Job Insecurity

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Umunna]

I shall come on to the point about the nature of the work and the jobs created. Of course it is a good thing for the hon. Lady’s constituents that there are more opportunities, but I shall return to that point.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Although we always welcome any improvement in employment, the fact remains that the purchasing power of people out of work has dropped about 5%, and that mostly hits women.

[Mr Umunna]

My hon. Friend is right. It is worth recalling that when my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition first talked about the cost of living crisis and the squeezed middle, Members on the Government Benches and their supporters ridiculed the very notion, but the existence of that living standards crisis is now undeniable. Indeed, since my right hon. Friend first talked about the squeezed middle, in 2011, I think, the people who compile the Oxford English Dictionary named it their word of the year, despite the fact that it is two words.

Words are one thing, but they are backed up by the reality of what we see in our communities. Ministers can do whatever jiggery-pokery they want with the figures, as the Chancellor did the other day when he claimed that the top decile of earners was the only decile that had lost out from his measures. In so doing, he miraculously forgot to take into account the huge tax cut he had given the top 1% at the same time as heaping a VAT rise on working families and taking away support from them.

The average employee is earning substantially less than when this Government came to office—over £1,600 less a year. It is important to remember that on Wednesday 13 February last year—almost a year ago—the Prime Minister at Prime Minister’s questions in this House pledged that people would be better off in 2015 than in 2010, and we will hold him to that. The head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who is often cited in all parts of the House, thinks differently. He said last month:

“We will be able to say definitively—I’m pretty sure—that, come 2015, average household incomes will be lower than they were pre-recession and lower than they were in 2010.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Umunna]

Of course it is good that more people are in work in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, but what is the nature of that work? Is it temporary or permanent, and what wages are people earning? That is the question I have posed.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

I seem to remember the Chancellor announcing, about 12 months ago, a bonus if people gave up their employment rights. I wonder what happened to that. It demonstrates that what this is really all about is the corrosion of people’s employment rights in this country and making life worse for them.

[Mr Umunna]

I will come on to that, but before that I will go through some of the things the Government have done to people’s rights in the workplace. They have increased the service requirement for claiming unfair dismissal from one to two years, depriving people of the right to seek justice when they have been wronged in the workplace. They have reduced compensatory rewards for unfair dismissal, which, as I have said in this House before, will impact in particular on those in middle-income occupations—the squeezed middle. They have also reduced the consultation period for collective redundancy and have sought to water down TUPE protections for people. I could go on.

We know that much of that was inspired by the 2011 report by the Conservative party donor and employment law adviser to the Prime Minister, Adrian Beecroft. By his own admission, in public evidence sessions in this House, Mr Beecroft said that his findings were based on conversations and not on a statistically valid sample of people—classic “off the back of a packet” stuff.

Never mind Beecroft, the best example of the Secretary of State failing to resist measures that increase insecurity in the workplace—my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) has just referred to this—is the shares for rights scheme announced by the Chancellor at the Conservative party conference in 2012. The scheme provides for new employer shareholder status, whereby in return for between £2,000 and £50,000-worth of shares in their employer, the employee gives up fundamental rights at work: the right not to be unfairly dismissed, rights to statutory redundancy pay, rights to request flexible working and so on.

For all sorts of reasons, this is a bad idea, so much so that there was cross-party opposition to it, with the former Conservative employment Minister, Lord Forsyth, describing it as having

“all the trappings of something that was thought up by someone in the bath”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 March 2013; Vol. 744, c. 614.]

What did the Business Secretary do about it? He not only waved through the scheme; he sponsored its passage through the House. Since then, take-up seems to be low —about 19 inquiries have been made to the Department—but what happened next? Up popped the Deputy Prime Minister at the beginning of the year—let us remember that the Business Secretary waved through the scheme and took it through Parliament—calling for the scheme’s abolition.

Let me get this right: the Deputy Prime Minister’s two Liberal Democrat colleagues—the Business Secretary and the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson)—guided the policy through the House just 10 months ago; the Deputy Prime Minister marched his Members through the Division Lobby, along with Conservative Members, to introduce it; and now the Deputy Prime Minister wants to take credit for saying he wants to scrap this disastrous scheme, which he set up in the first place.

I know the Liberal Democrats have a reputation for this sort of thing, but even by their standards this really does take trying to have your cake and eat it to a whole new level.