If Scotland is to be family friendly, we need MSPs who know how to raise one

THE period between rising star and yesterday’s man is growing shorter and shorter. We already know that Ruth Davidson will be standing down at next year’s Holyrood election after ten years as an MSP.

A decade is a long time in most careers but in politics it is barely a warm-up; after ten years in Parliament, Margaret Thatcher was still only shadow education secretary.

Now Gail Ross has announced that she, too, will be leaving Holyrood. The MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross was elected in 2016 but since then has shown herself to be smart and talented, with a keen sense of what matters to Highlanders and a determination to fight for their concerns to be heard. She was tipped for ministerial office and her absence from successive reshuffles was a curious oversight on the part of the First Minister.

The reason for her very early retirement should give us all pause. She explained: ‘I want to be able to spend more time with my family, to watch my son grow up and to be more involved in local issues, things I cannot presently do.

Career

‘The sheer size of the area I represent also means that I am having difficulty in reaching every part of the constituency on a regular basis and I am not able to represent my constituents in the way they deserve and rightly expect.’

An MSP is giving up parliament before her political career has properly started because the demands of motherhood and a rural constituency are proving impossible to reconcile.

Some will have no sympathy. She knew what she was getting into and lots of people work jobs with much longer hours and for much less pay that also keep them away from home. This is true, but we should be trying to get away from these employment conditions so that working parents can spend as much time as possible with their children. That is what parents want, and plenty of research also shows the importance of spending time with younger children in particular.

If you want the world of work to be more family-friendly, you need people in parliament who understand from personal experience how hard it is to balance a career with raising children. The days when mum stayed at home while dad went out to work are long gone and, besides, most families simply cannot afford to have only one parent earning.

The stress and guilt this places on parents is immense and the more they try to do to bolster the family finances, the worse they feel about themselves for missing school plays and sports days. Having mothers in parliament keeps these issues to the fore when policy is being made – and mothers in particular because, however politically incorrect it might be to say so, women are still the primary care-givers in most families.

Ross is not the only political moither to open up about the challenges of raising children while in parliament. Ruth Davidson’s departure from the Tory leadership was in large part about wanting to spend more time at home with her baby, Finn.

Aberdeen North MP Kirsty Blackman has also spoken out. She was rebuked in 2016 for bringing her two young children to a Westminster committee meeting after being unable to secure childcare. She even took them with her when she went to vote in the division lobby.

She said: ‘I have yet to work out what the House expects us to do with small children who are not allowed in the lobby. How do I explain to a two-year-old that she has to stay with adults she has never met so I can vote? The system is nonsensical and overdue for reform.’

I used to be resistant to the idea of making Holyrood or Westminster more family-friendly. Parliament isn’t a coffee morning; you can’t rearrange a vote on air strikes in Syria because little Johnny has a tummy ache. But a parliament is only as good as the quality of member it attracts, and if the status quo is going to cost us hard-working and capable MSPs such as Ross, then maybe it is time to look again at how parliament operates. Given the advances in video-conferencing software, it should be possible for members to participate in committees or chamber debates even if they are on the other side of the country.

There is also a case for the use of proxy voting. Members of the public can nominate someone to vote in their place on election day, so why shouldn’t the same option be open to MSPs, provided the proxy performs a purely functional role and doesn’t take any decisions themselves? The House of Commons recently introduced a proxy voting scheme for MPs on parental leave and there’s no reason why Holyrood couldn’t fashion a more generalised version of that system.

Childcare

The House of Commons provides an onsite nursery for MPs’ children, unlike the Scottish parliament. The Westminster experience is instructive, though. Because the Commons nursery runs like any other nursery, members’ children must be registered, long-term pupils, which doesn’t allow the flexibility essential to good childcare.

That has prompted MPs to call for a creche to operate alongside the nursery on a drop-in basis. There probably isn’t the space at Holyrood for a nursery and a creche but given the size of the Scottish Government estate, there should be space for a facility nearby.

Politicians don’t cut terribly sympathetic figures. Many people will say they should get on with the job they’re paid to do or go get another one. But this underestimates the value of having mothers and fathers at Holyrood, as well as MSPs from rural and island Scotland. Drive them away with unworkable conditions and you will end up with a parliament of Central Belt singles, unrepresentative of the country, unfamiliar with the challenges of parenting, and unresponsive to the concerns of families.

If we’re going to make Scotland a better place to raise a family, we need people who know about raising families making laws and shaping policies. Losing people like Gail Ross makes that all the harder.