Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Baroness Verma and Baroness Noakes

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, but I also support all the other amendments in this group. Both the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and my noble friend have already fairly comprehensively treated the issues that concern a number of us, so I will not repeat all those points.

I just underline three brief points. We are trying to look for a balance between the legitimate expectations of employees and employers, because we need those to work in harmony. At the end of the day—as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe pointed out—employers will be producing the growth that the economy needs, so their hiring plans will be critical and anything that harms this balance will damage the economy.

From an employer perspective, anybody who has undertaken recruitment as an employer knows that most employers approach this extremely responsibly—it is not a cheap process to get the right people into the jobs—but we also know that, however diligent you are in screening, interviewing and assessment processes, you do not always get it right. You can usually test whether a person has technical skills, although sometimes you need to see them in practice before you know whether they really have them. The important area is whether an employee fits with an organisation. That is really difficult to tell until the person turns up and starts working. Do they share the same values as the rest of the workforce? Do they have ways of working that are just not compatible with the culture of the organisation? This is particularly important for small organisations: if you have one employee who does not fit in a very small organisation, that is a significant proportion of the workforce and can be very damaging to the business of a small business.

The last point that I underline is that this Bill will make it much more difficult for the difficult categories of people who want to find a job but cannot. There has been much talk about NEETs, and ex-offenders are another case. Why would any employer want to take on an ex-offender with day-one rights? We know some of them make excellent employees but quite a lot of them do not. They can become quite difficult to handle in the workplace. If employers fear that they will not be able to easily overcome mistakes in recruitment they simply will not hire, which will harm people who want to work.

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, as an employer who has employed people over the past 40-odd years, I know that the difficulty for an SME—any small business such as my own—is the ability to manage all the bureaucracy that is entailed with it.

For businesses in the social care sector, for example, unfortunately you cannot really understand how good or bad a care worker will be until they have worked a little while in the organisation, even with the training. However, if we are to give the rights from day one, the difficulty will be that we will end up with a sector already very short of workers needing to hire more workers in case any are not suitable for the role. We would have to release them, knowing that they may then apply workers’ rights on day one without proper probation periods and take us to tribunal. It is a difficult sector.

There are many sectors like the care sector, and it is particularly challenging for small businesses in the wider sector of delivering something that is so important. If the care worker is not the right fit, it does not really matter how big or small the organisation is—that person is just not suitable for the role. We need to have the ability to dismiss the person without having to go through the bureaucracy of all the Government’s intentions in this part of the Bill. I therefore support my noble friend and the noble Lord on these amendments.

It is time to have a strong rethink about how we can come to a good middle ground, where employers are not fearful of employing. I have been talking to a lot of SMEs over the past few months, and the difficulty that noble Lords across the House will have found, when they have talked to businesses in their own communities, is the worry around what will happen when the legislation in this Bill is enforced.