Leaving the EU: Protection for Workers

Clive Betts Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for having initiated this conversation through her amendment to the previous motion, and I think a fruitful discussion has come from that. On the ability to cherry-pick those measures that are adopted by the European Union that might find favour with the Government but not those that do not, the requirement would be to report everything that the European Union has adopted during a six-month period and for the Government to have to make a statement in respect to all of those measures. The motion that would then be required to be put before the House would be amendable. The Government might say that they intended to implement one measure, to apply in a different way another, but to reject a third. That motion would be amendable, so the House could alter the Government’s intention and express its view directly. As for the direct access for workers to these procedures, I made a commitment to the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) that we would work together to see what can be done on that, and I am sure that the right hon. Lady will want to be part of those conversations.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

I actually whipped the minimum wage Bill through Committee on that occasion, so I well remember Conservative hostility to it.

What the Secretary of State is really promising today is future consultation and future opportunities for votes. Looking behind him, I do not see a great deal of commitment from those Benches to such measures. Why can he not go further? Why can he not agree to put a commitment into the withdrawal agreement and the treaty that the UK will never fall behind EU minimum standards on workers’ rights either now or in future? I know that he has mentioned parliamentary sovereignty and not binding future Parliaments but, historically, Governments have negotiated treaties and Parliaments have approved them and those treaties are binding on future Parliaments until they choose to withdraw from them. Why can we not have that sort of arrangement?

[Greg Clark]

We are talking about legislation here, not the treaty, and the withdrawal agreement has already been established. In the future economic partnership, there is a negotiation to be conducted—it is specified there—on our level of alignment when it comes to workers’ rights, but this is in advance of that. This provides an opportunity at the point of withdrawal to give Parliament the ability to make sure that it takes an informed view of whether it wants to continue to be aligned. That is a valuable opportunity. The hon. Gentleman says that we should do it now with the treaty. That is part of the next phase of the negotiations. It is taking all the Government’s efforts to conclude the withdrawal agreement, without being able to conclude the future partnership in the next few weeks. But this is an important opportunity to establish, in primary legislation, a requirement properly to consider all new regulations that would come from the European Union and to assess the compatibility of legislation that we make in this House with that of the rest of the European Union. That, it seems to me, is a valuable opportunity.