Jobs and Work

Christopher Pincher Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Umunna]

I think my hon. Friend is referring to somebody who is on an outrageous and exploitative zero-hours contract that is not reflective of her working conditions. I will come on to that shortly.

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Umunna]

I will just make a little progress and I will give way in a bit.

As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said last week, under this Government the shocking fact is that for the first time on record more people who are in poverty are now in work than ever before. The minimum wage is important. It is set with an eye to the impact on jobs, but we want employers to pay a living wage. Record numbers are currently paid less than the living wage—I have talked about the 22% in Dover, for example. It is estimated that we have 5.2 million people earning less than the living wage, which is costing the Treasury, at the very least, £750 million in tax credits and £370 million in means-tested benefits. We want to do all we can to ensure that anyone who puts in a hard day’s work gets a decent reward for doing so. That is why it is disappointing to see nothing, not just in this Queen’s Speech but in all four to date, to incentivise employers to pay a living wage.

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[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

rose—

[Christopher Pincher]

rose—

[Mr Umunna]

I thought that would rile them. I am going to get on, because I want to ensure that we get other people into this debate.

If elected next year, we would introduce “make work pay” contracts to encourage employers to pay a living wage and help businesses to raise the wages of millions of low-paid workers. This is fully costed and will be entirely funded from the increased tax and national insurance revenue that the Treasury would receive. Again, I encourage the hon. Member for City of Chester to encourage those on his Front Bench to adopt that proposal. If they do, we will support it. However, the silence we have heard from those on the Government Benches when it comes to doing anything on the living wage is quite extraordinary. People will remember the Prime Minister’s speech to London citizens back in 2010. In the last week of that campaign, he said he would do all these things to promote the payment of the living wage and he has done next to nothing—nothing—in office.

However, wages are one thing; insecurity at work is another, and never in recent times has it been so resonant an issue, as my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) said. I am not at all surprised by that, because since they came to office this Government have mounted a full-frontal attack on people’s rights at work. This is often talked about by Government Members as though it were a trade union issue, but it is an every person issue. Every single person in this country who works has had their rights at work attacked by this Government. They have increased the service requirement to claim for unfair dismissal from one to two years, depriving people of the right to seek justice when they have been wronged in the workplace; they have reduced compensatory awards for unfair dismissal; they have reduced the consultation period for collective redundancy; and they have watered down TUPE protections for people. I could go on. Most starkly, this Government have erected a barrier in the way of those seeking redress with the introduction of tribunal fees.

But perhaps the biggest symbol of insecurity is the extensive use of zero-hours contracts in 2014. The Office for National Statistics estimates that there are 1.4 million zero-hours contracts in use right now.

[Christopher Pincher]

I am obliged to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Just in case his Front-Bench team want to prompt him with statistics, my constituency is Tamworth.

The hon. Gentleman talked about the importance of having a job instead of no job. Has he had correspondence with Labour-run Liverpool council or Labour-run Newham council, which make extensive use of zero-hours contracts?

[Mr Umunna]

What I have said time and time again in this House when we have debated zero-hours contracts—I will come to this point in a moment—is that the Opposition are not opposed in principle to any use of zero-hours contracts. The question is: what are the Government going to do about their exploitative use? What they have announced so far comes nowhere near close to what we have proposed to deal with the exploitative use of such contracts.

Zero-hours contracts do not oblige employers to offer guaranteed hours of work to their workers. Sure, some workers—it is for this reason that we do not oppose zero-hours contracts in principle—choose the arrangement because they like the flexibility, but for many it leaves them subject to the whim and demands of their employer to work at short notice, promoting insecurity. These arrangements make it almost impossible to own a home, save for a pension or plan family life.

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[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow a fellow Staffordshire Member to speak in the Queen’s Speech debate on jobs, particularly on what is, of course, a great day for jobs and for the job prospects of millions. It may not be such a good day for the job prospects of the Opposition Front-Bench team, which may be why they have spent rather less time than they might have done talking about today’s good news.

Today is good news for my town, and this Queen’s Speech is good news for Tamworth. The situation in which we now find ourselves compared with the situation in 2010 when we had our first Queen’s Speech could not be starker. In 2010, at the end of the last Labour Government, the unemployment rate in Tamworth was running into double digits; today, we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. In 2010, at the end of the last Labour Government, one could walk down the Glascote road and see repossession notices on window after window as mortgage companies foreclosed on properties. Under the last Labour Government, people were losing not just their jobs, but their family homes. Those notices are now gone; growth is returning; hope is being restored. In my town, Jaguar Land Rover is recruiting; BMW is recruiting; John Lewis is recruiting. They are recruiting skilled workers because our educational outcomes are improving, with GCSE results going up, and the Torc centre has been named the automotive hub for Staffordshire.

I want to speak about this Queen’s Speech in relation to jobs, and I shall make three particular points. I am glad that Her Majesty made it clear that her Government will continue to cut taxes in order to increase people’s financial security. I hope that those tax cuts will also include business tax cuts—cuts in corporation tax and cuts in national insurance contributions. Small businesses are the engines of growth in this country—not Governments, not multinationals, but small businesses up and down the country. We need to reduce the burden of taxation on them so that they can expand, invest and create more jobs.

I was also pleased to hear the Secretary of State talk about deregulation and cutting red tape. We have to get on and go even further. I rather hope that the Government will look at regulation as if it were a tax. A small business man may have to juggle the responsibilities of being IT director, finance director and HR director with the all-important task of being sales director. Any Government activity that detracts from the ability to focus on selling or any Government activity that is a tax on time is a tax on business—and it is in those terms that we should think of regulation. I am astonished that we still have so many regulations. There is even a regulation on how to build a staircase. It seems to me that if we were to get rid of that regulation, carpenters up and down the country would not be left helpless. We do not need many of the regulations under which businesses still appear to labour, so I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will continue his work on that.

I was pleased to see further help being given to the exploitation of our shale gas opportunities. It is unfortunate that the Labour Opposition seem to blow hot and cold on shale gas. In the Finance Bill Committee, the Front-Bench team did not seem to know quite what they wanted with respect to shale gas. I believe that shale gas opportunities in our country could create between 60,000 and 70,000 new jobs. It could create billions of pounds of extra revenue to the Exchequer, which could be invested in infrastructure, creating even more jobs. If the Opposition are serious about the cost of living challenges facing our country, they should surely embrace a resource that will help to even out the cost of our energy. The fact that they seem to refuse to do so seems to make their position illogical.

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Christopher Pincher]

I will not. If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, many Members want to speak: they have things to say—or think they have things to say—and they should be allowed to say them.

In conclusion, this Queen’s Speech helps my town. It drives growth, it drives opportunity and it drives forward our long-term economic plan—and we are the only Government, the only party, who seem to have one.

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[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

I support the Queen’s Speech and, in particular, the work of the Department for Work and Pensions, which is engaged in nothing less than a moral crusade, a war on unemployment, a war for work and a war to defeat poverty. We all know that the best way to cure deprivation is a job and the best way to reduce poverty is work. Today, I have heard so much from the Labour party about how the Government do not care enough about the least well-off. As Labour Members talk about the ills of everything, they remind me of Jack Frost denying the coming of spring, yet each day the sun rises that bit higher and shadows are thrown back that bit further as the economy and employment continue to improve and as unemployment continues to fall.

The numbers on poverty are encouraging, too. Let us be honest. In the previous Parliament, under the last Labour Government, poverty rose. It is falling under the Conservatives. Under Labour, child poverty rose. It is falling under the Conservatives. Under Labour, inequality rose and it has been falling under the Conservatives. Before the crash, under Labour, 9.8% of people were reporting that they did not have enough money to buy food, according to OECD figures. Today, the figure is 8.1%. That is still too high but it is moving in the right direction. I hope that food poverty will continue to fall under this Government, who are engaged in a crusade against poverty, want and need because they believe in the power, importance and value of work, and the poverty-fighting aspects and dignity that work can bring.

Under Labour, youth unemployment rose and it has been falling under the Conservatives. Under Labour, economic inactivity—people doing nothing—rose and it has been falling under the Conservatives. Under Labour, long-term unemployment rose and it has been falling under the Conservatives. However, it is not enough. I have a vision of the future that we can build under a Conservative Government after 2015: a Britain moving further towards economic success and a work revolution, particularly through the promotion and fostering of small businesses, and through making it easier to have a light-touch regulatory system where one can set up an enterprise at no cost. I hope that the small business Bill will deal with that.

It is important that we give young people a better future. Under Labour, nearly 2 million more people went into renting. Young people’s futures were stolen by Labour’s buy-to-let policy and its promotion of buy-to-let landlords. That was a disgrace. It was wrong that, in 2000, 2 million households were in rent and that, by the time Labour left office, about 3.4 million were in rent. That took away the futures of our young people. We should give them their futures back, so I want more action to disincentivise buy-to-letting—it is too incentivised today through the tax system—and to incentivise owner-occupation. We should give back to our young people the chance, hope and aspiration that owning one’s home brings, which the previous Government took away. It was wrong. It was a shame for Labour to do that. We need to promote work for our young people. We need to promote home ownership and owner-occupation for our young people to give them those things. We need to build a society that is fairer and more just.

I have powerfully made the case for tackling tax avoidance. We must tackle want through welfare reform. We must tackle welfare tourism, too. It is important that we make our borders secure to give our young people a greater chance. For the Labour party, borders and immigration are just issues to be discussed at a coffee morning. Those issues involve the hopes, security and futures of our young people, a generation who were sold the pass by the previous Government. This Government are looking after them.

We need to reform zero-hours contracts, which the previous Government did nothing about.

[Christopher Pincher]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, although we do need to reform zero-hours contracts, only very few people on them say they do not get enough hours of work?

[Charlie Elphicke]

I agree. For me, this is about fairness and justice and ensuring there is flexibility while also protecting people. Labour did not do that, but this Government are doing it. That is very important, and social justice lies at the heart of so much of what we are doing.

We need to look after savers. There are too many zombie accounts—too many zombie ISAs, too many savers being taken advantage of. That was allowed under the previous Government. I say we should give consumers and savers a fair and just deal.

There should be more competition in the power markets, and our water bills should be fairer. I have made that case before, and I am glad to see that Ofwat has been listening and has made a stronger settlement for consumers in the 2015-20 period.

There must also be fairness and justice to our way of life. We need to make our Supreme Court supreme. We need to reform human rights legislation, which has too often gone wrong and too often promotes unfairness and injustice. That is the kind of vision a Conservative Government could build after 2015, and it is one I look forward to.