Helping female workers will boost productivity, MP says
THE UK will fail to improve its low productivity rates if it does not take steps to help women improve their working lives, an MP has claimed.
Wirral South MP Alison McGovern told a Westminster Hall debate, led by Barnsley Central’s Dan Jarvis, that women generally work at the firms that add the least to productivity, such as retail and hospitality.
MPs were told that the UK lags behind France and Germany in the output generated by the average worker, meaning that people in France “will have been more productive by Thursday lunchtime than will the people living in Britain by Friday teatime”.
Mr Jarvis, Sheffield City Region metro mayor, told of the divide on productivity, with his region and the North in general less productive than London and the South East.
But Ms McGovern told the debate that it was “important to understand and get to the root of the issue” and that women work in jobs that are on average 22 per cent less productive than men’s.
She said: “Why? It is because they work in those areas of our economy that are the least productive, such as retail and hospitality, where productivity growth has been slow for many years. As a result, women do the worstpaid work.”
The Labour MP added: “If national productivity is to mean anything and if the Government are to have any kind of strategy to improve the productivity of this country, we must recognise that one half of our population are unable to take the steps they need to improve their working life and their ability to contribute to our economy.”
Responding for the Government, Treasury Minister Simon Clarke said the issue was “something
I have been talking to my officials about”. He said: “The Government has seized of the cost of childcare and the need to resolve fundamentally the problem we face with social care, which has so many spillover consequences for our health service and our economy, and we will be coming forward with proposals.”
Mr Jarvis said the North’s productivity gap was “a huge missed opportunity for our people, our businesses and the Exchequer”.
He said: “There is no silverbullet solution to tackle the productivity challenge, but the levers to pull are all within our collective grasp, and there are things we can do urgently that will start the process of addressing the national and regional productivity challenges we face. First and foremost, we must win the argument for investing in an active placebased programme of investment that includes every region, city and town across the country.”