Jess Phillips
Main Page: Jess Phillips (Labour - Birmingham, Yardley)Department Debates - View all Jess Phillips's debates with the Leader of the House
(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Andrea Leadsom
The hon. Lady says that she is an employment lawyer, in which case she will know very well that Members of Parliament are not employees but office holders. It would be a very fundamental review that would say that MPs should become employees. The hon. Lady would have to consider by whom they would be employed, and the subsequent taking on of modern employment regulations. She has not been clear about what she is after, but I am absolutely clear about the fact that we will be debating this issue. We want to provide proper baby leave for new parents, but the hon. Lady cannot possibly suggest that we should become employees in order to do so.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
I have a quick question for the Leader of the House. I wonder how many times Members, mainly on her own side, raised with her, prior to the proposal for baby leave, the need for a new system for sick Members of Parliament. It seems to me that they have all become incredibly committed to such a system, in what I would call “whataboutery”, since the suggestion about parental leave. Did anyone ever raise the issue with her before?
Andrea Leadsom
Yes, a good number of people. For example, my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood), the Parliamentary Private Secretary, was absent for a considerable length of time with a very serious life-threatening illness. For as long as this Parliament has sat, there has been the need to provide pairing for people who are extremely ill suddenly, and the issue of how best to manage those processes has always been raised. The suggestion that baby leave is a unique problem for the House is simply not true: there are clearly other issues that Members want to raise in the debate.