Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Bill — House of Commons, 2018-05-11
Topic: Social Welfare
Michael James Tomlinson-Mynors (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right, as he often is. That is why I was so delighted to add my name to his amendment It is the same with grandparents. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston) led a powerful debate in Westminster Hall just last week on the important role that grandparents play in the family. I agree with him that we should give far more credit to the possibility of grandparents having care for and access to grandchildren. That is why I was delighted to sign amendment 2, which shows the important role that grandparents do and should play in the family Let me move on briefly to one or two other amendments before I get to my main point. On amendment 23, I completely agree with the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran about the need for flexibility. That is fundamentally right. We heard that from the hon. Member for Lincoln (Karen Lee), who quite rightly said that we do not know how grief will strike any of us—we just do not know. Some people will want to go to work immediately the next day. To be—dare I say it?—a little bit stereotypical, it is probably more often the man who will want to go straight back to work, throw himself into it, try to forget what has happened and put it to the back of his mind and just get on with life. That is not always, but quite often, the case. Flexibility is key. We have talked before about the fact that these are minimum standards. We are not talking about good employers. These provisions are there to safeguard employees who are not fortunate enough to work for a good employer. I completely agree with the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran and the thrust of amendment 22 on the need for flexibility That brings me to my main point, which is on amendment 21, which I have tabled, and amendments 6, 24 and 25. It seems entirely arbitrary and faintly ridiculous that we are saying that these provisions only apply when the child is up to the age of 18. It is simply not right to say that a parent acts any differently if their child is 17, 18 or 19. My brother died aged 24, and I know that it did not affect my parents any less or any more because he was 24, rather than 17 or 18 I am incredibly proud of my brother. He used to claim that he was the first Oxford student to have been president of both the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Conservative Association since my noble Friend Lord Hague of Richmond. I think he was wrong in that, but he was very proud to claim that he did that double. Sadly, he died out in Beirut. He was on a gap year in Lebanon—he was not fighting—and was learning Arabic. There were increased tensions between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, but he died of a very mundane cause: carbon monoxide poisoning. It was such an innocent tragedy, and it just should not have happened My father had just retired the summer before, and I know that had he still been in work, he would have found it incredibly difficult to carry on and to turn up to work the next day. My mother was still working. She had the good fortune of having a brilliant employer. She was a teacher—many of my family are teachers—and her headmaster effectively gave her that term off, so she had from April to September, because there are the long summer holidays. Imagine a scenario where a parent does not have a decent employer and does not have the protection of this law, and arguably the protection of these amendments as well I maintain, as did the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran and my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay, that extending this beyond the age of 18 would not widen the scope that much. We have heard evidence that it may increase the burden fivefold. It is probably my fault, but I have not seen that evidence, and I want to know what it is based on. My instinct is greatly that the older the child, the more likely it is that the parent will be in retirement and therefore that this will not widen the scope. I ask the Minister to consider and perhaps set out in some detail the evidence why the burden would be so much greater if the definition of "child" was opened up to beyond the age of 18 The final set of amendments that I want to touch on is amendments 9 to 11, in relation to the regulations. My hon. Friend the Member for Torbay is right that the regulations laid before Parliament by the Secretary of State in due course should not be onerous in relation to notice periods. We are talking about parents who are in an incredibly difficult position, at an incredibly sensitive time. We do not want to be shutting off people who are entitled to this parental leave just because they happen to have failed to give some minor notice, because the letter has gone missing or the email was not sent. We need to be sensitive at a time of grief.