Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Woolf Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2013 Lords Chamber

I make a last-minute plea to the Minister. As long as you get rid of the extremists on both sides—those who would have nothing and those who do not really like employment rights at all, who I think cancel each other out fairly satisfactorily—a position could be created here which would be about share ownership in the circumstances of a joint contribution to the sort of risky endeavour that every new company is and every new high-tech company certainly is. That is the position that I think the Government were seeking to place, but I do not think that they have done it. I do not want to say to the Government that we do not want any of it, but I would have hoped that the Government could have gone a lot further in listening to the advice of people who did not wish them ill but wanted to find a better way through this. Although they have removed a thing that made it, in my view, impossible to support, I am not sure we have gone far enough along the lines that we ought to have in order to make this—

[Lord Woolf]

I apologise for interrupting and thank the noble Lord for giving way. However, does not everything he has just said, which I have listened to with great care, indicate that this is one of those situations where legal or financial advice from somebody competent is critical?

[Lord Deben]

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, puts me in the most difficult of positions. I have spent my whole life congratulating myself on being the only politician from Cambridge of my time who was not a lawyer, and therefore complimenting lawyers, or suggesting the need for legal advice, goes against the grain in a big way—but I have to say that he is right. However, that is not the only thing. The issue is how we make this a creative contribution to the development of small businesses rather than something that has become an argument not about that at all but about giving up employment rights, the need for legal advice and all those things. We did not start from the basis that we ought to have, which is what puts me into this huge position. I apologise therefore for not being enormously supportive. I still have to listen very carefully to decide quite how unsupportive I am going to be, but I say to my noble friend that I wish we could have turned this good idea into a good idea instead of turning this good idea into what seems to me to be largely not an idea at all.