Employment Rights Bill

Gareth Snell Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

My right hon. Friend, with his experience, is exactly right. Just think about the impact on a small business of a fee of that magnitude and the length of time it takes to get justice.

What is going to happen? This is a really important point. Those on the Government Benches will be living this reality over the remainder of their term, and they will have to account for it. Businesses will be discouraged from hiring anybody without a perfect CV and a proven track record of work. Who are we talking about? We are talking about young people, people with dyslexia and related conditions, and people with a period of inactivity on their CVs—such as former prisoners seeking a second chance to go straight. Those will be the victims of that particular measure.

Labour Ministers should realise that they will be the first victims of disagreeing with Lords amendment 62. The long-standing principle here is a simple one: we should not be allowing strikes to be called when a majority of union members have not even voted, let alone voted in favour. A strike could still proceed with just over a quarter of those eligible. Opposing this amendment will guarantee that unions are held hostage by a militant minority who force strikes even when the union’s own members do not support one. We can ill afford more strikes that crush growth, prevent workers from getting to work and endanger lives, and the public will not forget the change that this Government seek to make.

Amendment 61 is a Cross-Bench Lords amendment that would maintain a consensus arrived at by the Trade Union Political Funds and Political Party Funding Committee—that only those who actively choose to contribute to a political fund opt in to do so. This is a basic principle that the Government have applied to services everywhere else in the economy, from beauty boxes, gyms and meditation apps to Netflix and newspaper subscriptions. Why should Britain’s workers not enjoy the same right? The only conceivable reason—it brings shame on anyone who votes against the amendment—is to swell the coffers of one political party.

Lords amendment 47, on the right to be accompanied, tries to finally level the playing field for the 80% of workers who are not in a union, but should have the same rights as trade union members to be supported in a disciplinary or grievance hearing. By voting against this modest but important reform, Labour is preserving what is essentially a closed shop that unions use to push people who do not want to join into doing so. We scrapped the closed shop decades ago, and no one should be bringing it back as a means of pressuring vulnerable workers into paying into union coffers.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Andrew Griffith]

I will happily give way if the hon. Gentleman will talk about the other organisations that will do a brilliant job of representing employees.

[Gareth Snell]

Well, that wouldn’t be the Tory party, would it, Madam Deputy Speaker?

What the shadow Secretary of State seems not to understand is that workers cannot turn up to a trade union and go, “I’ve got a problem. Can I join and get representation, please?”. Almost every union in this country requires a qualifying period to get the representation he talks about—the idea that this is a closed shop is just nonsense.

[Andrew Griffith]

The hon. Member has probably wilfully misinterpreted what I said. I am talking about the right for individuals to be represented by a trade union or by a qualified professional from another domain, such as a qualified lawyer.

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[Sarah Olney]

I understand the hon. Lady’s point, but a fellow qualified accountant would be better able to advise somebody facing a disciplinary than an official from a general trade union, who would not necessarily understand the points in dispute.

[Gareth Snell]

The hon. Lady makes good points in some parts of her speech, but not in others. The point of a trade union representative—or any representative who goes with an individual to a disciplinary process—is not to advise on the particulars of the worker’s skillset, but to ensure that processes are followed and the worker’s rights are protected. I fully understand what she says about accountancy, but are there people in her professional organisation who can give her employment rights advice? Disciplinaries relate to employees’ rights, not their professional skillsets.

[Sarah Olney]

As the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) have said, that has not been a requirement for professional bodies, but if we create the right for suitably qualified professionals to accompany employees, I fully expect that those bodies would go on to develop that capability. It is surely up to an employee to decide whether they want a fellow professional or a trade union official to protect and defend their interests. They should have the opportunity to make that choice for themselves.

The Liberal Democrats also support the retention of the opt-in system for contributions to trade union political funds. We believe in maximising choice and transparency for individuals in relation to the political funds to which they contribute. We therefore oppose measures that would make it an opt-out system.

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[Gareth Snell]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am a member of Unison and the GMB, and during the election I received financial support from trade unions. One thing I found when I was a trade union official was that it was not necessarily people who were not confident in asserting their own rights. A number of workers simply did not know what their rights were. Oddly enough, employers were not running around handing out little laminated cards saying, “Here are all the rights you can ask me for.” If employers are not made to tell them their rights, how else are employees meant to find out?

[Sam Rushworth]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. That is what the Bill speaks to. There is a power gap between the ordinary working person who does not necessarily know their rights and is unable to assert them, and the sort of person who, for example, might buy a house in their girlfriend’s name. I will progress.

I also oppose the attempt, in Lords amendment 106, to water down the Bill by requiring six months for protection from unfair dismissal. There is of course a difference between unfair dismissal and fair dismissal. No employer is prevented from using fair grounds to dismiss an employee. The previous Government extended the time before you could even claim unfair dismissal to two years. That left far too many people vulnerable to being dismissed at a whim, or dismissed because they had demanded their rights at work.

I had an experience of that myself. I have never talked about it before, because I signed a non-disclosure agreement. Shortly after becoming the branch rep for the University and College Union when I was a college lecturer, I pointed out that the college I was teaching at was not paying the minimum wage to some of its staff. The college then attempted to dismiss me for bringing it into disrepute. Thankfully, I was able to take on one of the top employment lawyers in the area at the time—only because they had forced me to teach an HR course—and give myself a crash course in human rights law. I left that place with a payout.

I remember the shame I felt at the time for signing the non-disclosure agreement. I wanted to fight for other people, but at the end of the day I was terrified that I was going to miss my next mortgage payment and I was thinking of my children. That is the position that far too many people find themselves in. So what we are doing on non-disclosure is right. I have to ask all Members, as they vote on whether to water this down, whose side they are on. Will they be on the side of those seeking to cover up sexual harassment, rather than on the side of the whistleblowers?

In my mind’s eye, as I vote this evening, will be real people in my Bishop Auckland constituency. I want to tell the House about two or three of them. A few months ago, I received correspondence from a parish councillor who is also a local farmer and a member of the Labour party. He told me of his concern that every day he saw two women sitting in the bus shelter in a cold hilltop village. He approached them to ask them what they were doing there, because they were there for several hours. It turned out that they were care workers. They were dropped off in the morning and did a visit. At another point in the day they would do another visit, and another visit later. But they were only paid for the specific time that they were in people’s houses; they were not paid for the entirety of the day. That is a workaround to avoid paying them the minimum wage. The Bill makes provision for a fair pay agreement in adult social care to address such practices. By the way, he then opened the village hall for them and made sure they had a warm space to wait in each day between shifts.

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Lords amendments that seek to remove clause 23 are, to my mind, clear attempts to water down one of the signature pledges of the Bill and of this Government’s mission to make work pay: a guarantee of day one rights. Even if I do not agree with those amendments, I understand many in the other place who have talked about the potential disincentive for many small businesses to hire in a difficult economy and a cost of living crisis. However, the rights of employees, and especially of our young workforce, should not be traded off in every instance in order to maximise spreadsheet efficiency in the labour market.

[Gareth Snell]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend agrees that when Conservative Members oppose day one rights, they are not really worried about the day on which the rights start; they are actually opposed to the rights. That is why many of them cannot muster an argument that is about more than, as he says, spreadsheet efficiency.

[Euan Stainbank]

I agree, especially if we look at unfair dismissal. The issue is not the cause of the dismissal; at its core, this is about denying people recourse. If a worker cannot claim unfair dismissal because of the two-year threshold, their recourse is substantially weaker. The course of the conduct is not changed simply because a worker has been in a place of employment for 23 months, as opposed to two years.

This issue is real and corrosive. I have had young people in my constituency office who have experienced this issue, especially in the run-up to consideration of this Bill. There has been a course of conduct in the workplace that has resulted in them wanting to leave, or somebody wanting to force them out, and this issue makes it substantially easier for bad employers—not every employer, of course—to force an employee out. It does not change the nature of the conduct, or what we should be tackling, which is poor employment practices.

I do understand the concern that has been raised, but a two-year threshold often leads to workers, early on in their careers, being taken out of the workplace without process or prior warning. Their only right of recourse, as I have said, is taking the employer to court through a far weaker form of redress that is often time-consuming, exhausting, fruitless and restrictive, and so deters them from pursuing their rights.