| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Gould for securing this debate today and congratulate her on it. She finished her inspiring speech by referring to Emmeline Pankhurst. Not long ago, many of us—including, we were
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1373
delighted to see, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris—were clustered rather damply under umbrellas in the teeming rain around Emmeline Pankhurst's statue. Subsequently, in a Question on Women's Day, I think the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, was delighted that Emmeline Pankhurst had finished her life as a Tory Party candidate. What she did not share with the House is exactly why Pankhurst made the move she did: she was ardently opposed to birth control, because she wanted purity for men rather than more promiscuity for women. Why that took her into the Tory Party, however, escapes me.
To return more obviously to the topic of today, women have three-quarters of the earnings, half the income and about a quarter of the pensions of men. Women's working lives and pension prospects are riddled with risk and uncertainty. I want to narrate one such life. A person partners, marries, has children, separates, divorces, is a lone parent, re-partners, and then in older age has a frail and increasingly elderly parent. That is not an untypical life nowadays.
If the owner of that life was Joe, throughout all those moves he would have stayed in work full-time and built his pension prospects. Whatever was happening in his private life would have had little or no effect on his public life, except perhaps to make him miserable. Having children, he would none the less continue to save for his pension. On divorce, he would probably not have been caring for the children. Becoming a carer for an elderly parent, he would still have remained in full-time work, as the stats show. At any point at which you examine Joe's life, as a series of snapshots at 27, 37 and 47, you could have predicted—subject to his not having a calamity—his pay and his pension.
Instead, let us say that that life belonged to Joanne. Apart from marrying, every other of those interventions in her life would have affected her work and her pension. If she had children, she would have been only marginally connected to the labour market, a point I shall return to. If she divorced and then became a lone parent, she would take an earnings hit and a pension hit. If she went on to care for an elderly relative, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, mentioned, her earnings and pension would again be hit. Every one of those interventions would have affected her capacity to support herself, as well as to go into retirement with a decent income.
In other words, where Joe's life can be seen as a series of snapshots, and his prospects change barely at all over time—subject to him not being involved in a motorbike crash, or whatever—Joanne's prospects are riddled with uncertainty. Unlike Joe, she could not have projected at 27, 37 or 47 what the next 10, 20 or 30 years would bring; whether she would marry, divorce, have children or be a carer; or what her state pension would be, and therefore whether it was worth saving for a second pension on top. The woman whose life is most riddled with risk and uncertainty is also probably the person with least knowledge and least leverage to do anything about it. As a result, for making decent choices all the way down the line to
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1374
combine her work with her caring life—choices that she wants to make, and that society wants her to make—society then punishes her for insisting she takes an earnings hit by doing part-time work and a pension hit. She gets punished for doing what is right.
The first step is her earnings hit. Many here today have mentioned the shocking fact, first produced by the EOC in its report, Part Time Is No Crime - So Why The Penalty?, and reproduced in the Prosser report, that women who go into part-time work take a 40 per cent earnings cut. What is more, 15 years later, if they go back into full-time work, they have still not recovered from that part-time earnings hit, sometimes because they have been clustered in the low-paid jobs in the five "c"s: catering, cleaning, clerical, caring or cashiering. That part-time work is a positive choice, but it limits the jobs they can do. It almost certainly means that they perform under their skills level, and they usually work close to home to combine it with childcare. As a result 5 million women work part-time, 2 million of whom work below the lower earnings limit, which would build up their stamps for their pension. By making what they and we think is a decent and compassionate choice, juggling their work and life by going part-time, their earnings and pension are hit.
While still caring for dependent children, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, said, the woman may also be caring for her parents as well. There are now more people living over 80 than under five. A quarter of all women today will live to 93. By 2030, the average life expectancy of a woman reaching 65 is likely to be 90. Four generations may therefore pivot around her health, her care and her work: her own children, her own generation, her parents entering retirement and elderly grandparents entering their 90s. In consequence, she will not only have taken an earnings hit through part-time work with a 40 per cent penalty all her working life, she will take a pensions hit as well, because pensions have been designed by men in full-time work for other men in full-time work.
As my noble friends have said, in the Beveridge system, the man was expected to work at his job for 40 years or so, while the woman was expected to work at her marriage for the same amount of time and consequently could derive her income and then her pension through him. Now half of all marriages end in divorce, and by 2030 half of all older women between 45 and 65 will not be married. They may be single, cohabiting, divorced or widowed, but they will not be married and therefore not getting the spouse's pension, and their caring responsibilities will have prevented them from earning a pension in their own right.
That combination of fluid family forms, which have removed her right to a spouse's pension—the "halfway emancipation" that my noble friend Lord Giddens talked about—the flexible labour markets, which have corralled her into low-paid part-time work, and increased longevity, which means she is taking on more and more caring responsibilities at the very point where government and society urge her to come back into the labour market full-time to build up a pension, mean that she cannot have it all, and she certainly
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1375
cannot do it all. What she will almost certainly do is ensure that she builds up poverty for her old age in retirement because she does what we as a society want her to do, which is to put her family first.
Joe, at 27, 37 and 47, knew what his pension prospects were likely to be. Joanne could not possibly have known what her life narrative was going to be, or what her attachment to the labour market, her caring responsibilities or her pension would be. I believe that we have come a long way, not just since 1918 but since 1997. I am proud of the legacy of our first Labour Government, who made work pay for women by introducing the minimum wage—two-thirds of whose beneficiaries were women—and by introducing tax credits, which ensured that a lone parent on the minimum wage of £5 an hour took home £10 an hour as income. An unskilled lone parent therefore got paid the same as a semi-skilled or skilled male. Our first Labour Government made work pay. Our second Labour Government made work for women increasingly possible not just through rights to ask for part-time work and maternity pay but through extended child care.
What will be the legacy for women of our third Labour Government? I want it to be a universal basic state pension in women's own right, which honours, respects and accounts for their unwaged work alongside their waged work. That means not cherry-picking from Turner and doing the bits that benefit men, but introducing the whole Turner package, which benefits women as well and, if necessary, bringing on the Turner proposals for a universal basic state pension faster even than Turner intended. We do not need more tweaks and shopping lists, or more means-testing; we should go for the Turner proposals, which cost the same as the tweaks by 2030, and which will ensure that women like Joanne can predict the pension that they will get in retirement and will have the confidence to build and save for a second pension in the mean time. As a result, we as a society will not ask the Joannes of this world to make choices where, if it is family first, that means herself last.
I hope that my noble friend will say that she, too, supports the Turner proposals for women, so that the legacy of this third Labour Government will be to transform women's prospects in old age.
1.02 pm
Baroness Massey of Darwen: My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, has with great passion and panache introduced this annual debate on women, and that others following her have been equally passionate. I look forward to my noble friend the Leader of the House giving her vigorous sisterly response.
So much has been said already about the progress of women and issues affecting women that I thought that I would try a different angle. I shall talk about some of the qualities in women, which, I think, have contributed to their progress. I thought of having a brainstorm about those qualities, but I am sure that the rules of the House do not allow such approaches—
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1376
far too frivolous. I have therefore selected some qualities, and I hope that noble Lords will agree with them. I shall illustrate those qualities by reference to a particular woman I greatly admire, who, despite a hard life full of tribulation, succeeded in becoming one of the finest poets of all time—Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet.
Some of the qualities that I shall list have been demonstrated in the examples of progress given today. Let me suggest that women demonstrate courage, tenacity, creativity, hope, passion and vision, and that their progress, whether with regard to women's suffrage, economic issues, education, science, health, the arts, reproductive rights or sport, has relied on these qualities. Of course, some men have these qualities, but that is not the subject of today's debate. Women writers have shown these qualities and have created female characters who have also shown them: for instance, George Eliot or, in modern fiction, Maya Angelou. I am always struck by how good women are at depicting relationships, communities and everyday lives and how events impact on those lives.
So it is with my heroine, Anna Akhmatova. She was born in 1889 and lived through the Russian revolution and two world wars. She sometimes lived in abject poverty, and suffered ill health from TB and heart disease. She suffered the execution of her husband and the imprisonment of her son for many years. She suffered the banning of her work and prosecution by the authorities. Despite all this, she refused to leave Russia. At one point, she and some of her friends had to learn her poems off by heart and then burn them, such was the terror under which they lived. She reflected on people's inner lives, their joys, sorrows and problems, and on the wider suffering of Russia, her country. She reconciled a passionate sexual nature with devout Christianity and a passionate love of nature with political comment. She was devastated by the impact of wars and the Russian revolution, during which she and other writers suffered much. Yet she could still joke about taking vodka for a heart condition and retain a hope that there was some reason or force behind misfortune. One of her poems says,
She spoke with the voice of women, at a time when women in Russia did not have much voice. On the imprisonment of her only son during the terror, she described standing in a prison queue with other women, in the freezing cold, trying to get news of their sons or husbands. A women with blue lips identified her. Akhmatova says that,
"she suddenly came out of the trance that was common to us all and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers in those days) 'Can you describe this?' and I said, 'Yes, I can' and then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face."
After 1925, Akhmatova's verse was deemed unacceptable by the authorities, which regarded her as having no function in the new order. During the terror, she was excruciatingly poor, and lived on a diet of mainly black bread and tea. She was thin and ill. A poem written down could have meant a death
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1377
sentence. She recognised that she had to live through the suffering and give shape and voice to it. A long poem, "Requiem", recounts a journey of suffering and how she would not leave Russia, her country:
The winter of 1940-41 was very bad for her. Her unpopularity with the authorities was making things worse for her son in prison. Her health had broken down completely. In June 1941, Hitler marched into the Soviet Union. She felt at one with the Russian people, partly because of this terrible event. In September 1941, she addressed the women of Leningrad on the radio. To quote a little, she said that,
"this great city of culture and labour is threatened by the enemy . . . my whole life has been connected with Leningrad . . . In Leningrad I became a poet . . . our descendants will honour every mother who lived at the time of the war . . . a city which has bred women like these cannot be conquered".
Akhmatova embraced fate and used it. She felt that in poetry she could describe, reflect and inspire:
Her poetry was banned again in 1944, when it was described as poisoning youth with its pernicious spirit. In 1953, Stalin died, and her son was released from prison. She began to earn some money from translations. In the mid-1950s, she was beginning to reflect about death. In an exquisite poem, "Seaside Sonnet", she says:
"The voice of eternity is calling
With unearthly, irresistible power
In another poem of this time, she wrote:
In 1965, however, Akhmatova was awarded the degree of honorary D.Litt by Oxford University. She died in 1966 after a life of immense hardship, partings, struggles, hunger, desolation, and despair. But the spirit of this woman lived on. Courage, tenacity, vision, creativity and hope—the qualities identified earlier—lived on. As she said:
Anna Akhmatova had spoken for, and appealed to, the ordinary people and they knew it—just like that day outside the prison when she was asked to describe the horrors. The following anecdote reflects how she spoke for ordinary people, particularly women. She was buried just outside Leningrad—now, of course, St Petersburg. One of her biographers describes how some close friends went to her grave to lay flowers ahead of the official ceremony. There was snow on the
16 Mar 2006 : Column 1378
ground and in it were footsteps, showing that someone had gone ahead. When they arrived at the grave, the person by it turned and went away. The writer said:
"No-one knew her. She was one of those anonymous Russian women in a grey scarf and a quilted jacket",
who appreciated what one woman had done for others.
1.10 pm
| Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |