Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2015 Lords Chamber

I am also troubled by the specific wording of the amendment. I do not know how a group of civil servants, however well trained or smart, can define what “late notice” is in every single walk of life in this country. For example, in racing, I do not know whether late notice is the night before. What happens if there is a frost overnight and there is no decision to race until 7.30 in the morning, or perhaps midday when the jockeys decide it is not safe? Which is late notice? I know a lot about horseracing and I could not make that judgment. Yet, in this amendment, we are giving the Government the ability to define that detail in every industry. We are likely to get highly perverse results because of it. We would be much better encouraging different sectors to develop codes of practice, publicise how they are doing it and ensure that the very people who say they really value these contracts get the chance of more jobs. I oppose this amendment.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, I want to follow the powerful points made by my noble friend with a small point which has occurred to me while listening to this debate. We heard the very moving thoughts of the noble Baroness about the single mother on a zero-hours contract who has to pay her babysitter when she turns up and then cannot afford her the next day. I, too, have been a working mother who has needed to use babysitters for my children if there was a sudden crisis and one of them was ill and could not go to school on the day that I was due to work. Like that single mother’s babysitter, my babysitter was also on a zero-hours contract. She was able to be paid for the day she turned up but, when she was not needed the next day, she was cancelled. We need to think more broadly about the needs even of single mothers who use a babysitter on a zero-hours contract just as much as we think about the needs of those on zero-hours contracts in other kinds of jobs.

My noble friend made the point that there is a varied range of employment positions and a wide range of ways in which people are employed. The way in which people are employed in domestic situations is usually on zero-hours contracts. We use our babysitters when we need them, not when we do not. Sometimes we cancel them at the last minute because we do not need them after all. We need to stop trying to see everything in terms of good and evil, right and wrong; there are shades. Trying to make regulations across that range would be a very dangerous thing.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I intend to be brief. My noble friends Lady Hollis and Lady Drake have given a forensic examination, based on factual analysis, and I do not feel I need to go through it again. I want to address some of the comments made by the noble Lords, Lord Stoneham and Lord Deben, and the noble Baroness, Lady Harding.

On the UK labour market, the first thing we need to understand is that it is probably the most flexible labour market in Europe. Nobody could say that we are like France, Italy or Spain or that we have something that makes it almost impossible for employers to hire people flexibly. I will leave noble Lords with the following thought. On grounds of fairness, are we going to say that a zero-hours contract means zero rights? Just to remind us, under zero-hours contracts there is no sick pay, no holiday, no national insurance contributions and nothing towards a pension—that is a pretty demanding contract as it is, and it is hardly weighted against the employer.

Nobody on this side who has supported these amendments has suggested that we want to do away with zero-hours contracts in their entirety. We accept that, for some people, they are a valid and necessary means of employment, both for the employee and the employer. However, there ought to be some reasonable ground rules. If you are running a business, yes, there will be changes in circumstances; that is undoubtedly right. However, this amendment aims to lay down a principle which it says will be interpreted in regulation and which will not just be dealt with by the spectre of solitary civil servants, who apparently between them have never experienced an hour of work in industry at all. From my brief ministerial career, I know that that does not necessarily apply to all civil servants, so I do not accept the idea that they will work in a total vacuum—that is an unnecessary fear.

Are we really putting forward the basic argument that, if I am being contacted and told by the employer, “I want you to turn up for work”, and I turn up, honouring my side of it, the employer has no responsibility whatever? I listened carefully to the noble Baronesses, Lady Perry and Lady Harding, and there might be other circumstances, but that is a question of taking into account how we phrase the regulations, so we can take those into account. That is not an argument for saying that there should be no control over this situation at all.

The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, reinforced the point, which my noble friend Lady Hollis had made, that it is curious that the CBI supports this. That is hardly an organisation that would support something it thought totally inflexible. Surely this is about basic fairness, is it not? If we are enjoying the services of somebody who is working under those conditions, surely it is right that they should have some fairness applied in the way they are summoned to their employment.

Surely we are seeking to encourage reasonable standards of management. I will give another statistic from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development: only one in five British managers has any training at all. I point that out to the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, because it is as important as some of the other statistics she quoted. Of course, people will declare that they are satisfied—they need the money and are glad to get into work. However, when we are being served by those people, do we not feel that there should be certain basic rights? This is one of them.

We commend the Government for getting rid of the exclusivity provisions in such contracts, which was clearly unfair. However, because of the way this amendment has been made it ought to attract cross-party support. We are not taking a political stance here, but a stance on responsible and effective management—that is what it is all about—and on giving a reasonable right to the employee. It can be dealt with very effectively in regulations, and I hope that the House will overwhelmingly support it.