Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Paul Scully

Tuesday 6th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)]

My hon. Friend is a doughty champion of small and independent businesses in her constituency, as well as of those big businesses that everybody knows around the world, not just the country. She is right to say that if people come to the centre of London, which has been remarkably quiet and slow to recover, they will see the benefits of those independent shops, as well as being able to enjoy everything that the most fantastic global city, represented by my hon. Friend, has to offer.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

  CF Fertilisers in Billingham in my constituency is one of the two remaining primary ammonia plants in the UK. The Department for Transport anticipates that 80% of UK domestic shipping will rely on ammonia for fuel by 2050, and CF Fertilisers will have a critical role to play. It has been hugely proactive in reducing emissions, but it is reliant on carbon capture and storage to decarbonise further. What plans does the Minister have to select and progress ammonia decarbonisation within phase 1 of the CCS programme, plus the sequencing process?

Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition) (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Paul Scully

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 11th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alex Cunningham]

No, we are running out of time.

Information received through a parliamentary question in June shows that since 2007, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs investigations have led to just 15 successful prosecutions of employers for national minimum wage-related offences, but there have been no prosecutions relating to internship cases despite more than 150 complaints received by HMRC from workers undertaking unpaid internships. And that is before we consider the large number of people who do not know they are illegal and are working for months on end under the illusion of it being work experience.

The Bill clarifies and tightens current legislation and ensures that those on unpaid work experience placements are not being exploited. One of the best ways to do that is to limit the length of time of a placement in law. A six-month unpaid internship will cost a single person living in London a minimum of £6,300, and in Manchester £5,300, just to fund their own placement. Not only are they not being paid, but their living expenses can put them into serious debt before they even get their first proper job. That is not a system that we should be advocating. One we could advocate is Mr Speaker’s own intern scheme, which ensures that the young person taken on is paid the London minimum wage, or the local minimum wage. We should encourage organisations to replicate Mr Speaker’s scheme. I would like to make it clear that the Bill does not apply to placements where a university course requires it. These are often unique circumstances in which the student is funded through other means, so it is not affected by my Bill.

Moving towards a conclusion, we in this place must first look to ourselves and recognise that Parliament needs to take a lead. It is a significant statistic that 31% of Westminster staffers have worked for an MP without being paid. How are we supposed to set the example when many MPs in this House think that having people work for us for months on end with no pay is even the slightest bit satisfactory? Out there, thousands of employers are offering such placements under the guise of work experience and most of them do not even know they are breaking the law.

The Sutton Trust found that up to 50% of employers thought most unpaid internships were perfectly legal. Many others were not so sure. We need to take the ambiguity out of this. We must make sure that the rules are not open to misinterpretation. We need to be firm and make it clear that long-term unpaid internships are not permitted. We need to ensure that those who can afford to work for free are not given a step on the ladder ahead of their less affluent peers. We need to make sure that young people are not being exploited by organisations that should be paying them a wage. We need to make sure that social mobility is a reality in this country. Passing the Bill will help in all those areas. It is simple, it is straightforward, and it provides the clarity needed by both young people and employers.

I would like to end by reminding the Government about their prior commitments. The response of the Government to the Taylor review of modern working practices was that they would introduce new guidance and increase targeted enforcement activity to help to stamp out illegal and exploitative unpaid internships, but they have not. When he served as Mayor of London, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to tackle unpaid internships. The Prime Minister also said on 25 July last year that he backed this exact Bill in the name of the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell. Now, however, it seems that instead of backing it, he has backed out.

Government Members have a choice today: back the Bill and work to thrash out the minor details, if necessary, in Committee. Take a stand today and acknowledge that we have not done enough to eradicate exploitative working practices and that the Bill makes the move to right the wrongs. All colleagues here should be aware and think of the teenager in their constituency who works hard but, because of a low socioeconomic background, cannot work for free. Help that teenager get on the ladder for a change. Many young people from poorer backgrounds face challenges that many of us in this House could not even imagine. Let us take down one more barrier in their way. Let us take one step further to improving access to the workplace. Let us end exploitative, unpaid work experience or internships once and for all. I commend the Bill to the House.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on his success in the private Members’ Bill ballot. Clearly, there is not a lot of time to respond to the detail, but I want to cover a couple of areas to show this issue the respect it deserves. I will mention one or two specific issues before I get on to the substance.

The hon. Gentleman talked about Members of this place taking on people and, as he rightly pointed out, the distinction that gets blurred between volunteers, interns and those on work experience. It is an uncomfortable truth, which we need to sort out ourselves. The W4MP—Working for an MP—website, from which some colleagues on both sides recruit their staff, states that, as a response to such campaigns in recent years, it does

“not generally accept adverts for work that does not pay at least the current rate of national minimum wage/national living wage”.

The exceptions include adverts for volunteers for political parties, including voluntary work for MPs, and any ad accepted for an unpaid role will include reference to its being voluntary. When we did a search for interns on that website, it showed 11 jobs that were all paid. A search using the term “unpaid” found no results and, similarly, “voluntary” and “expenses only” found zero results. We cannot be complacent and we must make sure that we are leading from the front, as he said.

The hon. Gentleman talked about national minimum wage prosecutions, and I think he was specifically talking about this aspect. However, in general terms of prosecutions—to update the House—there are currently seven cases at various stages of the criminal investigation process involving not paying the national wage across the board, although not necessarily in the field that we are talking about. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which tackles this, has issued seven labour market enforcement undertakings this year. Since 2007, 15 employers have been successfully prosecuted for underpaying the national minimum wage. Prosecution tends to be reserved for the most egregious breaches of national minimum wage law. In most cases, it is not necessarily the best approach to help workers. Criminal sanctions against companies can mean that workers, the ultimate beneficiaries of enforcement, end up waiting considerably longer for their lost earnings to be paid back.

I agree wholeheartedly with the hon. Gentleman that it is wrong to exploit workers through unpaid work experience, including internships. The rights of workers to be paid at least the minimum wage must always be upheld. An individual’s entitlement to the minimum wage depends on whether they are deemed to be a worker for minimum wage purposes. If someone is deemed to be a worker, their employer must pay at least the relevant minimum wage rate from their first day of employment. I will come back to this if I have time, but I should like to provide reassurance that most internships or work experience placements are likely to constitute work, and therefore individuals are likely to be deemed to be workers who are entitled to be paid at least the minimum wage.

[Alex Cunningham]

I know we are short of time, but I would ask the Minister two things. First, will he work to raise awareness among employers that a lot of their activities are actually illegal through not paying the national minimum wage? Secondly, will he look at the fact that many complaints have been made but no prosecutions or action taken when students have objected to work experience being unpaid?

[Paul Scully]

Indeed, we do work on both enforcement and awareness, but it is right that we continue to look at how much more we can do, including in making sure that employees and workers themselves are aware of what they are entitled to. Each year, as we address and set the minimum wage, we always have a campaign about that. It is important that we contact, yes, employers to remind them of their legal duties, but also workers to make sure they are aware of their own rights. That is absolutely key.

NHS Bursary

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Paul Scully

Monday 11th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

We can always talk about the NHS and the future of care, but we have three hours for this debate, and I suspect most hon. Members want to speak, so I will limit my comments to nurses. I will quickly outline the current system and talk about why I believe it needs to change, then we can debate exactly how it might change.

There are various elements to the NHS bursary. There is a non-means-tested grant of £1,000 per year. There is a means-tested bursary to help with living costs of up to £3,191 for students in London living away from home, £2,643 for students outside London living away from home, or £2,207 for students living at home. Other bursary elements include an extra week’s allowance for courses that run for longer than 30 weeks and three days each academic year. As we heard at the event that we held before the debate, the majority of such courses last considerably longer than 30 weeks; they are often up to 42 or 43 weeks a year. Tuition fees are paid directly to the higher education institution by the NHS. Students can also apply for a non-income-assessed reduced rate maintenance loan from Student Finance England of between £1,744 and £3,263, depending on their circumstances. That loan is reduced in the final year of the course.

Why change? The current system, as some, but not all, student nurses, prospective student nurses and those in higher education institutions that train nurses agree, does not always work as well as it might for students or universities.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Hospitals across the country rely on recruiting nurses from as far afield as the Philippines. If these new measures are introduced, does the hon. Gentleman think that that dependence will increase or decrease?

[Paul Scully]

I would hope that it decreased. I will touch on some of the costs of recruitment later. Students who receive bursaries under the current structure have less to live on than other students, despite the fact that their courses are longer. They face particular financial hardship in the final year, when funding is reduced. In one London university in 2012-13, 63% of the entire hardship fund went to NHS-funded students, which goes to show how much the system is of concern, and in need of investigation and reform.

Funding for nursing and physiotherapy degrees is lower than for any other subject in higher education, even though the courses put much greater demands on universities than many other courses in areas such as quality assurance, laboratory space and simulation kit. Universities receive less than the courses cost to deliver in many instances. There is a cap on the number of bursaries, and more than half the people who want to train to be nurses are turned away.

In changing the system from a bursary to a loan structure, the Government propose to remove the cap on places, and they expect the reforms to provide up to 10,000 additional nursing and health professional places during this Parliament. Some people who are concerned about the withdrawal of the bursary are worried about students having no money. Even now, many students, especially in London, with its high housing costs, say that the bursary nowhere near covers their living expenses.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Scully]

The hon. Lady is asking the wrong person. Perhaps the Minister will respond to that question a little later.

The idea of placements came out of our discussion prior to the debate with the student nurses, who have taken time out to come to London today from as far as Liverpool and elsewhere. We talked about bursaries, and it would be a more honest description to call them a salary because these people are working hours in what are supposed to be supernumerary positions but are often not. There are student nurses sitting in the Public Gallery, and we have one person here from Brighton who explained how he was saving children’s lives prior to Christmas—it is not a supernumerary position when someone is working with babies. We have other people in critical roles who are working with patients on a range of issues, so we need to be straight about the pressures on nurses and how we reward them.

[Alex Cunningham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way to me for a second time. He is talking about bursaries being like a salary. Student nurses are doing real work when they are training on the wards, so are they entitled to some sort of payment for the real work that they are doing while they are training on the wards?

[Paul Scully]

Absolutely. We are talking about bursaries, but I would rather be straightforward and call it what it should be, which is a salary.

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Paul Scully]

I will not give way. I am aware that I have been talking for quite a long time, and I am sure that a lot of hon. Members want to speak. With placements, student nurses have less time than other students to do another job because, although it is 50% placement time in theory, they are effectively working 37 or 38 hours a week, so it is difficult for them to have another job to raise money for their living costs, especially as their courses last for 42 weeks a year—many other courses last for only 30 weeks a year.