Employment Law: Devolution to Scotland

Debate between Angela Crawley and Gavin Newlands

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Westminster Hall

[Angela Crawley]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. The Taylor report gave the Government a comprehensive list of items that they could address, but sadly they have been sleeping on the job.

Although there was no commitment in this year’s Queen’s Speech to bring forward the promised employment law reforms, perhaps the Government now have an opportunity to do so. Will the Minister tell us why we should trust this Government to treat workers’ rights as a priority when, three years after that promise was made, no employment Bill has materialised?

We have already seen the ambitions of the UK Government slip. Now we are knee deep in pandemic recovery, a cost of living crisis and a looming recession. It is imperative that the Government make a concrete commitment to improving workers’ rights.

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

We can expect the Tories to denigrate or at the very least be uncaring on workers’ rights, but we have to be honest: the Labour party, certainly in Scotland, has questions to answer too. It denied—indeed, it fought—equal pay for women for decades, and then the minute it left office in Glasgow, it started campaigning for it; it voted against higher offers to council workers; and it stopped the devolution of employment law in the Smith Commission. Had it supported the SNP in the Smith Commission, I would not have had to introduce three Bills to outlaw fire and rehire. Does my hon. Friend agree with that?

[Angela Crawley]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is fair to say that the Labour party, like the Government, has been sleeping on the job when it comes to protecting workers’ rights in the UK. It has failed to stand up for workers and it has often been missing on picket lines.

The pandemic has exacerbated a steady entrenchment of precarious working conditions across the UK. More people than ever before in the UK are relying on zero-hours contracts and participating in the gig economy. It is a sad fact that workers sometimes have to turn away a job because it would cost them more to drive to collect an item than they would receive to deliver it. They simply cannot afford it because the wages are so low. How is it that here in the UK wages are so low and workers’ rights are so abysmal that a worker cannot even afford to attend work to earn money in the first place? It is absolutely absurd, yet that is the position we find ourselves in, with the Labour party, which is set, potentially, to take over at the next general election, also sleeping on the job.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Angela Crawley and Gavin Newlands

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

5. What steps he is taking to reduce potential disruption to travel in the event of the UK leaving the EU without a deal.

[Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)]

6. What steps he is taking to reduce potential disruption to travel in the event of the UK leaving the EU without a deal.

HELMS and the Green Deal

Debate between Angela Crawley and Gavin Newlands

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Newlands]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. We are not in a competition, but although the issue affected 169 people in her constituency, in mine 293 households received HELMS panels, out of more than 3,000 in Scotland. Like her, I held my first public meeting on the issue earlier this month. As we know, attendance at such meetings can be a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, but although the subject was rather niche, targeting households with solar panels, about 120 people were in attendance. The meeting was full of individuals with similar stories of being taken advantage of by outrageous mis-selling, pressured into agreeing to inappropriately costed works or told blatant lies for a quick sale.

Two of my constituents, Mr and Mrs Murray, were particularly affected. A HELMS salesman knocked on their door in Linwood—a part of my constituency particularly affected by the mis-selling—and stated that it was to have funding available to invest in homes and energy. He had pressured the Murrays by insisting that the funding was time-limited and finite. They were told that they should have loft insulation, exterior wall insulation and solar panel works. He mentioned no tie between finance and their energy bills, and nothing about a debt tied to their property until 2039 at £1.47 a day.

[Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)]

As my hon. Friend knows, last year I set up the all-party parliamentary group on green deal mis-selling, which I chair. We have been inundated by problems of that kind. The distinct issue in Scotland, with cladding work in particular, is the requirement for building warrants, which HELMS did not apply for and which cannot be applied for retrospectively. That leaves householders unable to sell or insure their homes. Does he agree that the Government should do more to support people in that position?

[Gavin Newlands]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, the chair of the HELMS all-party group here at Westminster. I shall come to this, but the building warrants issue is complex. In fact, I apologise in advance for making a longer speech than I am accustomed to, because of so many such complexities, building warrants being just one of them.

Back to Mr and Mrs Murray. The HELMS salesman tied them into an additional finance agreement with a personal finance company for a debt repayment of more than £9,000 to meet the expense of the solar panel installation. My constituents acknowledge that they were aware of that finance, but were told by the salesman that they would receive feed-in tariff payments quarterly to offset that cost, as well as having the benefit of lowered energy consumption and billing. However, such was the unfathomable incompetency and mis-selling of HELMS that when the Murrays applied for their feed-in tariff payments, they were missing essential documentation for the process. They pleaded with HELMS, which remained unco-operative and, as we all know, then went into liquidation, leaving my constituents helpless.

It gets worse. In January 2016, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, as was, introduced a statutory instrument requiring all existing renewable energy installations with certification issued before 15 January 2016 to submit their feed-in tariff application by 31 March 2016 or be unable to claim any feed-in tariffs or export payments. The UK Government not only failed to protect my constituents from the unscrupulous criminal behaviour of HELMS, despite accrediting it as an approved provider, but went on to implement procedures that would prevent my constituents from ever receiving payment for the solar panels that they pay £88 a month for. Mr and Mrs Murray have gone from paying £90 a month for energy to paying £220 a month, all under a Government incentive.

Many people did not know either that a 25-year debt would be tied to their house, potentially making it difficult to sell. An even bigger impediment to selling houses is that many households—possibly the vast majority—have no building warrant for the insulation that was installed on the exterior of their property. They were not informed of the need to apply for a warrant, and now not only might struggle to get one but may have to cough up the statutory uplift of 300% extra for a late application.

To compound that, in some cases when homes generate on-site renewable electricity via generating equipment such as solar panels, their import supply meter is incompatible with and affected by that on-site generation, sometimes resulting in inaccurate meter readings and billing issues. The current metering system and equipment was designed and configured to record meter electricity flows from the distribution network to consumer premises, but on-site generation has in some cases resulted in metering difficulties at premises where it is used, which are increasing in number.

Two things can happen. First, the import supply meter can run backwards. Since the ’80s, to prevent tampering, meters have been fitted with backstops so they cannot run in the wrong direction. Where on-site generators are connected at sites with meters that do not have backstops, exporting electricity causes the meter to run backwards. As a result, the consumer’s import meter readings are reduced by the amount of electricity they export. When that is discovered, the supplier may recalculate the consumer’s bill for the period for which the meter operated incorrectly and charge the consumer for the shortfall. In most cases, on-site generation exports are unmetered and the supplier needs to use estimates to calculate the bill.

In other cases, the meter treats all electricity in the same way. Some digital meters are configured in a way that results in them adding exported electricity to the imported electricity meter reading, which can result in the consumer paying for both imported and exported electricity. Again, once that situation is identified, historical bills need to be estimated.

Two other constituents of mine, Mr and Mrs Scott, had a HELMS salesman at their door five times. On the fifth occasion, Mrs Scott agreed to the works. She did so only after researching the Government’s accreditation and backing of HELMS. The family have gone from paying around £70 a month in energy bills to paying between £170 and £265 a month. The reason for that increase and variation in expenditure is that, on top of the green deal finance charges, the meter and the panels are incompatible. As a result, the family’s supply meter runs backwards and my constituents pay estimated bills from their supplier. They have fought for years to have that corrected. Only now, with prompting and reference to Ofgem guidance, has their supplier agreed to replace their supply meter with a compatible one.

That shows how ill-equipped HELMS was. Its lack of knowledge—or more likely, if we are honest, its lack of care—about panel and meter compatibility was outrageous. That should never have been an issue, and my constituents should never have seen their energy bills triple.

Members are no doubt beginning to see just how complex this issue is. My constituents and many other people across the UK have been through years of agony in seeking redress. HELMS failed to correct complaints. Constituents who took their cases to the green deal ombudsman were told they could no longer use that as a route to redress because HELMS no longer participated in the ombudsman scheme. Cases sat with the Financial Ombudsman Service for well over a year with no action. HELMS was liquidated and redress, such as it was, was unobtainable.

This was a UK Government incentive, backed and promoted as such. HELMS was accredited, and indeed promoted, under the Government banner, allowing it to enter homes and sell under a false umbrella of trust. Many of the families I have dealt with were sold on the phrase, “Government backed”. In fact, that was what persuaded many of them to listen to the dodgy sales patter in the first place. I have subsequently found that during that time, when someone searched online for a list of Government-accredited providers, HELMS was often top of the list.

How can the Government sit idle while households are left saddled with the hardships caused by HELMS? The very reason why work was agreed to was the shiny stamp of approval from the UK Government. What good is Government accreditation if it is worthless when issues and violations occur?

Who takes responsibility? HELMS and Robert Skillen have thus far escaped ultimate accountability. Despite being fined £200,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office, they paid a mere £10,000 before the liquidation of HELMS. That highlights why the ICO has called on the Government to allow it to issue penalties of up to £500,000 to the company directors responsible.

Thus far, the Government have washed their hands of any responsibility for this mess. Instead, they hope the Green Deal Finance Company, which purchased the green deal loan book from them, will deal with it. Although GDFC was aware of some irregularities, it was not informed of the scale of the mis-selling and fraud that HELMS undertook. Given the delays with seeking redress through the ombudsman, GDFC offered to take over the case load directly to try to speed up the process. Although that has helped, the process is still too slow. GDFC has admitted that it was ill-equipped and under-staffed to deal with the scale of the issue. It has apologised for the delay and vowed to speed up the process.

Colleagues may have a different take and may have casework to prove otherwise, but I have met GDFC three times—I was particularly pleased that it attended my public meeting in Linwood—and my impression is that it is diligently, if slowly, working through the various claims and, in the majority of cases, making offers to reduce loans or cancel them altogether. Of course mistakes will be made—my office has asked GDFC to reassess particular decisions, and it will continue to ask if necessary—but thus far, in my view, GDFC has worked in good faith.

Fathers in the Family

Debate between Angela Crawley and Gavin Newlands

Wednesday 1st March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Newlands]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend; he makes a powerful point. I think we have all seen circumstances in which that is definitely the case.

[Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that all the evidence from the work of the Women and Equalities Committee—including the gender pay gap report, the pregnancy and maternity discrimination report and the current fathers and the workplace inquiry—outlines that there is an economic benefit to fathers playing an active role in their children’s lives?

[Gavin Newlands]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend; if she had waited a few seconds I would have come on to that. Those factors help to create a situation in which men in the UK still spend only 24 minutes caring for their children for every hour that women do. Policies to create an economy that empowers and promotes the positive role of fathers in the family would help to achieve equality for women. In Sweden, it was found that for every additional month of leave dads took, mums’ career earnings increased by 6.7%.

However, despite some progress—such as the Scottish Government’s Year of the Dad initiative, which highlights the positives of active dads and which my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts spoke of in detail earlier—there is still a lot of work to do in creating an economy that allows dads to achieve an appropriate work-life balance. Attitudes towards the role of the father have changed somewhat, and for the better, but our economy has not adapted to the changing role of the modern dad. I think we all want to see any dad be able to achieve an appropriate, family-friendly work-life balance. That would benefit not only families but our economy.

In closing, it would be remiss of me not to speak of families in which the parents’ relationship has not survived, and there is either no father figure, or one whose influence is via scheduled weekly access. Like an increasing number of children, I experienced growing up in a traditional family unit, but following my parents’ separation when I was around eight, I was brought up, in the main, by my mother through my formative years. Although we talked earlier about promoting parental equality and enhancing the role of fathers, we must ensure that those who bring up children on their own—be they male or female—are fully supported, and we must try to end the stigma that the Daily Mail and other such publications attach to such parents.

Let us be clear: in the vast majority of single-parent families, it is women who bring up the children. They are often vilified in said press, whereas a single father will often be depicted as brave and an all-around good egg. That inherent bias aids no one and must end now. The truth is that although we would all like to see relationships succeed and children growing up in stable and loving families, that has become more an exception than the rule. Equally, there can be no doubt that children brought up lovingly in single-parent families have a better environment in which to grow up than children whose parents constantly argue and are trying to stay together for the sake of the child. That rarely works.

Immigration Rules (International Students)

Debate between Angela Crawley and Gavin Newlands

Wednesday 16th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) on securing such an important and timely debate. What we have heard so far proves that students contribute not only to higher institutions, but to our economy. As my hon. Friend said, international students’ day tomorrow—17 November—is an opportunity for the Government to make students their priority. The economic benefits in research, employment and opportunities for trade and international alliances have been well versed by all my colleagues in the Chamber. Our institutions in Scotland and throughout the UK are world renowned and attract the brightest and the best. We should celebrate that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) highlighted how the unrealistic thresholds and the crude way in which we are seeking to reduce immigration figures simply do not serve our constituencies or local communities well. The reputational damage to institutions and the UK globally will not be forgotten for a long time, when the brightest and the best—those who could find a cure for cancer or any number of illnesses—are unable to secure places at Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, St Andrew’s and elsewhere because they cannot secure the visas they need to come to our best institutions.

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend and I share campuses of the West of Scotland University, whose principal is Australian. Does she agree with him, as I do, when he says the Government’s proposal to restrict universities from recruiting overseas students is an ill-considered and retrograde step that will damage our economy, our competitiveness and our cultural standing?

[Angela Crawley]

Indeed. I thank my hon. Friend for his comment. I will come to the West of Scotland University.

Our advantage is that we are a world-leading country and we have world-leading institutions. I call on the Government to make the necessary practical changes and to look at the pilot scheme, the tier 2 visa, the work study visa and so on, and to consider how much more there is to be gained from bringing the brightest and the best to our country and retaining them than there is from sending them elsewhere.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin) has fascinating stories to tell. Unfortunately, my stories from Stirling University are slightly different, and I do not think the songs I learned are fit for Hansard, so I will move on.

International students matter, and we have heard about the direct impact that the Government’s policies can have on the prosperity of constituencies such as mine. My home town of Hamilton is rich in heritage and once had a thriving town centre. Only two weeks ago, I launched a joint consultation with my Scottish Parliament counterpart on the need to take action on town centre regeneration and to consider the importance of Hamilton being a university town, where Lanarkshire’s only university is located. However, like many communities across the UK, there are challenges because town centres and institutions with a student population and employment generate the local economy, but that is dwindling. This is in no small part due to the Government’s policies.

One saving grace is that the student population of universities, and particularly the West of Scotland University, enhances the town and the environment. I studied as an undergraduate at Stirling University, which is a fine example of a thriving university town. I also went to the world renowned Glasgow University—something I share with you, Mr Gray. As a group, students contribute to the local economy. It is clear that where there is a university institution, the local economy benefits. The financial contribution is huge, and we need more students, particularly those who live in or close to student accommodation and spend time in town centres. There is a direct benefit to the economy, and we must not forget that.

Every year, the University of the West of Scotland welcomes more than 1,000 international students from 65 different countries around the world. In Hamilton, students contribute £69 million to the local economy. Recently, when the university took the decision to move to a new campus, it was clear that this expansion was with a view to attracting more international investment. In a letter to me, the university’s principal, Craig Mahoney, said that the Government’s plan

“would be significantly damaging the University of the West of Scotland and the wider Scottish and UK higher education system”.

I therefore call on the Minister to please consider the concerns raised by hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber. In a world of uncertainty, all Governments must provide leadership. The proposal also sends a message of exclusion at a time when language must be about inclusion.