Stella Creasy, the Labour MP, is on a one-woman crusade to make the House of Commons more “family friendly”. You may remember her from the row over whether or not babies should be allowed in the Chamber.
Yesterday morning saw her take up the cudgels on this point once again. Tweeting in the early hours, she wrote:
“Me and kid2 finally leaving parliament after the votes for the policing bill went on until 1am – tell me again this system is family friendly…”
There is no doubt that making parliamentary life kinder on MPs with families is a worthwhile enterprise. Life in the Westminster goldfish bowl can definitely take its toll; the divorce rate for MPs is consistently higher than the national average.
But the challenge is to find a way to do it for all Members. Unfortunately, the vision of a “family-friendly” Parliament held up by Creasy benefits only the select few – and undermines the actual business of Parliament too.
Why? Because the idea that Westminster could be “family-friendly” on a day-to-day basis only makes sense if you’re a London MP, or at least have your family in London even if your constituency is elsewhere.
Acts of performative parenthood, as when Louise Mensch walked out of a select committee in 2013 to go and pick up her children, only ever occur in this context; nobody has yet cited the school run to justify hopping on a train up to Manchester or Scotland before the week’s work is done.
The truth is that when New Labour started to oversee cuts to Parliament’s sitting hours in the name of being “family friendly”, most MPs knew it was basically just a cut in their hours and voted for it on that basis. The diary of Chris Mullin, one Labour MP who opposed the changes, chronicles it in detail.
It was also he who pointed out (very unfashionably) that the result would simply be leaving the great majority of his colleagues in London several nights a week with no parliamentary business to engage them, and that this might create a highly social environment and, well, pressure on marriages.
The abolition of late sittings has also had an inevitable effect on the actual work of Parliament too, especially by giving rise to the awful programme motion. This is where the amount of time for any debate is fixed in advance, and is why you so often see the Speaker cutting speeches by MPs to four minutes… three minutes… two minutes…
Suffice to say, such constraints are not conducive to genuine intellectual engagement and exchange, and produce a system wherein MPs are too often basically reading things into Hansard or creating clips for social media.
Little wonder that in recent years the House of Lords, which does often sit late, has been picking up more of the slack when it comes to the detailed work of legislation.
Any debate over making the House of Commons “family friendly” ought to start by acknowledging that there are limits to how much that can or should be done. Being an MP is a job, and doing that job properly has time and energy commitments that cannot be infinitely adapted to an individual’s preferred work/life balance.
It should also take as an explicit starting point the need to treat all MPs equitably: it is not “anti-family” to expect Creasy to sit late and vote if the alternative is just that other MPs, also mothers, would be stuck in a hotel rather than home with their own children.
With those as our starting points, a real “family-friendly” policy might actually be a step backwards, away from some of New Labour’s misguided reforms.
Return the House to late sittings three nights a week, Monday through Wednesday. Use the extra time not only to ease controls on debate, but also to scrap the Friday morning sitting altogether.
That would allow every MP to return to their constituency on Thursday night, and spend three days near their families.
