Equality: Autumn Statement — House of Commons, 2016-12-14
Topic: Civil Rights
Kirsty Ann Blackman (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Quite a lot of percentages and stats have been mentioned. I will throw a few more in, but not that many, in the hope that we will not bamboozle everyone too much The Government have been saying that things are getting better for women and that the autumn statement must therefore be okay. They have tried pretty much to gloss over the fact that the autumn statement was written without considering the impact on the two different genders. Afterwards, they tried to fudge a response to the question that inevitably came. That is the situation, and it is not good enough—it is not good enough for the Government simply to fudge this issue The position that women are starting from is not a level playing field. More than 90% of lone parents are female. The gender pay gap in the UK is still 13.9% for full-time employees—that figure is from the Fawcett Society. Women are 60% of those earning below the living wage, by which I mean the real living wage, not the "pretendy" one. Women make up only 27% of higher rate taxpayers. We are starting from a position of disadvantage, in which there is a gender pay gap. The Government cannot simply say that they are not doing anything bad to women. They need to stand up and say that they will do good things for women. They need policies that make the situation better, rather than simply trying to stand still. As I have said, women do not start on a level playing field We should also really criticise the Government because they keep saying that the Library briefings and the evidence provided are wrong. They cannot say the evidence is wrong just because they disagree with it. That does not make it wrong; it simply means that they disagree with it. It is the same with the national living wage. The Government cannot call it a national living wage and then expect people to be able to live on it just because they have called it that. That is not how these things work. They need to make actual changes In November 2013, the Full Fact website did some work looking at Labour’s work and policies on the gender pay gap. It said that "women just tend to be in the groups more affected by benefit changes." That is absolutely the case, because of the percentage of women who are lone parents, and are therefore managing a household on their own, along with the reduction in the number of benefits being given to people with children—because of all of these changes, which disproportionately affect women. We start from a position in society of less privilege, fewer opportunities and less advantage. The Government need to do the opposite of what they are doing; they need to be making positive interventions The speech about people being able to climb up the ladder was frankly rubbish. People cannot climb up the ladder. People of my generation are having more trouble climbing up it than those of the previous generation. Things are going backwards. We are getting worse. People from less affluent backgrounds, women, those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds and disabled people have struggled more in the last few years to climb up that ladder than they did 20 or 30 years ago, when there was the possibility of that dream. The Government talk about how 26%, or something, of people on a FTSE 100 board are now female. For a start, that is nowhere 50%; moreover, of those heading up FTSE 100 boards, only five are women. That needs to be fixed.