Work and Families Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, but each hon. Member has a different hour at which they want to be somewhere else. The fact that I want to be at a charity ball right now is not the point—[Interruption.] I am not used to playing Cinderella. The time that mattered most to me was 7 o’clock, just before my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove left the Chamber having explained what she was going to do. I could not, of course, take that amount of time away from the debate, so I had to telephone my four-year-old son to say goodnight. As always, he asked me what I was doing and I said that I was about to make a speech at Big Ben—as he calls this place. He asked what the speech was about and I replied that it was about mummies having more time to spend with their children. He said, ““Great, so you’ll be able to come home and read my story then.”” That makes extremely well a point that others have made. It annoys me that just because Conservative Members speak up for small businesses and analyse the economic effect of proposals such as these, some Labour Members suggest that we do not understand the needs of children and families as much as they do. We do.