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Mrs. May: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Lorna Fitzsimons: We are on a tight timetable and I must go on. Other hon. Members have waited a long time to speak.
I want to put the working families tax credit into context. The lie must be nailed that it is anything other than brilliant news for working women. On the doorsteps in Rochdale before the general election and in every other election in which I have travelled around with a mobile surgery, I saw that the plight of women in poverty who were trapped in social housing on council estates--good though some of it may be, provided as it is by Rochdale council, one of the best social housing providers--arose from the cost of child care and the differential between benefits and low-paid work. They were trapped at home. They did not have choices. For the first time, I can go to them now to tell them that they do have choices. The working families tax credit will make them £17 better off. They will have the choice of being paid the child care costs that they need if they choose to stay in work.
Another myth needs to be nailed on the purse-to-wallet issue. There was a problem, but the Government have solved it to a large degree. The Inland Revenue will administer the working families tax credit, and the man no longer needs to sign the form. The woman can be the main applicant, and the man can be the supporting applicant. Nearly 60 per cent. of recipients are already single parents. In one third of other cases, the woman is the main earner. In the remainder, the family can choose. If the woman receives the form because she is the current recipient of family credit, she can fill it in and receive the working families tax credit.
Some vulnerable women could never receive the benefit because him indoors did not want to declare what he earned as he wanted to go down the pub to swill it all down his neck. Now, the Inland Revenue can phone a woman, and if she can give some details of her husband's employment, the Revenue can make sure that she receives the money if the majority of the information provided is correct. Women previously unable to receive family credit will be able to receive working families tax credit. It can be paid to a same-sex couple or a non-married couple; it is good news. People who have had to work extraordinarily long hours, because this country is the long-hours-for-low-pay capital of Europe, can now stay at home and do homework with their kids. To address the issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Barbara Follett) about men offering positive role models, half the reason that such role models are not available is that men are working slave-labour hours for slave-labour wages. They can offer positive role models for work and the work ethic, but cannot be at home to read to their children.
People can now have real choices. The Opposition's claim that the working families tax credit and the child care tax credit will force women out to work is codswallop. Families will have real choices--for example, one family member stays at home, which previously might not have been possible; or the other main earner can work fewer hours. The measures will give real choices. They will give real choices to the people whom I represent in Rochdale where, sadly, there are large numbers of single parents and teenage pregnancies, and we are over-represented in the poverty stakes.
I pay tribute to the raft of women's organisations which this debate acknowledges, and which have bridged the gap between the reality of women's lives and public legislation that has not talked the talk or walked the walk. Women know now that the Government are prepared to listen to them. We are not saying that we can offer a panacea for all ills and that everything is perfect. However, this morning at my town hall, I had the honour of opening the international women's week celebrations organised by the women's working party of Rochdale--a cross-party, multi-denominational group. That was a wonderful celebration of the richness of all the communities of Rochdale, and those women believed that this Government were starting to put women at the heart of Government. I believe that too, otherwise I should not sit on the Labour Benches.
Charlotte Atkins (Staffordshire, Moorlands):
I shall confine my remarks to the issue of part-time workers. The Government's decision to implement, through the Employment Relations Bill, the European Commission directive on part-time work will bring women benefits that are long overdue. Those benefits were denied to women by the previous Conservative Government, who blocked the Commission's proposals. That forced the Commission to introduce the proposals under the social
As everyone knows, part-time work is not confined to mums of young children who work to pick up pin money--that is an old concept. The contribution of part-time workers is vital to the household budget and to the whole economy. There are 6.6 million part-time jobs in Great Britain, of which more than 80 per cent. are held by women. There are more than 6,000 part-time workers in my constituency. Most people are happy to work part-time, but they should not be exploited merely because their work fits in with their domestic, caring or other responsibilities. What message does that send? It is that we do not value the caring, family responsibilities that many part-timers take on outside their paid work and that we are not a civilised society. The Government have introduced a national strategy for carers which acknowledges the huge contribution made by carers.
There should be a level playing field for full-time and part-time work, so that the economy can find the most efficient distribution between the two. No economic good can come from making part-time workers a cheap alternative to full-time workers. However, the Opposition do not seem to believe that--certainly not if their record in the Standing Committee on the Employment Relations Bill is anything to go by.
For too many women, part-time work has become synonymous with low pay and insecurity. We have seen the women's labour market polarised between a narrow band of women in professional and managerial posts, and the large and increasing number of low-paid, part-time workers. Poverty pay has generated spiralling benefit bills for the taxpayer and business. It is a transfer from the taxpayer to the sweatshop employer.
Labour's national minimum wage--which is about to come into force--will stop this subsidy to bad employers. It will also put an end to the old Burger King ploy of employing staff for a full shift, but paying them only for the time that they spend serving customers. For too long, that has been the attitude of employers to part-time staff. Under the Tory Government, flexibility became a euphemism for insecurity and exploitation. This Government recognise that the world of work is changing: the nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday generation is passing and the number of part-time workers has doubled in 25 years. They are the linchpin of the economy; they work in every sector, in industry and commerce.
Part-timers care about their careers as much as full-timers, but many have been denied the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Many are denied access to training and management development. They are viewed as disposable, so companies will not invest in their skills. That is a huge waste of human potential, particularly of women workers. This scandal cannot continue--and it will not under a Labour Government. With equal rights for part-time workers, many more people will take up part-time work. People will be able to move between full-time and part-time work and back again at different stages of their lives without worrying about the impact on
their status, seniority, or their pension. It will create a society in which people can broaden their choice between working and engaging in other activities.
I fear that society is becoming increasingly divided. There are families who are work rich and income rich but leisure poor, such as families comprising two parents who work full time--in fact, who work all the hours they can--and have no time for their children. On the other hand, there are families who are not in employment--for example, single parents or couples with children--who are leisure rich, but extremely income poor. Neither side of the divide is ideal: both situations have a devastating impact on family life and both can be helped by the availability of good, well-paid part-time work to relieve the stress of increased costs and the increased time commitment required by family life.
Ms Beverley Hughes (Stretford and Urmston):
In view of the time, I shall be brief and concentrate on only one point. However, in so doing, I associate myself with the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, North (Ms Ryan), who referred to the continuing need for this kind of debate about women's issues. I reject the views expressed by some Opposition Members who seem to think that everything has been achieved.
In the past two years, this Government have done more for the interests of many different kinds of women than the Conservatives achieved in the past 20 years. The contributions of the hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) and her hon. Friends were notable for their complete bankruptcy: they offered nothing by way of ideas or policy to address the real issues facing real women, and proved that they are completely out of touch.
The Government's priorities are to address issues that are important for women, such as work, child care, domestic violence and caring. As we have heard from one or two hon. Members, womanhood and the social experience of women embrace an even wider diversity of issues. Hon. Members have briefly touched on the point that the debate about women must also include issues of older and very old women. I call for the older woman--her past and current experiences--to be central to the debate about women.
Women over 65 are a substantial proportion of the total female population. Women are a substantial majority of the population over 65, and the world of the very old is almost exclusively a woman's world. Despite those facts, older women have been notable for their absence from the debate about the way in which gender shapes experience. As policy makers, we must not tolerate that omission because it will fail not only current but future generations of older women; and as we age, we will find ourselves confined to the rocking-chair that forms part of the stereotype about older women. As we know, such stereotypes hide the truth and mask the diversity and richness in the lives of many older women.
The Conservative party has always had difficulty with the view that people's class, race or gender has an impact on the course of their life. That is surprising when one
considers that nowhere is the impact of gender more clearly demonstrated than in this generation of older women. Their earlier lives were ones of enforced inequality and dependency structured by social values and enshrined in law, and it should therefore be no surprise that those characteristics have been carried into old age. Women are much more likely than men to be very old, very poor, single or widowed, living alone, living in poor housing and so on. Older women are among the most socially excluded people in our society.
We must not let those facts colour the whole picture, because the personal histories and testimonies of older women tell us also that if they are, in some senses, victims, they have not been passive victims. We would do well to remember that today's older women are survivors and that their lives have inevitably involved surmounting personal and social challenges throughout this century. As part of our commitment, older women must be given a central place as we develop ideas and policies for women.
Many older women continue to play vital roles for their families and society. They are the cornerstone of many grassroots organisations; they are the activists in residential homes, and it has already been said that political parties could not do without them. I could easily bring to mind women in my constituency who are in their 70s and 80s and who are still active. They have not arrived at that age without any of the consequences of living that long; they simply carry on regardless. They have arthritis and they are living on low incomes, but they continue to contribute, as they have always done.
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