My Lords, I support the amendments in the names of my noble friends Lady Lister and Lady Drake. We could call this set of amendments “Keeping up with progressive forces” or “Ensuring UK women and families do not begin to lose out beyond the point of our exiting the EU”. My noble friend Lady Lister wants the Government closely to monitor, report on and replicate future EU developments in the area of family-friendly employment rights, gender equality and work/life balance for parents and carers, as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, has just said.
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My noble friend Lady Drake calls for no regulations to be made under Clauses 7, 8 or 9 if such regulations weaken rights relating to maternity, paternity, adoption, parental rights or the rights of pregnant or breastfeeding women. Why are so many women’s groups and family and equality bodies concerned? Because for all the emollient assurances from the Government that such rights are safe in their hands, many of us are not convinced. Indeed, as my noble friend Lady Drake pointed out at Second Reading, the Prime Minister herself failed to rule out in December the scrapping of the working time directive, the agency workers directive and the pregnant workers directive. Perhaps the Minister can reassure us tonight that such directives will not be scrapped, alongside the right to care for an ill child, maternity rights and part-time workers’ rights.
My particular support for these amendments stems from the fact that it was my pride many years ago, as chair of the European Parliament’s Women’s Committee, to help broker into law the maternity leave directive, which has had an enormously positive effect on the women of this country in the intervening years. That law was brought in through very difficult negotiations with the UK Government of the day, who were not at all enthusiastic about it. So when
people say, “How can you begin to think that our laws might regress?”, I am the living, old proof that we had to work really hard to get where we are now from a very low base.
Back then, it was felt that family employment policy could go in only one direction—in favour of progress. Today, it feels as if there are hands itching to turn the clock back on the progress of those rights. There are those in the noble Lord’s party—not the Minister, I am sure—who regard such rights as a drag on profits and bonuses in the workplace and in the boardroom. One concession by the Government, made during the Bill’s Commons passage, is now in Schedule 7, paragraph 22. It tells us that before a statutory instrument is laid containing regulations under section 7, 8 or 9,
“the relevant Minister must make a statement—(a) as to whether the instrument or draft amends, repeals or revokes any provision of equalities legislation, and (b) if it does, explaining the effect of each such amendment, repeal or revocation”.
While I congratulate those who succeeded in securing this small brake on government as part of the Bill, I ask the Minister, does knowing the Government’s reasoning on the possible removal of rights make that removal any less painful for its recipients? In a recent parliamentary Question I suggested to the Government that British women would be better off, post Brexit, if we aligned ourselves as closely as possible with continuing EU legislation such as the directive on work/life balance for parents and carers. The Minister replied—I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Henley, in his place—that the Government would take note of what the EU does in the future but that the whole point of Brexit was that we could make our own decisions from now on. That is exactly what many of us are extremely concerned about.