Lord Leong
Main Page: Lord Leong (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Leong's debates with the Department for Business and Trade
(1 year, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberI am grateful to my noble friend for that question. I am afraid this is not my department, but I would be delighted to come back to her with a Written Answer.
My Lords, both the Minister and I founded and ran our own businesses before coming to this place. I hope he will agree not just with me but with many business leaders and trade unionists, such as my noble friend Lord Woodley, that decent working conditions for employees’ security, health and well-being directly lead to improvements in productivity. Will he remind his government colleagues that a surefire way to make UK plc more productive would be to enshrine the highest standards of workers’ rights in legislation and not to seek to weaken or remove them through the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill or the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill going through both Houses?
I thank the noble Lord for that point and for the extraordinarily high level of collaboration we engaged in last week when we were doing exactly this: bringing in protections for workers—in this case, the Carer’s Leave Bill, which will allow carers the flexibility to have a much-needed one week of unpaid leave. Ultimately, the best way to strengthen the workforce in this country and to enable businesses to give pay rises is to encourage the sorts of policies this Conservative Administration have brought into play, which have resulted in nearly 4 million new people in work, the average and minimum wages going up by over £8,000 and—