Deregulation Bill

Debate between John McDonnell and James Duddridge

Wednesday 14th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[James Duddridge]

It would be an additional benefit to look at these things sector by sector, as the Better Regulation Commission is doing—and is reducing regulation. However, I fear I am straying slightly, as we have done today, away from the pure health and safety issues. The hon. Member for Chesterfield kindly took an intervention on the concept of who is protected on a building site and I must admit that I am still confused. There is a case for stopping people being self-employed from an employment rights perspective—we can debate that, although not today. But although these bogus self-employed individuals take themselves out of a certain type of health and safety liability, by being on the site—by being in the care home or on the building site—they are subject to health and safety rules. There may be a case to make that those rules are too weak or that they are not the same as in an employment relationship, but people are still subject to them.

As I said at the start, something more nuanced could have been proposed, because there is a risk that people do not set up businesses because they are concerned about the overall level of bureaucracy. The hon. Gentleman prayed in aid the World Bank, saying that we are already at the cutting edge for being able to set up businesses, but if we do not look to move forward and constantly improve, as our competitors are doing, biting at our heels, we will fall behind in business growth, in growth and in employment. I say that on a day when I learned from the BBC that employment is at its highest level since 1971, when records were first kept. There is no health and safety protection if one does not have a job. Getting people into employment is a step in the right direction, and getting people involved in high-quality jobs with high-quality health and safety is a further improvement, but it is still a stepping stone. For those reasons, while I support Government new clause 1, I would vote against amendment 72 if it were pushed to a vote.

[John McDonnell]

May I first say that I welcome the new clause relating to the Sikh community? I chair the all-party group on the Punjabi community in Britain, and for a number of years there has been an issue, and it is helpful to get it out of the way now, once and for all. Others have also received representations on the matter, so today’s debate has been useful.

I will be straight with the Minister: I am really worried about this part of the Bill. Before I go into that, I will, like others, outline my background. First, let me refer to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Unite has just made a contribution to my constituency party for campaigning. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority tells me that we do not have to declare such payments, but I have anyway. I have not received the Unite briefing, but I understand that it has been lobbying on this matter.

I come to this matter from a trade union background—from the shop floor. When I first left college, I worked for the National Union of Mineworkers. Obviously, health and safety was a critical issue for mineworkers. However, it concerned not just those working in the mines but those involved on the surface, in deliveries and so on. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) has described the process of health and safety at work. The trade unions initially tried to tackle health and safety issues on an industry-by-industry basis. The reason the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 came about was that we wanted comprehensive overall protection, which is why it was a global Bill; we did not want anyone to miss out. Individual pieces of legislation would not have given us that comprehensive cover.

At that point in time, self-employment was not a big issue, but it is now. The expansion of self-employment in this country—my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) gave some figures on that—has been massive. That is partly because people who have lost their job or who have had their job privatised in some form have been pushed into self-employment; some choose it willingly, but others choose it because it is the only option. It is a fact that deaths at work and occupational injuries for the self-employed are twice the rate for the directly employed. If we look at recent TUC statistics on deaths, we will see that there have been 16 fatalities in the past four months, the bulk of which were among the self-employed. Clearly, therefore, there is an issue of health and safety among the self-employed.

Up until now, the simplicity of the legislation has meant that everyone knows that they are covered no matter what. No matter where they are working or what aspect of self-employment they are involved in, they know they are covered by the legislation. My worry is that legislating to solve one problem produces much bigger problems. I accept that there may be an element of truth behind some of the myths of the health and safety culture. Some small examples may be run in the Daily Mail, and we will all agree that they are daft, but the bulk of health and safety legislation protects people. There are too many people dying or being seriously injured at work at the moment. When we meet the families of victims, we understand why health and safety is such a cornerstone, and so essential in protecting people at work. As soon as we try to resolve some of the smaller exaggerations of the health and safety at work legislation, we then open up the possibility of absolute confusion about what is going on.

We will spend the next few months on the consultation about the list. Endless hours will be spent trying to identify what activities are included on the list and what activities are not included. We have already heard something like that today with the issue of what happens in the construction industry.

I have been dealing with Crossrail. Some Members may be aware that a few weeks ago, after a fatality at Crossrail, an extremely damning report about health and safety attitudes on the Crossrail project was published in the media. I am meeting Crossrail management and the unions to try to see how we can resolve those matters. It will be argued that Crossrail will be covered by these provisions because it is part of the construction sector, but the question comes up of what will happen with deliveries to Crossrail sites. Will they be covered when they are purely on the construction site or will they be covered on their way to a Crossrail site?

We will have endless debates and arguments about what happens in construction, which is the area where self-employment has grown in recent years. We have heard about false self-employment, and a lot of construction workers today are basically told to be self-employed or they will not get a job. It is as simple as that and if they try to argue against it they do not get work the following week. That is one of the big battles being joined at the moment by Unite and other unions, including the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians.