Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)

My Lords, I support Amendment 100 from my noble friend Lady Penn. I want to focus on the societal and class element of this. I come from a community that has some of the poorest social outcomes in the whole of Europe. One of the features of my community is the lack of a father in the home. I have watched my community struggle for multiple generations with the reality of that—poor educational outcomes and lots of prison attendance by fathers and by children who are unattended. This is an opportunity to reverse many of the social challenges that we face, in one fell swoop. If the Government are serious about addressing child poverty and helping the poorest working communities in this country, levelling up paternal leave would be such a profound thing to do. I have been a youth worker for over 38 years and one of the things that I ran was a single parent group with over 200 members. When you spoke to the young men involved, they all talked about a lack of connection to their family. If we can help to repair that, we can start to get into why our children fail so badly in school, why they spend so much time in prison and why their behaviour is so challenging in a school environment. The Government have a real opportunity to do this here. The economic impact of not doing this is significantly more than the tiny difference it will make economically to do it. This is a real opportunity for the Government to make a real impact for the poorest communities in this country. I beg that it happens.