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Mr. Gill: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Morley: I am sorry, no. Improving quota management will of course embrace time scale and bureaucracy issues. I agree about the need to involve fishermen in the ownership and management of their quotas. We shall be discussing that, too, with the industry.
My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby is concerned about greater regional management. We are very interested in the comments of the NFFO on coastal state management. There are differing interpretations of its meaning, however. There is certainly a role for more regional managing of the fisheries in our country--a point also conceded by the Commission in the letter fromMr. Santer to the Prime Minister.
After 2002 we want to extend the positive benefits of the CFP--relative stability, and the retention of our six and 12-mile limits. That is a Government priority.
Where third-country agreements are in place, it is important that the countries in question, generally developing countries, derive some benefit from the agreements, perhaps in the shape of joint ventures and some landings. The Commission must bear that in mind, and we will press for it.
Finally, I wish to answer the point that the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) made about Rockall. The United Nations convention on the law of the sea made it clear that it was not possible to draw boundary lines from uninhabitable islands. We said that we would abide by that convention.
The relinquishment of the Rockall fishery zone will have no significant impact on UK fishermen. The level of catches in the Rockall zone is very low; it made up 0.1 per cent. of Scottish landings in 1996. In practice, UK fishermen will continue to have full access rights to 95 per cent. of the area in question and quotas will remain unchanged.
However, this country gains some tangible benefits, in terms of having internationally recognised boundaries, as a result of the ratification of the UN convention on the law of the sea. The right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon may remember that the Rockall boundaries were always disputed by Ireland--
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord):
Order. It is time to move on to the next debate.
Ms Margaret Hodge (Barking):
This debate is about the rights of one small group of people in our society. They are people who deserve our full support but who suffer gross injustice and against whom we currently discriminate. I am talking about women who cannot, for a variety of reasons, have their own children, and who therefore choose to adopt a child. At present, mothers who adopt a child are not entitled to statutory maternity leave or statutory maternity pay. Rights that are universal for women who are lucky enough to be able to bear their own children are denied to those who cannot have children and therefore adopt.
As the Minister knows, I and others, including my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Helen Jackson), have been waging a long campaign on behalf of adoptive parents. In the dying days of the previous Government, I introduced a ten-minute Bill designed to end that unfair discrimination. Sadly but unsurprisingly, our coherent and overwhelming argument fell on deaf ears. There were few votes in support of that cause.
One of the first actions taken by the new Government--indeed, by the Minister who will reply to the debate--has been to start the process of righting the wrongs that these women suffer. When Britain adopts and incorporates the social chapter, we shall end part of the discrimination that currently confronts adoptive parents. I warmly welcome that move and congratulate the Minister on that action.
When the social chapter comes into force in two years' time, adoptive parents will be entitled to adoptive leave, but it will remain unpaid. That simply is not right, and I hope that the Minister will listen carefully to the case that I and my hon. Friends put to him today. I hope that we convince him and his colleagues in government to go the whole way, and I hope that he will act swiftly to put an end to that dreadful and unjust discrimination.
Each year, 3,500 children are adopted into new families. Fewer than 400 are babies under a year old. Most are children who have come through the care system. They may have been shunted from children's homes to foster homes and back to children's homes. For them, the only alternative to a childhood in institutional care is adoption. For them, adoption is their only lifeline chance of experiencing a happy childhood in a loving family. For the parents who adopt, adoption represents their final opportunity of enjoying the fulfilling role of bringing up a child and creating a family.
We all know that adoption is the best option for those children. We know that it is good for the parents, for society and indeed for Government, for by promoting adoption we shall save the state the massive alternative expense of keeping children in institutional care. All of us are therefore beholden especially those who have the onerous task of governing on our behalf, to remove unnecessary barriers to adoption. However, in discriminating against mothers who adopt by denying them the right to maternity pay, we are not only perpetuating injustice but retaining a deeply unjust barrier to adoption.
Not all the 3,500 mothers of children adopted into a new family will continue to work, but some will want to and others will have to. We should work on the principle
that they have the right to choose. At present, discrimination means that they have lesser rights than natural mothers.
Mr. Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South):
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the points that she is making. Does she accept that we should also be talking about parental leave that includes fathers' rights? I make that point because I suspect that I am one of the few people in the House, or perhaps the country, who has had parental leave for all my children, including my son, whom we adopted.
I was very conscious that the initial period of parental leave helped to dispel some of my fears about whether it would be possible to love a child who was not my own, and made it possible to establish routines of bonding that were to serve us throughout the entirety of the lives that followed. I am profoundly grateful to my son for the lessons that he has taught me about loving. We should include fathers in those rights as well as mothers.
Ms Hodge:
I accept the point that my hon. Friend makes. I am taking things a step at a time. However, fathers' rights are recognised in the social chapter.
Since I and others have taken up this cause on behalf of adoptive parents, we have been inundated with heart-rending letters, telephone calls and visits from people who feel deeply bitter and angry at the treatment that they received from their employers when they adopted children.
I spoke to an occupational therapist from Birmingham who had adopted a two-and-a-half-year-old girl after a series of miscarriages. When she asked for leave, her manager said that it was impossible because she could not give a precise date when she would bring the child home. He also could not understand why she needed time off, because she was not going through a pregnancy and a birth.
Another mother, from Nottingham, had to go through the humiliating experience of telling a panel all about her gynaecological problems when she was pleading for maternity leave and maternity pay to look after the 10-week-old baby whom she had adopted. Some mothers have been forced to leave their job because they could not secure maternity leave. Others were sacked when they even dared to ask for it.
A civil servant, an employee of the Government, working in Norfolk, adopted a 16-month-old child. When she asked for leave, even she found that she was entitled to only 20 days' paid leave compared with a natural mother, who is entitled to paid leave for 18 weeks. When she collected signatures for a petition among her colleagues at work, they could not believe that she was not entitled to equal treatment. That is the case everywhere. No one can believe that, in the latter days of the 20th century, we in Britain practise such inhumane and unjust discrimination against mothers who are unfortunate enough to be unable to have their own children.
The argument goes--Ministers have written to me and to my hon. Friend the Member for Hillsborough repeating this view--that maternity benefits are paid simply to allow the mother to take time off work physically to recover from childbirth and to protect the health of mother and child. That is an outdated, Victorian view of pregnancy and parenting. Gone are the days when pregnancy and childbirth were regarded as an illness.
Of course there are exceptions, but most mothers--having had four children, I should think that I know what I am talking about--need maternity leave primarily, not physically to recover from birth, but to allow time to bond with the new baby, time to get to know one another, and time to adjust to the new relationships and the changed circumstances that a new arrival in the family brings.
That is as true for those who adopt as it is for natural mothers. Arguably, maternity leave is even more important for those who adopt. Often the children come from families where they have been subject to abuse or neglect and it is vital that mothers have time to settle the new child, who may well be traumatised by previous experiences. We want adoptions to work and we should help adoptive mothers by stamping out the discrimination that they face.
Ministers may say that they cannot afford to extend maternity benefits to that group. As it costs less than £2,000 per adoption to pay maternity benefit and £50,000 for every year that a child is kept in institutional care, it makes financial sense for the Government to fund the maternity benefit and save expenditure on keeping children in care. Ministers may also say that they do not want to saddle employers with another statutory benefit right. That is simply unfair to adoptive parents and it exaggerates the impact of our proposals, for we are talking about some 1,500 women who adopt each year and continue to work, and who will therefore receive the entitlement, alongside the 260,000 natural mothers who currently exercise their rights each year--that is just over half of 1 per cent. of the current total.
12.30 pm
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