“Chapter 4A

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd]

I am pleased the hon. Lady asked me that question, because it is patently obvious that better working conditions lead to less absenteeism, more resilience in the workforce and better productivity. It is not a magic potion, but what is known as enlightened employment. She may like to read about that, and if she wants, I will put her in touch with a few people who can talk to her about it.

In that study I mentioned, 71% reported reduced levels of burnout, 54% said it was easier to balance work with household responsibilities, 60% found they had an increased ability to combine paid work with care responsibilities, and 62% reported that it was easier to combine work with social life, and so on and so on. As I have said, the Bill seeks to put this issue on the agenda, because I believe it is inevitable—history shows it—that changes in patterns of work, working arrangements, the nature of work and other associated issues, such as artificial intelligence, will eventually lead to a four-day week over a period of time. So let us embrace the change and let us plan for the change. If we do want to get the country back to work, get the country working productively and get many millions of people without work back into work, let us do this as progressively as we possibly can.

Finally, if we are lengthening the time we ask people to work by an extra year, two years or maybe three years in the future—if we ask them to have a longer working life—the least we can do is to ask them to have a shorter week. What is wrong with that, and is it really too much to ask? I do not think so, and many employers and employees take the same view, so let us not make an enemy of progress. Why do we not just embrace it?

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I rise to speak to the measures on zero-hours contracts, and Opposition new clause 83 and amendment 283. It is absolutely right that we should pause to consider the effects of these changes on employment tribunals, but it is also right that we should pause to consider their effect just on employment. Of course, there are bad employers and those who would seek to exploit, which is a very bad thing. We should bear down on them, but there is no reason to believe that the measures the Government are bringing forward will achieve that.

I suggest that the Government want to get rid of zero-hours contracts not because intrinsically there is a great problem attached to them, but because of the special place zero-hours contracts have in Labour mythology. I want to take us back to the glory days of the modern Labour party when the leader of the Labour party was the current leader’s immediate predecessor, the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). I see the then shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) is with us in the Chamber, and as it happens, I was the Minister for Employment at the time.

When our Government came to power, unemployment had been 8%, and it then rose a little bit to 8.5% at the end of 2011. From then on, it came down, and it kept coming down. By late 2016, it was under 5%, and it would fall further still. However, that did not fit Labour Members’ narrative. They wanted to be able to say that this reduction in unemployment was not real: it was all fake employment or low-quality employment. That was not true, but it did not stop them saying it. In fact, three quarters of the increase in employment was in higher-skilled occupations, and three quarters of the jobs growth was in full-time work. At that time, employment was growing much more quickly than self-employment, and the No. 1 sector for employment growth was construction.

However, Labour Members still kept saying that the jobs being created were all low-quality ones, and at the top of the list of things to call out was the zero-hours contract. The then Leader of the Opposition used to talk about it weekly at Prime Minister’s Question Time. There were a couple of awkward moments, such as after his glorious appearance at Glastonbury, when it turned out that the Glastonbury festival—guess what?—employed people on zero-hours contracts. There was further embarrassment when it turned out that there were people working for none other than the Labour party conference who were on zero-hours contracts.

At the DWP we did some research, and it turned out that less than 3% of people relied on a zero-hours contract for their main employment. On average, it delivered them 25 hours of work a week, while, strangely, they had above-average job satisfaction, and most were not looking for more hours. People said the number had grown, but it is actually much more likely that that was because of growing awareness of the term “zero-hours contract”.

Thinking about our history, it has long been the case that far more than 3% of people have had irregular income patterns, where they have not had guaranteed hours of work or levels of salary—from casual labour to piece work, catalogue agents and commission-only sales. At a certain point, it dawned on me that my own first job had been washing dishes on a zero-hours contract—or at least it would have been, had a contract been involved at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. I think the hon. Lady is in fact making her speech, rather than an intervention. [Interruption.] Oh, her speech will come tomorrow.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Member is right: of course those things are different, but with the dawning realisation I had back then, I started to wonder who else might take a zero-hours contract? Yes, it is true that disproportionately they are young people, but for quite a lot of people a zero-hours contract is for a second job. I would be interested to hear from the Government their assessment of that. It turned out, when we looked at this in 2016, that one of the biggest users of zero-hours contracts in the country was none other than the national health service, so that it could cope with increases in demand. These were people who had a permanent job as well, but who could, as bank staff, supply other hours when that was needed.

For this Government, it is totemic to do something about zero-hours contracts because of that Labour mythology. For the unions, there is also another reason. This is classic insider-outsider theory, with a shift in remuneration from people who are not in work to people who are already in work, and it pushes up what is called the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. In plain English, it is bad for jobs. The Chancellor of the Exchequer must know that because, as we all know, she is most definitely an economist—she has worked as an economist, she has trained as an economist and she is an economist—and this is classical economic reality.

For whom might zero-hours contracts work well? They work well for any employer with an unpredictable, variable need for workers—from the events business to the NHS, as I have mentioned—and there are other obvious cases in tourism, agriculture and food. However, some people may just choose to have that flexibility. Over the last two years it has been a seller’s market to go into teaching, but some people have still chosen to become a supply teacher because, for whatever reason, for them that works well.

The other group for whom this may work are those furthest from the labour market, who have perhaps been out of work for a very long time, who perhaps are ex-offenders, or who for some other reason find it difficult to immediately land a regular, full-time job. When this is combined with universal credit—which, by the way, the right hon. Member for Islington North also wanted to abolish—it can work very well, because the top-up payment can be adjusted according to how much someone earns week to week.

This Bill is bound to have unintended consequences. We do not know exactly which ones they will be, but I will suggest some of them. It could suppress seasonal peaks in employment—for tourism in the summer, but also at Christmas time—because employers will not want to take on the liability from the reference period. It could deter people from second jobs, which will be bad for growth. It could mean people move from contracted employment to self-employment or casual work. It could mean a move from permanent contracts to temporary contracts and, yes, it could hit our national health service and other important public sector employers.

I do not doubt that this piece of legislation will be good for unions, but it will be bad for the economy and bad for growth, and it will be especially bad for people in the hardest circumstances who so badly want to get back to work, and for whom this kind of contract can also be that important first step.

[Louise Haigh (Sheffield Heeley) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Deputy Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), and the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough (Justin Madders) on all their incredible work in bringing forward this landmark piece of legislation. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran), who is co-sponsoring new clause 74 with me today.

This is the first speech I have given as a Back Bencher in nearly 10 years. One of the few benefits of—ahem—elevating oneself to the Back Benches is the ability to speak much more routinely on behalf of my constituents and those without a political voice. The amendment I rise to speak to today is literally about the voiceless: those who have been legally silenced in the name of organisational and personal preservation.

New clause 74 would prohibit employers from entering into non-disclosure agreements with workers in relation to complaints of sexual misconduct, abuse, harassment or discrimination. It very closely mirrors legislation recently passed in Ireland that bans NDAs in those circumstances but allows them at the express consent of the victim, and legislation that has been passed in multiple US states in relation to sexual harassment.

NDAs have a perfectly legitimate use in business to protect commercial confidentiality and trade, but they are frequently misused to bully people into silence when they have already suffered at work. We know of the most high-profile cases, from Harvey Weinstein to Mohamed Al-Fayed, only because their brave survivors risked breaching their NDAs. But these agreements are far from confined to celebrity abusers; they are being misused and exploited on a vast scale. The campaign Can’t Buy My Silence—led by Zelda Perkins, who helped to expose the abuse of Harvey Weinstein—has also uncovered multiple scandals in the higher education sector, which led to action by the former Government to ban the use of NDAs in that sector.

We sadly know that, in our own labour movement, trade unions have been accused of using confidentiality clauses in settlements, which have the same chilling effect as NDAs. I have been told stories—