The Rev Mike and the Rev Nicky-Sue Terry have the classic married couple’s habit of finishing each other’s sentences. But perhaps it’s unsurprising that they know each other’s minds so well. They are not just man and wife, but also two halves of a pioneering job-share within the Church of England, splitting the role of vicar for St Mary’s in the Hampshire village of Warsash between them.
They take turns conducting services, he chairs parish council meetings, she runs the pastoral team, and vicarage life is divided according to individual strengths, although both try to take Fridays off. Mike, who previously served in the Royal Navy, likes long-term planning; Nicky-Sue says she prefers “to get into the detail of things, which … ” – she pauses, and Mike interjects – “drives me completely barmy”. Some parishioners in distress are drawn to her, some to him, but they try to make the relationship seamless. “We have a phrase we use,” says Mike, “which is: ‘We are the vicar, we are.’”
And both are thrilled to have a way of working that suits them. Having entered the church late in life – Mike, now 60, met 54-year-old Nicky-Sue in 2007, when both were training for ordination – neither wanted to run a church full-time, and so when their bishop suggested an experimental job share, both were intrigued. “In a sense, this is the Church of England beginning to recognise that we can do things in a more flexible way, and can be responsive to a modern environment,” Mike adds. “It’s a very positive reflection on a changing world. And if the Church of England can do it, that says something.”
Thirteen years after Tony Blair’s government pushed through the legal right to request flexible working amid squeals of protest, it feels as if the last bastions of traditional working practices are finally being stormed. Change is lapping at the highest reaches of the establishment; the armed forces, parliament and the judiciary.
Next spring, a landmark report is due to be published exploring the feasibility of job-sharing for MPs, to encourage parents and disabled candidates into parliament. The Ministry of Defence is in the middle of a trial project, offering soldiers with young children the chance to defer deployment overseas or rejig chunks of leave to reduce their hours. The scheme will be opened to more service personnel from February.
Two unnamed judges recently began the high court’s first ever job-share, and last week it emerged that future vacancies on the supreme court will be open to flexible applications in the hope of attracting female judges. (Currently the ratio is one woman to 11 men.)
The next big leap in the story, says the Fawcett Society’s chief executive Sam Smethers, would be moving to a default assumption that every job can be made flexible in some way – early starts or finishes, home working, part-time work or job-sharing – unless there is good reason not to. But that means showing it can work even at the top, and in professions once stoutly resistant to change.
“It’s about opening minds and realising that a lot of the way we do things is just because we’ve always done it that way,” she adds, “not because that’s the way it has to be done. In most jobs there is some prospect of flexible working.”
The niggling question, however, is how firmly these painstaking gains for working parents are entrenched in workplace culture: there are fears that, in a potentially tougher economic climate post-Brexit, it might become too easy to roll back employment rights. This is why it is so intriguing that even professions granted exemption from the law are now voluntarily thinking the previously unthinkable.
The single biggest reason for leaving the armed forces, according to the annual Armed Forces Continuous Attitude Survey, is the impact on family life – and it’s not just affecting women. There is growing concern about promising male officers leaving in their 30s and early 40s, just as experience becomes invaluable, because of the toll taken on marriages and children. It is this prospect of troops voting with their feet that has prompted a rethink of the rigid patterns of army life.
If the role of military wives was once to stay at home raising children while their men were off at war, those days are long gone. Almost one in 10 soldiers is now female, many military spouses work, and too many struggle to fit that around their soldier’s long absences and unpredictable hours. In a recent survey for the Army Families Federation (AFF), which has campaigned for flexible working on forces families’ behalves, 39% of spouses said their partner couldn’t help with childcare even occasionally. (For soldiers not on active deployment, variable start times and other forms of flexibility may be be available, but the forces are exempt from the legal right to request).
“You can’t rely on your soldier to finish at fixed times. They’re away a lot and the burden of the childcare absolutely falls on the spouses,” explains Louise Simpson, policy and research director at the AFF, and an army wife herself.
“If you talk to an organisation like Recruit for Spouses, which helps military spouses return to work, they’re trying to place people who were in incredible jobs [before becoming] military spouses, who are now downsizing considerably and finding even that difficult. Employers look at their CVs and say: ‘Oh, we can’t have someone this highly qualified.’” Yet many spouses can’t afford, she says, not to work.
Simpson praises the army’s current chief of general staff, General Sir Nick Carter, who personally backed the flexible working experiment last year by declaring there was “absolutely no reason” for not changing parade times on a base so that soldiers could do the school run. Tiny changes could, Simpson says, make a big difference.
But the Ministry of Defence remains cautious about the impact on operational readiness to deploy. The trial will continue until at least 2019 before any final decision is taken.
Meanwhile, the AFF argues that more could be done to spread the message that modern couples both work and need to share the domestic load. “We need to educate our command that this is the way most people operate now, so if every now and then a soldier wants to leave at 4pm to pick up the kids, they could,” says Simpson. But there is some private anxiety about the consequences of taking up the offer: one new mother Simpson talked to recently said her soldier husband wouldn’t take up the scheme because he worried that “it would be an end to the fast track”. For both civilian and military parents, the key may be making sure that flexibility goes right to the top of the tree.
At first glance, judges make terrible candidates for part-time working, since the same judge must sit continuously through trials that can last weeks. But the crown court now has a handful of part-timers, working in blocks of several weeks on and several weeks off – and the supreme court’s cases are shorter and more predictable than criminal trials, which makes them potentially more amenable to part-timers if they were carefully matched to cases. A final decision has yet to be taken on what kind of hours will be accepted, but crucially, candidates won’t have to declare that they want to work flexibly unless they are short-listed, meaning their CVs should be sifted purely on merit.
Since most supreme court justices are in their late 50s and 60s, the changes are unlikely to attract new mothers, but could suit someone seeking reduced hours because they are caring for an elderly parent, or to see teenagers through A-levels. And more than that, it sends a powerful signal through the system. “What we’re saying is that, actually, we appreciate people are looking to us to take the lead,” said a spokesman for the supreme court.
What kind of boss denies women the legal right to maternity leave, requires them to commute hundreds of miles a week and calls them lazy if they complain? The answer, technically, is all of us. MPs are not legally employees, but servants of the people, and the people can be unforgiving bosses. Ironically, the law on working life is currently made by people whose working conditions would be illegal almost anywhere else.
The Labour MP Rachel Reeves has just written a biography of the pioneering Labour minister Alice Bacon, Alice in Westminster, in which she reflects on how life has changed for female politicians since Alice’s election in 1945. “The hours have massively changed, the through-the-night sittings that existed in her day – the latest I’ve been there is maybe 1.30am,” says Reeves, who has two children under three years old. “There’s a nursery now, whereas when Alice was an MP very few women had children. There was a feeling you couldn’t have both. Those are choices that women are much less willing to make now.”
But the flipside of afternoon and evening sittings was that some MPs in Alice’s day treated parliament as a part-time job, pursuing careers in law or the City during the day. Time could be interestingly elastic, if what you wanted was the freedom to make money, not the freedom to see your children.
And while back then established MPs might have deigned to visit their constituency only once a year, the weekly shuttle back and forth is the bane of many modern political parents’ lives. Since there’s no way around the need to live in two places at once without breaking the constituency link, there is growing interest in job-sharing, with two candidates standing for parliament on one ticket and dividing the work between them.
Two Green activists, Sarah Cope and Clare Phipps, brought an unsuccessful court case last year arguing they should be allowed to stand for parliament as a job-share, and this week the Green MP Caroline Lucas – who shares her own party’s leadership with Jonathan Bartley – once again backed the idea.
But it remains controversial, dividing even those passionate about opening up parliament. Reeves thinks ministerial posts could be shared relatively easily, but worries about how an MP job-share would cope if its two halves disagreed over an unexpected issue, such as the vote on bombing Syria: “For me, that was an incredibly difficult decision. I had friends who politically I’m very close to who voted the other way. I’m not sure how you agree that in advance. Do you just say: ‘Well, it’s a Wednesday, so that’s Rachel’s day to vote?’ That doesn’t feel right. I personally think it’s incredibly difficult.”
Nonetheless, two academics, Bristol University’s Prof Sarah Childs – author of a separate recent report on diversifying the Commons, currently being studied by a working group of MPs – and Birkbeck University’s Dr Rosie Campbell, are examining the practical challenges for a report due next spring.
The urgent priority for many in Westminster, however, remains dragging arrangements for new parents into the 21st century. Ministers have been able to take maternity leave since 2001, but new mothers still have no formal right to time off constituency work. Most muddle through, reliant on the goodwill of whips to excuse them from voting at Westminster, while braced for criticism over their temporarily patchy presence. Reeves recalls signing casework shortly after her second child was born last June, and resuming constituency surgeries within six weeks. Despite being signed off Westminster votes for four months, she turned up to vote on Syria and tax credit cuts. “I was never completely off,” she says, before adding hastily, “but I’m sure that’s true for people in other jobs as well.”
Why don’t MPs complain more about conditions most parents wouldn’t tolerate? Reeves snorts incredulously at the question: “Because you get no sympathy!” Besides, she says, there’s flexibility in the school holidays when MPs work from their constituencies. “I don’t think we have loads to complain about. We’re a bit like self-employed people, who can’t take maternity leave because it’s going to cost you.”
The snail’s pace of reform in parliament undoubtedly reflects private fears of a backlash from voters still smarting over the expenses scandal. But Childs remains optimistic about the prospects for change, arguing that it is in nobody’s interest if MPs “have to rely on good relations with the whips” to get time off to recover from childbirth.
She is struck, too, by the way the wave of SNP MPs elected in 2015 are starting to change the dynamic. Used to the more modern Scottish parliament, which keeps something closer to office hours, she says they are much more willing to question stuffier traditions: “They’re able to make comparisons, and they look around and say: ‘Why are we doing this the way we do?’”
And as the two vicars of St Mary’s found out, that can be a life-changing question. “When we started, it was an experiment; we had no sense that we would do what we do now,” says Nicky-Sue, who thinks a job share might never have occurred to them without their bishop’s prompting. “But there’s something very symbolic about it, a married couple sharing a post like this. It’s perhaps a challenging concept. But it’s a beautiful one.”
