Featherstone on International Women's Day

• [Mar 11] Lynne Featherstone (Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat): ' . . MY right hon. Friend the leader of the Liberal Democrats has said that my party expects to increase the number of women in this House after the election. Should that fail to be the case, he has said that he will consider an appropriate mechanism, because there does come a point when one will be needed.

'Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I shall endeavour to be as succinct as possible. I am pleased to take part in this debate on international women's day. The reasons for the lack of women in the House are manifold, and I am sure that most of us in this place understand perfectly what they are.

I give credit to the Labour Government for having so many women on their Benches. It is a shame that a forcing mechanism was needed to make that sort of step change, but that is the reality. For liberals, there is a contradiction in terms between forcing mechanisms, localism and liberalism. However, my right hon. Friend the leader of the Liberal Democrats has said that my party expects to increase the number of women in this House after the election. Should that fail to be the case, he has said that he will consider an appropriate mechanism, because there does come a point when one will be needed.

A few years ago, at Christmas time, I was listening to the radio and I heard Bob Geldof say that he could not wait to get home to his wife who was doing womanly things in the kitchen. I do not know whether she was cooking or making curtains, but that was the sort of remark that usually makes me feel a bit ill. However, on thinking about it, I decided that he was merely saying that women make the world a better place, wherever they are. Obviously, that goes for Parliament too.

As we have heard, the importance of women in decision making cannot be underestimated. I was chair of transport at the London Assembly before I came to the House, and I was struck very forcibly by where and how decisions were made. I determined then that, as a woman, I should look hard at getting my hands on the levers and at being present when decisions about budgets and so on were being made.

I wanted to be able to move the agenda forward. Too often, women are pigeonholed as wanting some softer option. I noticed that there was a lot of argument in the London Assembly about who had the longest train or the biggest airport. The debate was all about setting and using budgets, and I was determined to be part of it. I am a great supporter of infrastructure projects such as Crossrail, but a great deal of decision making is about "home to work" and "work to home". When women are absent from those debates, too little representation is given to the wider issues of "school to home" and "home to school".

Domestic work patterns are important. It is not that men cannot speak for women, or that women cannot speak from a male perspective: the problem is that the absence of the female voice on issues means that half of the agenda remains almost entirely unexpressed.

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Christopher Fraser (South West Norfolk, Conservative): Given what the hon. Lady has just said, is she as disappointed as the rest of us that not one female Liberal Democrat Back Bencher is present for this afternoon's debate?

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Lynne Featherstone (Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat): I am not going to criticise colleagues for not being here-

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Christopher Fraser (South West Norfolk, Conservative): We have got some on our Benches, and so have the Government.

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Lynne Featherstone (Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat): Indeed, and I have my hon. Friend John Barrett-

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Christopher Fraser (South West Norfolk, Conservative): He is not a woman!

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Alan Haselhurst (Deputy Speaker)

Order. May I appeal to the hon. Member to desist from sedentary comments, which are not helping?

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Lynne Featherstone (Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat): That goes to the heart of some of what is wrong in this House, and of why there are so few women in it. One gets ridiculous point-scoring like that, for absolutely no reason.

If the Leader of the House were still in her place, I would have shocked her by saying that I totally agree with her: if there had been women in the boardrooms of all the banks we might not be in the financial crisis that we are in today. The lack of women in the decision-making and the power-broker positions is partly why we are in the state that we are in.

I want to move on to speak about the atmosphere in this House. It is a very hostile environment. We all learn to play the game, because there is no alternative, but women who are thinking of entering the House find it very off-putting. For instance, in my view Prime Minister's Question Time is too often adversarial nonsense that is more about testosterone than rational decision making.

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John Barrett (Edinburgh West, Liberal Democrat): When I was a member of a council group, 50 per cent. of it was male and 50 per cent. female. However, almost none of the women wanted to stand for Parliament, for the reason that my hon. Friend gave.

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Lynne Featherstone (Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat): I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. How do we begin to change the atmosphere? That is the question. When I rise in the House, I try not to follow the practice of scoring points just for the sake of it. The adversarial, jeering, bullying, public-school atmosphere is very off-putting.

I turn now to the problem of getting a seat, which is not necessarily the easiest thing for all women-or all men, for that matter. I am a single parent, and I faced a Labour majority of 26,000 because I could not go anywhere else. I have no parents and no support network, so I had to fight where I live and where my children were at school. There was no alternative.

How just is the Conservative proposal for a married couples tax allowance? It drives me mad. I was left alone to raise children and get on with my career to the best of my ability, so why should the tax allowance be given to my ex-husband? I might say that I am very friendly with him, as our split was amicable, but he has remarried. Why should he have the tax allowance, when I am doing my best to bring up my children on my own? It seems so unfair.

There is no level playing field in getting a seat. Obviously, Liberal Democrat policies on parental leave are very far-reaching but I want to talk about a problem in the Equality Bill to do with equal pay. Women's financial position holds them back terribly from taking part in the parliamentary process, and I am deeply concerned about the proposal for four years of only voluntary equality in pay.

When one asks a group of students in a classroom who wants to be Prime Minister, the boys will mostly put up their hands and say that they do, but the girls just sit on their hands, even though they know that they could do a better job. There are issues with how women are educated and trained, and how they approach learning to debate and make an argument.

As I said, my party expects there to be more women in Parliament after the election, but we have many women in councils, in the London Assembly, and in Scotland and Wales. The problem is with Parliament, and perhaps the electoral system. That is what leaves us so short on these Benches at the moment-although I am sure that it is just for the moment.

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