Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Thank you for chairing the debate today, Mrs Cummins. We hugely appreciate it. I would like to congratulate the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on bringing this debate.

This debate is really important and timely, given that we are five years on from the Taylor review. We need to see progress; there has not been enough. There is no point in commissioning a review if it is just going to be ignored. What is the point in doing all that work and coming up with these excellent recommendations that are going to make a real difference to people’s lives to then put the report on a shelf and do nothing about it? It seems like a bizarre waste of effort for everybody.

The consistent call that we are making is not a high bar. We are asking for an employment Bill. The Conservatives have promised an employment Bill, and we are asking for it. We do not have very high hopes for what a Conservative employment Bill will contain, but once it comes we have the opportunity to amend it and make cases on behalf of our constituents and all those in insecure and low-paid work, so we can try to improve that work. Surely that is what the Taylor review was about. If the Conservatives want to put the views of employers ahead of the views of employees, they should note that employees work better if they are in secure employment. We know that they are more productive and less likely to be stressed.

The Taylor review said:

“Individuals can be paid above the National Living Wage, but if they have no guarantee of work from week to week or even day to day, this not only affects their immediate ability to pay the bills but can have further, long-lasting effects, increasing stress levels and putting a strain on family life.”

If the Conservatives do not step up and bring in an employment Bill, workers are more likely to be off sick. They are more likely to struggle to pay bills. Therefore, presumably, the amount the Government have to shell out on universal credit—which they so resent—will increase. Bringing forward an employment Bill is a win-win situation for the Government.

I want to highlight a few issues—some of which have been mentioned today. The Government brought forward their national living wage. It is a pretendy living wage that does not meet the bar of a real living wage. The Child Poverty Action Group has said that, in 72% of families, with children, struggling to afford food, at least one parent works. That should not happen. The Government keep talking about hard-working families, but what they really mean are people who work and do not get benefits. Actually, there are so many hard-working families and people in low-paid jobs who rely on social security because the jobs are not paying them enough. The jobs are inflexible and insecure, and those people are not getting the hours they need.

The Prime Minister said:

“My strong preference is for people to see their wages rise through their efforts rather than through taxation of other people put into their pay packets and rather than welfare”.

The Prime Minister somehow thinks that people who are on low wages and zero-hour contracts are not putting in any effort. I think he will find that actually all of those people we have relied on the most during the pandemic—carers, hospital porters and cleaners—are likely to fall below the real living wage, because they are getting the Government’s national living wage, if that. Those folk are incredibly hard-working and are having to rely on universal credit in order to get even the most basic living standards.

So many people on universal credit, whether or not they are in work, are actually living below poverty lines. It is a devastating situation. I get that the Government have had other priorities, such as Brexit and covid, but, as has been said, this is the most important issue. In Scotland, we are doing everything we can to put it first. We had a discussion with the Government about freeports. When freeports were being created in Scotland, the Scottish Government wanted two things: to prioritise green jobs and fair work. The UK Government disagreed and said, “No. You cannot prioritise those two things in freeports. You cannot prioritise tackling climate change and fair work.” As was said, those should be the most important things. This Government have got their priorities all wrong. There is a timing issue, but it is still possible to prioritise workers’ rights, when we have seen our constituents’ savings fall. There has been some increase in savings, but that has been for those people who were already earning plenty of money. There has been a massive hit on the finances of those earning the least.

I want to highlight a couple of other matters. In 2021, the median hourly earnings gap between men and women grew. Something is going wrong if the Government are putting measures in place to fix the gender pay gap and it continues to widen. There needs to be immediate, urgent action to ensure that the gender pay gap does not continue to widen.

We need to see flexible work requests from day one. People who are pregnant, carers or disabled need to be able to make a flexible working request to their employers on day one of their employment. We know that many of those are refused anyway. The employer does not have to concede to the flexible working request, but the person needs the right to make that request, at the barest minimum.

We need the employment Bill and we need the Trade Union Act 2016 to be rolled back. We need a proper real living wage that is not discriminatory on the basis of age. We are doing what we can in Scotland with the fair work action plan. We have had that argument with the Government about freeports. We have a higher level of people paid the real living wage than elsewhere in the UK. That is mostly due to the action we have taken, particularly the requirement that people working in adult social care are paid the real living wage, not the national living wage. We have taken a lot of action in that space.

The Government are refusing to bring forward the employment Bill. It would be great if the Minister could tell us when it is coming. In the absence of that, devolve employment rights and workers’ rights. We will do a much better job of it than the UK Government. We will do it properly. We will ensure that we put workers at the heart of the decisions that we take on employees’ rights. We are showing that within the limited powers that we have. Imagine how much more we could do if we devolved those rights.

If the Minister is unwilling to concede that devolving those powers would ensure that the Scottish Government could provide a better service for the Scottish people than the UK Government, then he is strengthening the case, once again, for independence. He is strengthening the case for the people of Scotland to vote for independence, because they do not want to see that gender pay gap widen; they do not want to see insecure employment continue; they do not want to see the age discriminatory national living wage; and they do not want a Prime Minister suggesting that they are not working hard enough, which is why their wages are not growing. Independence is the way for us to solve that, because the Conservatives continue to refuse to take action that will make a real difference to our constituents.