Employment Rights Bill

Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I am generally somewhat nervous about purpose clauses, but I can see the argument in the case of this Bill, because there is a lot of confusion about what it is trying to achieve. Indeed, it serves to highlight the incoherence of this Government’s approach to generating economic growth, because it places far too much of a burden on businesses and will deter them from innovating, recruiting and investing in skills training, which we know is so very important right now.

That is particularly pronounced within the tech sector, which is one of the Government’s priority sectors because it has the potential to drive a vast amount of growth, but it is also one where we need to do far more to encourage investment so that our homegrown tech firms can scale and compete around the world. We must not forget that investors have a choice as to where they invest, and they will not go to countries where the costs are higher.

Although it is not properly an interest to declare, it is perhaps worth reminding your Lordships that until very recently, I chaired the Communications and Digital Select Committee of your Lordships’ House, and during my term in the chair we looked at the tech sector quite a bit, as noble Lords would expect. Our final inquiry was about scaling up in AI and creative tech.

I am sure the Minister, who is also a DSIT Minister, has seen that techUK, the industry’s trade body, has this morning raised some genuine concerns about the Bill. Its website says:

“With no economic modelling underpinning these proposals, businesses are being asked to shoulder new burdens without a clear understanding of the impact. There is a growing risk that entrenched positions will lead to a worst-case outcome, one that stifles innovation and investment in jobs. This is counter to the government’s pro-growth mission. We urgently call for further discussion and refinement to ensure the Bill supports businesses and protects workers”.


Alongside techUK, the Startup Coalition, which focuses specifically on start-ups, says in its briefing note on the Bill that it is concerned that without careful tailoring, the barriers the Bill currently introduces into hiring and scaling at the early stages of business development could undermine the start-up ecosystem and the economic growth it drives.

I do not know whether I would have succeeded had I tried to do this, given what my noble friend said about the punctiliousness of the Table Office—and I would be interested to hear more from my noble friend about this—but I suggest that any purpose clause also refers to growth and competitiveness. When the Minister winds up, I would welcome her explanation of how this Bill supports the Government’s growth agenda.

I know, from talking to a range of tech firms and businesses from all sectors and of all sizes, that while they all support good employment practices and condemn those firms that do not uphold high standards—as do I—there is frustration that the good employers are paying the price, literally, for the poor conduct of the bad. For them, the Bill represents a desire by the Government to do something to them that makes it even harder for them to create the economic growth that the Government have promised the electorate and, indeed, their workers. Let us be clear: it is business, not government, that generates economic growth.

As I say, a purpose clause has some merit in the context of this Bill, but I would like growth and competitiveness to feature within it. If we were to do that in the purpose clause and get some agreement from the Minister up front today, that would help to shape the Bill as we go through Committee, so that it actually delivers on what I think it is trying to do: to ensure that there are good employment practices that support economic growth and competitiveness.

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

My Lords, I admit that I am a little perplexed by Amendment 1, particularly in the light of the latest TUC-commissioned poll that was published last night. Not only is the Bill popular with the public, including a majority of Conservative and Reform voters, but, when they are faced with robust arguments against its key provisions, the Bill becomes even more popular with voters.

I am not sure that your Lordships or the public need this amendment to know that the Bill is about fairness, security and the right to an independent voice at work. The public are already well aware and, frankly, appalled that, under the previous Government, low pay and insecurity became mainstream in British working life. They want change.

Underlying this amendment—this might be my suspicious mind—is the worry that it is really about undermining the role of independent trade unions in representing workers’ interests. The ILO uses the term “workers’ organisations” for a reason. International law upholds the right to collective bargaining and freedom of association. Independent trade unions are workers’ best chance of getting their rights enforced and built on for better pay, safer workplaces, training opportunities and family-friendly hours, and they provide a democratic voice at work.

Without repeating the arguments from Second Reading, I encourage your Lordships to look at the evidence about just how far Britain has fallen behind other countries in employment protection, and how giving ordinary working people a stronger collective voice can help deliver more responsible businesses and a healthier and more equal society.

I encourage the noble Lord, Lord Fox, to cast his mind back to Labour’s introduction of a national minimum wage. He may remember that the Conservative Party and the business lobby said that a national minimum wage would cause mass unemployment and that businesses would collapse. In reality, the national minimum wage is now widely respected as one of Britain’s most successful policies. It has made a difference to millions of working lives in the teeth of opposition from the business lobby at the time. It is worth remembering that.

I end by saying that it is time to get on with and get behind the Bill, so that Britain takes the high road to improving business productivity by treating workers fairly, as human beings and not just commodities.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to address a quorate meeting of the TUC General Council. I should declare an interest at the beginning: I am the honorary president of BALPA, the British Airline Pilots Association, a union that covers all the people who fly you on holiday and back again. Its motto or strapline for many years was

“every flight a safe flight”.

It regarded its job as to deal not only with the members but with safety. In dealing with the companies that we dealt with and still deal with, aircraft safety and looking after passengers was as much at the front of our mission as anything to do with pay and conditions. Of course, we were interested in them—we were a trade union, after all—but we were a responsible trade union. I stand on this side of the House pretty convinced that probably a majority of the members of BALPA support this party. Let me remind the House why.

Most people do not join a trade union for any political purpose. They often join, as I did at the age of 16, because it is there. Nowadays, most trade unions, particularly the better ones, have a free legal advice service and will get you a discount on your car insurance. I have told this story once before, I think, but at a point when we had a silly dispute between my family and the bursar of our local private school, I rang up the union solicitor and he drafted me a letter to send to the bursar very quickly. I apologised and said, “I am sorry. I dare say this is not what you are normally here for”. I will always remember his reply. He said, “Mr Balfe”, for I was that in those days, “we are not here to judge our membership. We are here to help them”. At the basis of virtually every trade union official and action is the desire to help the membership. Nobody I know regards going on strike as anything other than a defeat, because it means the members do not get paid, you often lose pension entitlement, and you lose your wages. You know, people go to work to get their work done, to get a reasonable wage.

I always had a lot of time for a person who is almost unmentionable in modern politics, Edward Heath, because I thought that he came nearer to understanding the TU movement than probably any leader of the Conservative Party and maybe any leader overall. Indeed, I remember when I was a much younger trade union person in the 1960s asking a group of Conservatives who they thought was the best Secretary of State for Labour there had ever been. The result was unanimous: Sir Walter Monckton, Conservative Minister under Churchill, was reckoned to be the one who listened to them the most. You always have to have a runner-up in these things just in case one falls down, and that was Iain Macleod.