12:02

Harriet Harman, the Labour MP who led the battle for women’s rights in parliament for decades, said it wasn’t enough for the great repeal bill to retain women’s rights. Instead, she called on the government to guarantee that the rights of British women at work would continue to evolve in line with EU changes.

“Women’s rights have improved by us being part of the EU,” said Harman, in an interview for the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast.

There has been an evolving process in the EU, and what we don’t want to do is get off that escalator of progression and be frozen in time and not have the advantages that women in the rest of Europe are going to get. We don’t want women in this country to be Europe’s poor relations when it comes to their rights at work.

Harman said the EU had repeatedly nudged forward women’s rights over the years, by building on UK legislation in the past, for example shifting from the equal pay act to “equal pay for work of equal value”.

“I think great repeal bill should not be just ‘you keep rights’ but ‘you keep up with EU’,” she added, calling it a moving process.