Employment Rights Bill

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 16th June 2025 Lords Chamber

In summary, these amendments aim to promote fairness and sustainability. They would ensure that extending employment protections did not inadvertently tear holes in the cultural sector. Our intent is not to obstruct the Bill but to improve it, making it fit for every part of the economy. The arts enrich our society immeasurably; we should give artists and cultural workers the employment rights they deserve, while also preserving the institutions and projects through which our nation’s creativities thrive. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, my Amendment 287 in this group seeks to establish a freelance commissioner. I thank my noble friends Lord Freyberg and Lord Colville, and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who have supported this amendment. I support all the other amendments in this group, including Amendment 286, which is similar in intent in wishing to improve the situation of freelancers in the creative industries, and Amendments 301 and 302 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, which very usefully seek to define what a freelancer is.

The only thing that I would add to Amendment 301 is the category of sole trader, which would highlight the point that an artist is always working, whether they have a client or not and whether we are talking about a visual artist, a photographer, a musician, a composer or a novelist. The buyer, the publisher, the venue or gallery may materialise at some stage, but it is sometimes a thing of the future. In the creative industries, worker and client are not always walking hand in hand at any one time.

I very much support the Bill as far as it goes, but a truly modern employment Bill—and it is an employment Bill, not an employee Bill—would have included consideration of the self-employed and freelancers, a group which of course includes the creative industries. On 5 June in the previous debate in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, said

“we cannot claim to be modernising employment law if we ignore how it interacts with one of the fastest growing and culturally significant sectors of our economy”.—[Official Report, 5/6/25; col. 950.]

In trying to deal with the problem of zero-hours contracts in the wider economy, the Government are already encroaching on this territory but without properly assessing the wider effects of doing so—one good reason why the whole landscape of employment needs to be looked at through employment law in the round.

As the previous debate on the amendment on theatre workers, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, pointed up, there is the danger of unintended consequences affecting workers in the creative industries. Freelancers constitute around 15% of the total workforce of the country, but as the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg says, the figure runs at twice that national average in the creative industries, rising to 70% in the visual arts and 80% for musicians. Indeed, freelancers are often described as the backbone of the arts landscape. For a number of reasons, this is a growing workforce, despite—or in some cases because of—the increasing difficulties for workers.