Employment Rights Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. This group of amendments, in particular those dealing with non-disclosure agreements, deals with issues that are of cardinal importance in making workplaces safe for in particular but not only women. I support them and will speak briefly to Amendment 101 and others.

I cannot add to the comprehensive and telling introductions by my noble friends Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady O’Grady, the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, and indeed all the others, but I will just remind the Committee of the fact that my experience of employment tribunals confirms the need for these amendments to the Bill. It is not only the high-profile cases that we hear about which are representative of the problem. I got to know of very many instances of women in low-paid, insecure work, often from minority-ethnic backgrounds or even disabled, who could not afford legal advice, which was addressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Morrissey.

When this issue was raised at Second Reading, my noble friend the Minister answered very positively, but I share the opinion that more must be done and I hope she will do it. If we can make our universities safer by banning NDAs in cases of sexual harassment, then the least we can do is to mirror those safeguards for employment.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. That a Lucas can agree with a Cromwell demonstrates the healing power of time—it has taken only 400 years.

I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 101. I very much like the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, because it would draw in what happened to my friend who went through the NDA process. I like Amendment 147 because, as the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, said, this should all be about producing better behaviour. You want an incidence of bad behaviour to lead to better behaviour, not to disguise and cover-up. That ought to be the fundamental drive of the process.

To add a couple of sidelights, I am told it is very much current employment practice to ask, when taking a reference from a previous employer, whether an NDA has been signed. If the answer is yes, you take that employment no further—so NDAs can be really damaging things to sign. It is therefore important that someone signing one has achieved the fully informed consent that the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, referred to.

Another aspect of obscurity is in tribunal awards. I note, for instance, that tribunal awards that really criticise what has gone on in a school remain private. They never get sent to Ofsted. We ought to be using that tribunal process and what it has discovered to produce change. Where these things cannot be made public, as is often the case, they ought none the less to get into the system in a way which encourages better behaviour in future.