Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill [HL]

Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 1st March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as former leader of the TUC. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, and also to congratulate my noble friend and fellow trade unionist Lord Woodley on bringing forward this Bill.

In the wake of the P&O Ferries scandal, Grant Shapps, who was Secretary of State for Transport at the time, said on Sky News that the Government would

“send a clear message … that we will not allow this to happen again. That where new laws are needed, we will create them. Where legal loopholes are cynically exploited, we will close them. And where employment rights are too weak, we will strengthen them”.

The Government’s new code of practice, sadly, comes nowhere near meeting that promise. It does not close the legal loopholes that allowed P&O Ferries to evade the law and financial sanctions. It does not strengthen unfair dismissal rights to prevent an employer sacking their workforce, and either rehiring or replacing them on inferior conditions. A 25% uplift in compensation hardly adds up to a deterrent. Noble Lords will recall that the P&O boss brazenly admitted that employers can simply price-in the cost of one-off payments.

Emma Wayland of Keystone Law has said:

“The cynical might say that this can be treated as a tick-box exercise that will present no more than a minor inconvenience to an employer, for whom the threat of fire and rehire can still be used”.


That cynicism is justified and rooted in real experience. It is disappointing that Ministers have pushed through this code when it does not have the confidence of the very people who are on the front line fighting fire and rehire—namely, workers and trade unionists. Businesses use fire and rehire tactics for the simple reason that, in Britain today, sacking workers and rehiring or replacing them on worse paying conditions is far too cheap and easy. Those guilty of this practice over recent years are not just those running a few back-street sweatshops, or a few struggling employers who have fallen on hard times. The roll of shame includes big names in the mainstream, which have absolutely no excuse—the likes of Tesco, British Gas and British Airways.

In many cases, unions have fought back and won, but no working family in Britain should be put through the worry, hardship and humiliation of being treated as throwaway labour. Workers need stronger protection against unfair dismissal from day one in the job and tougher tests that require employers to consult with unions with enough time to explore reasonable economic alternatives. Instead of making it harder for workers to protect their pay and conditions, as with the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, the Government should recognise that, when faced with the threat of fire and rehire or replacement, workers must be able to respond quickly and exercise their democratic rights to withdraw their labour. Where an employer flouts the minimum standards set out in law, for example by not following the required steps for consultation before sacking workers, those workers must be afforded an immediate remedy, notably automatic reinstatement.

Finally, let us recognise that fire and rehire is often just a fancy name for casualisation: long-standing hotel staff on full-time contracts being rehired on short-hours arrangements; university lecturers facing similar, not least at SOAS, where worse conditions for staff mean a worse education service for students; and seafaring crews on collectively agreed terms and conditions being replaced by agency staff paid a pittance. As TUC analysis shows, it is no accident that black and ethnic-minority workers are twice as likely to find themselves on the sharp end of fire and rehire.

Paying lip service in the form of a code is not good enough. The Bill offers the Government a second chance to get this right, to make good on their P&O promises and to stop the slide towards insecure employment in Britain. I urge the Government to support the Bill so that the decent employer is not undercut by the bad, and so that everyone at work gets the respect and dignity that they have earned.