Employment Rights: Government Plans

Laura Farris Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

I am grateful to have the opportunity to talk about fire and rehire practices, which have been a source of enormous stress to many of my constituents. The Opposition asked the Government tonight to enact new law without any acknowledgment of what the common law currently says. When the Employment Appeal Tribunal considered the practice of fire and rehire in 1990, it said that

“you simply cannot hold a pistol to somebody’s head and say, ‘henceforth you are to be employed on wholly different terms’”

and remunerated at 50% of your contract. In those circumstances workers have a right to bring a claim for unfair dismissal, which the Court of Appeal later confirmed they have even if they take the new terms so long as they make it clear they are working under protest, and of course the tribunal can always order reinstatement at previous pay. The only way that an employer can get away with fire and rehire is by showing that there was a genuine business reason for their action. Here, I think, there is a vulnerability. We know that, after covid, many businesses will be able to show a fall in profitability as a way of justifying poor employment practice, but the answer, respectfully, is not to enact new laws, but to enhance the powers that already exist, for example, of employment tribunals to test the functionality of the business reason that is advanced.

The other elements in the motion on holiday pay, working time and rest breaks all have their provenance in the Employment Rights Act 1996, which, of course, is Conservative legislation. The Opposition argue that this Government threaten the right to include overtime in the calculation of holiday pay. That was only decided on in 2014 by the Employment Appeal Tribunal. It looked back at the working time regulations 1998 and found that workers should have had overtime in their holiday pay all along and, what is more, they had suffered an unlawful deduction from wages as a result of that. For 12 years of a Labour Government, British workers were short-changed in their holiday pay and that Government did nothing to close that loophole, so forgive me when I say that it is surprising to hear that it is we on this side who are threatening that particular right.

That is my overall concern about this debate. I am concerned that the Opposition are not really interested in confronting the real challenges facing the labour market because they are too busy fighting the battles of yesterday. What do the Opposition say, for example, about automation, which the ONS says threatens 1.5 million jobs in this country over the next few years? We on the Conservative Benches may not have all the answers, but at least we are doing the thinking and asking the right questions—for example, with strategies such as the lifetime skills guarantee to build dexterity and resilience in the labour market. We are coming up with creative, progressive solutions for the issues that lie ahead.