European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, I have no intention of trying to hold up this Bill, but I think it is a pig in a poke.

I want to talk about workers’ rights. Even the weakest possible assurances on workers’ rights, which were in the first draft of the Bill before the general election, have been taken out. During Second Reading in the Commons, one MP stated that

“they had their chance … but they decided to play party politics”—[Official Report, Commons, 20/12/19; col. 205.]

as an explanation for why workers’ rights were excised from this Bill. I am not naive enough to think that workers’ rights have not always been a political pawn. Some of us well remember waiting more than a decade for a single directive on workers’ rights to be enacted in the UK. When I was a member of the European TUC Executive, we dealt with a whole raft of rights including for part-time workers, maternity rights, and rights to bank holidays. Trade unionists in the UK then waited and waited until the election of a Labour Government, when Tony Blair fulfilled his promise to adopt all the delayed directives. I know they are used as a political tool but, for those of us who have spent their whole working lives defending workers, this is also about human rights, the dignity of work and adhering to the principles of the International Labour Organization. It is not just about playing party politics.

The Government have said that a separate employment Bill will be brought forward on a timetable yet to be announced, which will, among other things, protect and enhance workers’ rights as the UK leaves the EU. In answer to a question on 22 October last year, the Prime Minister said about workers’ rights:

“People will need reassurance…There can be no regression.”—[Official Report, Commons, 22/10/19; col. 828.]


That is great on the face of it, but both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have previously commented on the burden of EU employment and social legislation. In his introduction to Second Reading, the Prime Minister said:

“This will be with no alignment on EU rules”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/12/19; col. 147.]


So the Government have suggested that it is all right to drop workers’ rights from the Bill because we can have higher standards than the EU members, but, as Ruth Cadbury MP pointed out, the EU sets minimum standards for workers’ rights. There is only one reason to remove minimum standards, and that is because you want to fall below them. As we know, a Labour amendment seeking to prevent the reduction of workers’ rights after the implementation period was defeated. I accept that this is the political reality but I am not at all reassured by the Government’s statements, sometimes contradictory and always vague. The proposals do not satisfy the TUC test of maintaining workers’ existing rights and establishing a level playing field so that British workers’ rights do not fall behind those of other European workers. I am also concerned, as is the TUC, that Clause 26 would allow lower courts to ignore previous rulings from the European Court of Justice that UK workers and trade unions had benefited from. I understand that this is subject to consultation with the judiciary, but I see it as a potential significant weakening of labour rights.

I referred earlier to this Bill as a pig in a poke. I thought I should check the phrase’s appropriateness with Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The reference is to a common trick in days gone by of substituting a cat for a sucking pig and trying to palm it off on greenhorns. The French call it “to buy a cat in a pocket”. I am not a greenhorn, and this Bill is indeed a pig in a poke.