Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (Amendment) Order 2013

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green. I would like to ask the Minister how he justifies this change against the background of a repeated government assertion that we are all in this austerity period together. Even in a straightforward redundancy situation, this carves out the salaried or hourly-paid workforce that generally runs the company—we are talking about over 100 employees here. Yet in that same redundancy situation you will probably have managers who have contracts of employment that give them a notice period of six months up to as long as 12 months, which would give them a cushion against unemployment. Here there will also be workers who have nothing like that, and have a far shorter period to become accustomed to what is happening to them.

The Minister has heard that good employers will probably, if they need to, take more than 45 days. However, as in everything else, we need to legislate for the bad employers, because the good employers will usually follow their conscience. The bad employers will take advantage of this. Anyone who has witnessed over 100 workers losing their jobs in one go will know that it takes time and consideration. Certainly this change has nothing at all to do with helping the growth measures that we need in this country. It is about taking away the rights of workers at a time in their working lives when they are the most vulnerable. Their jobs are going and they need support at that time. This measure will do nothing but harm to the workforce and do absolutely nothing at all to help the growth in this country that this Government should be concentrating on at the moment. This measure will do nothing at all to assist that.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I, too, speak in support of the amendment. I believe that it was Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff in President Obama’s first term, who said:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. … it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before”.

I suggest that this is the latest example of this Government not letting a serious crisis go to waste. Purely in employment terms we have already had a reduction in the period for claiming unfair dismissal. Now we are faced with this. In some cases you could describe this as a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I see that there were a total of 160 responses to the Government’s consultation. That hardly suggests that this is a serious problem that needs to be legislated on. Of the 160 who responded—who could be bothered to respond because they thought that it was worth their while to do so—only 100 commented on the need, as they saw it, to reduce the consultation period. The impact assessment tells us that approximately 96,000 people a year come into the category of large-scale redundancies. That is out of a working population of 29 million. Therefore it is not a problem that employers are clamouring for there to be legislation on, and it is not an issue that involves a relatively large number of people, so why do the Government feel the need to move?

We also have figures for other European Union countries. We appear to be better at this stage than any of the countries listed there, so why try to race down to their level? As my noble friend Lord Young said, the OECD says that the UK’s economy is already one of the most flexible in the world, yet it is apparently not flexible enough. Despite the fact that we are ahead of many of our rivals, in an area where there is some protection we seem to be trying to have it whittled away.