Ms Camille Loftus:

One of the reasons I raised the matter of the contribution that greater gender equality can make to growth is because it increases the fiscal space and the kind of investments we can choose how to spend. Do we want to invest more in education or health? It gives us more room for that. Coming from a perspective that is the opposite of the Deputy's, sometimes we get from the business side of the House that this does not have anything to do with important issues. I just wanted to make the point that these are not mutually exclusive or contradictory to one another and they can be mutually reinforcing.

There are two big challenges that we face in social policy in all developed countries. Labour markets are changing very rapidly and they do not provide the kind of security or jobs they used to and on which most welfare states and tax systems are based. The kind of job my dad did - he was the male breadwinner in our household - was a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. secure job that he worked at from when he left school until he retired. That does not exist any more, and I have had to explain that to the man on numerous occasions when he wonders why I do not have one of them. That is changing but we have systems designed around a labour market that does not exist any more.

The other dynamic that is changing is care. It is done by everybody in society and one of the very welcome developments we can see now is that when we look at the gender balance among those providing unpaid care for older people, it is less gender marked than would certainly have been the case in the past. It is less gender marked than is evident in the care of children. Everybody knows somebody in this position; they know a man providing care for an elderly mother, father or whatever. Care is an integral part of every social policy decision we need to make; it does not need to be done by women. What we really need to consider is how to integrate those elements into all our lives in a way that we are happy about.