Baby Leave for Members of Parliament — House of Commons, 2018-02-01
Topic: Civil Rights
Darren Paul Jones (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you. I say that about my wife not least because during the snap election, when we were two months pregnant, I made it clear that I stood no chance of winning and that I would be able to apply for shared parental leave in my previous job as a lawyer. To make things worse, having actually won the election when I said that I was not going to—I am honoured to be here, of course—the local BBC news team had noticed a slight bump and announced our pregnancy to 1.3 million people in the region without checking first. When we received all these text messages saying, "Congratulations!", we thought that they were about the election, but we suddenly realised that they were about Ophelia. We had not yet had the three-month scan, so we wondered how on earth everybody knew. My wife therefore had a bit of a bumpy road on the way to becoming a mum involved with a parliamentarian My wife is also my constituent, and she has said that it is okay for me to share her experiences over the past year, which have been quite distressing. It has been quite difficult for me to support her. She was the director of public policy at an energy company called Open Energi, which receives Government funding, and doing very well in that senior role. After the announcement of her pregnancy, she was told that her role was no longer needed and that she was being made redundant. Having worked so hard to achieve what she had, that was very distressing for her, but she is a formidable woman, so she decided to take her employer to a tribunal As a litigant in person, while pregnant, she cross-examined her former employers in front of a judge, who said that since the Supreme Court had decided that fees were illegal for employment tribunals, his time was increasingly being taken up by "these type" of cases. Can Members imagine the environment and the atmosphere? As one of only two women among 10 people in the tribunal room—there is no gender balance in employment tribunal hearings or sexual discrimination cases—the experience was clearly distressing, and I have now taken up that matter with the president of the employment tribunals. My wife sadly lost that case, so perhaps we need a debate about the application of burden of proof rules in this country, because it is down to women to establish a burden of proof that discrimination could have taken place, but employers can bring forward witnesses and documents to show that it did not take place—at the time, it was said that documents did not exist—and that makes it difficult for women to bring such claims As a father and a husband, it is perfectly sensible for me to want to lean in. It is normal for dads to want to lean in. I want my wife to achieve her aspirations as much as possible, and we want to give our children the best upbringing together. I support the motion not just because Parliament should be in line with what is happening in the rest of the country, but because it gives us the opportunity to set the tone for what we expect in a modern Britain. We should look at reforms for companies that receive Government money and at the judiciary—perhaps at even having a gender balance—and then we could achieve change in the wider economy, too. I commend the motion to the House and look forward to supporting in any way that I can.