Work and Families Bill

With the leave of the House, Madam Deputy Speaker, I want to say a couple of things in response to the debate, albeit without eating into the hours available for the Adjournment debate on parish councils. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) for her contribution. Indeed, I feel like awarding her a prize—perhaps a Terry’s Chocolate Orange straight from the checkout of WH Smith—because she was very brave to say how much she supports the Bill, including the measures on paternity leave, and how much she disagrees with her right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. I also congratulate the hon. Lady on raising the important matter of the marriage bar, which affected her mother. It does the House a service to think back because the marriage bar lasted until the late 1960s. Indeed, trade unions that stemmed from the civil service such as my own, the Communication Workers Union, kept the marriage bar for their employees into the early 1970s. Kim McKinlay, a great woman trade unionist, had to keep her maiden name and pretend that she was not married to prevent her from being sacked from her position as an assistant secretary with the union. I say this to many young girls, including my daughters, so that they understand what women have had to do to reverse a situation that, as the hon. Lady said, meant that women had to lose their senior positions in the civil service simply because they got married. I thank the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) for his support for the Bill, and I shall respond to a couple of the points that he made. He talked about direct payments, and although the Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Sutcliffe), dealt with this during the debate, I noticed—I was watching it on the telly—that the hon. Gentleman said that the problem with regulatory impact assessments is that because they are produced by the Government, there is a suspicion that they are meant to reinforce their argument. We really wanted the figures to come out differently. Nothing would have pleased us more than to find that we could introduce direct payments in the way in which we and the hon. Gentleman wanted. The startling figures of £75 million ongoing costs and a £1 million saving for small businesses were correct. We must remember that we are considering setting up a completely separate duplicate structure. The payroll experts from the CBI who met representatives from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agreed that the figures made it difficult to proceed. I assure the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members that we want to help small businesses. If we cannot do that through the direct payments route because of the stark figures and statistics, we shall look for other ways.