Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I will speak very briefly. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, who very powerfully made the case for Amendment 48. I am going to focus on Amendment 47. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, has already made the case for that very powerfully, but I will add one very recent set of statistics to it. The noble Baroness mentioned unions and, just last week, Unite put out a study that polled women across the 19 sectors of work that it covers. It found—these figures are truly shocking—that a quarter of respondents said that they had been sexually assaulted at work, in a workplace-related environment or on the way to and from work. Some 8% said that they had been a victim of sexual coercion at work. This is the sort of situation that was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. People are in insecure employment and zero-hours contracts, which the Government are doing something about—perhaps not quite enough but something. If you are in a situation where you desperately need those hours and the supervisor decides where on the rota you are and how many hours you will get, that puts the supervisor in an incredible position of power, which can and clearly is being abused. What is really telling is that 56% of respondents said they had heard a sexually offensive joke at work and 55% had experienced unwanted gestures or sexual remarks. I am sure the government response will be to tell us that they are taking measures to react, but, crucially, Amendment 47 sets out a responsibility to prevent it happening. This really needs to be regarded as a public health measure. We hear often in your Lordships’ Chamber about the issues around mental health and well-being and the problems we have in our society. If you are forced to keep going into a workplace that is actively hostile to you, with gender harassment and abuse, then that will be very bad for you and for the company. As a society, we should not tolerate it.