Yes, there has been a lot of work going on in Parliament about getting rid of the discrimination against women in the workplace. I suspect that's what you're referring to. Quite a lot has taken place in regard to that, but still there's a debate going on about the disparity in income between men and women in the U.K.
Some of that is met by the fact that women are more likely, proportionately, to be in part-time work. So when you look at the figures across the piece, they don't always tell you the full story. But there still is, in some cases, a glass ceiling. There are still problems for women both accessing certain areas of work and sometimes moving on through them. I would be the first to accept that was the case. I think it has improved a lot over the last 15 to 20 years in the U.K., but there's always room for further improvement.
But the real point I have a problem with is that actually when you talk about poverty and the groups that are in poverty, we don't even get to the point about issues over women, because there is an absolute absence of skills and capacity even to get to the point of debating whether women are able to be in the workplace. The fact is many of the women that I see in these conditions have no reading age worth talking about, they have little or no skills, they left school early, and they're in very destructive relationships. And that applies to their children, who then go on to repeat much of that themselves.
The problem here is that many of them are not ready for work at all. The idea that you can cram somebody into work simply because you have a target is an absurdity. What you have to do is work with the person to make them work-ready. That's not to say you put them on courses to make them carpenters or steel welders, or whatever it happens to be, but you do need to get rid of some of their problem, maybe drug or alcohol abuse, maybe issues concerning mental health problems, or poor reading capacity. Sometimes you need to work with them first to get them ready for work, so that when they get to work, they're more likely to stay in work.
Then you need to mentor them. There's no question in my mind that if you do not follow through with someone who has never held a job before and comes from a family where there has been no work, they are almost certain to crash out of work unless you support them for the next nine months or a year in their work so they get the work habit that is a fact for most people around this table.
That's not understood by a lot of people. They often say, “When they get a job, why don't they stay in work?” The answer is because if you go home to a family in the evening that has never had a job for three generations, where nobody understands what the hell you're doing going to work in the first place, the moment you hit a problem with your boss, what are they going to say to you? They'll say, “I don't know why you bothered. Why did you bother to take a job in the first place? I wouldn't bother. It's a waste of time. Stick at home. Don't do it.”
They have no support with a view to going out, and they see nobody in their community who is doing so. We have social housing estates where, literally, people will grow up not seeing a single person go out to regular work. They'll see no fathers. Fathers have disappeared from these estates, in a structural sense. Often they're only destructive forces and they will be seen only in street gangs or as drug dealers. They will not be seen as a member of a household contributing to that household. Very little of that goes on.
If I lived in a community like that, the chances of me sitting here today would be almost nil.