Mr Peter Bedford

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) for securing this important debate. Men are often told that we do not talk enough about our feelings and that we bury our heads in the sand, and too often in this House and across Whitehall there is a tendency to overlook the challenges faced by men and boys. We rightly and frequently hear about the importance of protecting the rights of women and girls, and that is obviously very important, but equality must mean fairness for everybody across the United Kingdom. If we want to build a nation that everybody is proud to be part of, we must be prepared to confront the challenges facing men. We have a Minister for Women and Equalities and a Select Committee scrutinising that brief, while the civil service employs diversity and inclusion managers to promote the interests of seemingly any group other than men and boys. I am not claiming that that is done on purpose, but it needs to change. This is not about diminishing the progress made in advancing opportunities for women and girls, but we must acknowledge that in several key areas, such as education, employment, justice and health, men face profound challenges that are simply not spoken about enough or dealt with. In education, the disparity starts early: only about 60% of boys are deemed to be school ready, compared with 75% of girls. The gap does not disappear, but persists through secondary education and beyond. Some 45,000 fewer men go to university and 18,000 fewer young men have started apprenticeships since 2017. At the same time, boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be permanently excluded from school. Alongside the statistics, an unhelpful narrative has developed that boys are a problem to society and that they need to be managed. That does nothing to raise aspiration or instil pride and responsibility in young men. We see the issue even in working life. The number of young men unemployed for more than a year now stands at more than 107,000—the highest level since 2015, in part thanks to the economic decisions of the current Government, sadly. As we all know, long-term unemployment has serious social consequences. As has been mentioned, we have a male prison population of more than 90,000 and we have thousands of young men sleeping rough on any given night. That is not the life that any of us in this place would want for our sons, brothers or friends. Finally, we cannot ignore the realities of men’s health. Men are more likely to become alcoholics or have addictions than women. Physically, men are more likely to be overweight, to suffer from cardiovascular disease and to die earlier than women from a range of conditions, including cancer. Most worrying of all is the fact that in England and Wales suicide is about three times more common among men than among women, and the gap continues to widen. This is the elephant in the room that we are simply not talking about enough. These outcomes demand serious and sustained attention.