Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-54)
BARONESS PROSSER
14 MARCH 2007
Q40 Miss Kirkbride: The Commission
was cautious on the question of reforming the Equal Pay Act. Could
you take the Committee through that because there is still in
broad terms men's work and women's work, is there not?
Baroness Prosser: Yes. I think
there is a general recognition that the equal pay for work of
equal value regulations are convoluted, to say the least, and
lead to tribunals and claims that can go on for years. But, as
I said earlier, it was not in our brief to make detailed legal
recommendations because the Discrimination Law Review was meeting
at the time. Hopefully we will see the results of that review
before too long because, particularly with the establishment of
the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, there is a requirement
for a single Equality Act—it is a mess at the moment and
I would like to see more employers on the bandwagon of demanding
that because it is a mess for them. They have an employee that
might be a disabled woman—which bit of legislation are they
going to look at? They have to look at all of it at the moment,
whereas if we had a more streamlined approach it would be much
more helpful all round.
Q41 Miss Kirkbride: So what would
your own view be on the Equal Pay Act and the measuring of men
and women's work to make sure that there is better parity? Or
what has traditionally been men and women's work.
Baroness Prosser: There has to
be some kind of mechanism to value work but the hurdles that you
have to get over currently in the equal value regulations with
all the assessments and goodness knows what else puts people off
and gets people very confused, and that is one of the problems
with equal pay reviews; it is all very well to say, "We have
men over there doing that and women over there doing that and
she is paid as her job has been assessed, so that must be all
right, and he is also so that must be all right." An equal
pay review is not going to get into valuing those jobs against
each other because that is just too much performance, so it will
not really, in my opinion, shed a lot more light on whether or
not there is real fairness going on. When I was with the T&G
one of the responsibilities I had was interviewing people who
wanted to become paid officials of the union and we used to travel
around the country interviewing very senior shop stewards and
conveners who wanted to work full time for the T&G and I used
to say to them, "We have had 30 years of equal pay legislation
and we still do not have equal pay. What is going on in your workplace?"—"Everyone
is paid equally in our workplace. No, no, of course we have equal
pay." Do they walk out of the gate with the same money in
their pocket? No, of course they do not. And they cannot get their
heads around the difference. So there is a lot to be done on that
front.
Q42 Chairman: So the concept of the
hypothetical comparator, is that just unworkable or unusable or
does it need to be extended so that it covers part-time legislation
and so on?
Baroness Prosser: The requirement
for the hypothetical comparator is a real problem because if you
look at the way in which contracting out has happened in local
government, for example, you have lots and lots of women contracted
out to do school meals or cleaning, whatever it might be, lots
and lots of men contracted out to do gardening and those people
cannot compare their jobs with each other because it is all men
doing gardening and it is all women doing school meals, and you
cannot use the hypothetical comparator argument. So it is a big
issue.
Q43 Chairman: So you do not have
any suggestions that you want to make to us?
Baroness Prosser: I am assuming
that the Discrimination Law Review Group has done all of this.
Q44 Chairman: Moving on to the future
work that we are planning to do, the first area we were looking
at was whether we might ask some of the companies that we all
meet in the normal course of our work as individual MPs and through
the Committee about the position of women in their firms or workplaces,
and then we thought rather than us drop a questionnaire we would
wait until you came and see if you had any ideas on what sort
of questions we should be asking them. If you were a member of
this Committee what would you ask companies about their practice
and how they would tackle these issues?
Baroness Prosser: I think one
area of interest is how do they recruit people because if you
are talking about particular areas of the sectors of the economy,
which may be predominantly female or predominantly male, what
are those companies doing to try and break down those barriers?
Do any of them offer internal adult apprenticeships to women to
enable women to change path, a bit like I was saying earlier about
women employed in the food industry who are now being given the
opportunity to train as food technicians. What sort of upskilling
arrangements do those companies have to enable the women they
currently employ to move on to bigger and better things? What
sorts of arrangements did they have for women returnees to enable
women to keep in touch while they are on maternity leave, maybe,
or maybe extended leave for caring of one sort of another? Do
they have special programmes to enable women to keep up to speed
with what is going on in that particular area of the economy,
the area of employment? I cannot think of anything else off the
top of my head.
Q45 Chairman: If you do have any
thoughts on the sorts of questions we would be asking that would
be very helpful to know and you have a chance to come back afterwards.
The other area of course we are going to be seeking oral evidence
from government departments and inevitably you start off with
DCLG, but we then have this issue about why they should be responsible
for getting everybody else to do everything and that other government
departments need to also be taking a lead. There are those with
a clear responsibility, like DfES, who have given us some thoughts
on some of the things which we should ask them, and DWP and DTI,
but all government departments do have a role in relation to that,
so we thought we might send round a questionnaire, and what again
do you think we might ask to test whether they are taking their
responsibility of giving a lead as a government public agencies?
Baroness Prosser: Given that there
are so many departments which cover so many different areas the
big broad question is what sorts of data do they keep about women?
If you take the health service, for example, where is the data
about different people in different kinds of jobs? Everybody is
talking very positively and understandably so about the increased
number of women in medicine, but how many of those women are GPs
working part-time, maybe, because that is the easiest thing to
do if you have a family? How many of those women have managed
to move up to become surgeons or consultants because my guess
would be that almost all of those women are in the GP side, and
that is a good step but it is not far enough. So what sorts of
data are they keeping to enable them to monitor how some of these
things are progressing? DCA also, for example, with solicitors,
are they keeping an eye on newly qualified women solicitors or
women barristers, how they are moving forward and what the opportunities
are there and what opportunities may be being missed?
Q46 Chairman: The other area we thought
we might pursue was government departments which have huge public
procurement responsibilities, which also ties into an inquiry
our overall Committee is doing on the manufacturing industry and
public procurement is one of the aspects of that. We did have
an interesting exchange with one of the European officials when
we were there who did not really seem to get us asking about whether
it was legal to impose conditions on people from whom you are
procuring in relation to, for example whether they were implementing
the new gender duty. Are there areas there where, from your knowledge,
we could be seeing guidance from government departments on how
we deal with public procurement?
Baroness Prosser: Absolutely.
I think it is very important and I should have mentioned it earlier,
perhaps. We held a round table on procurement as part of our evidence
taking and the Office of Government and Commerce could not get
the argument that maybe it was good for people to have some sense
of equality and equality of requirements contained within their
modus operandi, if you like, and at that meeting were representatives
from the Greater London Authority, who were doing this all the
time. They have big requirements on equalities, on training, on
health and safety for the contracts which they put out for London
Underground, for example, and other London-based organisations.
If they can do it I do not see why anybody else cannot, and there
was somebody there, an academic whose field this is, and he was
arguing that this is not a problem. The Office of Government and
Commerce were saying, "We have to fall in line with all of
this because this is what Europe requires of us," and the
opposite view was, "Nonsense, you can do it, you are just
being too tight-lipped about it all." So I think it is a
very big area, there are huge amounts of money spent and what
we always used to call contract compliance has been long forgotten,
and it is a pity.
Q47 Chairman: One of the areas of
evidence we have is from the Greater London Authority, which obviously
has a long history of in the past having wished to pursue those
issues, so we might pursue that a bit further.
Baroness Prosser: Yes.
Q48 Chairman: Just a final, maybe
broad question. Earlier on, or threaded through the evidence really,
you talked about the impact on the economy, the loss of skills
that we are losing, and obviously as a trade and industry and
economic Committee the whole issue of the relationship between
this issue and the economy and health of the economy and the waste
of skills is a very critical issue and there was a report from
economists at the IMF showing the lost growth around the world
of billions of pounds from not implementing gender equality issues.
For us that is clearly an important issue in relation to our broad
remit as a Committee, but do you have any thoughts on how we can
promote that as an issue, that this is not just a moral question,
a question of fairness, it is an issue that is a serious economic
issue. Is that something that Commission addressed at all—
Baroness Prosser: We have included
that in our report.
Q49 Chairman: And how would you think
we could pursue that?
Baroness Prosser: I think I am
right in saying that we determined, "The Commission estimates
that removing barriers to women working in occupations traditionally
done by men, and increasing women's participation in the labour
market, could be worth between £15 billion and £23 billion
or 1.3 to 2.0 % of GDP." So that is a lot of money. That
does not include such increased tax and national insurance contributions
that would come from women who were earning more, it simply is
an estimation of how much more could be contributed to the economy
if they were in levels of employment which they themselves have
determined they would have the ability to do and to cope with.
Q50 Chairman: How widely do you think
that argument is accepted and understood within government or
within the economic players, employers and so on?
Baroness Prosser: This report
was widely pored over by Number 10 and Number 11. The Chancellor
of the Exchequer invited himself to the launch, which we were
very pleased about, but, for reasons of space and all sorts of
other proprietorial niceties, he was not on the original list,
but he wanted to come along and we were, of course, very pleased
about that. He would not have wanted to come along if there was
anything contained in the report that (a) he did not agree with
or (b) he thought was going to make him a hostage to fortune.
I can only conclude from that that he is quite comfortable with
this point and I would hope that it encourages his department
to continue to recognise that upskilling and retraining of women
to enable them to participate at an appropriate level is good
for women and families and good for the economy generally.
Q51 Chairman: That is extremely helpful.
Can we ask you, you know we are going to be carrying on with the
inquiry, is there anything that you feel that you have not covered
or other issues that you feel we need to jump on and keep pushing
on?
Baroness Prosser: I do not think
so, thank you. You are going to be calling DOC, TUC and CBI and
they will be able to hopefully say a number of the things that
I have said and some of it will be a bit different and different
angles. Of course, DOC has lots of research evidence of detail
about these things, but I am grateful to you for conducting your
work and for asking me to come along because it is another measure
of keeping the show on the road.
Q52 Miss Kirkbride: I remember one
headline we saw a few weeks ago which we all remarked upon and
I wonder what your take was, which was the figures on women in
the boardroom had gone backwards and the underlying assumption
for this was that they were all going out to work for themselves
instead of starting their own companies, and I wonder if you had
any observations or further thoughts on that.
Baroness Prosser: There is a lot
of evidence which says that women are starting their own businesses
because either they are not prepared to face what some of them
see as a daily grind at that level, or they are being ignored
and not being enabled to reach the level that they see is appropriate.
I hope that business takes this as a big wake-up call to them
because it is an enormous loss of talent. I sit on the board of
Royal Mail, there is now one other woman who sits on the board
who is a non-executive director with a financial background but
everyone else is male and much as I must say I really thoroughly
enjoy the work, masochist that I must be with the problems that
Royal Mail has got, I am extremely fortunate in the sense that
the men who are there are very much of the view that as long as
you demonstrate you know what you are doing then they are really
pleased to have you along. There is not a closed atmosphere about
it. For all that, all their conversation is based around, "We
need a good chap for that", it just comes naturally and if
there is not a woman in the room to pull these blokes up sharp
sometimes, they bowl along without thinking.
Q53 Miss Kirkbride: And discussing
football all the time!
Baroness Prosser: I have to put
a stop to that.
Q54 Chairman: That is a good end,
it shows us what we are up against. Thank you very much for coming.
You have given us a lot of thought to sharpen up the questions
that we need to go on and ask of other witnesses and hopefully
it will help sharpen up the debate around your report and recommendations
to us. We are very grateful to you for giving us your time, even
though you have only had to come down the corridor, but thank
you very much indeed.
Baroness Prosser: Thank you very
much.
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