Draft Companies (Miscellaneous Reporting) Regulations 2018
Debate between Bill Esterson and Michael Fabricant(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Bill Esterson
My hon. Friend is quite right to raise that point, given that we are talking about private sector companies. Perhaps it is time for the Government to consider wider corporate governance issues in the private sector. The directors to whom she referred have benefited from public money and success for such companies has come through the Government’s Help to Buy scheme, where unfortunately, despite the Government’s intention, money has gone to the directors rather than helping people who desperately need somewhere to live. Last year, Labour’s manifesto had commitments on the 20:1 ratio for the public sector and companies involved with public contracts. Might the Government be in a position to do something similar?
I agree that improving relationships and consulting stakeholders is important. Doing so with employees is also important, so I will return to employees. Consulting, discussing and publishing the results of those discussions is one thing, and action is quite another. I am interested in the Minister’s thoughts on what can be done with the findings of such consultations. If consultations are just a talking shop and the results have to be published, what is the point? What is a company’s motivation other than to look good in reports?
Members of the Committee will have had the TUC’s briefing. It has raised a number of concerns. It said—the Minister touched on this in his opening remarks—that the whole workforce need to be engaged, and that these regulations should be about engaging with workers as a whole and not just with employees. I remind the Committee that the TUC estimates that 740,000 people in the UK today are working through an employment agency, 450,000 earn most of their income through personal service companies and 500,000 people are in bogus self-employment. Significant numbers of people are in indirect employment and their indirect employment is often with the companies covered by the regulations.
I hear what the Minister has to say about the difficulty of having direct control, but is there not a danger that some employers will take the opportunity to act less than scrupulously and use indirect employment as a way to avoid their responsibility under the regulations? Sadly, we have seen too much of that kind of behaviour in our economy and the mistreatment of people in precarious situations is a growing and dangerous part of how our economy functions. Not only is it bad for working people, but it creates an unfair competitive advantage and undercuts those employers who want to do the right thing—those businesses that want to act in a responsible way. I urge the Minister to take that point on board, in the spirit of its being good for workers and good for businesses.
The TUC also raised the point about the size of businesses covered by these regulations. For listed companies the regulations use the established definition of a large company, which in this case is one with more than 250 employees, but, for reasons that the Minister might want to explain, for private companies the figure is 2,000. The TUC has drawn to our attention the fact that the gender pay gap reporting requirements use the same lower figure for public and private. I stand ready to be corrected by the Minister, but that is my understanding from the information coming from the TUC. Why is there a difference between the reporting requirements for gender pay and for pay ratios, if that is indeed the case? If it is not, and they are both 2,000 for private companies, I would still want to know why there is a difference between private and public.
Michael Fabricant
I always try to be helpful. Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that although these rules of course concern companies and corporate law, perhaps other organisations should fall under such a remit, such as universities, where some vice-chancellors, we hear, earn astronomical wages?
Bill Esterson
Yes, of course—I do not think there is any doubt about that—but this is about the private sector. I quoted the figure in our manifesto for the public sector. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is advocating that the Conservative party should make similar proposals of its own for the public sector? I welcome his conversion to the cause and support for Labour’s manifesto from last year in the spirit in which his intervention was no doubt intended.
The other point I want to raise with the Minister concerns the FRC’s responsibilities and enforcement. Perhaps he could start by describing how enforcement has happened with the gender pay gap regulations and what examples have been received, in what I think is just over a year since those regulations came into force, of the need for the FRC to intervene and whether they have found companies that are not compliant. He quoted the policy of “comply or explain”; perhaps he can say whether he has considered what happens if the answer is always to explain and if we do not have compliance. I would be interested in his thoughts on the level of enforcement that has already gone on with the gender pay gap, and on how enforcement will happen for these regulations.
A lack of enforcement of the prompt payment code was one reason so many ended up in such a precarious financial position as suppliers of Carillion. The Minister and I have debated before the difficulties of enforcing the prompt payment code. This debate is an opportunity to remind him that good enforcement is essential for the regulations to have any meaning, and to encourage him in that regard. Perhaps the Minister could tell us how he envisages that and also give examples of how the FRC will be able to deliver that enforcement.