Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts
Tuesday 21st September 2021

(2 years, 6 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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George Freeman Portrait George Freeman
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In a word, yes. My hon. Friend makes a powerful case. Freeports and regeneration corporations are vital to our innovation strategy. Not only are we determined that there will be funding for the golden triangle, but we want to harness science and regeneration to drive growth around the country.

Ian Lavery Portrait Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
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3. What steps he is taking to help ensure that businesses do not use fire and rehire practices.

Paul Scully Portrait The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)
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We have been clear that threats to fire and rehire as a tactic to pressure workers during negotiations are totally unacceptable. That is why we have asked the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service to produce guidance to help employers to reach negotiated outcomes with their workforce. We continue to keep the issue under review.

Ian Lavery Portrait Ian Lavery
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While Members across the House were munching away this morning at the country’s favourite breakfast cereal, Weetabix, they will have been blissfully unaware that Post Holdings, which owns Weetabix, has turned its guns on its workforce with fire and rehire. Employees at Weetabix are set to lose £5,000 per annum, and of course if they refuse they will lose their jobs. That is quite simply not good enough. Minister after Minister, including the Prime Minister, has stood at the Dispatch Box saying how abhorrent fire and rehire is. Will the Minister please tell the House what he intends to do about fire and rehire? Can he confirm that the Government will support the Second Reading of the Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill—the private Member’s Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner)—on 22 October?

Paul Scully Portrait Paul Scully
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The Government take fire and rehire very seriously. Obviously there are occasions when businesses need the flexibility to change workers’ terms and conditions to avoid mass redundancies and insolvency, but there have been examples of its being used as a bully boy tactic. I know that the Labour party understands that, because as recently as July, it made a load of its own employees redundant and hired workers on temporary contracts with worse terms and conditions to keep the party afloat—unless that was a case of one law for the Labour party and another for UK businesses.