Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices

Andy McDonald Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins. I congratulate the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing this really important debate. As he said, it is important because this report was published back in 2017, because we must keep scrutiny strong on progress with employment and because there can be nothing more important to our country at the moment than having a strong economy. The role of workers within that is crucial.

The hon. Gentleman could perhaps forgive me for thinking that the Government have been quite busy since he was elected in 2017. I have the privilege of having been elected a number of years before that. The pandemic and leaving the EU have been quite time-consuming issues. Not only that, but they have changed the very nature of our employment market and economy. It is a strength that we are coming to this afresh, as the economy is recovering very fast from the pandemic, and that we should take a long, hard look at how we can not only bounce back to pre-pandemic levels of work and growth, but also—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman would like to intervene, I am happy to give way.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

I am very happy to intervene. I am interested to hear the right hon. Member describe the Government as being “busy”. There is nothing more important than workers’ rights, and to think for one minute that they should somehow be relegated is quite frankly a staggering admission from her. Perhaps she would like to reflect upon it.

[Mrs Miller]

I am very glad to have had that intervention because many workers listening to this debate will remember how the Government furloughed many, many thousands of people—not just because it was the right thing to do to protect their jobs, but because it also protected their pay packets. Far from doing nothing, this Government have done more than any other Government in peacetime history to support the workers of this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Cummins. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) for securing this debate. I, too, declare my interest as a private member of Unite the union. I note that Government Members on the Benches opposite are rather sparse—I do not know whether that betrays their attitude towards this issue or whether they are busy writing letters or taking part in Operation Big Dog Whistle.

As we all know very well, coronavirus has reshaped the landscape of the world of work quite considerably. While a number of the Taylor review’s recommendations are still very relevant, such as taking a more proactive approach to workplace health, others do not address the situation we find ourselves in today—for example, the suggestion that national regulation is not the route to achieve better work.

As we have endured the greatest health crisis in a century it has become clear that the strong role of Government is critical to creating good work, whether through tighter regulation of workplace health and safety or proper enforcement of workplace rights. If we are to learn anything from this pandemic, we must ensure that Government intervention to keep workers safe and free from exploitation is not seen as unnecessary red tape.

Last year I had the privilege of chairing a taskforce with the Labour party’s affiliate trade unions to produce a report of our own. That in turn led to our Green Paper on employment rights—which, in the best traditions of the Labour party, is red—setting out our plan for a new deal for working people, which would build on the good recommendations in the Taylor review. Our taskforce looked at how we could learn lessons from the pandemic and set out a raft of employment rights policies, from establishing fair pay agreements and reinstituting sectoral collective bargaining, to ending bogus self-employment and bringing in day one rights for all workers. That provided a vision of what truly good work could look like after the devastation of covid and more than a decade of failed Tory ideology.

The laissez-faire approach taken by the Government to the protection of workers during the pandemic, but also the years leading up to it, has shown itself to be fundamentally flawed. At each step of their handling of the crisis, Ministers have been too slow to act, particularly in their failures to protect workplace health and safety. The fact that the position of director of labour market enforcement was vacant for 10 months after Matthew Taylor stepped down last year, and that we are still to see an employment Bill more than two years after one was first promised, speaks volumes about how little the Government prioritise good work.

The failures over recent years have been compounded by the pre-pandemic austerity cuts that the Tories inflicted on our public bodies. For example, the Health and Safety Executive has been left with half the budget and two thirds the number of inspectors that it enjoyed under the last Labour Government. The £14 million in emergency funds that the HSE received at the beginning of the pandemic goes only a short distance towards making up for the more than £100 million in lost funding that it has endured over the past decade, and it still lacks the resources to fulfil its statutory role. Having been so stripped back after years of austerity, few prosecutions are ever brought, leaving workers at risk of unsafe conditions. Last year, only 185 convictions were secured—a drop of almost two thirds compared with 2016-17.

In Labour’s “Employment Rights Green Paper”, we set out the importance of giving the HSE the full funding that it needs to protect workers properly. Our new deal would also introduce an effective single enforcement body to bring health and safety prosecutions and civil proceedings on workers’ behalf and to end the underpayment of the national minimum wage, along with other exploitation and discriminatory practices.

Soon after the introduction of the first lockdown, in April 2020, an astounding 1.6 million workers were being paid less than the national minimum wage, according to the Low Pay Commission. The Taylor review was right to stress that a top concern of workers is the issue of unpaid wages. However, only through national regulation of workplaces and a single enforcement body can that be achieved. With only 18 employment agency standards inspectors responsible for inspecting 40,000 employment agencies, it is no wonder that the situation is so terrible.

Our new deal for working people differs from the Taylor review in one major respect, and that is on the issue of creating a single status of worker for all but the genuinely self-employed. Our policy is captured in Lord Hendy’s brilliant Status of Workers Bill, which awaits a final formal Third Reading in the other place, after which it will come to us. Rather than following Matthew Taylor’s proposal to maintain the present multiple categories, with different rights attaching to each, our plan to create the single status, with all workers gaining full rights from day one of employment, would have life-changing effects for so many.

For example, security guards at Great Ormond Street Hospital had to threaten industrial action to pursue their basic rights to sick pay, enhanced maternity leave and annual entitlement. More than 30 security guards at the hospital are all outsourced to Carlisle Support Services, owned by billionaire Tory donor Lord Ashcroft, and are denied the same rights as their co-workers who are employed directly by the NHS. Under the plans in our green paper, those key workers would not have their rights withheld at the whim of heartless and exploitative employers such as Lord Ashcroft.

We need to see a new deal for working people, one that speaks to their economic and social rights and that reinstitutes sectoral collective bargaining to bring about secure employment with fair pay agreements for all workers from day one of their employment. We simply have to make the change and to secure a better settlement and a better future.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins. I congratulate the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing today’s important debate.

Despite what we have heard, the UK still has one of the best employment rights records in the world. We have one of the world’s highest minimum wages; it was increased on 1 April last year and will be increased again next year. The UK’s national living wage is one of the highest minimum wages in the world—larger than those in similar economies such as those of France, Germany and Japan. In the UK, we get over five weeks of annual leave, minimum, whereas the EU requires only four weeks. In the UK, people get a year of maternity leave; the EU minimum is just 14 weeks. The world of work is changing, and continues to do so.

[Andy McDonald]

How does our statutory sick pay compare with that of our European competitors?