Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill

Kevin Hollinrake Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Bill now be read a Second time.

This Bill is about making Britain the best place to work. It is about levelling up and treating people fairly. It is about better regulation to govern fire and rehire. I am grateful to hon. Members on both sides of the House. I know that Fridays are an important time for us all to be with our constituents. That so many Members have chosen to be here is, I hope, not simply testimony to the power of the Whips, although I have my doubts. I believe it is because Members of all parties recognise that the practice of fire and rehire is creating hardship and real distress for hundreds of thousands of families across Britain. We can end that misery, and we must. I will set out my remarks in answer to four key questions: what the problem is, how we can solve it, what my Bill does not do, and what it does do.

What is the problem? I believe that every Member of the House would do all they could to stop a key worker in their constituency having their wages cut by thousands of pounds. Each of us would want to prevent a constituent who has done nothing wrong and has given loyal service from being fired. If we could, we all would.

These people are workers who have kept us all going through the pandemic and are now being fired and rehired. They are loyal workers who have served their companies for years, such as bus drivers who risked covid to keep the economy going; gas workers who kept the heating on in our grandparents’ homes; and teachers who kept our schools going. They are being told, “You are fired, and you can only get your job back if you sign a new contract on worse terms and conditions.” That is wrong; it should not be happening in Britain today.

Over the past months, I have visited workplaces all over our country. In Loughborough, I met a man who told me that he was watching Saturday night TV at home with his son when his phone pinged. It was email telling him he would be fired unless he accepted £15,000 off his annual salary.

In the village of Street in Somerset, I met a man at Clarks shoes who told me of his feelings. He has a two-bedroom flat because he is separated from his wife, and his children stay with him every second week. “If I have to sign that contract,” he told me, “I’ll not just lose my home; I’ll lose my family as well.” The man could not then have afforded that property and would have had to live in a bedsit. That is fire and rehire.

In Banbury, at Jacobs Douwe Egberts, one of the 291 workers who were threatened with the sack there told me that her family had given over 100 years’ service to the company. Her father had worked there, she had worked there for 34 years, her husband had worked there and now her son worked there. She felt that all of them had been treated with contempt.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

The hon. Member is making some very important points and this is a very important debate. He set out right at the start of his speech that he wants the UK to be the “best place to work”, and I agree with that. Does he agree that the UK should also be the best place to start and grow a business, because that is what creates the opportunities for work?

[Barry Gardiner]

I do agree with the hon. Gentleman, and that is why I was very keen to say at the beginning that this is about making Britain the best place to work. It can only be the best place to work if our businesses are thriving, and I believe our businesses can only be thriving if they have a well motivated workforce.

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[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and let me tackle it head on. The survey by Britain Thinks, of 2,321 people, showed that 9% of workers said that in the previous nine months they had either been fired or rehired, or they had been threatened with being fired and rehired. If one were to extrapolate that 9% across the workplace, which I do not seek to do, it would be 3 million workers. Let us say it is half that number—we are still talking about 1.5 million workers. Let us quarter it—it is still three quarters of a million workers in this country. This is a serious problem.

I also want to address the other element of the hon. Gentleman’s remarks. I have been on a demonstration picketing with workers outside a Labour council. A Labour council has done this in Tower Hamlets, and shame on it. Wherever this happens, it is wrong. It does not matter whether it is the private sector or the public sector, it is wrong and families are suffering because of it. That is why it is incumbent on us all not to play party politics with this, but to act.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I think we should do something in this area. It is an unacceptable practice, and a good employer would not resort to it. But on quantum, the poll in the ACAS document shows that less than 3% of HR professionals reported this. The figures quoted by the hon. Gentleman are across the entire working population. Most employers are not making redundancies or downsizing. So the quantum is far lower than the numbers he quoted.

[Barry Gardiner]

Again, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I am sure he will also have noticed that that survey was sent out by the institute to 160,000 of its members, and it asked whether those members had ever engaged in fire and rehire, how they had used it, and how they had sacked people in the previous nine months. Does he recall how many people replied to the survey? It is there—

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Two hundred and twenty-five HR professionals.

[Barry Gardiner]

It was circulated to 160,000 members, and 225 wanted to reply. In my view, that says everything about the way this is being used by personnel departments.

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[Barry Gardiner]

May I just remind the hon. Lady that the comment about capitalism was not, in fact, mine but the Leader of the House’s? I understand her fundamental point, and from it I take that both she and I want to see wages in this country rise to an appropriate level so that every person and every family feels they can put a roof over their head and food on the table, and feels secure in their life—although she will have voted one way on Brexit, and I will have no doubt voted the other way, we would both welcome a move towards a society in which that is possible. The Bill is about levelling up and stopping the practice whereby, at the moment, many hundreds of thousands of workers in this country are seeing their wages levelled down, which is why it is so important that we get legislation.

I have set out that there is a problem of morality and economics. How can we fix it? Back in June, when I sat down with the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), he made it clear to me that the Government were “not minded to legislate.” That was even after the ACAS report “Dismissal and re-engagement (fire-and-rehire): a fact-finding exercise” was published, which may appear surprising given that ACAS reported examples of what participants in its survey

“regarded as employers using the crisis opportunistically as a ‘smokescreen’ to diminish workers’ terms and conditions; and the use of fire-and-rehire as a negotiation tactic to undermine or bypass genuine workplace dialogue on change.”

ACAS made it clear in the report that, although the Government were happy for it to outline the findings from such a fact-gathering exercise,

“Acas was not asked to present recommendations to government.”

If not legislation, what? The Minister advised me that the Government are now asking ACAS to recommend how they might strengthen the guidelines to business. I am a believer in guidelines, and good businesses tend to follow them, particularly if they are clear and if other businesses are doing the same. The problem comes when unscrupulous businesses are not adhering to those guidelines and gain a competitive advantage from that non-adherence. There then often follows a race to the bottom in which the good company feels forced into bad practice.

I do not believe that any manager goes into work thinking “I am going to do something noble and fine this morning: I am going to tell my 300 employees that they will be fired unless they accept a pay cut of 20%, even though our company is making record profits.” That is why I believe guidelines are not a solution. Managers at Jacobs Douwe Egberts, the coffee people in Banbury, made record profits during the pandemic, when coffee consumption increased by 40%. While the managers awarded themselves large bonuses, they demanded wage cuts of up to £11,000 from 291 staff. The truth is that guidelines are not going to change the practice of such managers. Only by putting good practice into statute will companies be prevented from bullying their workforce by using the threat of fire and rehire, and only if those tactics are outlawed will good companies not feel the competitive pressure to behave just as badly.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Gentleman highlights a shameful example, and he is right to do so. As the road to hell is paved with good intentions, particularly in terms of legislation, I am interested in his intentions with this Bill. I have watched him talk about the Bill on television a couple of times, and I think he said on Sky yesterday that it does not outlaw fire and rehire but ensures that the right information is provided. Is it his intention that the Bill does not try to ban fire and rehire, because I think it does?

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[Barry Gardiner]

My hon. Friend speaks with such a wealth of experience on these matters and he is, of course, absolutely right. Good businesses need to be able to respond quickly to the pandemic, as the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) suggested, but they also need to maintain the good will of their workforce, to go with workers on that journey and not only to take the immediate measures necessary but restore the benefits in the long term.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on a technical point?