Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Damian Hinds and Andy McDonald

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andy McDonald]

We want to get through this consultation as quickly as possible and to get this Bill on the statute book so that the position is clear, but I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. We need to move on these issues as a matter of urgency, and he is right to point that out.

Lords amendments 23 and 106 to 120 propose to reduce the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from two years to six months. We cannot support that halfway measure. Our manifesto is clear: Labour will deliver day one rights. Accepting these amendments risks entrenching insecurity and delaying meaningful reform. Workers should not have to serve a probationary period of six months or two years before being protected from arbitrary dismissal. We will fully consult on probationary arrangements to get them right, but we will not compromise on our principle of security from day one.

I must urge the rejection of Lords amendment 62, which seeks to retain the 50% turnout threshold for industrial action ballots. The threshold was a deliberate barrier imposed by the Trade Union Act 2016. No other democratic process in this country faces such a hurdle—not parliamentary votes or local elections. This House was elected without such restrictions. Trade unions must not be uniquely singled out. Removing the threshold restores fairness, strengthens industrial relations and honours our commitment to repeal draconian Conservative legislation.

Finally, Lords amendment 121 would permit academies to deviate from pay and conditions agreed through the school support staff negotiating body, which risks entrenching inequality. It could mean teaching assistants in the same trust being on wildly different terms, creating a postcode lottery in education and exposing staff to equal pay disputes. Instead of undermining sectoral bargaining, we should be expanding it, ensuring fair, consistent and collectively agreed standards across the board. Let us be frank: after years of pay erosion, school support staff truly need a pay restoration deal that values the vital work they do.

In every case, the Lords amendments before us risk weakening rights, not strengthening them. Our task is to make work pay, end one-sided flexibility and ensure fairness and dignity for every worker. If this legislation does not go far enough to meet union demands for sectoral bargaining and a single worker status, Members of this House will rightly call for a second employment Bill this autumn. We cannot sustain this anathema of fragile, insecure work for so many millions of people in this country; they need that security to plan their futures, and they need to have the protections that those in employment enjoy. In addition, were they to be brought into that architecture, the Treasury would benefit to the tune of more than £10 billion per annum, opposite the uncollected tax and national insurance contributions.

Working people have waited long enough. It is time for us to deliver the stronger rights and protections that they truly deserve.

[Damian Hinds]

I intend to speak mainly to the provisions dealing with guaranteed hours, but I begin with a word of thanks to the Government for what they have announced about special constables. It is not quite as good as adopting the amendment, but I welcome the review. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) for the work he has done. I hope the review will report quickly, and I hope for a growth in the number of special constables, not only in neighbourhood policing, which my hon. Friend rightly mentioned, but among people working in the tech sector. We need cyber-specials to tackle the scourge of cyber-crime and fraud, which is now the single largest category of crime, and is, sadly, growing once again.

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[Damian Hinds]

I am very grateful to the Secretary of State for suggesting that he will try.

I turn to the provisions dealing with guaranteed hours and zero-hours contracts. I understand why it is attractive to the Government and the Labour party to seek to restrict the availability of contracts that do not have a guaranteed number of hours. From listening to Labour colleagues, it seems almost as if “exploitative zero-hours contracts” is one word. It is as if those words must always go together. We all want to end exploitation—that is why, in 2015, the then Government passed legislation to stop employers imposing exclusivity. We said, “If you are not going to guarantee your employee a minimum number of hours, it is not all right to say that they must not work for somebody else.” But not all zero-hours contracts are necessarily exploitative.

One of the biggest users of zero-hours contracts in our country is none other than the national health service, through its use of bank staff. I notice that the Liberal Democrats announced a new policy today, which would require extra pay for people on zero-hours contracts; I do not know whether they have yet costed that policy. By the way, for many of the people working as bank staff in the NHS, that is not their primary job but a second job. This allows a hospital or other setting to respond to spikes in demand. For many people with a zero-hours contract job, it is their second job, not their primary source of income. Zero-hours contract jobs are also very important to people coming back into work, as the hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray) said powerfully in an intervention.

Many people on zero-hours contracts are students. Particularly in hospitality, there is a pattern of work whereby an employee lives in two places: at home, and at their term-time address. They can stay on the books of their employer at home—it might be a local pub—while they are away studying during term time. It could be the other way around: they could have a job in their university town, and stay on the books when they come home. They can dial up or dial down their hours; for example, many students do not want to work a lot of hours, or any hours, during exam time. Contrary to what we might expect, and contrary to the all-one-word conception of “exploitative zero-hours contracts”, some people actually prefer a zero-hours contract.

[Andy McDonald]

And some people do not.

[Damian Hinds]

And some people do not, as the hon. Gentleman quite rightly says.

When I was working at the Department for Work and Pensions, the issue of zero-hours contracts became a totemic issue under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), the immediate predecessor of the current leader of the Labour party. There was this idea that there had been a huge increase in the number of people in the country on a zero-hours contract. We discovered that less than 3% of people had a zero-hours contract as their primary source of income, and the average number of hours those people worked was not zero or close to zero, but 25. Even more unexpectedly—this was the bit that really got people—the average job satisfaction of people on a zero-hours contract was higher than it was for the rest of the workforce.

I think we understand why the Labour Government wish to legislate in this way. It is something for Labour MPs to bring home. When so much else in their manifesto is falling apart before our eyes, they can say, “At least we’ve killed off this modern scourge, this huge growth in zero-hours contracts.” As I say, the number of those contracts is not nearly as big as most people think. If you think about it, we have always had zero-hours contracts in all sorts of forms, whether it be piecework, commission-only sales, agency catalogue work or casual labour. In fact, it is possible that today, there are fewer people on a zero-hours contract than ever before in the history of the labour market. Many colleagues might reflect on their first job. Mine was washing dishes in a restaurant. We did not have the phrase at that time, but it certainly would have been a zero-hours contract, apart from the fact that there was no contract at all.

If the Government wish to reform this area, as they may, I ask them to consider the situation in sectors with great seasonality, including hospitality, tourism and retail, and to please look again at the concept of a 12-week reference period, which does not reflect the reality of seasonality. I know that this will be introduced through regulations, not the primary legislation, and I welcome what the Secretary of State said; I think he indicated that the Government were open to looking at a more sensible length of time. The Government could also do things differentially by sector; there could be one period for employers in general, and another for sectors or sub-sectors that have particularly strong patterns of seasonality.

I also ask the Government to reconsider the requirement to not just offer guaranteed hours once, but keep on doing it. That is introducing unnecessary bureaucracy. If the Government want to make changes in this area, I encourage them to at least ensure that once an employer has made the offer once, the right can become an opt-in right.

The Government think that these provisions are something for Back-Bench Labour MPs to take home, but I ask Labour colleagues whether they really want to take them home. Do they want to take home higher unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment? Do they want to take home fewer opportunities for people returning to the workplace after many years away? Do they want to take home fewer opportunities for ex-offenders—those furthest from the labour market? Do they want to take home—because this will come as well, as night follows day—a further trend away from permanent employment and towards fixed-term temporary employment? Do they want to take home a shift from waged or salaried work to more self-employment? Is that really what Labour wants to deliver?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Damian Hinds and Andy McDonald

Monday 29th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

T7. Five years on from the approval of a new secondary school in my Middlesbrough constituency, not a brick has been laid and the children of Outwood Academy Riverside remain in an old Home Office block, and the next two years’ intake are going to be bused to Redcar to portacabins plonked on a field. Children are spending their entire secondary school years in temporary accommodation and it is just not good enough. Will the Secretary of State tell ministerial colleagues to get a grip and crack on with building the new school these students need and deserve?

[Damian Hinds]

We have increased the amount of money going into condition funding. We are also, of course, rebuilding 500 schools under the school rebuilding programme. I will look into the specific case the hon. Gentleman mentions and come back to him.

Transport

Debate between Damian Hinds and Andy McDonald

Wednesday 5th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andy McDonald]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. The Welsh Government are taking a serious issue more seriously, and they are to be commended for their work.

What is more, transport is the most emitting sector of the UK economy. It is responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and that is excluding international shipping and aviation. It is also the worst-performing sector when it comes to reducing carbon emissions, which are higher now than in 2010. Progress has been poor in comparison with that of other sectors: transport emissions were just 2% lower in 2016-17 than 1990-1991, compared with 60% for energy supply and 30% for businesses more generally.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Would the hon. Gentleman care to comment on what happened to transport emissions under the Labour Government in the 10 years following 1997, before the financial crash?

[Andy McDonald]

We are dealing with 2020 and the risible record of this Government. I know that a number of Conservative Members think that the world started in 2020, but the Government have been in power since 2010, and they should take that on board.

The facts that I have given compound the Government’s depressing lack of ambition. Their failure to reduce transport carbon emissions and act on the crisis is a huge missed opportunity to lead the world in developing and manufacturing low-carbon technologies. Yesterday’s announcement of a 2035 phase-out of the production of petrol and diesel cars highlights the poverty of vision for the climate and for industry. Electric vehicles will be as cheap as diesel and petrol cars by the mid-2020s. It makes no sense to go on selling polluting vehicles that will be more expensive to buy and run into the 2030s. In its alternative strategy, Labour has set out a clear pathway to achieving significant reductions in climate emissions at the same time as reducing regional and social inequalities and improving the quality of life.

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[Andy McDonald]

I have already indicated that I will not give way because so many people want to speak.

Fifteen per cent. of the UK’s population accounts for 70% of all flights, and half the country does not fly at all in any given year. Ahead of a possible tax cut for the aviation industry next month, Ministers should be thinking more imaginatively, such as replacing air passenger duty with a fair and just levy that targets frequent flyers. The Government’s advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change, has called for the introduction of a frequent flyer levy. Such a move could reduce demand for flying without penalising the annual family holiday in the sun, instead making it more expensive to fly out for a weekend at the second home in Provence for the umpteenth time that year.

[Damian Hinds]

It is more about business.

[Andy McDonald]

No, it is not.

Is the Secretary of State aware that it is more than a decade since the effectiveness of regulators in the transport industry was seriously questioned or considered? [Interruption.] I know he is not listening, but he really should.

Regulators could and should have a positive role in driving carbon reduction in the industries they oversee. Does the Secretary of State agree that the powers of the Office of Rail and Road and the Civil Aviation Authority should be strengthened to ensure that the road, rail, bus and aviation industries meet their climate crisis obligations? Have the Government issued any guidance to the transport industry regulators in that regard?

Finally, the Department for Transport does not have a carbon reduction budget or target. The Government should set a carbon budget consistent with the aspirations of the Paris agreement and beyond. In addition, each of the sectors—rail, road, aviation and maritime—should have carbon reduction targets in line with that departmental budget, and departmental spending should be reallocated to achieve the changes required.

Claire O’Neill is correct to say that the Prime Minister “doesn’t get it” on the climate crisis. The Transport Secretary has an opportunity to show that he does get it by halting the colossal road-building programme and his plans for airport expansion, and by boosting investment in active travel, public transport and electric vehicles.

Dealing with transport is critical to confronting the climate crisis. We are compelled to take action by decarbonising not only to respond to the existential threat to our one and only planet but to embrace the green industrial revolution and, simultaneously, to address the gross and obscene deficits in social justice. We must level up so that everyone across our nation has affordable, accessible and sustainable transport. We must connect our communities and businesses, and we must give people the means to get to work, to get to college, school or university and to get to hospital, and to help address social isolation.

The moral, social and economic imperatives are urgent and stark, and I urge this Government to take the bold and radical action that is necessary. The country, indeed the world, is watching. I commend this motion to the House.

Draft Disclosure of Exporter Information Regulations 2015

Debate between Damian Hinds and Andy McDonald

Wednesday 9th December 2015 General Committees

[Damian Hinds]

I thank the hon. Lady who speaks for the Opposition for her, as ever, constructive and insightful contribution to the debate. She asked a number of questions and raised several issues for clarification, some of which we have covered and others of which I will try to respond to now.

The measure is all about the Government’s commitment to UK growth and giving exporters and their customers the right information at the right time to allow them to prosper and increase their business. It adds to the range of tools at their fingertips. Exactly how it will be used remains to be seen. Companies and intermediaries tend to be creative, and people operating online tend to be even more creative, so they will probably come up with ways of leveraging data that were not anticipated when the dataset was created.

The hon. Lady asked about the safeguards and opt-outs, and about whether concerns that are less serious, as she put it, but still significant and legitimate will be taken into account. I set out the current safeguards to protect commercial and strategic confidentiality and the measures proposed by HMRC to ensure confidentiality of businesses in the future with the new exporter dataset, which will be fully in line with those currently in place for importers’ details. I should clarify that it is about non-EU trade.

The arrangements for importers have been in place for many years. They have a high level of usage and industry is highly confident in them. No significant issues about disclosure have arisen.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

When we look at the explanatory notes and the consultation outcome and hear that there were only five respondents—

[Damian Hinds]

Fifteen.

[Andy McDonald]

The figure is very small. We were told that a small number are concerned that the publication of their identity and the sensitive nature of the goods that they export might attract adverse interest, and that measures will be put in place to address their concerns. Can the Minister say a little more about the nature of the businesses that are so concerned about this measure, given that it must be a pretty targeted and focused group of activities?

[Damian Hinds]

I do not have the names of the individual respondents or the details of their business, but clearly businesses in sensitive sectors are more likely, first, to be concerned and, secondly, to respond to a consultation on the issues. We think that we have created a sufficient framework of opt-out and of mitigating measures to protect confidentiality and that we have got the balance right. Clearly, there is a value to the dataset and to promoting trade, but there are also the legitimate concerns and reasonable requirements of certain businesses to keep their details confidential. We have to find the balance, and we think that this one is reasonable.

[Andy McDonald]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. We are talking about the “sensitive” nature of some businesses—are we talking in particular about people dealing in arms? What are we talking about? What are the specific trades that cause concern?

HMRC Office Closures

Debate between Damian Hinds and Andy McDonald

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I will not just at the moment, if that is all right with my hon. Friend.

The primary objective is for HMRC to bring its workforce closer together in regional centres so that they can collaborate better, providing more opportunities for economies of scale and of scope and for individuals’ career progression. That will allow them to deliver higher quality public services at a lower cost to the taxpayer. It is simply not efficient to have HMRC’s 58,000 employees spread throughout 170 offices across the UK.

[Andy McDonald]

While the Minister is on the subject, does he want to tell the House what assessment he has made in socio-economic terms of the damage that will be caused by those tax offices and workers withdrawing from those very communities?

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[Damian Hinds]

There are a great number of job opportunities in Liverpool, near the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. This will be a different type of operation, with more disciplines co-located in the same building, so there will be more opportunities for collaborative and efficient working and for career progression and development. Everyone working for HMRC will have the opportunity to discuss their personal circumstances with their manager ahead of any office closures or moves, including any issues that need to be taken into account when making decisions.

[Andy McDonald]

Will the Exchequer Secretary give way?

[Damian Hinds]

Not at the moment. As I have said, HMRC has mapped the geographical location of all of its employees, to work out which locations work best for most people. We envisage that the new office structure will give more people more opportunities, which is good for them as well as for the organisations as a whole.

I have not given way as much as I might have done, because I wanted to respond to as many as possible of the points that have been raised during the debate. The questions were many and the minutes available are few, but I shall do my best. If I omit anything crucial that has been raised, I will write to the hon. Member concerned.

The official Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris), rightly raised the question of the Mapeley leases. It is precisely because of the expiration date of those leases, which account for about two thirds of the estate, at the end of the private finance initiative contract in 2021 that this is a one-off opportunity to make this change to the estate footprint. If the opportunity is missed, there will not be another one like it for some 15 years.

I have been asked a number of times, quite rightly, about the number of compulsory redundancies. Of 58,000 staff in total, 4,000 are expected not to be in reasonable travel time of a regional centre, but that is not the same as saying that there will be 4,000 compulsory redundancies. Every year, many people retire or move away from organisations, including HMRC.

[Andy McDonald]

What counts as reasonable travel time?

[Damian Hinds]

I will in a moment come to the point that the hon. Gentleman is shouting out from his seat. The average age of employees in the organisation is late 40s or early 50s, and this is a 10-year plan, so compulsory redundancy should be a last resort.

What counts as reasonable travel time will depend on the circumstances of the individual and will include consideration of factors such as caring responsibilities, which is one reason for providing the opportunity of one-to-one discussions, quite rightly, with all employees. Typically, reasonable travel time is taken to mean around an hour, but that does not mean that that is correct for everybody in every circumstance in every location.

A number of hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) and for Bootle (Peter Dowd), my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian C. Lucas), complained about the manner in which the announcement came out. I make no apology for the fact that the staff were told first. On the day of the announcement, the entire HMRC senior team was out in the field at those office locations to carry out face-to-face discussions with staff. The direction of travel had been shared with staff 18 months earlier, and in the intervening time some 2,000 events had been held up and down the country to discuss the changes. In terms of contact with MPs, I can confirm that HMRC will be happy to discuss the situation with them.