Employment Rights Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, there have been some excellent debates in this group. I ask for some clarification, particularly from the Government, on something I am confused about. I am sympathetic to Amendment 74A. The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, made a very useful and insightful contribution that brought another layer to the discussion. There is a danger of us talking about these things technically, yet in a rather old-fashioned way, when there is a lot more evidence and new phenomena to consider.

Amendment 74A looks at the impact on—

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade and Department for Science, Information and Technology (Baroness Jones of Whitchurch) (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness, but we are not debating Amendment 74A. It is grouped elsewhere.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I have the right group; I have just said the wrong thing.

[A noble Lord]

It is in the next group.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

All right; thank you.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in what has been a very interesting debate. I will try to reflect on what I have heard as I speak; that will make my job quite difficult and probably make my speech completely incoherent, but I will do my best.

We closed last week with a couple of de-grouped Conservative amendments. I promised to reserve what I would say on statutory sick pay for this group, which means that I am unlikely to speak on the next group. Last week the noble Lords, Lord Sharpe and Lord Hunt, spoke firmly against the Government’s proposed changes. I have seen evidence of businesses arguing strongly either for the status quo or for a two-day threshold.

I am not a behavioural scientist, but I can read a room politically. The party that is sitting on a huge majority in the Commons has made it very clear where it stands on this issue, and that has been reasserted by some of the even stronger comments we have heard from the Benches opposite. Businesses have drawn the same conclusion. Many of those I talk to are seeking ways to ameliorate this, rather than eliminate it, which is probably unlikely.

I was interested to hear the noble Lords from the Conservative Front Bench speak to Amendments 71A and 71B. Their version of amelioration appears to be to reduce the amount of SSP, or at least severely limit it. We heard a different story from the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister and Lady O’Grady, who set out why SSP is important and why the rate is meaningful. To contextualise poverty, we are talking about the poorest people who are working people but still extremely poor. It is difficult to overestimate the generosity of this scheme, but that is what I have heard from several on the Conservative Benches. This is a very modest offer. With her statistics, the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, set it out very clearly, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Smith.

Before I talk to my own Amendment 74 and Amendment 73, I will deal with the others. In Amendment 75, the noble Lords, Lord Sharpe and Lord Hunt, call for a reviewer to report within two years. I mentioned there is a subsequent group which also has impact assessment amendments in it. I am not really sure why we are debating them separately. Rather like the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, I am going to mention 74A to 74C, which have been shunted into a separate group. Taken together, there is a slightly curious mismatch of timings: Amendment 75 is after two years, 74B and 74C after six months and 75A after a year. I agree that there do need to be impact assessments following whatever your Lordships decide, perhaps on a more systematic calendar than the ones suggested.

I am interested in the pre-emptive impact assessment. For the benefit of your Lordships’ Committee, it would be good to hear the Minister spell out the detail of the impact assessment of business on the current proposed measures. If, as the Minister says, the costs will be relatively modest, the costs of Amendment 73 or 74 would also be relatively modest, which takes me to the point in question.

As we have heard very eloquently from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, she and I have come up with very similar suggestions in terms of amelioration, which is what I was talking about earlier. Rather like the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, I slightly prefer the version from noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, but that is not the point—this is not a competition. We would like to sit down with the Government and thrash through a way whereby a rebate scheme can be reintroduced. This seems to be the sensible approach. We care deeply about SMEs—they drive a huge part of our economy. This is a way of making sure that they do not get disadvantaged as employees get what they deserve as SSP. That is what I am asking for from these Benches. Very sensibly, the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Noakes, and others supported it. I hope that the Minister will be able to make a positive noise about that and we can sit down and have that conversation.

Today, we have heard that SSP is absolutely vital for a section of society who are already massively disadvantaged. We should not be drawing lines and pushing them further down. We should be finding ways of making sure that they are not disadvantaged even more and, at the same, we should find ways of making sure that our SME sector is not also disadvantaged.

--- Later in debate ---

I therefore urge the Minister to continue to consider the potential conflicts between these provisions and look for ways to align them, in order to avoid creating undue burdens on businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises. I beg to move.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I should have spoken in the other debate—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

But I will carry on. I also want to refer to the issue of absenteeism, but I feel as though I have wandered into the skivers debate, and I do not necessarily want to be involved in that.

I am not worried that sick pay will create a nation of skivers or everybody phoning up and saying, “I am off sick”. But I am confused—maybe the Minister can help me here—about what seems to be a conflict in government priorities concerning our attitude to work and, in a way, our attitude to sickness. There seems to be some tension between the discussion around reforming the welfare system and PIPs, for example, and the concerns raised in that debate about ever greater numbers claiming disability benefits, especially for mental illness. I thought that the questions asked by Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary—quoting experts and evidence on the problem of overdiagnosis and of encouraging a culture in working-age adults, especially young people, of feeling incapacitated and dependent on the state in a demoralising way, such that they are written off—are in fact a very mature way of looking at that discussion that we should consider.

We also have to acknowledge a phenomenon that we discussed quite a lot during the passage of the Mental Health Bill. Being unwell, particularly mentally unwell, has now become integral to many people’s identities. The figures given in the earlier debate—when I meant to speak, and when the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, and others made the point about huge numbers of people now being off work as a result of disability due to mental ill-health—indicate that there is an increase not in mental ill-health but in a new cultural phenomenon of people feeling unable to cope in some capacity.

I raise this issue in relation to the Bill because, although the Government are having a mature and interesting discussion on welfare in the other place, I cannot see that it does not conflict with the statutory sick pay provisions and debate we have had on this Bill. On Amendment 74A, which calls for an impact assessment regarding absenteeism, I am concerned in a different way about absenteeism. If Liz Kendall and Wes Streeting are incentivising or encouraging people who have been on long-term sick leave to return to the workforce—maybe to all those care home jobs that have just been created—will they willingly do that, or will they take advantage of this new flexible sick pay from day one? Is that likely to happen? I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, made this point. In what way would they be encouraged to employ somebody who has been on long-term sick leave if they must say, “Come and work for me—by the way, you can have sick pay from day one”, when they have taken all that time trying to persuade them to get back into work? At the very least, it becomes a bigger risk for the employer to take on such people: the very people the Government want to get back into work and who, for their own sake, should be in work, because the alternative is not doing them any good.

We need to be honest in this discussion. Sick pay was hard-fought for for all those years, but we live in a different time, when sickness is viewed differently. It is almost like a badge of honour in some instances, but it has also become a way of coping. To give your Lordships an example, when I was a further education teacher, some 25 years ago, it was the first time I had come across people taking time off for stress-related sickness. It was often when there had been a political dispute or some big row at work, or a disciplinary action had been taken. Instead of it being dealt with politically, people went on stress-related sick leave. Fair enough—that was fine when it was one or two people. But at one point, a third of the staff in a further education department of humanities were off on stress-related sick pay. As you can imagine, it was a dysfunctional department.

So I agree with the Minister when she said earlier that we are hoping that a happier workplace is going to have less stress. I get that point, but I genuinely think that something else is going on. That form of sickness has become a means for people to express their problems in a range of ways, and they lose the habit of work. My concern is that the Bill, particularly in respect of some of the less flexible ways this issue is being dealt with—in this instance, sick pay—will incentivise those regressive ways in which people are retreating from the workplace.

There is a report out today that says that Gen Zers, or whatever the term is, believe that the workplace itself makes them ill and that workaphobia has to be taken into account. I know that these concepts seem a bit flaky, but it is an academic study, so I am citing it. It says that what needs to be considered is that is why young people should be treated with leniency about not going into the workplace, because they find going into the workplace and interacting far too stressful. It is that kind of nonsense, to be frank, that I hope that we will not encourage inadvertently by this Bill.