Employment Rights Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Alex McIntyre Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

I beg to move amendment 127, in clause 22, page 33, line 12, leave out from “that” to end of line 21 and insert—

“the reason for the variation was to provide for improved employment practices and to update and reform outdated working practices, in order to allow for the more effective running of a business or organisation.”

This amendment would provide an exemption to unfair dismissal for failure to agree to a variation of contract.

It is a pleasure to see you back in the Chair for the afternoon sitting, Ms Vaz. The amendment, in my name and those of my hon. Friends, is a probing one—I want to be clear about that from the outset—that would provide an exception to unfair dismissal for failure to agree a variation of contract.

The premise underpinning the Bill’s provisions on fire and rehire is that the only reason for an employer to want to re-engage employees on varied terms is to exploit them by giving them worse terms and conditions. I am in no way, shape or form suggesting that that does not occasionally happen, but I come at this debate from the other direction, presuming that most employers are good employers who care about their workforce and want to see a happy staff getting on, being productive and doing the things they do to make the business a success, be that making things, giving advice or providing a service.

The Bill basically says that a business needs to be going bust for the process of varying a contract to be justified. Again, I am not certain that that is the right starting point. What if there were a legitimate reason for wanting to vary certain terms and conditions? We touched on this in our debate on SNP amendments 160 and 161 before the break, and I gave some examples thinking about the pace of change in a business. Let us say a manufacturing business moves from a very manual process for putting a product together—be it a car, a piece of furniture or some smaller product—to invest in robotics or something.

I can think of a farm in my constituency that was a traditional dairy farm but, thanks to a not insubstantial grant from the previous Government, has built a robotic dairy. That means that the people who work on that farm are doing a fundamentally different job. They no longer have to get up at 4 am to manually hook the cows up to the milking machines; believe it or not, the cows now form an orderly queue for the milking robots. I am not joking, Ms Vaz. I invite anyone to come and see it with their own eyes. There is a vending machine where people can buy the milk direct. The point at which staff intervention is needed is if an alarm indicates that a machine has clogged or broken, the pasteurisation room has hit the wrong temperature, or whatever. It is a fundamentally different job. Sometimes, that happens in a workplace where the employer wants to keep the staff—they do not want to let anyone go and they do not want the robots to replace them—but it involves different terms, different conditions and a different physical thing to do on a daily basis. I offer that as a practical example of how businesses change.

[Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)]

I refer the Committee to my membership of the GMB and Community unions. I have two short questions for the shadow Minister. First, if the changes are so positive for employees, can they not simply accept a change to their terms and conditions? Secondly, let us take the scenario that he describes, where there is a change in processes, and put that in a business-to-business context. Say a business moves from wooden cogs and to metal cogs, and it has a contract with the wooden cog supplier. Is he aware of any circumstances in which that business would be able simply to break that contract without any notice or legal recompense to the other business?

[Greg Smith]

I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. He is right that the businesses in the situation he describes would have to go through a legal process, probably involving very expensive contract lawyers, to alter such a contract. I do not think it is helpful to directly compare those supply chain contracts with employment contracts, because on one level we are dealing with human beings and on the other we are dealing with the flow of parts, services or whatever.

The hon. Gentleman is also right that a change in terms and conditions can sometimes be very positive for the employee. Perhaps it involves fewer hours for more money—that sometimes happens—or longer holidays. Of course, if something better is being offered, employees should have the flexibility to accept that, having exercised due diligence and looked it over properly—dotted the i’s, crossed the t’s and all that. What I am trying to get at is where the business model, and the day-to-day operation of the job, has fundamentally changed, through robotics or whatever.