Employment Rights Bill

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

My Lords, may I rather impudently congratulate the Government on their Amendments 112 to 116 and 117 to 119? In Committee, I moved a series of amendments to similar effect; namely, that the output of the negotiating body should not impose a detriment to existing terms and conditions and should permit any enhancement to existing terms and conditions by negotiation or otherwise. I am not so immodest as to imagine that there is any causal connection between my amendments in Committee and the appearance of these amendments on Report. I recall that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, also had amendments to similar effect; it may be that she had much more traction with my noble friends on the Front Bench than I had. Whatever the process—it is of course irrelevant—I congratulate my noble friends on the Front Bench for the introduction of these amendments, which make solid that this is a floor and not a ceiling.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran in her Amendments 111A, 111B, 116A and 116B. I have not spoken on the Bill before, so I refer noble Lords to my registered interests, in particular as a founder of a multi-academy trust with 18 schools and around 1,400 staff.

This new negotiating body—a central bureaucratic body dictating terms and conditions and pay for all to obey across our whole nation—literally drives us back to the 1970s. It would remove any ability to take note of local employment conditions. My own multi-academy trust completed a secondary school core structure review in 2022 and we have just finished the same review for our primary schools. We now have in place posts and grades that meet the needs of each school and, most importantly, those of our pupils.

We have set out a grading system to reflect the local conditions in which we operate. Primary and secondary staffing levels are strong and sustainable. The SSSNB would undo all this, and the cost of going through this new legislation would be bureaucratic and increase the overhead in our human resources. Administering these changes would take resources away from the front line with no meaningful benefit. I congratulate the Government on at least accepting that there is a floor to this whole arrangement, but it still leaves an extremely complicated central bureaucracy.

To provide good education we need flexibility. We operate harmoniously with our unions; we share a common mission and believe we have created a first-class cadre of support staff. Indeed, only two weeks ago, one of our support staff saved the life of one of our children, who had a cardiac arrest on a playing field when playing away. The local defibrillator had broken and he kept the child alive for 20 minutes.

I am looking at this whole Bill more widely. If we zoom out beyond the area of education, we start to see the impact of the aggressive anti-employer strategy being deployed by this Government. We have already seen the impact of VAT on private schools, with them going out of business and staff losing their jobs. We have already seen the escalation of employers’ national insurance and the widening of the bands, which has contributed to some 60,000 jobs being lost in the hospitality sector. Last week, we tried to warn the Government about the banter clause, which will drive another nail into the coffin of the hospitality sector.

Private sector employment market vacancies are under great pressure. At the beginning of last year, there were 900,000 vacancies and, by May this year, that was down to about 720,000. We heard earlier in the debate from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on AI, and we are already seeing the impact of this—perhaps more dramatically in the US, where Microsoft has got rid of 15,000 staff in the last two months.