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10.43 am
Mr. Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire): I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Bolton, West (Ms Kelly). She gave compelling evidence to the Select Committee on Social Security, and I am grateful to her for adverting to the fact that the Committee's ninth report, on parental leave, was published earlier in the week.
I congratulate the Minister for Competitiveness on the way in which he introduced the debate. The subject is very important, and it is a very important time to discuss it. He was chancing his arm slightly by using clever wordplay on "creche" and "crash". As he is the hon. Member for Hull, West and Hessle, he had better be careful not to get lumbered with the soubriquet of "Minister for hassle". In any case, he must have got the joke from his private office, because these days only civil servants can afford to run Range Rovers. However, I enjoyed his speech.
I am an Opposition Member--although, as Chairman of a Select Committee, I am above all the party political dialogue--but I commend the Government on what they have done on family friendly employment policies. In two years, they have made a great deal of progress, at least in erecting signposts showing the direction that we would all like to take. It is not always as easy to deliver on
commitments as it is to publish documents, but the Government have taken a positive stance on a range of policies.
The Government must understand that the subject has interdepartmental aspects. The Education Minister who is sitting next to the Minister for Competitiveness is welcome--
Dr. Howells:
I am from the Department of Trade and Industry.
Mr. Kirkwood:
Times change! The hon. Gentleman has made such an impact that I thought he was still an Education Minister. I beg his pardon; I withdraw that allegation.
The point remains valid that, if the implementation of family friendly policies is to be consistent and coherent, it must be done on a cross-departmental basis. It is not simply a social security matter, or an education matter, or a health matter; all the other Departments are affected.If these policies are to succeed, the Minister for Competitiveness must accept his responsibility to co-ordinate that work. I hope that he does.
I am especially keen for the Government's welfare-to-work plans to succeed. If they do, they will put more people into work, which is right and proper; but, by definition, they will increase the pressures on people in reconciling the demands of family life and the workplace. I believe that the Government have moved in the right direction and I wish them well. They still have a long way to go, and there are still big gaps in what they have proposed today.
I have a great deal of time for the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning), but I am sorry that she came to the debate straight from Conservative central office. If she had left her brief behind and used her experience and her passion for these subjects, in which she is genuinely interested, we would have had a better debate. However, I do not want to provoke her into attacking me, because I am too sensitive for that type of thing.
When we debate social policies, we should remember an important point. I am sure that, like me, other hon. Members were reminded of that point when reading reports in The Independent and The Guardian on 25 October. They said that the market research group CACI had found huge variations in economic circumstances between the north and the south. I need not tell the Minister or the hon. Member for Bolton, West that there are huge economic and social differences between different parts of the country; and that is true intra-regionally as well. Some postcode areas within regions have much more difficult circumstances than other parts of the country.
Ministers are right to deploy legislation based on the whole United Kingdom--it would be strange if it were otherwise. However, I would argue for positive discrimination in some of the ways that policies are implemented. We should focus on some of our most deprived peripheral estate-type areas. That is true of family friendly policies, too. It would be very positive if that were reflected in the implementation and configuration of some of the plans that the Government are making, and if pilots were targeted on some of those
deprived, hard-bitten, downtrodden parts of the country. Otherwise, inequality and the income divide will become worse, which is in no one's interests.
We are dealing with a long-term problem. In the single generation from my father's day to my son's day, the process of family breakdown has accelerated. Marriages have fallen by half; divorces have tripled; children born out of wedlock have quadrupled; and 70 per cent. of young couples now co-habit before marriage. In a generation, that is a fantastic revolution in the way that ordinary people live. I sometimes wonder whether policy making is keeping up with that revolution. We risk being left behind. The Government are doing a great deal to tackle that, but there is an awful lot more to do.
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough):
Should Government policies follow social trends or seek to influence them?
Mr. Kirkwood:
Discuss. The hon. Gentleman, a distinguished colleague on the Social Security Committee, pursues that point with great dedication.
Government should remain neutral in social relationships behind the family front door and recognise that people have practical problems to confront. The Lord Chancellor's Department is doing some research. Nottingham school of sociology is examining the ways in which family breakdown has arisen and whether people are now committed to personal development more than to the family.
Government should be agnostic about that and offer practical proposals that help people to reconcile the differences. It is a mistake to contrive taxation and other policies to keep families together. Conservatives say that we are not doing enough to support marriage. I remember that, in Nigel Lawson's day, it paid people enormous dividends financially to be single and stay together, because of double mortgage provision and so on. Conservatives cannot claim to have been champions of the family friendly approach when they were in government. Governments should try to provide the best practical support.
I was dismayed and astonished to find in the Child Support Agency's annual report, which was published in the past few days, that there are 52,000 absent mothers, who have left their children behind and gone to develop other families. That is just the tip of the iceberg--the women whom is the CSA is pursuing for maintenance. There is a real problem out there and we must grapple with it. Someone told me the other day that one in five members of Gingerbread are now men. Such figures are difficult to comprehend and reflect a situation that requires our urgent attention.
I shall make two or three suggestions about how we should make progress. I hope that the Minister will have a chance to study the Royal College of Nursing's "Making Time" campaign. For many years, I have been a member of the RCN parliamentary panel. I was struck by a survey which reveals that one in five nurses leave their jobs because of inflexible employer practices. The Government have some influence in the public sector and the national health service. If I were the Minister--the Minister for Health, rather than a DTI Minister--I would be interested in finding out more about the survey results. [Interruption.] I am pleased to see that the Minister for Competitiveness has a copy in his inside pocket.
Two of the key findings are worth sharing with the House. Evidence of the lack of employee friendly policies comes from the finding that almost half the respondents--47 per cent.--believed that family life had been affected, with 30 per cent. of the nurses in the sample stating that their relationship with their children had suffered. An even more worrying finding was that almost two fifths--39 per cent.--of nurses in the sample felt that, on some occasions, they had not been able to give their best to patients because of outside pressures. That is worrying. If the DTI can work with the NHS, the trusts and the unions to discuss the findings, that would be extremely helpful.
The national child care strategy is positive, but it has three gaps, which the Government should consider carefully. First, I understand that almost two thirds of mothers return to work at the end of their statutory maternity leave. I welcome the Government's steps to rationalise maternity leave, but if two thirds of working mothers go back to work after maternity leave, and the child care strategy begins to take effect only when the child reaches the age of three, there is a huge potential gap in the child care provided for the under-threes. That is reflected in nursery provision. We need more playgroups and better provision.
Secondly, I am disappointed that students cannot take advantage of the child care tax credit. The Social Security Committee has been considering tax credits, and we warmly welcomed the massive steps forward that the Government have taken. However, many colleges do not provide nearly enough creche facilities--that is a separate point--so I hope that the Government will find some way to allow student couples with young families to take advantage of the tax credit provision.
Thirdly, the national child care strategy does not deal appropriately with shift working. Only about 10 per cent. of working families adopt a normal nine-to-five 40-hour-a-week work pattern. Part-time work and shift working are patterns that we ignore at our peril. Much more could be done.
We need more trained child care staff, better public transport so that people can take the children to school and get to work, and better opening times. I know that Government consultation documents have focused on public sector opening hours. The CSA offices, for example, are now accessible by telephone until later in the evening. That is valuable.
I commend the Social Security Committee's ninth report, on parental leave. I was initially a sceptic. The hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Pond) persuaded the Committee that the subject was important, and I thought that we could deal with it in a day and produce a short report. However, once we began, we could have spent at least six months on the subject. The evidence, including that given by the hon. Member for Bolton, West, was compelling and of high quality. I am a convert, or even a zealot on the positive impact of parental leave.
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