Gangmasters Licensing Authority

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

I am pleased to speak in this timely debate. I thank all hon. Members for their contributions to it, and I particularly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) for introducing it. The red tape review is going on, and the Minister will have taken note of the passion and expertise among Opposition Members, who have spoken strongly of the support across parties and across civic society for the introduction of the original legislation, and I am sure that that support remains. He will have taken note of the genuine ambition that he should ensure that there is no diminution, weakening or dilution of the GLA as currently structured, and that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) said, the licensing regime’s proactive enforcement is not watered down.

We have had a good debate about where we go from here. That has been the nature of the debate; we are not trying to find the be-all and end-all solution. I hope officials and the Minister, in carrying out his departmental responsibilities and in his wider discussions across Whitehall, will take some of our messages away with them.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South made an all-encompassing and powerful contribution. He put the case exceptionally well, and I will come back in a moment to some of his points. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) referred to his role as chair of the PCS union group; I have previously engaged with him in that role. I commend him on his work, and on the constructive way in which he has always represented the interests of PCS union members. As my hon. Friend has shown, they can make a contribution to ensuring that we have better workplaces and better ways of working.

My hon. Friend referred to the criteria by which we could judge whether the GLA should move into other sectors. That is the sort of issue we need to debate. Under what circumstances, and judged against what criteria, could we say that the GLA’s great success, testified to today, could be replicated in other areas into which the evidence leads it?

My hon. Friend referred to the fact that licensing and enforcement powers are critical, wherever they are located in government. There is an active debate about what the most appropriate place is—concerns have been raised about whether the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills would be the right place—and whether the GLA’s core values would be best preserved in a Department that is simultaneously trying to drive down regulation.

The point was well made in the debate that there is good regulation as well as bad regulation. The great benefit of the way the GLA has been constructed and the way it has acted over the past few years is that it does the right thing in the right place at the right time. If hon. Members will excuse the comparison, it punches like a good Welsh bantam-weight—well above its weight. It has relatively few resources, it is very fleet of foot and it really packs a clout.

Tribute has rightly been paid to my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Jim Sheridan) for introducing the original private Member’s Bill, and for the work that he and others did to build tremendous consensus, which is sustained today. He referred to the necessity of proactive enforcement, and that is key. He put the case very well.

My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington, has a great background in this issue, not as a Member of Parliament, but as part of the wider civic engagement through the trade union movement. He reminded us that behind all the debates about where the GLA goes is the human tragedy that inspired it, and that necessitates its continuation in a dynamic, proactive form. He talked about support extending from plough to plate, across all parties and across society. He also said that we can look at using the model we have to end the scourge of modern slavery, which still exists.

The GLA, which was established in 2004, was designed to do a number of things. One was to establish a level playing field across industry, so that we could avoid undercutting and take out rogue operators. It was about improving the working lives of the vulnerable, and its success in doing that has been proved. It was also about assisting in the battle against criminality and human trafficking.

It is important to set out the GLA’s successes, and we heard earlier about its measurable, tangible successes. The annual report for 2010-11 showed that 845 cases of worker exploitation were identified in that year. Some 91%—that is, 78 cases—of the GLA’s intelligence-driven operations identified serious cases of non-compliance. Thirty-six cases of unlicensed activity were uncovered, and 33 licences were revoked, with 12 successful prosecutions. The case for the GLA continuing its work is therefore still crystal clear; abuses are still happening. Even with the GLA’s dynamic, fleet-of-foot approach and proactive enforcement, there are still cases out there to be pursued and prosecuted.

The GLA has had a significant wider impact because of its deliberate efforts to go after high-profile cases with a high media impact to get the message out to rogue employers that they cannot continue doing what they are doing. That has been very successful.

There has been continuing support for the GLA. When surveyed in 2008, eight out of 10 respondents said they were in favour of licensing, while seven out of 10 felt the GLA was doing a good job. Only 18% described contact with the GLA as being in any way burdensome.

In that respect, does the Minister have a view about the GLA’s role on forestry? There has been great discussion with forestry employers and unions about whether forestry needs to be retained in the remit of the GLA as currently structured. Some have put forward the view that certification means it is very difficult to find unregulated, rogue operators in the forestry regime. Does the Minister think there might not be a case for forestry remaining in the current structure? I would be interested to hear his views on the issue, and particularly what discussions he has had on it with the unions.

Let me turn to the question of whether the GLA is efficient as well as effective. There is no doubt that it is effective. As to whether it is efficient, the organisations using the GLA as an example of how to implement an efficient regulatory control framework include not only the TUC, but the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, with its research reports, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Oxfam, the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, the International Labour Organisation, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Dutch national rapporteur on trafficking and the Harvard university programme. One after the other, they line up to say that the GLA is not only effective, but efficient. It does what it does leanly and with minimal resources. If it works so well, my question to the Minister is: why would the Government tinker with it without a darn good reason?

That is before we look at the issue of where the GLA should go now. In one sense, the debate is about the future of the GLA as currently formed and in the sectors it currently looks after. In another sense, it is about where the GLA goes from here. As we have heard from hon. Members, the TUC and others believe that there is a strong case for extending the GLA licensing scheme, and the Select Committee on Home Affairs said the same in its report on the issue.

Baroness Kennedy’s report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission commented:

“Another problem is that the remit of the GLA is currently confined to the oversight of labour in the food and agricultural sectors, while exploited foreign labour may now be found in the service and construction industries as well as in care homes. In our evidence-gathering it became clear to us that there seemed to be no good reason for the vital work of the GLA not being expanded to include these other sectors and to cover other forms of contract employment and outsourced work, and that employers who used such labour should hold some responsibility for wages and conditions.”

There have been other reports, such as Oxfam’s “Turning the Tide: How to best protect workers employed by gangmasters, five years after Morecambe Bay”. We have also had the TUC’s commission on vulnerable employees and the Health and Safety Executive’s report on deaths in construction, “One Death is too Many”. They all proposed that the scope of the sectors covered by the GLA should be under consideration for extension.

Finally, I recommend that the Minister reads, if he has not done so, the report by the TUC and the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians, “The Hidden Workforce Building Britain”. One of the many examples in it concerns a UCATT investigation in July 2008, which showed that on a private finance initiative hospital site in Mansfield, workers were being paid a total of £8.80 for a complete 40-hour week. The union took the case to the employment tribunal. It was contested. The company is a large one, by the way, which carries out many large public sector contracts throughout the UK. It, of course, insisted that the workers were self-employed and did not come under the national minimum wage regulations. On and on it went. The GLA would be effective for that sort of anomaly.

The debate is a genuine one. We want the GLA to be safe in its current form, not weakened; and we want to ask what consideration is being given in government and Whitehall to extending its remit, and how that would happen. Where would that remit go, and is anything happening at the moment? There is strong support for the Minister to take the matter forward proactively, rather than simply putting it under the banner of the red tape review so that the GLA becomes diminished without our even considering its success and whether it should be taken further.