Tag: Caroline Nokes

The speech made by Caroline Nokes, the Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North, in Westminster Hall, the House of Commons on 1 December 2022.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Elliott. I will start where my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) finished: by talking about the pointy-elbowed, middle-class privilege that allows me to stand here and say that still, in 2022, we cherry-pick which victims we think are innocent and which we do not. That is why there is massive media coverage of some cases and not of others. We like our victims to be young, blonde and white, do we not? When police community support officers of my age are killed, it makes barely a headline, as in the case of Julia James. The murders of young women such as Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, whose photographs were taken by police officers, do not gain the same number of column inches as the murder of Sarah Everard. When women such as Raneem Oudeh and her mother are murdered while the police are ignoring their calls for help, we must wonder what cultural element came into that.

It is important that we stand up in this House and are prepared to use our pointy-elbowed, middle-class privilege to highlight that, in this country, on International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, we need to get our own house in order. We need to be prepared to legislate for things such as public sexual harassment. Let us face it: countries such as Morocco have managed to legislate for that, but we still have not.

I have high hopes for my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) and his private Member’s Bill. I pay full credit to police forces such as Nottinghamshire police for collecting statistics on misogyny as a hate crime, but we need that to be rolled out to more police forces across the country. In this place, we have done some great work and every year the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) stands up in the Chamber on International Women’s Day and reads that great long list—which is not getting shorter—of those women who have been murdered over the previous year. At her behest, a couple of weeks ago I met, virtually, Carole Gould and Julie Devey, the mothers of Ellie Gould and Poppy Devey Waterhouse—young women murdered by their partners. Carole and Julie have set up a new organisation, Killed Women, specifically to make sure that we listen to the victims and consider the aftereffects for those families who have lost a loved one in horrific circumstances. We all need to listen to those stories and understand the very profound impact that ongoing violence against women is having in this country.

I will speak very briefly of the work that the Women and Equalities Committee is doing on this subject. I pay tribute to you, Ms Elliott, for having been a guest in a recent session. We are looking at sexual harassment, misogyny, violence against women, and sexism in all its forms across a variety of areas in this country, whether in schools, colleges and universities—I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock for the great work she did on that before she left the Committee—or in the music industry, where black women are overly sexualised. We know from the case of Child Q that black children are—I am not sure if this is even a word—adultified and treated as adults when they are still children. That still happens way too often. We heard of the horrors of being a young black woman in the music industry—they were truly horrific in the same way as the sexism in football that we heard about.

Similarly, we hear time and again about how women at university are treated appallingly and how, in too many cases, the institution does not stand up for them. I will highlight Bristol University—apologies to the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) for referring to her city again—because it did not support a young woman who spoke to me yesterday on this subject. When she went to the police, she was told that she had to think of the mental health of the student she was accusing of sexually harassing her. That, to my mind, is absolutely unthinkable. How are we going to empower and encourage young women to have the courage to come forward, speak of their experiences and press charges when they are being told to consider the impact on the individuals they are accusing? We know that 97% of the accusations made are truthful.

I want to pay tribute briefly, in 50 seconds or less, to—

James Daly (Bury North) (Con)

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Caroline Nokes

That will not give me an extra minute. I pay tribute to former Ministers who have worked so hard on this issue, some of whom are sitting in this room today, including Ministers from across the Home Office who worked so hard on the tackling violence against women and girls strategy and on finally getting the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 on the statute book. My message to all of us is that there is more that we can and must do. We have to keep pressing forward. If we do not do that, we will not be able to look around the globe and wring our hands in horror at the actions that we see elsewhere, when our own house needs to be in much better order.

The speech made by Caroline Nokes, the Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North, in Westminster Hall on 2 November 2022.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I thank the hon. Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) for leading this debate on a crucial issue.

The Women and Equalities Committee has twice held one-off evidence sessions—although there is a slight conundrum in twice having one-off sessions—looking at black maternal health. It has taken evidence from campaign groups, such as Five X More, and experts in obstetrics and gynaecology, yet the picture does not change. Looking at the evidence, we have known that there is a disparity in the health outcomes for black mothers since the early 2000s. For 20 years, we have known that there is a problem, yet still it continues. It has been a huge privilege for me to serve on panels alongside people such as Clo and Tinuke from Five X More, who have done so much incredible campaigning to highlight the issue, as has the hon. Member for Streatham. It is crucial that we begin to see progress; we cannot, 12 months or 10 years down the line, continue to have the same debate.

Raising awareness in Parliament is vital, but what we actually need is Government action. The hon. Member for Streatham made a slight dig about Government reshuffles. I am delighted to see the Minister in her place; this is an issue on which we have engaged before and she takes it seriously. I hope that the Secretary of State for Health will himself grasp the issue, and ensure that we drive it forward to see progress.

We have heard that one of the challenges is data, and the lack of specific data being collected on maternal health outcomes for black and Asian women. I pay tribute to Five X More, which carried out its own experiences survey that included 2,000 women—a huge number—reporting their experiences and findings. The thing that really hits home for me is the repeated use of the phrases, “I didn’t feel listened to,” “We weren’t listened to,” and, “What I was experiencing was being ignored.”

I am loth to say that we sometimes have very gendered healthcare, but look at the evidence. Look at the fact that when there is medical research, it is almost exclusively carried out on men; look at the fact that drug trials are carried out on men; look at the fact that some of the highest backlogs as we come out of the pandemic are in health conditions predominantly affecting women. Whether it is in cardiac, obstetrics or another sphere of medicine, too often the experience is, “I didn’t think they were listening to me.” I am sure every Member hears that from their constituents, and that has been my experience as a constituency MP. I hear from my constituents that, specifically in the area of maternity, “I wasn’t listened to. Nobody paid attention. It was my body, and I knew something was wrong.”

Only last week, I received an email from a constituent who had lost his daughter-in-law moments after she gave birth. He was with his son, helping to bring up a baby and pursue a complaints procedure against the hospital in question. Throughout his email, he kept making the point that they had not been listened to. His daughter-in-law had been a midwife, and even she was not listened to.

Talking to black and particularly Muslim women—I should declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Muslim women—they feel that their voices are doubly ignored, and that there is that intersectionality. Whenever I talk to journalists about intersectionality, they look at me and say, “Please don’t use that word. Nobody understands that word.” It is imperative that we all understand that word. You will be discriminated against if you are a woman, and you will be discriminated against if you are a woman from a black, Asian or other minority ethnic group; when the two come together, as we find in maternity units in particular, women’s voices are not heard or listened to.

When we talk to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, as the hon. Member for Streatham has done, it calls for specific targets for black maternal health outcomes, and it is right to do so. Although it may be a small number as a percentage of births every year, it is still a significant number. The loss of one mother is one too many.

Jim Shannon

It is always a pleasure to listen to the right hon. Lady; she brings lots of wisdom and knowledge to these debates. Ministers in other debates we have had in Westminster Hall, in different positions in the Department of Health and Social Care, have always spoken about the issue of data. The hon. Lady is outlining examples of where data could be used to formulate a Government and ministerial response. Does she agree that the Government really need to grasp the data issue? They can then prioritise their strategy to respond.

Caroline Nokes

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I did not think he would be entirely able to resist speaking in the debate. He is right: policies must be data-driven and evidenced, but the evidence is there and has been for many years. We are augmenting and adding to that body of evidence the whole time.

I will not be entirely negative, because we have some great opportunities. I was pleased to see Dame Lesley Regan appointed women’s health ambassador earlier this year. I welcome, reinforce, champion and offer anything I can to help the women’s health strategy. Finally, we have one of those, and I pay tribute to the Minister who was instrumental in getting that published. What we now need from the strategy is outcomes. That has to be the focus. What is happening to drive outcomes, and to ensure that the disparities we know exist are recognised, acted on and reduced? Our goal has to be to reduce that horrendous figure of four times as many maternal deaths for black women. We have to improve the outcomes for black babies, so that there is not, as I think the hon. Member for Streatham said, a more than 100% likelihood of stillbirth—

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

Increased risk.

Caroline Nokes

Increased risk. The hon. Lady is absolutely right to highlight that as an imperative. We must ensure that we reduce the inequity, of which there are many drivers. She was with me when the Women and Equalities Committee took evidence from Professor Sir Michael Marmot, who talks so compellingly about health inequalities and their drivers.

I will not say that there is anything wrong with black women’s bodies—there is not—but we have to look at housing conditions, air quality and the areas where they live. Air quality is a significant driver of poor health outcomes. We have to look at what we are doing around smoking cessation, which is good for not just black women, but all women. We have to look at obesity, which is, again, a crucial factor for all women.

I look forward to seeing, in the remainder of this Parliament, focused and determined action around obesity, smoking cessation and air quality. There are targets on all those things, but—how can I put this gently?—there has been a little backsliding on some of them. Targets have been pushed into the dim and distant future, and there is less commitment around drives to reduce obesity and smoking, which are incredible drivers of poor health outcomes across the population. We should double down on our commitment to those targets.

I hope that in due course—I get fed up of saying “in due course”, which is a standard ministerial answer—to see a White Paper on health disparities. It is imperative that we get that done, and that the women’s health strategy is seen as a driver to ensure that we improve outcomes. First and foremost, I reiterate the calls from the hon. Member for Streatham for targets. I am never a great fan of targets if they are just there for the collection of targets, but if they work, and we see that in many instances they do, we should have them.

We should have time-limited targets, so that in maybe three years we can look and say, “Nothing has changed.” Looking at the data and the evidence from campaign groups, I see that over 20 years, nothing has changed. I do not want to be here in 20 years’ time giving the same speech on this important issue, feeling that nothing has changed. I look forward to the Minister’s comments, and reiterate my congratulations to the hon. Member for Streatham on calling for today’s debate.

The speech made by Caroline Nokes, the Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North, in the House of Commons on 10 March 2022.

It is an absolute pleasure to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. International Women’s Day is a day to celebrate and, this year, I have doggedly looked for things to celebrate, perhaps with a grim sense of determination. I will start by focusing on a few positive things, such as a young boy who, in his school assembly on Monday, said to me, “Tomorrow’s International Women’s Day. What are you doing to celebrate?”. That is how far we have come—even 12-year-old boys wish to celebrate alongside us. I thank Hugo for asking me what I was going to do. I told him that I would speak in today’s debate and celebrate international women.

I want to celebrate female entrepreneurship in this country. This morning I have been at No. 11 Downing Street to hear the brilliant women of the British Beauty Council talking about their new project to launch jobs in STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths—and beauty, focusing on the fact that science and beauty go hand in hand. We have to make sure that brilliant women in this country study science subjects and go on to fabulous careers in scientific areas. We heard from an amazing woman, Tumi Siwoku, who spoke about her journey into the beauty industry via science-based A-levels. She was meant to study medicine and become a doctor, but her act of rebellion was to make sure that she went into beauty—and, my goodness, I love rebellious women. They are the ones who push boundaries, break down barriers and do the unexpected.

I also want to talk about the female entrepreneurs I met this week at somewhere far more traditional—Goldman Sachs. They are absolute leaders in their fields, and I want to talk specifically about a very young woman, Thuria Wenbar. She is the chief executive officer of e-Pharmacy, and she talked about her excitement at launching menopause products over the counter. She is still in her 20s, but she was talking about the menopause, and that shows how far we have come. It also pays tribute to the work of my hon. Friend—and she is my hon. Friend—the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), who has done so much to break down the taboo and stigma around the menopause. Thuria spoke absolutely unashamedly of her determination to create prosperity and jobs for other women. She spoke about bias—her personal bias—in employing more women in her organisation, and that is one bias we do not wish to break.

I would like to pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), who has done so much work on the menopause and women’s health. We can look forward in a few short weeks to the female health strategy coming forward, and I would like to say that, in her role as the Minister for patient safety and primary care, she has been a breath of fresh air. Staying on that theme, I also look forward to the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport making a real difference with her forthcoming online safety legislation. That could be a real game changer for young women, and indeed men, for whom the online harms they currently face every single day can spill over into real life. I have no doubt about her mission and determination to bring forward a fiercely effective piece of law.

There are other colleagues I want to celebrate. My hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), who is here, has done so much brilliant work on botox. It seemed really trivial this morning to be talking about the beauty industry, lipstick and botox, but her private Member’s legislation—the Botulinum Toxin and Cosmetic Fillers (Children) Act 2021—makes it illegal to give botox to under-18s. We need to be protecting young women from the dangers of injectables and cosmetic procedures that can go horribly wrong and alter their looks forever, and we need to be protecting young women from that “Love Island” identical face, which actually looks pretty awful. I would also like to celebrate the brilliant female scientists who made vaccines for covid possible.

But, actually, today I do not want to celebrate at all; I want to talk about International Women’s Day and the women we have seen in war who have been impacted by the Putin invasion of Ukraine. There are those killed by the war, those reporting on the war whether as a journalist or a citizen journalist via social media, and the doctors in the hospitals tending to the sick and the wounded, including the maternity hospitals that we have seen bombed.

I want to talk about one specific woman, Yaroslava Antipina. I do not know her—I had never heard of her before the war started—but she is keeping a daily diary of her life in war, and I know from what she has written that she wants to have her life back. She wants to be able to drink coffee in peace with the people she has met on Twitter. She has fled her home, and I wonder what it would feel like for all of us if we had been forced out of our homes and made to live again with our mothers in a different part of the country. She has taught me that, in Ukraine, International Women’s Day is a holiday—there is a great idea, and perhaps we could introduce that here—but it is not a holiday from war. She wears a sweatshirt that says “Superwoman”, and she genuinely is one.

Yaroslava wants to be able to buy jeans, but she does not know whether the shops will be open, or whether the small shop she has gone to today will be open between 12 noon and 3 pm, so she has launched “operation jeans”, because she just wants to have a spare pair of trousers to wear. She has established her regular no make-up war look, and she posts photographs of it. I want to imagine what that would be like for each and every one of us coming into this Chamber with no make-up. That is why I referenced cosmetic procedures and the British Beauty Council, because we take all that for granted, and if we were her, we might have to accept that, for the conceivable future, everything will look different and our faces will look different.

Yaroslava talks of “this” life and “that” life. This life is the present, her reality; and that life was what she had before—freedom, and her coffee with friends, her jeans, her lipstick and her life in Kyiv. While we celebrate International Women’s Day here, we have to recognise that, just as Yaroslava has a “this” and a “that” life, there is a life here and a life there: here there are no bombs, there are jeans in the shops and we can drink coffee whenever we want; and there they have none of those things. There are little girls in bomb shelters singing the song from “Frozen”, female doctors dodging bombs to treat the sick, female MPs staying defiantly in Kyiv—their capital—and a former Miss Ukraine brandishing her assault weapon in army uniform. There are women on the borders of Ukraine with their children, having left their husbands, their fathers and theirs son behind to fight. So on International Women’s Day this year, I cannot celebrate, but I have to have hope that, as the women of influence in this country, we can make sure that we do better.

The speech made by Caroline Nokes, the Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North, in the House of Commons on 11 March 2021.

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who does so much in this place to champion women.

Last year in this debate, we were not learning how to run a Parliament remotely, and none of us had ever considered being able to contribute to a debate while admiring the cobwebs on our own light fittings. In the spirit of celebration, I am going to think of uplifting things to start with, such as the sheer fact that this centuries-old institution has learned to flex and change—to adapt to Zoom and remote voting.

I thank the Chair of the Procedure Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), for having driven that agenda forward. We have seen more women contributing more often in Commons debates—more female voices in our Chamber, whether physically present or not—and that I celebrate. We have seen stunning contributions and campaigns from women right across the House and across Parliament, making desperately needed amendments and improvements to the Domestic Abuse Bill. We have seen women outside Parliament, such as Kate Bingham, who ran the vaccine taskforce determinedly, making sure that we got that roll-out.

We have heard from the Secretary of State for International Trade and Minister for Women and Equalities, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), about her support for the normalisation of flexible working. That could mean so much to women, and I look forward to an employment Bill coming forward that champions that.

But it is impossible for me to turn my contribution today into an unabashed celebration. It is not going brilliantly for all women—not here, not anywhere. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) will speak later, and I know that she will have had to update that hideous, depressing list she is going to read out to add the name of Sarah Everard, so tragically killed while just walking home. Overnight, we saw an outpouring of stories from women about keys, headphones, clothes and sticking to lit streets. We all know the reality is you will probably not be attacked by a stranger, but the fear is there and the fear is real.

On this International Women’s Day, let us champion all women—gay women, who do not need conversion therapy; trans women, who want to be treated with respect and fairness. Remember, they are the ones most likely to suffer domestic abuse.

I wish to reference the work of the Women and Equalities Committee and its report on the gendered economic impact of covid. That was reinforced yesterday by the publication from the Office for National Statistics confirming that women have indeed suffered a greater economic impact from the pandemic—more likely to be furloughed than their male colleagues; more likely to be employed on a part-time contract and not entitled to statutory sick pay; less confident that they will not be made redundant.

We no longer have to look at health policy in the round because of the announcement this week of the women’s health strategy and the call for evidence, but apparently we still have to look at economic policy in the round and cannot accept data from the ONS that women have been harder hit economically. We will not get a female employment strategy, and I do not celebrate that.