Code of Practice on Dismissal and Re-Engagement

Debate between Lord Hendy and Lord Browne of Ladyton

Monday 25th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am confident that the Minister will have read the Second Reading debate of my noble friend Lord Woodley’s Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill. I too do not intend to repeat the speech I made then, but I make no apology for repeating the most important points, because they were designed to expose whether the code will be the deterrent that the Government think it will be. I am personally extremely sceptical about that, for two very clear reasons, which I will repeat by way of explanation.

First, while this debate is ostensibly concerned with this somewhat anaemic code of practice, it engages much larger questions of access to justice, the balance of power between employers and workers, and, fundamentally, whether the code does what it purports to do and will shield workers from manifest injustice. Given that the introduction of this code was announced in response to P&O Ferries instituting mass redundancies in March 2022, I think it is legitimate to look back at what the Government said then. The then BEIS Minister, Paul Scully, explained the Government’s new commitment to introduce a statutory code of conduct. He did so in highly emotive and, one might say, colourful language. He described the practice of firing and rehiring as “deceitful” and “disgraceful”, labelled the actions of P&O “appalling” and “unscrupulous”, and vowed that the Government would “stand up for workers” against the flagrant disregard shown by companies that use sudden mass dismissal as a negotiating tactic.

Having raised these expectations, it is no wonder that there is manifest disappointment with the glacial emergence, over two years, of a code of practice that will impinge upon employers only at the point a case reaches tribunal. Testing whether or not that will be a deterrent is what I want to draw the Minister’s attention to. I did this in my contribution to the Second Reading debate, drawing attention to the issues of delay and the coming imposition of fees for tribunals. The Minister who responded to that debate, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Lainston, was unable to pick up on those points in his winding up of the debate and offered to write—and, true to his word, he did write. I thank him for attempting to ease my anxieties but I confess that his letter was not wholly successful. Indeed, it was the opposite: it raised the temperature of my anxieties.

The letter began by admitting that there remains a backlog of 32,000 cases in the tribunal system, asserting that reducing outstanding caseload is the key to bringing down wait times, before revealing that:

“Employment Tribunal timeliness data has not been published for some time due to the Employment Tribunal changing their case management system in 2021”.


That was three years ago. We have an assertion that bringing down wait times is essential, followed by a confession that, owing to a change in the case management system three years ago, we are today unable to gauge whether or not wait times are falling.

The viability of this code of practice is entirely contingent on a tribunal system that is effective and can prove timely redress. The fact that we currently, by the Government’s own admission, have no access to the data that would tell us whether it delivers timely redress is absurd, if the Government are to rely upon that as being the ultimate deterrent against this behaviour by the people they described with those very colourful adjectives.

The letter also engaged the question of the Government’s consultation on reintroducing fees at this time, of all times, for those who wish to bring a case before an employment tribunal. I thank the Minister for outlining, in his letter, the details of the help with fees remission scheme, but I remind your Lordships’ House that I raised the case of R (UNISON) v the Lord Chancellor in my speech on Second Reading. It is not mentioned at all in the letter, and I can understand why, because the judgment in this case was unambiguous. It concluded that levying fees was unlawful. It cited the Leggatt report, which specifically identified the absence of fees as one of the three key elements that made tribunals successful, and concluded that fees, however modest, have the effect of preventing access to justice. That was the principal point that I raised in that aspect of my speech, and it was just ignored in the letter I got back from the Government.

I understand the fees coming under consideration are appreciably lower than they were previously, but they will certainly not encourage victims of fire and rehire to have recourse to the tribunal system and may well act as a further discouragement. This is yet another case of the Government telling us that they understand the existence of an injustice, assuring us that their heart is in the right place and they are seeking to right a wrong, but then again balking at doing the needful. We are all familiar with the cases of Tesco, Jacobs Douwe Egberts and Carnival and the other cases that seem to be appearing by the day, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, referred to, and the way in which employers and others weaponise the power advantage they have and exploit their workers. Rather than institute a non-legally binding code of practice that tells employers what they already know, I believe a more fitting course of action would be to enshrine good practice into law and offer clear redress to workers when they are victims of injustice.

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

My Lords, I share the regrets expressed by my noble friends. I intend to address the second element in the regret amendment put down by my noble friend Lord Woodley, and that relates to the International Labour Organization, which your Lordships will recall is a tripartite body, consisting of Governments, employers and workers. The United Kingdom was a founding member in 1919; it was the first signatory of the fundamental convention on freedom of association—convention 87—in 1949; it is a member of the governing body; and it is represented on the Committee on Freedom of Association.

The relevance of that is that, on 8 November last year, the governing body approved the 404th report of the Committee on Freedom of Association, which reported on the P&O Ferries saga of St Patrick’s Day 2022. Your Lordships will recall that 786 seafarers were dismissed on that date and only 100 were subsequently reinstated. The other jobs were given to agency staff. The Committee on Freedom of Association, as approved by the governing body, made three substantive recommendations, none of which, so far as I can see, is reflected in the code of practice.

The first recommendation related to collective bargaining. The committee said that it

“urges the Government, with the social partners, to ensure mutual respect for the commitment undertaken in collective agreements, which is an important element of the right to bargain collectively and should be upheld in order to establish labour relations on stable and firm ground”.

In many of the instances of fire and rehire mentioned by my noble friend Lord Woodley, there have been established collective agreements and established collective bargaining. That was the case with P&O Ferries, where collective agreements stretching back nearly 100 years were flouted.