Deregulation Bill

Debate between Baroness Donaghy and Lord Lea of Crondall

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, it is important to place on the record and clarify some of the misunderstandings that took place in Committee. At the beginning of the discussions on the Bill, the Government prayed in aid, with a great deal of enthusiasm, the recommendations of Professor Löfstedt, who is professor of risk management at King’s College London. That enthusiasm became less and less as Members of the Committee challenged some of the statements contained in the proposals. Certainly, my noble friend Lord McKenzie challenged them on a number of occasions.

In Committee on 21 October, the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, said:

“I was in contact with Professor Löfstedt in the past week. He has seen the wording of the Bill and appears to be very content with it”.—[Official Report, 21/10/14; col. 568.]

It is important that we set the record straight: Professor Löfstedt is not in the least bit happy. My noble friend has already quoted from his letter. To save time, I will quote a small additional bit. He says that,

“the proposed Government list may increase injury and death in the workplace something that I never intended with my original recommendation”.

It is very serious that there has been a misunderstanding about the authoritative recommendations that were claimed to be behind this proposal. I agree with my noble friend: it will increase confusion; it will add complexity to the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act; it will add burdens to the conscientious self-employed who want clarification about their obligations; and it is a charter for cowboys. I urge the House to support the amendment.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, it is very noticeable that when people such as those from the Federation of Small Businesses are asked, “Where is the evidence that more people ought to be excluded?”, they say, “It is not a question of particular evidence; it is a question of perception”. Something rings a bell in my mind when somebody says, “It is not the evidence; it is a question of perception”. As somebody once said, what about changing the perception? I think that is where we are at the moment. Indeed, that is where the Government and the employers do not want us to be—to look at the evidence.

Instead, there are lots of crocodile tears and lots of red herrings dragged across the trail. One red herring is, “They do it in Germany”. Well, they do lots of things in Germany. In the one minute I have available, I say to the Government that if they would like to start citing Germany and give us the whole employment package that they have in Germany, we on this side will vote for it. I put that proposal; perhaps the Government would like to agree to it.

Finally, there is a trend in Britain today, whether or not it is being deliberately promulgated—that makes it sound like some sort of conspiracy theory, but I do not go in for conspiracy theories because we are often at the receiving end of them. But if there has been an increase in self-employment, it is hard to reconcile with the idea that it is very difficult to be self-employed now because of all the red tape. Anyway, on one side there has been a vast increase in self-employment, if we can get our brains around that. On the other side, there are a number of people who do not have contracts of employment. That is partly a question of whether, ex hypothesi, in a static labour market there are a greater number of people in work. But on the employed side of the labour market, which is the vast majority, the quality of the contracts of employment is being reduced bit by bit.

One of the great advances since the war has been to improve the quality and content of the contract of employment. If you were to interview a random group of self-employed people and a random group of people with good contracts of employment, a lot of people who are self-employed would turn out to have some sort of relation to the employed but with a subcontract in the middle whereby they are not really self-employed—they are on something which does not give them a contract of employment with four weeks paid holiday and all the rest of it. Will the Minister therefore comment on the fact that it is very desirable that the good-quality contract of employment terms are a benchmark for the self-employed, and that this is not a further means of endeavouring gradually to wear away a benchmark on which we in this country have always been able to rely?

Postal Services Bill

Debate between Baroness Donaghy and Lord Lea of Crondall

Monday 14th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy]

My Lords, I speak as a former chair of ACAS. One of the joys of ACAS is that I probably know more about the employment relations of most industries in this country than anyone else; one of the frustrations is that I follow the ACAS tradition of not speaking about them in detail.

I want to speak in general terms about the importance of recognition. I am sure that noble Lords from all sides of the House recognise that whatever final shape the Postal Services Bill takes, this will be an unsettling time for employees and will increase their anxiety for their future.

Whenever ACAS became involved in labour relations in a particular industry, its key concerns were transparency, consultation and employee buy-in, and we would take both sides through the steps required to achieve success. Continued recognition of the appropriate trade unions would always be a key element in achieving employee buy-in. It would be enormously reassuring during these uncertain times if the Government were to agree to uphold in the Bill existing recognition rights. It would be much more than a gesture of good faith; it would be a statement that the worker’s voice will be heard, and their involvement assured, in negotiating both their own future and that of the industry to which they are committed.

Recognition rights do not mean that an employer has to accede to union demands or to weaken its position commercially. They represent an acceptance that employees are an asset and that their commitment is a commercial asset. I hope that the Government will accept the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, I am afraid that we now see week after week in some newspapers—I would include under that heading a magazine such as the Economist—thinly disguised attacks on collective bargaining. We cannot debate that topic in its totality this evening, but I refer the Committee to the central point. Across the OECD countries, there is a close statistical fit between the amount of collective bargaining in a society and its equality. It is therefore the grossest hypocrisy—it is not conscious, but perhaps subliminal—for people to say that they do not like the gap between rich and poor when they are attacking collective bargaining. Both at a point in time and over the decades, the weakening of collective bargaining means that the forces in society are no longer balanced. We now have a gross imbalance between the oligopoly of power in the City of London and the attempt to weaken the workforce.

I think that we will see in the demonstration to be organised by the TUC in London on 26 March that the workforce has woken up. It will demand that its rights be respected, which will have great resonance with the people of this country. I therefore fire a warning shot across the bows of people who think that they are now able to administer the coup de grace to people who have collective bargaining. When the postal services are in the private sector, they may be expected to fit the private sector model whereby workers are not covered by collective bargaining and it is much more difficult for them to be so. Therefore, it is fair to take the opportunity to point out, in the spirit of this amendment, that it would be very unwise for people to think, “The public sector has collective bargaining. In the private sector, we don’t have collective bargaining and we can just say goodbye to it”. Anybody who thinks that is deluding themselves.