The truth is that for both MPs and journalists the job can and should involve more than being in the main office. Getting out and meeting people, for example, is a major part of doing either job well. When Sunny asked me to write a short piece on what MPs do in recess I didn’t think I would have time before I go away. But I’m maddened by the hatred and vitriol from the radio towards the summer recess as if all MPs do no work during it.

Rant over.

I understand the anger at MPs – but as one of the MPs who was declared a ‘saint’ by the Telegraph, ‘squeaky clean’ by my local papers – and who works right throughout the recess (except when on actual holiday) I am beginning to think I am a mug. I didn’t take the opportunity to coin it by getting a second home (that I am ‘allowed’ within the rules) and I don’t bugger off for the summer doing nothing.

But given the ‘tarred with the same brush’ syndrome – I must just be stupid.

So – as I calm down – and remember that it is important that the good guys fight on and don’t leave the battlefield – here is a little picture of my recess occupation.

The best thing about recess is just working like an ordinary human being – basically 9 – 5pm and not at weekends. During term time – I work a seven day week – with Monday and Tuesday being 6am – 11.30pm, Wednesday and Thursday being 6am – 10pm, Friday usually 6am – 6pm plus evening engagements one or two out of every four weeks; and Saturday and Sunday are always working, emails, paperwork, constituency events, etc.

So – you can see why it feels fantastic to just work a normal working week.

Lots of meetings and visits that I haven’t managed to fit in during term time are scheduled for recess period – and obviously surgeries and casework, continue in usual fashion. I also use recess to write articles, prepare for (in this recess) the return of the Equality Bill to the floor of the House at Report Stage and prepare speeches. That time to think, research and learn is vital – as otherwise you are just at the mercy of others who tell you what you should be thinking. But the best thing is being able to do something for the constituents that I would never normally have time for.

The year before last I set off to visit every shop in the constituency on foot – from high street to tiny parade (over-ambitious – I only made it to about 60%). It was incredibly useful. The shops and small businesses were thrilled and I was able to raise their concerns both with the local council and in Parliament.

Last year I set out to visit every older persons residential home and sheltered housing (again over-ambitious – made it to about 70%) and it too was hugely useful for picking up the issues that older residents needed me to take up. It was also good to go to older people where they are as sometimes they find it difficult to get to public meetings, surgery or whatever.

This year I am aiming to spend one to two days walkabout in each of the ten wards that made up my constituency of Hornsey & Wood Green finding the issues on the ground and meeting and talking to local people.

So that’s what I do in recess – but I think I must be mad!

I floated my idea during the Second Reading of the Equality Bill and it caused quite a hoo ha. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development waded in to support the idea – albeit they didn’t think it should be mandatory. Some Human Resource departments were less happy and thought it a stupid idea. Well – it will be interesting to see what they say in response to the evidence that’s now been gathered.

Because – when I spoke to my amendment on anonymous job applications in the Committee Stage of the Equality Bill, I was absolutely thrilled with the Solicitor General’s response:

That is a valid point and perhaps what we ought to do is experiment, which is what we are seeking to do in that the Department for Work and Pensions [DWP] has carried out a CV research exercise. Two carefully matched applications or CVs with names recognised as having different ethnicities have been submitted in response to the same advertised vacancies to see whether employers make different decisions depending on the names in the CVs. That research will be reported in the summer—I am sorry that I do not have an answer now, having tantalisingly mentioned the subject. The initial indications are that there is significant discrimination, so more work needs to be done to find an appropriate solution.

So – initial findings are of significant discrimination. And whilst it is clearly early days and the DWP is going to do more work – it seems clear to me that – first – those who argued there isn’t a problem which needs fixing in particular need to look very closely at what the DWP has been finding, and second – here is a simple proposal which costs business nothing but could actually deliver enormous benefits in removing discrimination in the job market.

Removing such discrimination is not only important in itself – but by providing people with equal opportunities to earn their living, it opens up all sorts of other knock-on benefits in terms of social cohesion and economic efficiency, which we all benefit from.

So once we see what the rest of the research shows – I’m hopeful that we will have a proposal that is easy, not burdensome and brings major benefits – and that of course the Government will in its wisdom decide to adopt it!

I trust that the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) will also step up to the plate and advocate anonymous job applications – and I will be writing to them as soon as I get a minute to rub together.

We’ve seen it as its most obvious with dealers – who can run big risks, retire very rich very young – and not have to worry about the long-term consequences, because they’ve long since left the scene. Another example has been in the boardroom – huge bonuses in the good times, and if it goes wrong? A nice little pay off and pension pot.

So how do we even out the score – especially in those institutions deemed too big or too crucial to be allowed to fail, which immediately sets up all sorts of risks of one-way bets?

Part of it is about control of the bonus culture. Part of it is about better management and identification of risk. Part of it is about getting remuneration committees to get external advice – rather than relying on the cosy arrangements of internal advice, which means it’s far too easy to have a situation of “you talk up my pay, I’ll talk up yours”.

Yet there is one group who really can see at first hand the ups and the downs of risk taking – and that is the ordinary workforce. It’s these people who suffer real financial hardship when risks fail to come off – but can also see in their job security (and – though not as often as perhaps should be the case – in their own pay packets too) the benefits when things do go well.

Having a stronger voice from the workforce in the senior decision making would be a vital safeguard in helping to control the risks firms run – because some of the people who really do suffer when the risks go wrong will be making the decisions, not just those largely on a one-way bet.

As an added bonus – recruiting some directors from the workforce would also add some much needed diversity to the make-up of company boards.

Diversity is about more than just “let’s add one middle-class white woman to a board of middle-class white men”. It’s about having a diverse set of experiences and knowledge and outlooks and instincts. That brings business benefits which some of those boards that collapsed in single-minded, risk-loving groupthink could have hugely benefited from.

That’s win, win, win for everyone.

It’s because of the appallingly wide gap between what the university pays men and women. The university’s own Equal Pay Report shows that men are paid on average nearly a third more than women – £37,157 compared to £28,247.

There are two reasons for the gap.

If you compare people on each pay grade, then for two-thirds of the grades, women on that grade get paid less than men – and also the higher the grade, the higher the proportion of men. At the most senior level, there are seven men for every woman – but even for those women who have reached the very top, they are still being paid less than men in the same position.

So there are some real questions for the university to answer – but there seems to be too much complacency around, particularly in the half-baked attempted explanation that men get paid more because they tend to be pay on a higher pay grade. Well, duh! But why is that the case? And why, even when people are on the same grade, men usually get paid more?

There are some professions where change in pay and equal opportunities has been slow and a long time coming. I have a smidgen of sympathy for those where you have to have many years of service in order to get to the very top – and there is at least an argument that those years are needed to gain the necessary experience. The Law Lords might be a case in point.

But academia – despite its rather fusty image at times – is not one of those. Look at what happens to the youngest and brightest new academic stars – they are often snapped up and become professors at a young age. Decades of service are not needed.

The gap at grade 12 (the top pay grade) is over 5%, which is the threshold where, under the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidelines action should be taken. The university is trying to wriggle out of this by saying the gap is under 5% – if you exclude “market pay supplements and other pensionable and non pensionable payments”. In other words – the gap is smaller, if you ignore bits of it. Not got enough. Pay is pay. So – over to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission!

As an interim report, it would be unreasonable to expect it to have come to conclusions across the board – but time after time, rather than offering up suggestions or ranges of options for further consideration before decision, the report basically says, “we’ve thought about it, and decide someone needs to think about it some more”.

Mix in the love of plans, strategies and new groups and it is the blend of bureaucracy and indecision that often frustrates even the keenest fans of the New Labour governing style.

And that style has the report’s foreword, from minister Stephen Carter, in a suffocating grip. As the foreword says, “the average British adult spends almost half of all their waking hours using the services of the communications sector or browsing, watching or listening to the audio-visual content it distributes”, and yet how does the foreword start? By talking about digital’s role in Britain’s economy.

The health and success of this sector is discussed in terms of the economic benefits it brings. That is certainly important – particularly at times like these – but when we are spending nearly half our waking hours consuming to some degree or other its output, then it is also a sector that is about far more than just economics. Digital life should be about more than a matter of pounds and pence, economic statistics and econometric models.

This narrow-minded focus on the economic stands in ironic contrast to how much of digital life is driven by non-economic factors – as with the large volume of content make available voluntarily and for free. Imagine a digital world where the only contributors were those with a direct economic motive for contributing. It would be only a shadow of the vibrant digital culture that we have.

Moreover, understanding how to foster and grow that culture is necessary in order to in turn reap the economic benefits. Yet on so many of these issues the report is silent. A few quick examples. A spread of creative commons licensing could unlock much creativity. Instead, we have no imagination on the copyright front in the report, not only in its own copyright status but in the lack of good plans for changing crown copyright or the copyright culture more generally.

Not even a modest step in the direction of copying the US federal government’s approach to copyright where, for example, it is standard for photographs taken by the US military and then available free for all to use. If the taxpayer is paying for the photo then (security considerations excepted) why shouldn’t the taxpayer be able to use it?

Likewise on libel. It can have a chilling effect on blogging, and there is plenty to debate changing – such as the way libel law discriminates against those who moderate comments, encouraging therefore the lowest common denominator style of blogs where anything goes in the comments.

Or the ease with which someone can threaten libel action, run up legal costs and then try to pressure you into paying them even if you are willing to say sorry and issue a correction long before matters get to court.

As with copyright, we are stuck with a set of rules, procedures and habits that so often hinder the flourishing of creativity in a digital world – but which the report does not adequately address. Similarly crucial to that flourishing are the technology start-ups, but again their needs for care and attention are largely omitted.

The report does talk about some important issues around the digital skeleton of the country – the structure of our broadcasting services, uses of spectrums and availability of broadband. But it is rather like producing a report on the wine industry that is largely about the supply of glass bottles and has very little about the product that goes in those bottles.

Although there is a chapter titled “Digital Content” all its meat is really just about online piracy and public sector broadcasting content – important, but again a rather narrow and traditional view of what matters.

Even on the digital skeleton, the report is very timid in its statements. As my colleague Don Foster put it in Parliament when the report was published:

Perhaps the biggest disappointment relates to the plans for rolling out universal high-speed broadband. The Government promised that they would bring forward capital investment to help us out of the recession. This is one of the key areas in which that could be done. If done properly, 600,000 new jobs could be created in this country, but what have we got? We have some vague commitment to a universal 2 megabits per second provision. As the hon. Gentleman said, average speeds are already 3.6 megabits per second, so why is there such little ambition and such a low target?

In the end what should be a study in supporting the exuberant range of new opportunities is one smothered in a welter of bureaucracy and timidity. A open, welcoming digital world this ain’t.

More:
Cabalamat: A broadband tax for the UK?
Jim Killock: Why Digital Britain could be bad for you

Most of the time was spent on Baby P, not surprisingly. Just to break for a brief moment from Baby P – Ken said at the end that I could spend the last minute ranting about whatever I wanted. So I did. I made an appeal to Gordon Brown to re-open the sub-post offices in London that he has closed. Having decided to stop any further closures it seems to me that those of us who were unfortunate enough to have had the axe already fall should have the closures reversed.

Back to Baby P – Saturday was the day Sharon Shoesmith received some support in the form of a letter to the media from 61 head teachers in Haringey. Sharon is Director of Education here in Haringey. As Ken put it on air – she’s their boss.

But this isn’t about her competence or otherwise in education – it’s about her responsibility and accountability for the social services side of her brief – which includes having – under the Children’s Act of 2004 – the responsibility for child protection in Haringey. Under this legal framework her and the political leadership side of the equation have the ultimate responsibility.

Whilst she has – rightly – been in the firing line, thus far George Meehan, Labour Leader of Haringey Council, has not had the decency to step forward to take his share of the responsibility. He was leader too during the Victoria Climbie affair – and it is worth remembering some of the damning conclusions in Lord Laming’s report:

The manner in which a number of senior managers and elected councillors within Haringey discharged their statutory responsibilities to safeguard and protect the welfare of children living in the borough was an important contributory factor in the mishandling of Victoria’s case … I was left unimpressed by the manner in which a number of senior managers and councillors from Haringey sought to distance themselves from the poor practice apparent … [The report's criticisms] are directed not just at the front line staff … but at senior managers and councillors.

Neither George nor any of the other councillors so criticised resigned their posts then.

What Sharon Shoesmith, Geroge Meehan and Liz Santry (the Haringey Council Cabinet member for this area) don’t seem to understand is the really, really deep sense of outrage amongst the public.

One illustration of the depth of public concern and anger over this issue is that in the last week my website has been read more heavily that at any time ever before. My office is inundated with phone calls and emails – all virtually of one voice – how could this happen again in Haringey and this time they must not be allowed to get away with it.

During the time of the Laming inquiry I wrote a newspaper column, quoting Ambrose Bierce – and the quote seems all too apposite once more: responsibility is “a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbour. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it on a star”. If only it were not so.

I refer to both Barack Obama and David Cameron’s recently zooming in on the world of fatherless black children.

Now yes – there is a disproportionately high number of black families being brought up essentially by the mother – but it’s also an issue in white communities.

I’ve been a single mother myself since my children were 7 and 12. And two things that used to annoy the whatsit out of me when they were at school were firstly that each year parents got a class list (with contact details of all the class parents) and despite informing the school many, many times that we were separated – it was always (only) my address and number on the list – the school itself was acting as if to exclude separated fathers.

Secondly – the school tended to send notes home with the child about parents evenings, plays etc. And again – that means they all came to me – and more generally, as it is usually the mother that children live with, to the mothers. So again – the school was acting in a way that excluded separated fathers rather than bringing them in and encouraging their involvement

Being obviously extremely civilised – I would tell my ex the details from the notes and we would often go together to the parents evenings and so on. But if you’re not so lucky in how things work out, the school should be there encouraging the involvement of both parents.

The school should have an obligation to contact both parents about all school activities. Clearly if the situation is hostile – there may be issues – but at least both parents would be informed (so long as the parent and their whereabouts are known).

This has improved a bit in recent years – with email and some good practise where it is the norm to list and contact both parents regardless of status or hostilities – but not nearly enough.

I continue to believe that given it has been shown that a kid’s reading ability, particularly boys, improves beyond measure in correlation to how much reading they do with their dad – it’s time for pro-actively engaging fathers more.
I’m sure lots of you reading this (fathers) are engaged and equally involved with your kids – but this is about improving a situation where there is need.

In America, they have been implementing a scheme (or various schemes) called any variation on ‘Dads and Doughnuts‘. Now whilst here we might prefer something other than doughnuts – the idea is a good one that can travel: the school invites Dads in to do things with their kids without the mums. Sometimes this is reading with a breakfast (great for Dads who go to work early) or evening events or parents’ nights for Dads only.

Dads have been left out in the cold for too long. We are seeing the consequences of their absence – but it’s not something we need simply complain about. We can, and should, act.

What a fantastic nine-word summary of what is wrong with so much of our tabloid journalism: whipping up fear and division based on a fairy tale.

I’m not sure what is worse – believing that the person who wrote the headline was so ignorant of the story they thought it was true – or so cynical they were happy to write it knowing it wasn’t.

Because the truth is there is no provision like that in the Equality Bill. Nowhere. All the Bill proposes is that if two different people are equally qualified for a job (and that is a very big if!), it should be ok to choose between them on gender or race grounds.

And why may you want to do that? Well, to take one example – there’s a real shortage of male teachers in primary schools. We all bang on about the need for more male role models for children at this stage. So why shouldn’t the law allow give the school the option if it wants (because yes – that’s all the Bill would do – it wouldn’t force this upon any organisation) to decide that faced with two equally qualified people, it wants to introduce a bit more balance amongst its teachers and employ a man?

And if the school wanted just to ban white men regardless (or indeed black men – though notice how that didn’t make it into the headline) – then that would be illegal. End of story.

This sorry tale is though a good reminder as to how we can’t take the case for equality for granted – particular when there are Conservative MPs like Mark Pritchard jumping on the bandwagon happily exaggerating away and mirroring these fairytales too.

It is also a distraction in some ways from the big issue missing at the heart of the Bill – effective action to tackle the continuing discrimination in pay. So, the private sector – in which around 80% of the population work – will escape any form of mandatory measures to ensure that there is no discrimination in their workplaces – thus probably ensuring that the gender pay gap and the employment barriers that exist in race, disability and so on continue barely troubled by the Single Equality Bill.

Given that there are something like 120,000 cases waiting to be heard at equal pay tribunals this is not some trivial niche issue. That is approaching 200 cases per Parliamentary constituency. It should be a huge scandal, grabbing every MPs’ attention – but instead, it is overlooked and sidelined by our political system.

So I will aim to help push those better intentioned MPs in all parties to add in more effective measures to the Bill as it wends its way through Parliament. Lord Lester (our Lord Lester) who basically wrote the book on the equalities agenda is quite clear that mandatory pay audits are absolutely vital to deliver any sort of significant change.

What is to be welcomed in particular in the Bill, and which seems to have been agreed at the eleventh hour, is the inclusion of our older citizens into the public sector equality duty and following on from that – although no timetable was given – the end of discrimination against them in goods and services.

Helped the Aged – and others – have done some great work to illuminate just what goes on at the moment.

Take two examples. First, the Disability Living Allowance. People aged 65+ who become disabled are not eligible to receive this allowance – they qualify instead for Attendance Allowance, which takes longer to qualify for and pays less. Second – car insurance, where it is seen as acceptable to charge people more for being old, regardless of their health or driving record. Charging more because someone is genuinely a higher risk – that would be fine– but simply assuming “old = risky driver” in the absence of evidence to back that up – that is discrimination as plain and simple as if someone was to say, “they’re black – so let’s charge them more”.

The Bill will also bring in a much-needed consolidation of the huge number of different laws, rules and regulations – good news again. And of course the passage through Parliament will provide plenty of opportunities to try to make the legislation better!

———————–
This article first appeared in last week’s Liberal Democrat News.

Just when you think that we have moved beyond the bigotry and homophobic hatreds of the past – something like this (or Iris Robinson) pops into the limelight and reminds us that we still have a long way to go to eradicate homophobia. We may have been able to make homophobic behaviour subject to the law – but it is clearly still there in the people – and in corporate cowards.

Would Heinz have pulled an advert if 200 people had objected to it containing a woman? Or a black person? I certainly hope not! But if such blatant sexism or racism isn’t acceptable, why treat homophobia as ok to give in to?

Andrew (a former employee of mine!) has blogged on the subject at his blog – and gives details of how to lobby Heinz. It’s very easy – just an email or a call to their free phone number.

I have signed an Early Day Motion condemning Heinz for their action – and I hope this whole episode does them the damage they deserve.

(If you aren’t a constituent of mine, do pop over to http://www.writetothem.com/ and email your own MP asking them to sign EDM 1889. Don’t worry if you don’t know who your MP is – the site will look it up for you and sort out sending the message.)

Sunny adds:
There is also an online petition, now signed by over 10,000 people, and a Facebook group.

Anyone know what products other than those under the Heinz name should be boycotted?

My criticisms in both cases are three-fold: the money involved could be better spent on other projects (such as giving us more police rather than keeping huge databases of the activities of innocent people), they involve a huge infringement of our liberties and privacy, and – thirdly – big IT projects like this are likely to go wrong and to be vulnerable to misuse.

But I’m not a Luddite. Over time I’ve found embracing IT innovations has made my life easier and made me more efficient – whether it was years ago buying a laser printer to speed up production of casework letters or more recently starting to use the text-messaging based blogging service Twitter to help keep residents informed of what I’m up to as an MP.

Indeed, the idea of organising information in an efficient way so that it helps people make decisions and find out what’s going on is fundamentally a very liberal approach – getting computer code to do the heavy lifting so that individuals can find out and act.

So this has got me thinking – if I could commission just one IT project from government, what would it be? Because that’s really the implicit fourth reason for my rejection of ID cards and logging all emails and phone calls – if you were going to spend that amount of money and hoover up that amount of IT expertise, surely there are better things they could go on?

Having pondered this a bit, I think my choice of project would be one that there isn’t currently any clamour for but which in a quiet way could revolutionise the way in which people contact public services – and so in turn the benefits garnered from having those services.

It all boils down to this. There are a myriad of different contact details for public services which most people – even MPs who are making numerous contact each week on behalf of constituents! – struggle to remember, if that is they even know they exist. For example, how many people do you think know how to contact their local police, other than on the emergency 999 number?

But we pretty much all know the postcode of where we live. So why not introduce a national scheme for matching up email addresses containing public services with the relevant public service? Imagine if you could email yourpostcode@police.gov.uk and you knew it would automatically go the relevant team? Or yourpostcode@nhs.gov.uk or yourpostcode@libraries.gov.uk or yourpostcode@schools.gov.uk or any other of a myriad of public services?

There’s no doubt it would be quite a meaty set of data sitting behind all this, but these days matching up postcodes to geographical units to public services is increasingly common – just look at what www.writetothem.com or www.upmystreet.com achieve – and this database would frankly be tiny compared to one holding records of all the phone calls and emails in the country or the national ID cards database.

Sure you have to factor in the email forwarding and other overheads, such as having to deal with the emails because the whole point of making contact easier is that you end up with more contacts.

But it seems to me feasible and practical – and is the sort of innovation that, once introduced, we would soon end up wondering how we ever lived without.

So my choice is ‘the Peoples’ Database’ – a database we the people might actually want rather than one that they the government want to impose. What’s yours?

Updated: in response:
Simon Dickson – The power of postcodes.