My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, and I support the other important amendments in this group tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and my noble friend Lord Collins of Highbury.
I have checked with the official statistical offices for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and there are roughly 900,000 conceptions each year. That is some 900,000 women on the verge of motherhood and not necessarily for the first time. I am aware of course that not all will go to full term, but the sheer scale of demand for a serious, advanced, 21st-century maternity and parental rights provision is referenced in such a figure.
What are the Government saying to this vast community of women and parents? “We will abolish the EU rules that underpin your protection and think of something for you all later”—is that it? We should be improving the maternity provision that we already have, not putting an enormous question mark next to it. While statutory maternity pay, amounting to some 47% of the national living wage, is increasing from April 2023, roughly in line with inflation, it is still falling well below what many can realistically live on. New parents often face debt and have to return to work earlier than planned.
The cost of living survey carried out by Maternity Action last year found that 51% of respondents had either relied on credit cards or borrowed money while on maternity leave just to get through. Several campaigning organisations, including the Young Women’s Trust, Gingerbread, Pregnant Then Screwed, Working Families, the Women’s Budget Group, and of course the TUC, all believe that the Bill poses a significant threat to British women’s rights at work, and I share that belief, as do many in this Committee today.
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Any Bill that proposes to sweep away thousands of pieces of legislation and upend decades’ worth of case law poses a threat to women accessing protection from discrimination in the workplace. Michael Ford KC, in advising the TUC, has said:
“It is difficult to overstate the significance of EU law in protecting against sex discrimination.”
The Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999—the subject of Amendment 1, which I have put my name to—are among the rights that could be lost or become more difficult to access due to legal uncertainty if the Bill goes through unamended. These regs include not only the right to take maternity and parental leave but current protections against redundancy while on maternity, adoption and parental leave. It also includes the right to return to the same job after maternity and parental leave, where that is “reasonably practicable”.
Other workplace rights that have a special reference to women and could be at risk include the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which implement the health and safety requirements of the pregnant workers directive 92/85/EEC into UK Law. I spoke at Second Reading about my personal and active involvement in the passage of that directive in 1992 while I was chair of the European Parliament’s women’s rights committee. There are also the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 and the Fixed-term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002, as well as agency workers’ rights. As we know, so many more women than men work part-time in insecure work and on fixed-term contracts that losing or diluting these laws will surely increase discrimination against women.
Finally, there is the threat to collective consultation with workers’ representatives where redundancies are proposed. There is currently a spike in redundancies for pregnant women and new mothers as a result of the economic state of the country, and also the potential loss of “direct effect”, which would make it harder to bring an equal pay claim or a discrimination claim.
I ask the Minister, in the light of such uncertainty produced by the Bill for so many women, why will the Government not think again and set aside the Bill, or at the very least, remove the cloud hanging over maternity and parental rights?