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11.34 am
Mr. Brian Sedgemore (Hackney, South and Shoreditch): I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) on obtaining this important debate. I agree with a lot of what she said, although not all of it. May I declare an interest, not as a pregnant teenager but as a member of London Brook, an organisation that gives advice to young people on sex, contraception and abortion. I am also a member of Population Concern, an international charity that runs projects in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Peru and South Africa.
I am sure that the whole House will welcome the publication of the report of the social exclusion unit on teenage pregnancy. On the whole, it adopts a pragmatic and positive approach to the highly sensitive issues of sex, teenage pregnancies, contraception, sex education in schools and abortion. None of us can be happy with the fact that teenage pregnancy rates in the United Kingdom are twice as high as in Germany, three times as high as in France and six times as high as in the Netherlands. The 90,000 teenage pregnancies a year in England alone create an awful lot of misery and wreck many lives.
None of us can be happy about young people's lack of accurate knowledge about contraception, which is in part responsible for the fact that among under-16s over half the pregnancies are terminated and that a third of conceptions in the under-20s end in abortion. Prevention has to be our top priority. We cannot carry on living in a country in which many teenagers have such low expectations for themselves and are so ignorant and so confused by mixed messages from society which, as the hon. Member for Billericay said, suggest that sex is compulsory but contraception is undesirable.
I welcome the response of Ministers at the Department of Health to the report. Their commitment to the £60 million strategy to galvanise work across government to prevent teenage pregnancies seems absolute. I hope that Ministers at the Department of Health will push harder, as the hon. Lady argued, to press for over-the-counter
sales of emergency contraception, sometimes referred to as the morning-after pill. I hope that they will discuss with their colleagues in Northern Ireland the need to introduce the provisions of the Abortion Act 1967 into the Province to ensure that young people there have the same right to abortion as their sisters in mainland Britain.
The Department of Health must realise, too, that access to services and contraception needs to be expanded. I am sure that they know that the health authorities are currently cutting grants to organisations such as London Brook and others. This is a problem that cannot be neglected, especially in the light of the report.
Judging by the performance of the Department for Education and Employment in this area and the scarcely concealed negative attitude of the Secretary of State, there is even cause to doubt the intention of the Department to implement some of the policies suggested in the social exclusion unit report to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies. Indeed, I would go further: having followed the subject for the past 15 years or so, I have little doubt that if there were an Ofsted report on the performance of the Department, it would be deemed to be failing.
We have to ask whether it is right that young women should continue to suffer and lead miserable lives because of the biblical self-righteousness and dark 1950s morality of a few people in the Department for Education and Employment. Let us take the issue of school nurses handing out contraceptives. The Secretary of State is reported to have said that it would be allowed only over his dead body. I hope that it will not come to that; we really do not want blood on the floor, especially my right hon. Friend's blood. I hope that he will carry on doing good work in other fields. It is just that he needs to do some more good work in this area.
It is clear that Parliament will need to monitor closely the activities of the Department for Education and Employment to ensure that there is no backsliding. I feel that we should consider making personal, social and health education, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Mr. Hope) referred, compulsory in schools and part of the national curriculum. Bizarrely, at the moment few girls in primary schools are told anything about puberty.
There is also the difficult position of the Catholic Church. The theology of the Vatican on contraception is out of line with the practice of many Catholic worshippers in the United Kingdom. Like everyone else, I wish the Holy See a long life, but when the present Pope dies I hope that the new incumbent will do what is long overdue and moderate the theology, which after all in historical terms is relatively new, to allow young Catholics to use contraception without the guilt of sin, hypocrisy and lies. It is time that the Catholic Church woke up to the fact that for the young, sex can be fun.
I was delighted to see Geri Haliwell, formerly Ginger Spice, promoting the use of contraceptives in the Philippines in her new role as United Nations ambassador. Surely she was right when she said:
I know that other hon. Members want to speak so I shall conclude by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and the social exclusion unit on producing a wonderful report. It is a pity that it has 185 footnotes referring to 185 research documents. I have read the report in full, but I have not yet read the research documents--I hope that I soon will.
Dr. Jenny Tonge (Richmond Park):
I congratulate the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) on obtaining the debate. I looked forward to reading the social exclusion unit report, but I was instantly depressed by the Prime Minister's letter at the beginning. Yes, we do have the worst teenage pregnancy rates in Europe--90,000 each year, 8,000 of whom are under 16--but as the Prime Minister goes on he begins to sound more and more like the Vicar of St. Albion. He may disapprove of young people's sexual activities and I do not believe that it is a good idea for young people to have sex at all, but they do, frequently. We are dealing with reality. They are following the message in every magazine, film, television play, soap opera or advertisement. Renault is now advertising its cars by saying that size matters and I understand that Haagen-Dazs ice cream tastes much better licked off one's partner. I will not go on because I do not want to excite you too much, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but such things must be taken into account.
The hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) mentioned the Spice Girls. I am delighted that Geri Haliwell is now promoting contraception worldwide. However, their image of immature sexuality has been pushed at young people, particularly those under 10, for several years. They knew what they wanted, what they really, really wanted, and they pushed it on to young people. However, to do justice to them, they are trying to do something about it now.
In contrast, the hypocrisy of this country is breathtaking. We tut-tut about young people's sexual activity while, in comparison with other countries, we provide very little sex education and contraception advice. I should like to bet that some of those who are tut-tutting are rejoicing as share prices soar because of some commodity having been promoted with a sexual message. They are not worried about taking the profits, but they do not want to do anything about the consequences.
However much we might want to turn back the clocks to an imagined age of innocence where no one had sex until they were married and then only under the blankets with the lights off, we cannot do that. The genie is out of the bottle and we must equip our young people to cope.
In many ways, it is an excellent report and I congratulate the Government on the fact that, backed by wonderful tables and statistics, it spells out clearly the major reasons for teenage pregnancy. It includes low expectations, disadvantaged children, children from broken homes or care homes, and ignorance. Study after study has shown that sex education does not make young people more sexually active. In fact, the reverse is true and the report backs that view.
I have already dealt with the problem of mixed messages and the Government accept that that is a reality. They intend to deal with the ignorance and to spend a great deal of money on a campaign to warn against teenage pregnancy and parenthood and the importance of contraception. That is excellent. Local campaigns and the media are mentioned and we are told that there will be more sex education, starting in primary schools--full marks. It sounds great, but it is a little bit woolly.
Will we have advertisements for condoms? We have advertisements for everything else on television, but do we ever see an advertisement for the antidote to all this sex? Why not have a message before "Neighbours" or "EastEnders". For goodness' sake, let us have condoms on television. We are talking about not just pregnancy but sexually transmitted disease, which is another serious problem.
We have the inevitable mention of joined-up action--I hate that phrase. It talks about local joined-up action and national joined-up action. The problem is that teenagers already know about joined-up action, because that is what they are doing all the time.
The report talks about local and national support co-ordinators with an implementation unit and monitoring. It all sounds a little ominous. Where is the detail? Where are the extra teachers and school nurses? School nurses are a rare breed and their numbers have been cut horribly recently. Where are the family planning doctors--another disappearing species? I was one of them for 30 years and I have disappeared into this House. General practitioners and teachers do not have time to do this work. Parents still have the option of removing children from sex education classes.
According to the report, sex education will not be a statutory requirement. Citizenship will be statutory, so why not sex education? It is a basic activity of every human being if the species is to survive, but it is not statutory in our education system. It must be. The recommendations are not strong enough.
Teenage mothers are dealt with in great detail in the report and I thought that that section was superb. However, that is only a small proportion of the problem. We have heard no mention of the view held by many hon. Members and those outside the House that young women become pregnant to get a council flat. My hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) recently tabled a parliamentary question asking how many new housing association lettings--we could not get the council figures--out of a total of 30,000 new lettings per annum had gone to young mothers with babies. The answer was 2,000. So we are talking about a small proportion of teenagers. We all know of cases where we think that someone has got pregnant to get a flat, but it is anecdotal evidence and the figures do not support it.
Like other hon. Members I welcome the proposals for hostels. That is much better than a lonely council flat in a tower block. The Minister and I know all about tower blocks. I used to work in Hackney and Islington and I know that they are grim. However, the use of hostels must not be compulsory and I hope that the Minister will emphasise that.
I am concerned about the section on prevention. That is understandable because I spent 25 or 30 years in birth control clinics dealing with sexual health. I spent five years in the Brandon centre, which is a good youth advisory centre in Kentish Town. I was a co-founder and trustee of a similar centre called Off the Record in my borough and I know very well the Magic Roundabout in Kingston, which is mentioned in the report. They all give excellent contraception advice and counselling.
The specialist centres for young people are excellent and we need many more, but many more young people go to ordinary family planning clinics, which are anonymous and efficient, with properly trained doctors and nurses who give a rigorous service; but sadly, they have been a soft option for local authority cuts over the past 20 years and are disappearing fast.
Young people are told by their health authorities that the GP will provide the services but in my experience they do not want to go to the GP because they will see Mum's friend in the waiting room, the receptionist knows Dad or the GP might tell Mum, however much he is discouraged from doing so. Young people are happier to mix with all ages in general clinics.
"I believe that if you can't control your fertility, you can't control your life, and if you're having sex, you've got to be protected against unwanted pregnancy and infection. It's everybody's fundamental right."
23 Jun 1999 : Column 1118
Of course, given the current state of Catholic theology, no one can object to the priesthood in the Philippines criticising Geri Haliwell. However, to refer to her, one of the icons of youth, as "blasphemous" and to hint at violence by saying,
seems uncharitable and unchristian. We must remember that, whereas the Pope is an icon to the past, Geri is an icon to the future. I hope that Catholic theology on this subject will change.
"In a Muslim country she would be clobbered",
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