Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Lord Hendy and Baroness Barran

Report stage
Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 111A, 111B, 116A and 116B in my name seek to improve the Government’s proposal to mandate a single, detailed set of terms and conditions for all support staff.

As we debated in Committee, the status quo is not perfect. The current national joint council arrangements have significant weaknesses in their application to schools, which has led some local authorities to opt out of the Green Book terms and conditions. I hope the House will forgive me if I remind noble Lords why these amendments are necessary. First of all, we are talking about a very large workforce: about half a million people are employed within the school support staff workforce. Half of those, roughly, are teaching assistants, and the other half have a huge range of roles, literally thousands of different roles. This is a very complicated area. There is variety in roles and in pay and conditions, which reflects local needs, whether it is the organisational structure of a trust, pressures on a local authority where it opts out of the NJC, or where employers have particular needs because of geographic local market conditions. I mentioned in Committee the difference in trying to recruit an IT assistant in Cambridge versus Oldham.

The landscape is very different today from the early 2000s when the SSSNB previously existed. We now have around 2,500 trusts, with about half our schools in trusts and half in local authorities. But the innovation that we have seen in relation to pay and conditions for school support staff has of course been largely in the trust sector.

I will just recap our specific worries about the Bill as currently drafted. The first is that it will add to the complexity, workload and cost of every single school in the country at a time when we know that schools are under considerable pressure and when the Government are rightly focusing on recruitment and retention of the teaching and support staff workforce. My Amendment 111A seeks to mitigate the potential damage of this by limiting the SSSNB’s powers to creating a framework that academies must consider regarding remuneration, terms and conditions, training, career progression and related matters.

I tried to work out roughly how many role profiles the department will need to create to meet the breadth of roles that the SSSNB will cover. I think it is realistic to say that across about 22,000 schools and around 2,500 trusts, there will literally be thousands of ways of dividing up and specifying roles, so that if the SSSNB is to try to articulate role profiles in detail, it will have to produce thousands of them. We just debated the power of AI; maybe these are all going to be drafted by AI—who knows? If not, it could take a very long time.

I will just give one example of the complexity of this. If we think just about finance roles in schools and trusts, they could vary from the chief financial officer of a large trust to the chief operating and financial officers in medium-sized trusts who manage estates and technology, through finance directors of smaller trusts who might be more like executive business managers in larger trusts, and to finance directors in single-academy trusts who have a role not unlike a business manager in a maintained school, but with more accountability. Then we have finance managers, finance assistants, management consultants, senior management consultants, financial accountants, finance business partners, payroll managers—the list goes on. These are all in endless combinations that change over time as trusts and schools grow, shrink and change. The same is true for HR, technology, data and projects, as well as pastoral roles.

This illustrates that we are looking at a vast undertaking, and more importantly a needless one, given my Amendment 111A and the Government’s very welcome Amendment 112 and associated amendments that clarify that there cannot be an agreement that cuts the pay of a school support staff member. But any national framework that fails to acknowledge this reality risks becoming either so vague as not to be useful or too rigid to serve communities effectively. We have not had clarity yet from the Government about how this is going to be addressed in the real world.

We are also worried that there is no estimate at all for the additional costs that this approach will create for schools, and my Amendment 116B aims to address this. It seems extraordinary to introduce a measure that will increase costs to schools and costs to the public purse without working out how much that would be. I do not know whether the Minister can update the House on that point.

Our final concern is that the Government’s Amendment 112 will not fully address the ability of trusts to innovate and improve the terms for their support staff, which, rightly, the Government have as their priority for recruitment and retention. As I read it, it appears to say that new subsections (2) to (5), introduced by Schedule 4 on page 207, do not apply if each individual term and condition is to the advantage of the employee. I phrased that in a positive sense; the amendment is phrased the other way around.

Across the House, I hope we are keen that innovation around terms and conditions is possible where it provides an advantage to the employee in the round, but not necessarily looking at every element separately. For example, some trusts currently have a policy that everybody who joins in a child-facing role must either have or work towards achieving a level 3 qualification. That is clearly good for children. It leads to higher pay, which is good for the member of staff. But the duty on an employee to work towards a level 3 qualification is clearly a new requirement on that employee. My understanding is that anything that requires a person to acquire a qualification or undertake training is not defined as an improvement in their terms and conditions. An employee could reasonably say, “I don’t have to do that under the new national terms and conditions”, even where the unions think it is a good idea and other employees are in favour of it. So trusts would not be able to stick with such approaches, which benefit children and staff. I hope that the Minister can confirm that my understanding of this is right.

It is frequently the case that contracts for support staff in trusts are constructed very differently from those in the maintained sector. If contracts specify that hours, holidays, allowances, pay scales et cetera are set out in a completely different way from the SSSNB terms and conditions, but the overall impact is better for everyone, why would we want to rule this out?

The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, kindly met the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, and me last week. She pointed out that school support staff are the only public sector workforce without a pay negotiating body. She is right about that but, if the Government are interested in the outcomes rather than the process, my amendments, particularly Amendment 111A, achieve their aims but avoid complexity and cost.

We believe that the Government have addressed the issue of setting a floor not a ceiling on pay, but, although I understand it is their intention to address innovation, the amendment as drafted does not address the reality of innovation and improvements of terms and conditions—hence my Amendment 111B. I hope that the Minister is able to be clear when she sums up that the Government agree with me and the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, and that we can find a way to address this effectively. I beg to move.

[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.

School Buildings: Safety

Debate between Lord Hendy and Baroness Barran

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not think we can say that the 10% which have not responded are weak. We are dealing with it by running a small call centre in the department. There are organisations that we have had to contact multiple times—including, sadly, some local authorities—and we are working with MPs and others to make sure we get all the returns. We are also supporting, in slightly slower time, all trusts to improve their competency in relation to the management of their estate, including rolling out a free specialist capital adviser programme to support them in estate management.

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

My Lords, one aspect of safety in schools is fire safety. I declare an interest as a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group. In 2007, draft guidance was given that predicted that most schools would be fitted with sprinklers and very few would not. In 2021, further draft guidance was published which predicted the contrary: that very few schools would be fitted with sprinklers. I understand the consultation on that has not been published yet and therefore the guidance has not come into effect two years later. I understand, too, that the problem is that there is a division of opinion between the department on one side, which thinks the risk is low, and the insurance industry and fire chiefs on the other, which think the risk is high. Would the Minister be content to attend a meeting of the APPG with representatives of the insurance industry and fire chiefs to see whether there is some methodology to ascertain precisely what the risk is and therefore the need or lack of it for sprinklers?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I would be delighted to meet the APPG, but I remind the noble Lord that there are 67,000 buildings on the school estate and about 450 fires a year, 90% of which cause no significant damage.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Debate between Lord Hendy and Baroness Barran

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

My Lords, in the previous group I drew attention to the fact that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report criticised the absence of detail in the Bill in relation to the provision of minimum service levels. In that group, the Minister explained to us that the criterion in setting minimum service levels in the health sector would be life and limb. Will the Minister say what the criteria are for the setting of minimum service levels in the education sector? What factors are going to be taken into account? A second and related point is about how the minimum service level is to be set. Is it going to be some percentage of the hours that teachers do, or something of that kind? What is it that the Government have in mind by way of a metric to measure the minimum service level?

As an associated point, what is the metric that employers will use to identify the workers necessary in a work notice to implement the minimum service level? My noble friend Lady O’Grady pointed out in opening the debate on this group that millions of hours are given by public service workers, and hundreds of thousands of those hours are provided by teachers in unpaid voluntary overtime. Quite clearly, the minimum service level, still more the work notice, presumably cannot specify that teachers have to work a minimum service which includes voluntary unpaid overtime, so the minimum service that could conceivably be specified is limited to the 35 or 38 hours or whatever it is per week specified in the contract of employment of each teacher. Effectively, if the Government implement 100% minimum service levels, there will be a work to rule. All the teachers will do the absolute minimum hours that their contract specifies. I invite the Minister to help us on how that could possibly be exceeded in a minimum service level and on what it is that the Government have in mind, taking that very important factor alluded to by my noble friend into account.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure, as my noble friend Lord Markham said earlier, to respond to your Lordships’ critical challenge. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and the noble Baroness Lady O’Grady; it really is a pleasure to be across the Dispatch Box for their amendments. I put on record the Government’s appreciation for all teachers, teaching assistants and staff who work across our schools and colleges and in higher education for the extraordinary and valuable job that they do.

Amendments 6 and 7 seek to remove the education sector and education services that are within scope of having minimum service levels implemented. As noble Lords know, the key sectors outlined in the Bill broadly stem from the 1992 Act as amended by the Trade Union Act 2016, and they have long been recognised as important for society to function effectively.

The noble Baroness asked why we need minimum service levels in education services. She can probably anticipate my answer, which is twofold: first, they have far-reaching consequences for children, who are potentially denied access to education if their teachers or other staff are on strike, and, secondly, it has an impact on their parents, many of whom work in other critical services but are unable to go to work. It is only right that these essential services, which the public pay for and expect to be there when they need them, are included in the Bill so that there is a reasonable balance between the ability of workers to strike and the rights of the public. The Government therefore cannot support the amendments.

Amendment 7 would exclude the vast majority of education services from the Bill. The Government believe it is right that the detail of specific services and minimum service levels is set out in secondary legislation. I am afraid that is why, in response to the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Hendy, who asked for specific detail on criteria and metrics for minimum service, I am unable to give that detail to the Committee today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We absolutely know that the pandemic has had a terrible impact on school attendance. That is why I say that the strikes at the moment are particularly unhelpful for children when we are trying to send a clear message that school is not an optional extra but something that you go to every single day. To have renewed disruption is not helpful for those children or the message that we are trying to send them. I am not confident, but I hope that I have reassured the Committee enough that the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

Can I just inquire about the Minister’s proposition that all options are being considered? Can she say whether the possibility has been excluded from consideration of requiring teachers under a work notice fulfilling a minimum service level to carry out unpaid voluntary overtime?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not aware of the details, but I am not sure that it would be appropriate to comment at this point.

Social Capital

Debate between Lord Hendy and Baroness Barran

Monday 25th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I agree with the noble Lord and thank him for his tireless work in this area. I share his recognition of the outpouring of social kindness. Our efforts, in the funding that we have provided the voluntary sector in particular, have predominantly focused on small local organisations, for exactly the reasons that the noble Lord sets out.

[Lord Hendy (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the fragmentation of society, starkly illustrated by the report, is the consequence of replacing the ethic of public service with that of private profit, of privatisation, outsourcing, austerity, the closure of libraries and youth clubs, ending rent controls and taking measures against collective bargaining, causing the real value of wages to stagnate and poverty for 4 million in working families. I assume that the Minister will confirm that there will be no U-turns on these damaging policies.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The issues that the noble Lord raises are more complicated, as I am sure he knows, than some of the limited examples that he has given. I commend to him the work that the Government are doing, particularly on social impact, the use of the Public Services (Social Value) Act in all government procurement and the emerging hybrid model of profit and purpose.