Carer’s Leave Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Friday 3rd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) on not only her luck in having her name drawn out of the hat, but the drafting and presentation of the Bill, which I am delighted to support.

More than 4 million people in this country are unpaid carers for loved ones, and most of them are women over the age of 50. They are very common to us all as constituency MPs. I can think of several people who have been in touch with me about not only the challenges they face in getting support, but the just challenges of what it means to be an unpaid carer. We can all do everything that we can as legislators to ensure that the support for them is better than it is and that the process, particularly for applying for help, is smoother, but the reality is that, as the hon. Lady said, they work all the hours there are. Ultimately, they are dependent on themselves, their friends and family and their support networks. I honour them for everything that they do. In a sense, they are the backbone of our country and our communities and the foundation of our national life. In the words of Queen, they “make the rockin’ world go round” and I honour them for that—[Interruption.] I did not quote the whole lyric. [Laughter.]

The Bill is welcome and I am pleased that the Government support it. Of course, we made a commitment in our manifesto and there were plans in 2019 to introduce a Bill along these lines. It is shame that it has taken this long to get here, but I am pleased that we are supporting it. The fact is that many employers extend these sorts of flexibilities to their staff anyway, because they are good people. I was struck by what the Minister said in response to the previous debate about the importance that employers such as him place on their reputation. Their primary reputation is based on what their staff—the people who work with them and know them best as employers—say about them. That reputation matters hugely, so it is no surprise that we all come across employers who do the right thing and are flexible with and sympathetic to their staff with caring responsibilities. As the Minister and the hon. Lady said, it helps the business to be a good employer in this way. It is not all about selfless action on the behalf of employers—even Yorkshire employers.

I am particularly struck by the provision, supported by the Government, for carer’s leave to be a day-one right. That is essential and reflects the fact that this is an important principle: it is something that is not earned through length of service but extended to an employee on day one. The value is not just for the employee but for the company, because it will help so much with recruitment in our very tight labour market. With all the social challenges that exist in our society, there are huge numbers of people who would like to work but for whom their caring responsibility comes first. For them to know that they will have the flexibility that the Bill gives them from day one is an enormous incentive for them to apply and take a job that is offered. It is, then, absolutely right for employers and the economy that we make this change.

That said, we obviously need to be careful. I look forward to seeing what the Government do in the drafting of the regulations that will bring this change into force. As I understand it, the regulations will determine how long the right to carer’s leave will be. It will be at least a week, but it could be longer, and I could totally support that, because in many cases it will need to be much longer than that. It probably should not be 365 days a year, because we do have to worry about people who take the mickey.

That leads me to my next point, which is that we currently have significant problems in our labour force and labour market. Too many people are not getting into work, and although I very much hope that this Bill will help to address that challenge, we do need further reform to our welfare system. I am not satisfied by the rate of success that we get out of our welfare system. Sadly, for all the great work done by many jobcentres and many of the civil society organisations that support them, the success rate of transforming an unemployed person into an employed person nevertheless remains too slow. We have to make work pay, and the Government are rightly prioritising a number of reforms and changes that need to happen to enable that. We need a higher-wage economy in which work pays better than welfare. We need to strengthen the conditionality around certain benefits to ensure that people understand that benefits are dependent on them looking for work and taking work when it is offered. We also need greater flexibility in the arrangements that people have in their employment.

I will end with a general point, to which the Bill speaks very well. My concern about our whole economic model and the way in which we conceive of work is that we have a very individualistic attitude to what we are as a worker. We think that work and life are separate spheres and that when we are an employee—a worker—our private life has no bearing on our work. In a sense, we can understand that. People need to leave their home life behind when they come to work; we all have to do that in our jobs. We need to be a professional. However, it is not fair to say that people have these entirely separate spheres.

As the hon. Lady emphasised in her speech, people increasingly live a portfolio life. Life changes for all of us; things happen. It is right that the system recognises that, for all that we have to be a professional, for all that we should be seen as a responsible, accountable and autonomous individual, we have overlapping responsibilities in our lives of which the system should take note. Principally, that means that people need to understand the challenges that we have around time, and the obligations that may occasionally intrude on the time we can give to our employment.

I applaud the provision that the hon. Lady hopes will be in the regulations, which is to extend the rights to people who have responsibilities to their neighbours—obligations and relationships outside the home. I think that that is absolutely right. She mentioned the great benefit of covid. We should acknowledge that good things happened as a result of the lockdown, which was the way that neighbourhoods were strengthened and obligations to people who we might not have known well before suddenly became real. We need to recover and retain some of that spirit and neighbourliness, and the Bill might help with that.

Best of all is the support that the Bill gives to family life. We need to recognise families and the obligations that we have to our relations, our children, and our elderly dependants much more in the general system of regulation. I recognise that, through the benefit reform, which the Conservative-led Government over the past 10 years introduced, universal credit now properly recognises family obligations in the benefit system. The next stage is to recognise family obligations in the tax system, which, at the moment, remains much too individualistic and disregards the obligations that people have.

Almost every other comparable country—European and north American—recognises family obligations in the tax system. Uniquely, the UK does not. The result is that people with young children or with adult dependants are penalised through the tax system in a way that in other countries they are supported, and, fundamentally, that is what we need to change. I honour the hon. Lady’s Bill and very much look forward to supporting it.