental leave.
If we are to encourage women from all backgrounds to become Members of Parliament and, indeed, Ministers, we must have modern working practices, so that it is a vocation that is open to everyone. A clear sign that further changes are needed, particularly when it comes to making Westminster a more family-friendly environment for working mothers, is the make-up of the House today. At present, 102 years after women first won the right to stand for Parliament and after reforms to sitting hours and the system of proxy voting, there are still just 220 female MPs compared with 430 men. That has to change if we are truly to reflect the country and all the experience and talent within it. I urge the Minister to work constructively with other parties and find parliamentary time to progress the further reforms that I believe many in the House would like to see.
I know that the Minister responded to my initial intervention, but the shadow Minister has referred to more reform, which I think is important. That reform has to look towards other elected representatives, including those in the Assembly and the councils. As an example, one of the ladies who works for me is a councillor, and she did not get the leave that she should have had, so I think this Bill is only the first stage when it comes to maternity leave. Does the hon. Lady agree that we can, and must, go further?
I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman. Elected representatives, whether here in Parliament, in devolved Administrations or in local government, and indeed those in all workplaces, absolutely deserve maternity rights which in some workplaces, including those of elected representatives, just do not exist today. I would very much support further reform in this area.
I very much welcome what the Opposition are pushing for. Does the hon. Lady agree with me that this House has a position of leadership, in relation not only to the devolved Administrations but to the rest of the country, and that is why work towards paternity leave and, particularly, shared parental leave is so important?
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. The Paymaster General and I have been speaking about the further reform that is needed, and in a way, the case for this Bill has shone a light on the wider reform that is necessary. We should not just be reacting to events; we should be thinking towards the future and about the challenges of combining work and family life which all of us in this place—men and women—face.
I would now like to turn to some of the challenges that women in Parliament have faced over the decades, and to talk about why it is so important that we continue to modernise some of our, frankly, outdated working practices. Without the battles fought in Parliament by the women who have come before us, I do not think we would be here today, fighting for those further changes that will make us more representative of the people we seek to represent. Pioneers such as the indomitable Barbara Castle fought for years to secure equal pay for women. There was also the independent MP Eleanor Rathbone, who successfully battled to see the Family Allowances Act 1945 become law. They both helped to build the foundations for a better, fairer society, particularly for women.
There are many other inspirational women MPs who have done so much for women’s rights. However, that often came at a high price. None of the first four women in Cabinet—Margaret Bondfield, Ellen Wilkinson, Florence Horsbrugh and Barbara Castle—had children, and it is hard to see how in those early decades they could have combined their job, and the antisocial hours it involved at that time, with having much time for family life. The first woman Cabinet member to have children was Judith Hart in 1968, a full 50 years after the first woman took her seat in this place. As the then Labour MP for Lanark, she found it very hard to combine long periods away from her family with her work in this place, and eventually made the difficult decision to relocate her family from Scotland to London.
I am sorry to hear the experience that the hon. Lady is recounting. She has been paying tribute to pioneering, so I wonder whether she will join me in paying tribute to Aileen Campbell, a good friend of mine and the first Minister in the Scottish Government to take maternity leave. At that time, the Scottish Government were able to find a way of having a substitute Minister. It is not quite the same as what the Government are proposing today. Aileen and a couple of other MSPs are, sadly, leaving the Scottish Parliament because of these pressures, so it is welcome that we are making small but steady progress along the way to supporting women in politics.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, which builds on the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) that it is important not just in this place, but for other elected representatives, that wherever they are representing their constituents they should be able both to continue doing their job and to bring up a family. We need in this place and in other elected forums to be able to represent the whole country. We say that we represent Britain or our local community, yet too often we do not look like the communities we are meant to serve. I hope that with the sorts of changes in the Bill, and with those in devolved Administrations and councils, we will make ourselves more representative.
Although the measures in the Bill amount to positive change, there is understandable alarm about this Government’s track record on workers’ rights more generally. It is important that while we today make changes to help women in this place, we also think about employment rights and women’s rights more generally. Just like this Bill, the Government’s new employment Bill should be an opportunity to extend and safeguard workers’ rights, not water them down. However, after a year of silence on that Bill, the Government have failed to deliver on their promise to enhance the rights of all new mums. Pregnant women have found widespread discrimination throughout this pandemic, with many left without basic maternity pay and instead put unlawfully on to statutory sick pay during the pandemic. Indeed, there is a stark contrast to be drawn between the Government’s urgent passing of this legislation, which we support, and their inaction on behalf of struggling pregnant women across the country. I hope that today the Government will reflect on what more they can do to help women in this country.
The Government should also be doing more to help the parents of babies born prematurely. Under the current rules, maternity leave of up to 52 weeks starts when the baby is born, but because a premature baby can spend weeks in hospital, mothers are effectively cheated of spending some of the leave with their new child. I raised this subject two years ago, as a Back Bencher, based on casework in my constituency and working with Bliss—the charity for babies born prematurely or sick that does such brilliant work. I called on the Government then to change the rules so that new parents of premature babies are not put under further unnecessary pressure; today, I again urge the Government to bring forward plans to ensure that parents of premature babies are given the time and flexibility granted to other parents to care for their baby once their baby is home.
Order. Before I call Caroline Nokes, I want to set out the time limits that will apply. As Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, Caroline Nokes will have six minutes. She will be followed by another Front-Bench spokesperson. Then, from Cherilyn Mackrory onwards, a four-minute limit will apply, and that may be reduced later.
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This provision will be similar to that available to members of the armed forces and the civil service and, significantly, it responds directly to a recommendation made in 2014 by the all-party parliamentary group on women in Parliament. The Bill does not try to confer equal terms or provide absolute parity with maternity leave provisions for all employees and workers. Both adoption leave and shared parental leave are important provisions, but they are not included in this piece of legislation. They are complex issues that require further consideration in the wider constitutional context, but they are not impossible, and I will return to those issues shortly.
On paternity leave, the current statutory entitlement for all new fathers is two weeks. I am pleased to say that this absence can be accommodated within existing practices, should a Minister wish to take paternity leave. The Government recognise that new fathers may want even more flexibility to support their partner following the birth of a child, and I am glad to confirm that we will consider this as part of our further work. The House will also be aware that the Government recently consulted on parental leave and pay for employees, and we are due to respond to that consultation in the near future. This work will provide us with a valuable perspective on how the existing provisions function, and any future proposals for Ministers will be developed with these conclusions in mind.
Some Members hoped for this Bill to address other issues of parental leave. I mentioned earlier the significant improvements that have been made to make this House more family-friendly, and the provisions that are still needed. The Government agree that both Parliament and the Government should seek to lead from the front on working practices, providing as much flexibility as possible to office holders to aid the effective discharge of their duties. I am very conscious that this Bill relates to a subset of ministerial and Opposition office holders—a payroll of just 115 people. It is also solely concerned with maternity leave. I shall not go into the technical detail of why the other matters are not in the Bill, but let me be clear from the outset that we will bring forward proposals to address those outstanding issues. We looked at putting many of those issues in this Bill. That has not been possible, but we do want to address them swiftly and have been discussing with colleagues across the House how we might do so.
I also know that Opposition postholders—in fact, Members from both sides of the House—have for a long time expressed concerns about provision for maternity leave under the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority scheme. IPSA is independent, and for good reason. In this particular respect, I am grateful for the engagement of my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee. I know that many Members will want to address these other issues, and I will reserve the bulk of my remarks on them until my concluding speech on Second Reading. In the meantime, I draw colleagues’ attention to the Prime Minister’s written ministerial statement committing the Government to present a report to Parliament setting out considerations and proposals on these issues.
The issues with the Bill also touch on the fact that a number of Lords ministerial posts are unpaid. The Prime Minister has undertaken that the Government should look at the use by successive Administrations of unpaid ministerial posts. Clearly the Bill does not relate to anyone outside the ministerial pipeline or anyone outside Parliament. In bringing this Bill to the House, which I hope will gather wide support, I do very much recognise the context. The terms for those in the armed forces and civil service are the terms on which this Bill is pegged. They are far more generous than the public sector average, and many people will be in receipt of far less than that average.
I am sure that some Members will want to focus this afternoon on other issues that people are facing, as I have already set out. I just want to outline some of the detail of the Bill, but I will be very brief in doing so and will go into further detail later. Clauses 1 to 3 deal with the designation of a Minister on leave, setting out the mechanism that allows Ministers to take up to six months’ paid maternity leave. Clauses 4 to 6 set out the arrangements relating to six months’ paid maternity leave for certain office holders in Her Majesty’s official Opposition. Clause 7 contains the usual final provisions.
The second part of the Bill makes provision for certain Opposition office holders—namely, those listed in the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975—to take up to six months’ paid maternity leave. In contrast to the arrangements for Ministers, Opposition office holders who are to take maternity leave would stay in post. The Bill authorises a payment to a nominated individual, who, at the discretion of the Leader of the Opposition in the relevant House, is to cover the office holder’s role on similar terms as those for Ministers that I have already outlined.
The difference in approach reflects the fact that Opposition office holders are not appointed by the Prime Minister and do not have statutory functions in the way that a Secretary of State or a Law Officer does. It is therefore more straightforward for an individual to provide the necessary maternity leave cover while the original office holder remains in post. The arrangements may last for up to six months, and the eligibility criteria are the same for those in relation to Ministers. The Bill leaves it to the discretion of the Opposition leader in each House to appoint individuals to these temporary covering roles. Only one person can be appointed to cover an office holder’s post at any point during the period of leave. However, should the Leader of the Opposition wish to change the appointment, they have the discretion to do so.
Clause 5 builds on these provisions and outlines how the allowance payable should be calculated, how payments are administered and when payments should end. As with the provisions for Ministers, the person appointed to cover an office holder’s role should receive a monthly allowance that is equivalent to the office holder’s monthly salary. This financial arrangement should continue for as long as the individual is fulfilling the responsibilities of the role, but for no longer than six months. This allowance, as is the case with Opposition office holders’ salaries, is to be paid from the Consolidated Fund.
The final provisions relating to Opposition office holders are set out in clause 6, which establishes the relationship between the appointed individual covering an Opposition office holder and existing legislation. As is the case with a Minister on leave, where the Opposition office holder is a Member of the House of Lords, she is not eligible to claim the so-called Lords office holder allowance provided under the Ministerial and other Pensions and Salaries Act 1991 while on maternity leave. However, the individual appointed as maternity cover by virtue of these provisions is entitled to claim that allowance for the duration of the appointment. That is because the allowance is to reflect the work undertaken in the House, such as late-night sittings.
The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 makes provision for both Members’ and Ministers’ pension schemes. Both Ministers and Opposition office holders are entitled to pensions under the Ministers’ pension scheme. Given that there is no material change to their position, there has been no need to make provisions in the Bill to ensure that their salary remains pensionable during their maternity leave. However, the individual appointed to cover the post is entitled to the Ministers’ pension scheme for the duration of their appointment, in relation to the allowance paid to them for the role.
Finally, clause 7 makes the usual provisions necessary for the Bill to operate in law, including defining its territorial extent, setting out its commencement arrangements and providing the Bill’s short title. The Bill comes into force on Royal Assent and will thus be of immediate benefit to those wishing to take maternity leave, should there be anyone who is in those circumstances. As I said, I am very aware of the issues that the Bill has brought to light with regard to language. I know that there are time pressures on the debate, but I will address those issues in more detail in the course of the afternoon.
As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister set out in his written statement on this topic last week, the Government have undertaken to look at considerations and proposals for Ministers and Opposition office holders in the other areas not covered by the Bill. We are committed to building more widely on the progress that the Bill represents and will present a report to Parliament setting out those considerations. For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that all Members of the House will support the Bill, and I commend it to the House.
The first woman MP to have a baby while serving as a Member of Parliament was the former MP for Welwyn and Hatfield, Baroness Hayman, who had her first baby in 1976. However, just 10 days after giving birth, she was forced to come into Parliament because pairing had been suspended, and there was certainly no proxy voting then. She had to leave her baby in the Whips Office in order to take part in crucial votes. I also remember seeing my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) in a wheelchair in this Chamber two years ago for a key vote, as it was just two days before the birth of her son. At least that unacceptable situation has been ended by the system of proxy voting which, because of cross-party support, now enables MPs who are new parents to nominate another MP to vote on their behalf if they choose to do so.
Despite the hurdles they faced, those remarkable women built the foundations for the work in Parliament taken forward by irrepressible campaigners such as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), Dame Joan Ruddock, and the late and very much missed Dame Tessa Jowell, who all tackled inequalities, injustices and rights for women in Parliament and in the country. In fact, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham has long supported the changes that we are discussing today. Under the last Labour Government, Ruth Kelly, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) had babies while serving as Ministers but had no formal provisions for maternity leave. The same has been true for Conservative Ministers in the past few years. They all watch with interest and contribute to this debate. It is fair to say that their experiences of combining their work as Ministers and their roles as new mothers were mixed, and I am very much looking forward to hearing my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford speak later in this debate.
I have already touched on Barbara Castle’s achievements with the Equal Pay Act 1970, which came when there were just 24 female MPs and was a watershed in the fight for gender equality. We have also had the Equality Act 2010 from my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham, the introduction of thousands of Sure Start centres, and the introduction of child tax credits and of free nursery places, all of which have been a lifeline for so many women and families in our country.
However, there is still much work to be done on improving employment conditions for women and the culture in workplaces, both in Westminster and across the rest of the country. The decision a decade ago by the former Speaker to close a bar on the parliamentary estate and replace it with a children’s nursery was undoubtedly a welcome move and has benefited many in this House and our staff, but it was not before time. I also recall that in 2015, when I was shadow Work and Pensions Secretary and expecting my second child, a Conservative Member suggested that as an expectant mum I should not be appointed to the Cabinet if Labour won the general election, as I would not be able to manage doing two things at once. I hope that he has since revised his opinions, and I am pleased that this Bill will allow Cabinet Ministers, for the first time, to have paid time off after the birth of a child.
At present, Ministers have no rights when it comes to maternity, paternity or adoption leave. If a Minister wants to take maternity leave, as the Paymaster General set out, the rules do not allow for them to continue to receive a Government salary along with the person providing their maternity cover. It is right that that should be changed to remove that barrier in a woman’s career. The Bill would end that anomaly and mean that Ministers would not have to face being financially penalised or forced to stand down from their ministerial role to care for a newborn. The changes would bring Ministers into line with most civil servants by providing them with a period of six months’ leave on full pay.
Last year, there was cross-party support for the change that now allows MPs who are new parents to use the proxy voting scheme, so they can spend precious time with their new child. The proposals before us today represent another baby step in what should be an ongoing modernisation of working practices to ensure that women do not get a raw deal at work due to failure to move with the times. It is a shame that it has taken the pregnancy of a member of the Cabinet—happy news though that is—for this Government to realise that improving the workplace rights of expectant parents should be a priority. This change will benefit family life, remove a barrier to career progression, and ensure that having a baby does not come with a financial penalty as well as the sleepless nights that none of us can prevent. However, we need to see far more progress by the Government on this issue to ensure that women and all workers are treated fairly in the workplace, including when they have children.
We are behind the times when it comes to adopting modern, family-friendly working practices in Parliament and in Government, and change is long overdue. I ask the Minister to make a firm commitment to review and explore, as a matter of urgency, further potential reforms that can be made with cross-party support to ensure that this “mother of Parliaments” is a Parliament that genuinely welcomes mothers. This should be the start, not the end of a journey by this Government to deliver more employment rights and to give workers in all workplaces and in all jobs the protection and support they need and deserve.