Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill

James Daly Excerpts

Friday 28th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am a practising solicitor and a partner in a firm of solicitors.

I support the Bill, which I think is a perfectly reasonable Bill. I am pleased to support the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), a fellow Lancastrian MP. I do not know whether she would wish me to say this, but I remember the halcyon days at Bury magistrates court when the hon. Lady, an eminent barrister, used to prosecute my clients and I did my best to defend them, mainly unsuccessfully. The memories came flooding back when I heard her speech. It is good to support her with a good Bill, but I want to make some points that I hope are constructive.

Flexible working is not a panacea. Every speaker so far has talked about it as something that the economy has to go towards. For a huge employer such as Zurich International, with the right resources and in a business whose nature suits it, I am sure flexible employment is a good thing.

If you will indulge me, however, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to mention my wife Joanne, who is up in the Gallery. She is a small business owner—she runs a business in Bury North—and the opportunity for flexible working in her life is non-existent. As a self-employed person, she does not have the luxury of being able to do that. She works—I am not saying this because she is my wife—night and day to keep people in employment.

The nature of the business that Joanne runs—my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) ran a similar business for many years—means that it is incredibly difficult not to have employees in the office. It is a firm of conveyancing, will and probate solicitors. With the technology and interaction that is required, in the main employees have to be there to do the job. As MPs, we sometimes forget that. Colleagues have talked about experiences in the pandemic. For small businesses in constituencies across the country the thing that matters is making money. They make money in order to be able to pay wages, and if they cannot do that, flexible working conditions do not exist at all.

This is a reasonable Bill, because it does not place undue burdens on people in businesses of different sizes, but we have to understand how businesses work, including small businesses. The situation for a business in Bury that employs 10 people does not correspond to that of Zurich International. This is not a criticism of the Bill, and I know that the hon. Member for Bolton South East reflected this in her speech, but when we talk about self-employment—we should talk about the self-employed much more in the House and cherish them much more—we must understand the sacrifices that thousands of self-employed people make to ensure that others at least have the opportunity to work in a flexible manner.

I have another concern about flexible working—I would welcome the thoughts of other speakers on this—as Bury Council, laudable organisation that it is, has essentially encouraged all its staff to work from home. During the pandemic, we had to work at home—now that may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing. One impact is that people are not in town centres. They are not going to a local shop to buy tea, coffee and sandwiches at lunchtime. There are hundreds fewer people in town centres. If we are going to encourage flexible working—again, I think that there is a lot of merit in that—we must accept that there are consequences. We have to look honestly at the issue of productivity, which blights the labour market and our industrial output.

During the pandemic, many of us had to work from home—that was true of the Passport Office and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency—but I remain to be convinced of the benefits of that step for such organisations, which need access to certain types of information, and there is also a need for interaction with colleagues. When we offer flexible working, especially in the state sector, we have to be mindful of productivity and what it means.

[Andy Carter]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for allowing time for interventions. He is making an excellent speech, and I agree with many of the points that he has made, which have prompted earlier interventions from me. One of my concerns, having run a small business, is that when teams are together in the office a culture is created, with a transfer of knowledge. If someone is working from home that does not happen, which is why it is incredibly important that businesses think carefully about how they can allow flexible working to take place. It is not one size fits all, and for small businesses with only two or three people, having everyone working from home is not necessarily right. They have to create the workplace culture that is right for them.

[James Daly]

As ever, my hon. Friend is absolutely correct. We have to be mindful of that. Again, the House has to understand the pressures on businesses. This is an extremely difficult time for businesses across the country. The concept of flexible working takes second place to being able to pay wages and bills, and making sure that people are employed.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Can I alleviate the hon. Gentleman’s concern? Under the Bill, if the employer says, “No, I cannot provide flexible working,” that will be the end of it. There is no ability on the part of the employee to take the employer to an industrial tribunal or any such thing. If the employer says no, that is the end of the matter, so I do not think that small businesses or any other employer have to worry about the consequences of the Bill.

[James Daly]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. As I said at the start of my speech, that is the very reason why I support the Bill. It does not place burdensome legal responsibilities on employers, but, while I am not criticising the Bill or the good intentions that underpin it, it is right that we discuss the realities of small businesses and the pressures they are under.

I welcome the Bill. It is great to be able to support a fellow Greater Manchester/Lancashire MP in trying to change employment practice. Flexible working is a great concept, because we want to ensure that people are not locked out of the labour market. As the hon. Lady has rightly said, many people with childcare responsibilities, and others, need flexible working to help them into the market and to ensure that they have an equal opportunity to thrive and succeed. There are, however, other realities that we must always keep under consideration, and we must always celebrate the self-employed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Antony Higginbotham]

Ultimately, that must be a conversation between the business—the employer—and the employee. I think most employers want to do the right thing for the people who work for them; that is how to have a productive and motivated workforce, and the employee often wants to do the right thing for the employer. Getting both sides together to say, “Is there a way of coming up with a trial period? It may not be exactly what the employee has asked for or exactly what the employer has offered for so long, but is there a trial period?”, while the employer knows that at the end of that period there is no obligation to say, “Yes, this definitely works.”, or, “No, it definitely doesn’t.”, but that there is the option to consider it, would help.

If the trial does not work out as planned and the employer does not think it is sustainable in the long term—something that is sustainable for four or five weeks might not be sustainable for four or five years—then that gives the employer confidence to say, “Not now, but I’m happy to look at it again.” It gives the employer a little bit more flexibility.

As I think about my constituency, an area with higher unemployment than some other parts of the country, flexible working offers an opportunity to bring people back into the workforce who might otherwise struggle, be it because of childcare issues or because they are not ready to take on full-time hours. In doing that, we must ensure that we address some of the points my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) made about building a culture: if we are bringing someone back into the workforce for the first time, they might want a greater propensity for working from home or doing annualised hours, but if the impact is that they do not properly get the opportunity to embed themselves in the organisation and get the benefits of learning from colleagues, the downsides outweigh the positives.

[James Daly]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, but I want to touch on productivity, because that is the central point. It is great to offer people the chance to work in various different ways and by various means, but if that employee is not productive in that situation away from the office, it simply cannot happen.

[Antony Higginbotham]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. One of the great problems that has vexed our economy for at least a decade is lost productivity or the suppression of productivity growth. Any changes that we try to make to employment law and employment regulations must have at their centre, “What will this do for productivity?”. Ultimately, we have spoken for a long time about a focus on economic growth, but—particularly in an economy like ours, where unemployment at the national level is at 3.5%—the only way to have sustainable high growth in the economy is by increasing employee productivity. We must think carefully about how we do that.

This Bill provides a way forward and offers both employers and employees a balance of flexibilities. As we think through the Bill as it goes to Committee, we must consider whether there are further tweaks we could make to flexible working and the kind of options available to employers, so that they can say yes, no or offer a possible third option. Nevertheless, I look forward to supporting the Bill later.