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Baroness Gale: I thank my noble friend Lady Gould for bringing this very important debate before us today. When the Labour Government were elected in 1997 it gave Wales the opportunity to have devolution. Devolution not only enabled us to bring decision-making closer to the people of Wales, it also gave us the opportunity to move away from the male-dominated, traditional image of Wales. That was achieved by the large number of women elected in the first elections to the Assembly.
The Labour Party took full advantage of that opportunity and ensured it fielded an equal number of male and female candidates in 1999. At the elections of 2003, Wales won the distinction of having the only legislature in the world where 50 per cent of its elected members are women, and having more women in the Cabinet than men. I know that I have said that before to your Lordships' House, and I am sure that I will say it again, and again. I am sure that Members of the Committee will understand that there is a feeling of euphoria in Wales this week. Having this debate and speaking about Wales adds to that feeling.
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I have mentioned the Welsh Assembly and all the women that we have there, but, on looking at Westminster, we do not have many women. However, we have some very important women from Wales in the House of Commons; for example, Ann Clwyd, the Member of Parliament for Cynon Valley, who has done such great work in Iraq on behalf of the Prime Minister. Other women MPs in Wales include Lady Megan Lloyd George who was the first women to be elected, in 1929, for the Liberal Party. Later, she became a Labour MP, so we can both claim our rights to Lady Megan Lloyd George. In 1950, Eirene White was elected MP for East Flint. She later became Baroness White of Rhymney. She was and still is the only woman to be appointed as a Minister in the Welsh Office. Eirene White and Dorothy Rees, who was elected as Member of Parliament for Barry, became the joint second woman MPs in Wales in 1950. We also have Glenys Kinnock who serves Wales well in the European Parliament and has achieved so much in the international arena. So we are very proud of these Welsh women politicians.
[The Sitting was suspended for a Division in the House from 5.45 to 5.56 p.m.]
Baroness Gale: I finished by mentioning how proud we are of Glenys Kinnock at the European Parliament. But we have women achieving in other fields. In sport, we are very proud of Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson who won two gold medals at the Olympics in Athens, bringing her tally of Olympic medals to 16, including 11 gold. Today, she is at Buckingham Palace receiving her honour.
Have Members of the Committee ever heard of the Rhondda Rebels? No, it is not me. It is a very successful women's basketball team which is based in the Rhondda. We even have a Wales women's rugby team, which one day I am certain will win the grand slam and the Six Nations Championship, as did its male colleagues so successfully last Saturday in the Millennium Stadium.
Other Welsh women bringing fame to Wales include singers Dame Shirley Bassey, Charlotte Church, Kathryn Jenkins, Mary Hopkins, Petula Clark and Dorothy Squires—I could mention a lot more; actresses Catherine Zeta Jones and Sian Phillips; fashion designers Laura Ashley and Mary Quant; and the artist Gwen John. Those are only a few, but I will not go on to mention any more. You get the idea.
The trade unions in Wales have traditionally been dominated by men, but changes are being made. Felicity Williams is the first woman to be appointed as the general secretary of the Wales TUC. Catherine Speight has recently been appointed as the Welsh regional secretary of the manufacturing union, Amicus—the first woman to hold such a post. Barbara Wilding is the first woman to be appointed chief constable of South Wales Police.
I could go on and on about women in Wales, and you may begin to believe that everything is okay in Wales and that women are well on the way to achieving equality. Sadly, that is not the case. On the political scene there has only ever been seven women MPs in
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Wales. I hope that that will change at the next general election as several women have been selected to fight seats which have good Labour majorities. We may even see women from other parties become MPs in Wales. I could say, "I hope so", but I am not sure whether I should say that. That, of course, depends on the electorate.
In local government in Wales, only 23 per cent of councillors are women and only 14 per cent are council leaders. In schools, 73 per cent of teachers are women, yet only 17 per cent are secondary school head teachers. At university level, there are no women vice-chancellors and there are no women chairs of police authorities.
Recently, the Equal Opportunities Commission in Wales, together with the Wales Women's National Coalition, jointly produced a document, Who Runs Wales? It makes the point that there are now more women at work than ever before. Nearly, two-thirds of women with children now work. Thirty years ago, it was less than half. Women are having children later in life and fathers are spending more time with their children. More people are combining paid work with caring responsibilities. So although women's lives are changing and it is almost 30 years since the Sex Discrimination Act was passed, there has not been much change in who the people at the top are—men.
"In many places women are effectively kept out of the rooms where decisions are made, unless minutes need to be taken or tea needs to be poured . . . and if its difficult for women, its even more difficult for black and ethnic minority women, as evident from a quick look around our overwhelmingly white councils, businesses and public bodies. Discrimination on many fronts, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion and race, has a double impact on women already struggling to make it to the top, and needs to be tackled".
It has to be acknowledged that in business, and in political and public life, Wales is unrepresentative of society. That cannot be good for anyone in Wales as there are so many women who could make a valuable contribution to life in Wales. But I am pleased to say that the Labour Government have done much to bring about a better society for all. They introduced the political parties' candidate legislation which allows political parties to have all-women shortlists. The Labour Party has taken full advantage of the legislation, which is working well for this round of candidate selection. The proposed equality and human rights commission will do much to ensure that all people will be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.
The national minimum wage has proved to be a great help to women workers. One million women in the UK are now better paid. That is another measure of how concerned the Government are to address the problem of women achieving equal pay.
The Women and Work Commission, chaired by my noble friend Lady Prosser, is looking at how to achieve equal pay for women. Its interim document, which has recently been published, makes really interesting reading. I look forward to the final report, which will be out in the autumn.
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Free bus travel for all over 60 has been available in Wales for some time, and I am pleased that England is now catching up with us. This is a great help to women, as not all women have access to a car. The policies that the Government have implemented to support the family have helped women very much. Following the Budget last week, more than 123,000 working families in Wales will benefit from the increase in the child element of the tax credit. All these measures will help women.
I know that the clock is giving an accurate account of how many minutes I have been speaking.
Baroness Crawley: Perhaps my noble friend will draw her remarks to a conclusion.
Baroness Gale: That is what I thought I would do.
Although we have not yet achieved equality for all, we are making progress, albeit too slowly for most of us. It takes a long time to change a culture, to change people's attitudes to all forms of discrimination, but I believe that the Labour Government's policy of support in legislation will go a long way towards helping us achieve that goal.
6.3 p.m.
Baroness Thomas of Walliswood: I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, for introducing this short but important debate. Her comprehensive introduction to the debate was a model of its kind, and I know that we all respect her immense experience in this field. It does us all good to be reminded of the promises made to women world-wide 10 years ago. I shall talk a little about women in the third world and then come back to our own country.
I shared the relief of many that the United States did not carry out its threat not to reaffirm its commitment to Beijing. Unfortunately, the ability of women to control their own fertility is still a problem for the present Administration. And yet that ability is an essential prerequisite for improving the health of mother and child—two of the specific objectives of Beijing, particularly in the developing world.
As a member of the All-Party Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, I am very happy to congratulate DfID on its efforts to secure continuing recognition of the importance of this subject at the United Nations for its forthcoming programme. In my view, there should be no quarrel between reproductive health and the fight against AIDS, especially now that the face of AIDS is a woman, particularly in Africa. I very much welcome the work that is being done—again, with the support of Her Majesty's Government—to try to ensure that these two essential programmes are delivered in a collaborative way, making the best possible use of scarce financial and manpower resources.
Another pair of objectives which seem to me to go hand in hand are those of cutting poverty by 50 per cent by 2015 and universal access to education. I have long been convinced that if you educate the woman, you educate the family, a point vividly made by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen. Even the
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poorest mother, if she has received some education, will strive to ensure that her children also get to school. She may be able to earn a small salary or to contribute to the unpaid collaborative work that does so much to provide improved sanitation or better water supplies in the poorest parts of the world.
These small changes are the seed corn of economic development, and such development is essential if poverty is to be reduced. In the past few days a lot of concern has been expressed about the United States' nomination for the World Bank. I wonder whether the Minister is briefed to tell us what attitude the Government take to that proposed appointment.
Of course, poverty is a contributory factor to so many of the conflicts in the world today—conflicts which face women with gender-specific problems such as rape, unwanted pregnancies, stigmatisation and the eventual duty of looking after orphaned family members. Conflict resolution and peace building are also areas where women should play their full part.
Before I turn to the duties of the Government in the UK and of the European Union in responding to the challenge of Beijing, I would like to ask the Minister whether she feels that the donor nations are paying sufficient attention to problems caused within developing countries by a lack of administrative capacity to cope with the delivery of donor-funded programmes.
Secondly, I want to raise my concern at the slow progress of the United Kingdom in reaching the 0.7 per cent of GDP target for international aid. After all the target was set in 1975 and the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands achieved it some time ago. I welcome the Government's setting of a date—2013—for the UK to achieve that target. Can the Minister give us any indication of the stages by which this ambition will be achieved? Indeed, could it not be achieved by 2011, as the Liberal Democrats believe?
Coming closer to home, while I found it reassuring that the new Afghan constitution has established a 25 per cent quota for women in the new Parliament, I am less pleased that Afghanistan, if all goes to plan, will have a higher percentage of women in Parliament than the UK, where women make up 18 per cent of MPs and 22 per cent of your Lordships' House.
The poor showing of British women in this respect does not indicate a lack of interest on the part of women in political issues. That has been demonstrated pretty effectively recently. And research shows that women are just as interested as men in the issues which lie behind politics. The problem seems to be that only one of the political parties has really managed to crack the problem of persuading selection committees to select women candidates. I congratulate it on its persistence in that effort.
In general, there is evidence of women's social, economic and academic progress on quite an impressive scale in this country, certainly during my lifetime. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, made an excellent speech on the health gains of women under the NHS. Yet data drawn from my press clippings of
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the 12 days leading up to 20 February this year—a group that I picked at random—demonstrate that we have no reason for complacency.
Perhaps the difficulties women face in pursuing a career in architecture or surgery—such as bullying, sexist behaviour and extremely demanding working practices—might seem merely the problems of wealth. But recent successful cases against North Cumbria Acute NHS Trust, in which women were awarded sums from £35,000 to £200,000 as compensation for years of unequal pay, are another thing altogether. After all, the public sector is supposed to be the flag-bearer of equal pay.
The fact that women working full-time earn around 82 per cent of the equivalent men's salary is in itself not satisfactory after 30 years of equal pay legislation. But if one considers the fact that part-time women workers earn less than 60 per cent of the male equivalent, the situation becomes even more unsatisfactory.
According to the EOC it is the failure, so far, of employers to adapt their employment policies in the light of new flexible working rights introduced by the Government—and I congratulate them on that as well—which results in women being unable to return to their former employment after childbirth and tends to condemn them to poorly paid, local, part-time work.
Of course, we already know that low pay and interrupted contributions may well result in poverty in old age. Currently, about 1.3 million women pensioners live below the poverty line. Again, I wonder whether the Government are considering the radical option of the citizen's pension proposed by the Liberal Democrats, at least for pensioners over the age of 75.
If you are a woman from the black or ethnic minority communities, your problems are magnified. Two-fifths of Asian and black women live in poverty, twice the rate for white women. Only 8 per cent of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women have an occupational pension. It is this and similar data which have prompted the authors of another recent report to urge the new commission for equality and human rights to tackle multiple discrimination as a priority. I very much hope that it will do just that.
We have already heard a dramatic and excellent speech about the trafficking of women into this country from the Far East and from some of the new EU member states. It is a continuing scandal. I welcome the decision to put Harriet Harman on the case with a remit to galvanise the EU into a united attack on this appalling trade. But will this result in a UK decision to ratify the EU convention on trafficking? Is any consideration being given to penalties for the men who use these virtual sex slaves?
Clearly there is no comparison between the problems faced by women in very poor countries—problems, indeed, of life and death—and those that we face here, but we cannot afford to ignore the lessons of Beijing for our own country. As I have said of women in the developing world, their work is an important contribution to the growth of the economy. The same is true here.
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In an interesting speech recently about women and engineering, the Princess Royal made the point that there is no scientific way to predict scientific aptitude from the gender of the pupil. She concluded that by helping women to progress in the sciences there is a good chance of improving the quality of scientific research. I agree—and I am willing to hazard a guess that the same thing could be said for most other areas of employment as well.
We need to continue to put our own house in order. We need women to be full partners in the whole of our national life, not only for fairness but because here, as in the developing world, women can make a valuable contribution to that life. We ignore that truth at our peril.
6.13 p.m.
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