Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill

Aaron Bell Excerpts

Friday 22nd October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

I raised it as an interesting point. I do not underestimate the stress, and I will cover that later when I talk about the solution we have come up with. It was a resolution, but none the less we want to get rid of the bully-boy tactics—the use of fire and rehire as a tactic of negotiation—because that should never be able to happen. As we have said, it has been exacerbated by the pandemic, but we want to make sure that we get our resolution and our approach correct so that it does what it says on the tin rather than have some of the unintended consequences that we have heard about today.

I was talking about the recovery. We have one of the fastest recoveries of any major economy in the world, thanks to this Government’s will to act and plan to deliver. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said at our conference that we were embarking on a change of direction for the UK economy, away from the broken model of low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity; away from a broken model underpinned by reliance on uncontrolled immigration to keep wages low. We want to build back better in a new direction towards a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy, which the people of this country—workers and employers—need and deserve.

A key part of the building of that economy will be to continue to champion a flexible and dynamic labour market, creating the conditions for new jobs, protecting existing ones and maintaining the UK’s excellent record on workers’ rights—one of the best records in the world.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

Is it not the case that now, with unemployment lower than before the pandemic, the bully-boy employers that mistreated their workers will find that those workers—this is the genius of capitalism—will go and look for jobs with better employers?

[Paul Scully]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are taking proportionate and appropriate action on the issue of fire and rehire, but that must avoid any course of action that runs the risk of doing more harm than good, increasing the risk of collapsing businesses and subsequent increasingly redundancies and unemployment. I have real concerns about the approach in this Bill, as it would significantly increase administrative burdens and costs to employers, when they are already facing challenging circumstances.

I want to assure the House that the Government take reported misuse of fire and rehire really seriously, and we are continuing to assess the evidence available from different perspectives. I will set out today what I believe to be a proportionate response to the available evidence on the practice of fire and rehire. It is an approach that encourages best practice by employers, protects workers from unscrupulous employers and, above all, protects jobs and livelihoods by not forcing employers into a situation where they need to make redundancies or close entirely. That is an approach which, in line with the Government’s actions over the past two years, has supported businesses, livelihoods and jobs through the profound impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the whole country.