Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 107A in this group, which is intended to be an entirely helpful amendment for the Government, allowing them to put nine months on the face of the Bill but preserve all the flexibility they have there at the moment. I think that would be a small step forward in giving comfort to employers to know what is coming their way.

I understand that probationary periods are uncomfortable for people who want to take them—it would be interesting to try them in this House. None the less, when you run a small business, as I do, they are important. I have in the past employed prisoners; actually, every single one of those has worked out really well. I have employed promising young people who have turned out to be a total disaster. It is really hard to know. You cannot rely on references these days; nobody gives a truthful bad reference, because they would just get sued for it, so it is really hard to pick up warning signals. Everyone’s documents are compiled by AI, so they are beautifully written and answer all the questions perfectly. You cannot interview everybody, you have to take a chance, and sometimes it just does not work out.

To have to prove capacity or competence is hard. I do not know whether any noble Lords here have been involved in a school where the head has not quite worked out. It is really difficult to get rid of them on the basis of competence; it takes so long to negotiate their departure. If you are faced with that sort of disincentive for the ordinary, run-of-the-mill employees—“If get this wrong, I’ll be saddled with a £50,000 bill for unfair dismissal”, which is about the scale of these things if you are paying people decently—that is a big disincentive to employing people in the first place. It is certainly a huge disincentive to taking on people who have a question mark in their CV—a period of unemployment or something that looks odd about it—or who are just young.

We want people to take risks. I have enjoyed taking risks. It is wonderful when it goes right. You really feel you have helped someone in their career and have been part of building a life for them. They leave you, which usually they do, but you take pleasure in what they have gone on to do and the success they have made of their life, and perhaps you have done a bit there. But it is a risk, and to load that risk on to what is by its nature an inexact, uncomfortable and uncertain decision is a real incentive not to take that decision—not to hire.

I think it would be a mistake to go down that road, although I am comfortable, as the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, pointed out, with a shorter timescale. You ought to know, if you are paying attention, whether things are right within three months; you might want to give someone a bit of extra leeway if you think they can set themselves right—but not holding it at two years. I am totally in favour of that; nine months seems a decent figure. It has to be possible, as my noble friends have said, to dismiss people just because it has not worked out. In some circumstances that is the best you can say: “No, sorry—we both did our best and it didn’t happen”.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

Very briefly, because we are talking about the time periods here, you have to be very careful because accrued holiday goes into that, and if you do not give people notice before the holiday is up, you cannot get rid of them. So be careful: it should be three months or less, and actually you have to knock off another week or so. This is from experience.

The other thing is the headmaster issue. I know one small school which had terrible trouble because the headmaster was incompetent. He knew it, so he got depressed and went on permanent sick leave, and of course the school was then saddled with the costs. There are a lot of problems such as that. It would be nice to clean them up at the same time if we could, but I do not think it will happen in this Bill.

Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Lucas

Report stage
Tuesday 21st January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the regulator quite clearly needs a standard against which to judge. Public interest is the established one in FOI, medicine and elsewhere. It is the standard that is used when I apply for data under the national pupil database—and quite right too. It works well, it is flexible, it is well understood and it is a decent test to meet. We really ought to insist on it today.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I want to add very quickly that we have got a problem here. If someone did take all this private data because we did not put this block on them, and they then had it, it would probably become their copyright and their stuff, which they could then sit on and block other people getting at. This amendment is fairly essential.