Trade Act 2021 (Power to Implement International Trade Agreements) (Extension to Expiry) Regulations 2025

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations. This is my opportunity to express a personal welcome to him on his new ministerial responsibilities. I hope he enjoys them. For those of us who are veterans of the Trade Act 2021, such as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and I—perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, also counts in that category—the abstruse nature of the debates that we take part in can always be characterised as having a certain fellow feeling and enjoyment. This debate will doubtless be one of them.

As veterans of the Trade Act 2021 will recall, Section 2(10)(b) confers the power to extend the operation of the Act by a period of up to five years from IP completion date—31 December 2020—and, on more than one occasion, as specified under Section (2)(11). The Act provides for the powers to implement “an international trade agreement” or “a free trade agreement”, but it applies only to agreements to which the European Union and a counterparty were signatories prior to exit day—31 January 2020—so it applies only to those agreements that we referred to at that time as continuity agreements.

Those involved in the original legislation will recall that the regulations were expected to apply principally to procurement agreements and mutual recognition agreements for conformity assessments, as well as similar agreements known as agreements on conformity assessment and the acceptance of industrial products. That was in reference to what my noble friend Lord Grimstone—he of the famous Grimstone rule—enunciated in the passage of that legislation on 29 September 2020. I think it is correct to say that, since the passage of the Procurement Act 2023, further powers are available separately to the Government to include further countries to have access to the government procurement agreement by adding to the list in Schedule 9 to the 2023 Act, so there should be no further need for regulations under the Trade Act 2021 in relation to procurement.

I do not believe the same is true for mutual recognition agreements. One can see that powers in the Act have been used for this purpose. I found three: SI 2021/730, which was the mutual recognition agreement for the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Republic of Korea and Japan; SI 2021/1332, which extended the Canadian agreement to construction products; and SI 2022/1400, which applied to Switzerland. Are those powers still needed? I conclude yes, in so far as I can see there are three continuity agreements that include the potential for a mutual recognition agreement or an ACAA, but where such agreements have not been concluded between the European Union and those counterparties. They are the association agreements between the European Union and Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia respectively. Will the Minister say what, if any, ongoing work is being conducted to reach any agreement with any of those three states, or am I correct in thinking that we would implement such an agreement only if or when an MRA or ACAA is concluded between the European Union and one of those states?

I have one further question. Is it the Government’s intention to legislate for a power to implement mutual recognition agreements in free trade agreements in the future? The Trade Act applies to continuity agreements only, and clearly there is a wider question. Will the Minister explain what we might agree with Switzerland or Turkey that is covered by the Trade Act 2021 and regulations under that Act? I am not sure I understand what that would be.

Going outside continuity agreements, the UK-India agreement includes commitments to work on the joint development of technical regulations and can include the acceptance of conformity assessments, but it is not a full mutual recognition agreement. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership states, at Articles 8.5 and 8.6, that each party shall give positive consideration to accepting the results of conformity assessment procedures conducted in the territory of another party and may do so through a mutual recognition agreement; and that, at the request of another party, a party shall enter negotiations for the conclusion of agreements for the mutual recognition of the results of conformity assessment procedures. Among the member states of the CPTPP, Japan, Canada and New Zealand already have mutual recognition agreements in place with us, but other countries may request them. I take this opportunity to ask whether they have done so. On the assumption they have not, were they to do so, would the Government consider implementing legislation for the purpose of bringing mutual recognition agreements into force through statutory instruments, rather than waiting for primary legislation for the purpose?

The conclusion I reach is that these regulations may be needed, if for no other purpose than that the European Union might fast-track agreements with Ukraine and Moldova, although probably not Georgia for the time being. If they are fast-tracked towards EU membership and would be compliant with conformity assessments for industrial products, we may arrive at a situation where we could extend our continuity agreements with them in like fashion. I therefore see the purpose, potentially, for an extension for the next five years.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, in thanking the Minister for the introduction and repeat his welcome. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, who led us so skilfully and bravely through some truly obtuse bits of the Trade Act in 2021, including questioning his Front Bench very strongly. I will aim not to be obtuse and to be brief. Just the existence of this SI reraises some of the big questions that we discussed in 2021 in the context of what has happened since then.

Employment Rights Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 23rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

184B: After Clause 150, insert the following new Clause—
“Review of the impact of high temperatures on workplace health and safetyWithin 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must publish a review of the impact of increasing temperatures on workplace health and safety.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure the Government is considering the impact of increasing temperatures due to climate change on the safety and health of workers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, aware of the hour, I begin with a promise that I will not test the opinion of the House, although I am afraid that I cannot speak, of course, for the numbered amendments after this one.

Just to explain very briefly—it is fairly self-evident—my amendment calls for a new clause to review the impact of high temperatures on workplace health and safety. Of course, this is in consideration of the rising issue that this presents for the rights of workers in the climate emergency. I did not table a comparable amendment in Committee. I tried to table a broader amendment which was ruled out of scope and I never managed to get back to it, but I feel it is really important to bring this amendment here today, in light of events between Committee and Report.

Noble Lords may be aware of a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson called The Ministry for the Future, which features a mass mortality event as a result of extraordinary high temperatures and humidity. If we ever get to that stage in Britain, we will be beyond deep trouble. None the less, what we have just experienced at the end of June is what one expert described as a “quietly devastating” heatwave across Europe, which killed 2,300 people in 12 major cities and, it is estimated, will have caused several hundred deaths in London alone. The climate emergency means that, through that period, the temperatures were four degrees higher than they would have been otherwise, and one of the important things that has happened is that we have seen a large increase in so-called tropical nights, when the temperature does not drop below 20 degrees centigrade, people struggle to rest and that then has a cumulative effect on workers’ health.

We have not just seen the heatwave. We have also seen the TUC launch a large-scale, serious campaign to ask the Government to look at this and, in fact, to go further and set a maximum working temperature. It is worth stressing that, unlike other countries such as Spain—which might not surprise noble Lords—and Germany, we do not have a maximum working temperature. There is an obligation on employers to provide a safe workplace, but without that maximum temperature, and with circumstances arising that neither workers nor employers have encountered before, we really need to set some guard-rails for the safety of workers.

The TUC did a recent study on this and produced some horrifying examples, starting with what is happening in schoolrooms. It surveyed almost 6,000 teachers; some 94% reported they worked in excessively high temperatures during the summer, with 42% doing so regularly. A union rep reported on 27 telephone exchanges, in which the highest temperature was 36 degrees centigrade. A chicken factory reported high temperatures leading to incidents of tiredness and dizziness in a place where there was a lot of hard physical activity—that sounds like hell. In tissue culture and virology rooms, the temperature was 32 degrees and the room was full of ethanol fumes, which is another issue all to itself.

I am acutely aware of the hour, but I hope I will hear from the Minister that this is something that the Government will look at very seriously and consider the TUC’s call for a maximum temperature. That would obviously vary according to the circumstances. When we think about working outside, we have the issue of sun exposure, which also has longer-term risks for health and skin cancer, et cetera. I hope that I will hear something positive from the Minister and that the Government will take this seriously, listen to what the TUC is saying, acknowledge that the climate emergency is making this a fast-rising problem and take action. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response. The problem is that words such as “reasonable” and “assessed risk” refer to what may happen in well-regulated, well-controlled workplaces; in contrast, it is the most vulnerable workers who are the most vulnerable to that not happening. However, many of the cases I cited were very mainstream workplaces, such as schools.

As promised, I will withdraw my amendment. Before doing so, I finish with an apology to the staff. We should give thanks to them for supporting us right through the Bill and throughout all the time it has taken. I also note that we should think about the impact of heat on their health and well-being in our workplace. We might want to think, as employers ourselves, about what reasonable adjustments we might need to make for them, as the temperatures in this workplace change. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 184B withdrawn.

Employment Rights Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 14th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I am going to speak very briefly, because the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, has given such an effective speech, which outlines the issue, and the hour is late.

When she first came forward with the proposal for the Health and Safety Executive, I thought, “My goodness, here is a body that could effectively deal with harassment and violence in the workplace, because it knows how to respond very quickly to situations that put people into an unsafe set of circumstances”. I suspect that, when the HSE was first put in place, sexual harassment and violence were probably considered somewhat acceptable, or they were domestic or private. They were certainly not something that an employer or workplace should be concerned about. Well, times have changed and we no longer look at it that way.

It is therefore entirely appropriate to update the HSE’s role to take on these issues. It is very easy to see how effective that organisation could be in closing down both harassment and violence. It is a respected organisation; people in a workplace know that it will act and it will enforce. Those kinds of behaviours make a great difference to the whole culture within the workplace. So I thought that this was an ingenious approach, which I very much want to back, because we all want to stop violence and harassment and here is a mechanism that does that with very little change to the existing organisational structures, but by giving power and responsibility to an organisation that has the capacity to deal with the problems effectively.

[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.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords who have contributed to this debate, and in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, for introducing it. We must, of course, recognise that violence and harassment in the workplace are unacceptable in any form. It is also important to acknowledge that women, particularly in certain sectors, are often at greater risk and may face additional barriers to speaking out or seeking redress.

This amendment raises serious and pressing concerns about how we ensure that all workplaces are safe, inclusive and free from abuse. The call for more proactive duties on employers and greater involvement from the Health and Safety Executive is one approach to addressing these challenges. However, as with any proposed legislative change, it is right that we consider carefully the potential implications, including how such duties would be enforced, the capacity of the Health and Safety Executive, and how we balance existing legal protections with any new obligations we would place on employers. I am very interested to hear what the Minister has to say on this point, particularly with regard to how the Government see the role of regulation, guidance and support in preventing workplace violence and harassment.

In Amendment 47, my interest was piqued by subsection (3C) to be inserted by the proposed new clause, which refers to

“gender identities, including women and girls”.

That seems to me to stray dangerously on to Supreme Court territory, which, as I understand it, we have yet to hear the EHRC’s guidance on. It strikes me as a tad premature, but I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say on it.

Employment Rights Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 5th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. In doing so, I declare my technology interests as set out in the register. It is a pleasure to follow him because this has always been his “WAIRIA” of expertise—bear with me. I will speak to my Amendments 289 to 298 and 314 to 316, but before doing so, I give full-throated support to everything the noble Lord said and his amendments. We are very much on the same page.

There is a strange situation with government at the moment when it comes to AI. That is not specific to employment rights but across the piece. We have been subject to it for the past year. We are told consistently that the Government will not be bringing forward cross-sector AI legislation. That position is to be defended if it is taken—the Government have decided on a domain-specific AI approach. But the difficulty with that is that whenever we have had domain-specific legislation coming through your Lordships’ House—be it product regulation, data or any of the Bills that I, my friend the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and others, have worked on—we have been told that those are not the Bills where AI is to be considered. In only a slightly reductive way, we currently have a situation, to be clear, where the Government are saying they are not bringing forward cross-sector AI legislation and specific Bills are largely—not exclusively—not the place to incorporate AI issues.

The amendments that noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and I set out in this group are key to one of the most important sectors—it is broader than a sector, and such an important aspect of our lives. It is how we are employed, what that employment looks and feels like, and how it is experienced by all of us. These amendments do not seek to address issues that will occur next year, next month or even tomorrow. AI is impacting workers right now, oftentimes without them even knowing that it is in the mix.

My first amendment seeks to suggest that the principles that have variously appeared in White Papers and other reports are put on a statutory basis in the Bill. We give ourselves the best opportunity to optimise with AI if we take a principles-based, outcomes-focused and input-understood approach. Similarly, I set out in Amendment 290 that all employers and organisations that develop, deploy or use AI should have an AI responsible officer. For this, do not think burdensome, bureaucratic or overcompliance. Because of the proportionality principle, it simply means that there is an obligation on those employers to report on their use of AI in the workplace. It can be well understood through reporting obligations such as those set out in the Companies Act, which employers will be very familiar with at this stage.

My amendments then move to questions of use. What happens where IP or copyrighted material is being used in the workplace? There needs to be labelling so that everybody is clear on, and there is transparency about, what is going on. What about the use of workers’ data? This is an incredibly rich resource that should not in any sense be served up or sold off to the highest bidder. The use of AI in the workplace should be clear and transparent, and workers should have an opt-in, not an opt-out, responsibility, as set out in the amendments.

Then, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has touched on, there is the question of automated decisions. It is clear that workers not only have to be aware that ADM is being used—and have the right to opt out—but also need the right to a human explanation of what is happening in those situations. If we are to optimise things with these technologies, concepts such as “human in the loop” and “human over the loop” must be understood. Safeguards need to be in place, not least where ADM is used, and this could form part of the data protection impact assessment that employers have to undertake.

Then there is the question of regulators. Employment and recruitment currently find themselves wide open to the use of AI. An individual may find themselves not getting shortlisted, not getting hired and not even knowing that the reasoning behind that was algorithmic processing rather than human judgment and human reasoning. It is critical to consider the right approach to fill that regulator gap. Would a specific employment and recruitment regulator do the job? My view—and I think there is evidence to support this—would again be that we could have a cross-sector AI authority. Again, do not think of a bureaucratic and burdensome AI regulator; instead, think of a nimble, agile, adaptive and, crucially, horizontally focused AI regulator, not only in the area of employment rights but across the whole of our economy and society. It would deliver that clarity, consistency and certainty that we all need wherever we come across AI in our working, professional and private lives.

It is so significant that, in Amendment 315, I believe there should be a commission on AI in the workplace. Mindful of comments from Monday, I am certainly no fan of setting up a commission to delay or kick issues into the long grass. But perhaps by using the technology to solve some of the issues that are created by the technology, we could have a reimagined approach to commissions and consultations.

Finally, I come to Amendment 316 and the algorithmic allocation of work. This is already happening, and it has already been in front of the courts. It is clearly an issue and one that needs to be fully understood. The Government need to state clearly their position on this most significant of matters. I look forward to other speakers and to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow two of the House’s acknowledged experts in this area of the impact of AI. I will speak to my own Amendment 323B and also note that I attach my name to Amendments 294 and 298 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes.

My Amendment 323B is quite a modest step. It calls for a review to be published within 12 months. In saying that, I thank the Ministers for having a meeting prior to the discussion of these amendments, which I very much appreciated. But I think the time for talk is over; the time for action is now. Twelve months is still too short, but it seemed the best timeframe I could reasonably give for this call for a review of the electronic monitoring of workers in the workplace. This picks up some points made by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. It also crucially points to the need to look around the world and see what else is happening and what we can learn from what has happened in other places. The companies selling these systems are global giant multinational companies. The companies deploying these systems are giant multinational companies in many cases. It is important that, rather than trying to pick this off ourselves, we look around the world and say that we want to be leaders in creating a different kind of model of how workers can be protected.

Online Harms: Young People

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a very important point that we need to provide alternatives to online activities for young people. She is absolutely right about drama, and sport can also help with that. The Department for Education is conducting a curriculum review at the moment and one of its priorities is to make sure that children genuinely have a balanced, wholesome curriculum that deals with all those issues—one that is not just academic but deals with children’s development in the round, which is exactly what the noble Baroness is saying.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, Finland is known as a global leader in education and has schools that focus on critical thinking and the ability to absorb online information and regard it sceptically, when needed. Does the Minister agree that that is something we need to see much more of in British schools? We are presenting teachers with a real challenge, with so many subjects focused on teaching to the test and rote learning things to regurgitate. We have to think about the whole way in which our schooling operates, so it is focused on critical thinking.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point, and it goes back to the need for a balanced curriculum. In the past, our curriculum has become too focused on a very specific set of goals and not the broader issues. Having healthy relationships is part of teaching and learning at school; that is absolutely something that we need to do and we are strengthening the provisions for that within the curriculum. The Department for Education will provide guidance to help young people develop the skills that all young people need to be able to navigate this complex modern world.

Employment Rights Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this important Second Reading debate. It is great to see so many noble Lords taking part, and I particularly welcome and congratulate the maiden speakers. I hope they will work with all of us, particularly those on the Government Benches, to constructively improve the Bill.

This is a Bill that the Green Party welcomes, and my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will shortly provide a listing of the many points on which we agree. I am going to focus on the big-picture context in which this Bill comes before us. In doing so, I respectfully but strongly disagree with the pleasantly colourful opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral. This Bill modestly—we Greens would still say inadequately—seeks to rebalance the power of workers and employers.

That relationship was thrown profoundly awry under Margaret Thatcher, particularly by strangling the ability of workers to get together in unions to support each other against the power of the bosses, particularly the bosses of large companies. The imbalance was then enhanced by allowing zero-hours contracts and other insecure forms of employment to explode, and for working hours to extend, across many sectors of our economy. That is something that was not permitted to happen in many of our European neighbours, which now benefit from healthier, happier workers, who have the capacity to contribute to their communities and societies generally, as the noble Lord, Lord Monks, highlighted. We saw the wage share of workers collapse, a rise in inequality, and the inefficient and destructive financialisation of our economy, all of which can be at least in part attributed to failures to make work safe, fair and adequately remunerated.

There was a failure to recognise changing social structures, whereby the previously unpaid and unacknowledged labour of women has been brought into the paid workforce. That work has to fit around the continuing demands they still face. We are, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle and the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, both highlighted, people with responsibilities and needs outside work that our working structures do not adequately acknowledge. The economy is paying the price of this too, with skills, energy and talents excluded by inadequate labour protections.

The Blair and Brown Governments failed to redress the imbalance between workers and employers created under the Thatcher Government, and so we are where we are today. They too allowed the minimum wage to drift downward in real terms, subsidising the profits of giant multinational companies in particular, at a cost to us all. As the noble Lord, Lord Barber, said, we have seen a race to the bottom in employment, and that has to stop.

I often hear those on the Government Benches say that they want to get workers into good jobs. We in the Green Party take a different view: we want every job to be a good job, and those that are unavoidably difficult and unpleasant to have conditions that reflect the conditions of work. We clapped essential workers during the pandemic, but we did not lift their pay or the respect in which they are held. This Bill has the potential to do much more than it currently does. I invite noble Lords to consider the relative position of sewer cleaners and bankers, and what would happen if we did not have the former working for us all.

A fair society and a fair working environment are particularly important in what have often been described as the green areas of the economy. On Monday, the All-Party Group on Climate Change held an interesting meeting about the just transition, and that is something I want to look at in this Bill.

I am greatly concerned about the impacts of new technology on workers—for example, on the employees and agency staff at that great parasite, Amazon, who are forced, at a cost to their health, to act like robots, working themselves into the ground. That kind of surveillance is spreading to many other areas of work. Workers need the right to breathe at work. Hospitality workers need to be able to travel home safely at night, and work is being done on that through the Get ME Home Safely campaign. Generally, health and safety at work needs much more attention, and I want to see how we can build this more strongly into the Bill.

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that proposal. Again, I hope that all these companies will contribute, or have contributed, to the consultation, because those are exactly the sorts of standards we want to achieve. We want to make sure that creators get the right awards; that is certainly our intention through this consultation. We need to find a way through this. We are working hard and we will not give up until we have found a way to resolve the issue.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, all pointed out the way in which big tech has already stolen large amounts of property. Had that property been cash or gold, we surely would be getting a different reaction from the Government—yet it is actually the same thing. I have a constructive suggestion to help the Minister. How about a universal basic income for the creative sector as compensation?

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her helpful suggestion. Hopefully, she has fed that into the consultation. I am sure it will be considered as one of the many proposals to resolve this issue.

Biocidal Products: Hand and Body Washes

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what restrictions they are considering placing on the use of biocidal products in over-the-counter hand and body washes.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade and Department for Science, Information and Technology (Baroness Jones of Whitchurch) (Lab)]

My Lords, biocides are a broad group of chemicals that include preservatives vital for ensuring the shelf life of cosmetic products. Preservatives proposed for use in cosmetics must be approved by the Secretary of State, following consideration by the independent scientific advisory group on chemical safety, before being added to the permitted list in the cosmetics regulation. Cosmetic products with a secondary biocidal function are permitted only if they are safe for human health.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her Answer. She and other noble Lords will have received a briefing on this matter from Dr Paul-Enguerrand Fady at the Centre for Long-Term Resilience. The Minister referred to preservatives, but many products are advertised as being biocidal. That briefing refers to a British Medical Journal article, which talks about biocide resistance as

“a new scourge of the infectious disease world”.

There is a lot of focus on antimicrobial and antifungal resistance, but does the Minister agree on the need to focus on biocide resistance as well? Will she direct the department to look at biocide resistance and see what can be done to tackle what that article describes as a “scourge”?

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes an important point about the impact on antimicrobial resistance that could result from these products. The Government are already focusing the second of our five-year national plans on this, and we support the 20-year vision established by the previous Government to ensure that antimicrobial resistance will be controlled and contained by 2040. This is an important issue that crosses over into human health in the wider sphere, so I thank the noble Baroness for raising it.

Paternity Leave (Bereavement) Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, who so comprehensively and powerfully set out the need for the Bill. I also commend the honourable Chris Elmore, for taking it up and seeing it through the other place.

I am speaking to express Green Party support for the Bill and for fathers and partners who, in the most tragic of circumstances, find themselves a single parent as a result of the death of a partner or spouse. We all struggle to imagine how people survive such circumstances, but they have to. I must reference the amount of discussion that we have had this week about the evident need to improve maternity care dramatically. But, whatever we manage to achieve in that area, there will still be tragic occasions that we need this law to cover.

It is interesting to note that this is a real indication of how Parliament and the parliamentary process can and should work, but so rarely does. We are amending the Employment Rights Act 1996 and, in Committee in the other place, the original proposed Bill was amended to cover a broader range of circumstances, fully covering adoption and surrogacy and, as the noble Baroness said, the situation where a child dies. It was a copybook process, which we would like to see being done a lot more to produce good legislation and do things that needs to be done and that do not need to be regarded as political.

There was discussion in the other place about how this does not cover Northern Ireland. There was some suggestion that it might be extended, so can the Minister comment on whether that is technically possible, feasible or is being taken forward in any way? It was raised in the other place.

I follow the noble Baroness in acknowledging the work of Gingerbread, in making the case for this legislation and driving it through. It is a demonstration that campaigning works. Campaigning can be a long and thankless task, into which people have to put an enormous amount of effort, but it delivers. We need to acknowledge the importance of civil society voices being heard in both Chambers and being listened to and acted on.

Finally, I want to look at the broader context of the Bill. It restates an important principle that, when a child is born, they are not just an individual or a member of a family but a member of our society. They are definitely not the property of their parents. They are not the sole responsibility of their parent or parents, but the responsibility of all of us. Society has a responsibility to make sure that every child has a decent start in life. That is a moral position that, sadly, needs to be increasingly restated these days, but it is also a practical position: if we are going to have a functioning society that can tackle the many challenges and crises that we now face, we need to make sure that every human being in our society is able to develop to their full potential. We cannot afford to abandon any child, or any parent who is struggling to raise a child in impossible circumstances, without the resources to do the job.

This is a really excellent piece of work. I congratulate everyone involved and, like the noble Baroness, look forward to it being on the statute book with the regulations in place as soon as possible.

UK Trade Performance

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Tuesday 7th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

When it comes to stock market listings and the operation of stock markets, that is, by definition, capitalism in the private sector, and the Government should not get involved in that particular exchange. However, the previous lord mayor led a very interesting initiative which identified that our pension funds are not investing enough in UK equities, so there is now an interesting scheme going on whereby we can see whether we can get 5% of UK pension funds invested in UK equities, which I think is a very worthwhile initiative.

When it comes to headquarters, et cetera, a number of studies have been put out recently by PwC, EY and Boston Consulting Group which have done surveys with CEOs who indicate that they still believe that the UK is one of the best places to locate their head office in Europe. Therefore, we do not see any diminution in that. Foreign direct investment into the UK now is greater than into France, Germany and Italy combined. The market, the money, talks. The money is coming in—my noble friend Lord Johnson is doing a sterling job on that. We have a strong, good economy. Foreign investment is coming in. There is dislocation of stock markets, but initiatives are being taken to alleviate that concern.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I am glad that the Minister agrees with the Green Party about GDP growth being an extremely inaccurate measure of progress in a society. The question I want to ask is specifically about the situation of small and medium-sized enterprises exporting to the EU. Importers are having many difficulties. The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, referred to florists, and horticulturists are reaching out to me regularly. On exporters, British Chambers of Commerce figures for the fourth quarter of 2023 show that 50% of SMEs have had no change in overseas sales while 24% have seen a decrease and that exports from SMEs to the EU are consistently underperforming domestic sales. The head of trade policy at the BCC has said

“firms continue to express huge frustration with the complexity and cost involved”,

referring to exporting to the EU. Are the Government going to do more to help in what is clearly a deeply damaging situation for SMEs?

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

I just wish the noble Baroness had been at breakfast this morning at No. 10 Downing Street, where my noble friend Lord Petitgas and I hosted 16 SMEs which are exporters to Europe and elsewhere. They reported on how their businesses are trading up and that they now have the opportunity to trade around the world beyond Europe. I have been through the numbers; they do not lie. The numbers say that in terms of our manufacturing there has been no difference between Europe and the rest of the world. There are of course individual circumstances and individual companies where there have been ups and downs. That is business, but, overall, we are very clear that our SMEs have a great appetite to export. We need to get more of them exporting—as I said, 300,000 out of 2.5 million VAT-registered companies do so; I personally feel that we should push that up to half a million. We can do that, especially with the new digital industries coming through. Certainly, I would be very happy to introduce the noble Baroness to a number of the export champions today. Some of them are actually bringing manufacturing back—onshoring manufacturing —to the UK following Brexit. That is a very pleasing development.