Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill (First sitting)

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th December 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Davies. It is a real pleasure to be here for this Bill Committee—what a great start to the day! I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East again for bringing the Bill this far, for her relentless campaigning and for not giving up on a Bill that will, as she said, make a difference to millions of people across the country. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn for all her campaigning and my hon. Friend the Member for York Central for the campaigning she outlined.

So many people have campaigned for the Bill here in the House and outside it. I thank the TUC, the Pregnant Then Screwed campaign, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s “Flex From 1st” campaign and the Multiple Sclerosis Society, to name just a few of the campaigning organisations that will be cheering us on from around the country today, because they know the difference this will make to working people.

This is a huge step towards the right to work flexibly being enshrined in law and to tacking the employment gap that exists for carers, women, people with disabilities and low earners. This is good for employers and good for employees. There is a chronic shortage of workers in many areas of employment, and the Bill will go a long way towards bringing people back to the workplace and giving people confidence that their flexibility needs, many of which will be non-negotiable for them, will be able to be heard, understood and acted on by employers.

In my own working life, I have seen the need for this flexibility many times. I have had four children and returned from maternity leave four times. Every single time, my children are well and fine until my first day back at work, when they suddenly get ill, and it is at the beginning of my return to work that I need flexibility most. That is why this being a day one right is so important. After that, I get back into the routine, my children get into the routine, and off we go—it is fine—but it is the return to work that I have always found the hardest; I do not know why that always happened, but I cannot be alone.

I have also seen in my working life how a move from one workplace to another triggered anxiety and mental health issues for someone. I was able to arrange flexible working for him, with time off and then a slow return to work, working in different places; it was about what worked for him. He has now been working in that place of employment for years, but he only needed that flexibility right at the beginning. As a manager, I was able to accommodate that, but agreeing it with my managers was not entirely easy, and it was not seen as a right. Having the right to ask for flexible working from day one will be so important for those kinds of cases and so many others.

I was reassured by the Minister’s answers to many of the questions that I was going to ask. Ensuring that this is a day one right and seeing that in the secondary legislation will be very reassuring to us all. Another issue is moving at pace. It has been a year since the consultation closed. I have heard the Minister say that this will go through in the course of next year and be enacted early in the year after. Could it be sooner than that? Could we see it going through early next year and being enacted next year? Every day that it is not enacted is detrimental to so many workers. We really need that workforce back in the workplace.