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Mr. Nigel Waterson (Eastbourne): Does the hon. Lady recall that, earlier in the week, she and I attended a meeting with Age Concern and the all-party group for older people, in which Lady Greengross was a speaker, as was the hon. Lady? Does she recall the tangible disappointment of Lady Greengross and other people from Age Concern at the Government's change of tack on this issue? Can she confirm that?
Ms Perham: Well, Lady Greengross has made her views clear. This week she has been interviewed perhaps as much as I have, so her opinion has been made known.
More than 100 hon. Members have signed early-day motion 628, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, South (Mr. O'Hara), which welcomes Age Concern's age discrimination week and calls on the Government to respond with legislation, in the 1998-99 parliamentary Session, to ban age discrimination in the way that existing legislation outlaws race, sex and disability discrimination, tying in with the 1999 United Nations year for older persons.
I hope that the House will show its commitment to ending age discrimination by giving this limited Bill an unopposed Second Reading. Further to the intervention made by the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson), about 2,000 people have contacted Age Concern with their stories of age discrimination.
Mrs. Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham):
I start by thanking you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for calling me early in the debate and by giving my unreserved apologies
I congratulate the hon. Member for Ilford, North (Ms Perham) not only on presenting the Bill, but on her ingenuity in including her parents in the debate. They will be rightly proud of her, and I am delighted that she found that avenue.
This has an element of deja vu because, on 9 February 1996, I was the Minister when the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) presented a similar Bill. On that morning, we had a first-class debate and agreed to differ in the end. It was a good-humoured debate which reflected the great concern in the House for this issue. I am delighted to see the hon. Gentleman in his place, and that the hon. Lady has put the issue at the top of the agenda once again. No matter what our differences are on the route, our aims are the same.
I add my voice to that of the hon. Lady in congratulating Age Concern, which has put agism on the map this week. I am sure that no one in the Chamber has not seen the series of advertisements by Age Concern. I see from the nodding heads and smiles that they have had an impact. They certainly had an impact on my husband, who said that he thought the model looked rather more attractive fully dressed. I hope that we also pay attention to those later on in years who are doing things to prove that older people are not past their sell-by date. The one example that comes to mind is the astronaut John Glenn, who is about to return to his career in space many years after his first famous trip.
It is important that this debate receives wide coverage, as that would help me in my argument that we should use education and persuasion and not legislation. Using legislation, in my view, is using a hammer to crack a nut. While we all agree on the aims, we will differ on the ways in which they can be achieved. My sympathies lie not only with the hon. Members for Ilford, North and for Walsall, North, but with the 150 Labour Members who appended their names to the early-day motion. They fully expected a new Labour Government to honour their pledges.
In 1996, the shadow employment Minister at the time, the hon. Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney)--now the Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry--made an unambiguous pledge. He said:
Mr. Robin Corbett (Birmingham, Erdington):
I am sure that it was a slip of the tongue when the hon. Lady said that the Labour Government had broken their
Mrs. Gillan:
That is a generous interpretation of the Government's actions. The comment made on the Floor of the House was unambiguous. The Minister is not rising to say that legislation is imminent. Indeed, he has let it be known that legislation is not favoured by his Department at this time.
It is disappointing that hon. Members and the wider audience outside the House have been duped. The right hon. Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) also supported legislation at the time. What have the Government done so far? Precious little. They have abandoned the older workers advisory group, which regularly advised me when I was a Minister responsible for such matters. Sally Greengross, who was mentioned earlier, was a member of that group. I believe that she has had the privilege of meeting the Minister on this subject only once since his appointment. He has abandoned a group on whose advice he could have drawn.
The Government have announced that a code of practice will be developed, but that is not substantially different from my own campaign, which was built on the excellent work of my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald(Miss Widdecombe).
Despite the criticism of the hon. Member for Ilford, North, our campaign, with the limited funds that we had to spend on it, caused people to think about age discrimination. We had a series of roadshows. Such importance did I attach to the matter that I went out to launch those roadshows throughout the country.
We had widely circulated booklets, "Too old--who says?", which contained advice to older workers, "Getting on", which was advice to employers, and "Age Works", which was targeted at recruitment agencies. While we were researching advertisements and the age limits found in them, we discovered that out of, say, 22 newspaper advertisements that carried an age limit, 17 would have been placed by recruitment agencies. It was obvious that we had to get to the middlemen to stop such discrimination.
We had seminars with the Carnegie third age programme, the Industrial Society and the Policy Studies Institute. We even produced a video. The expenditure was real and the intentions were good. We have not seen such expenditure or activity from the Minister, who is in his place and is listening.
It might be apposite for me to put on record my thanks to all the officials and organisations that assisted me in my time as Minister and helped to make the campaign a success and to move the matter forward.
I am totally opposed to age discrimination. It is particularly shortsighted if employers practise it. The benefits to business of employing older people are undeniable--better service, lower staff turnover, experienced personnel and increased customer satisfaction. Some organisations, such as B and Q, make a virtue of employing older workers.
There is a phenomenon known as corporate memory loss. If a business does not retain its older workers, it may lose the experience and knowledge of the business that
they have accumulated over many years. In Japan, the culture is quite the reverse. Hon. Members may know that when one does business in Japan, there will be a senior, much older man sitting in the meeting room. He will often close his eyes and appear not to be listening--indeed, he is called the sleeper. He is the senior man in the organisation, who has many years of experience. Whether a company gets the contract depends on his assessment of its representatives at the meeting. Many organisations waste their older workers, and I am glad that corporate memory loss is at last on the agenda.
At a time when businesses face increasing Government burdens in the form of taxes, regulation and the social chapter, I believe that the Bill will add yet another layer of bureaucracy. There is little international evidence that such legislation makes a real difference. There has been legislation covering this area in France since 1986, under the code de travail. However, in 1994, when we examined advertisements in Le Monde, 30 per cent. of them stated maximum age preferences--people were openly flouting the law.
The Minister, who does not want legislation, cannot be convinced that much action is necessary in this area. In the footnotes to his press release on the code of practice, he says that employment between the ages of 50 and retirement has risen by 1.9 per cent., versus 1.6 per cent. for the working age population in the past year. At least the Minister acknowledges that there has been some improvement in the position of the over-50s, but I am afraid that he adds weight to the argument that the hon. Lady's Bill should go no further.
"The Labour party's position is quite clear. This Conservative Government may not accept my hon. Friend's Bill, but an incoming Labour Government will introduce comprehensive legislation to make age discrimination in employment illegal."--[Official Report, 9 February 1996; Vol. 271, c. 618.]
Nothing could be clearer than that quote from the hon. Gentleman, but, nine months after coming to power, the Labour Government have broken their promise. That will be disappointing not just to hon. Members, but to members of Age Concern and the other organisations that have worked so hard on both the Bills that have been presented to the House in the past two years.
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