Employment Rights Bill

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st May 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Aberdare]

102: Clause 23, page 43, line 30, at end insert—
“(2) The provisions of Schedule 3 do not apply to apprentices during any probationary period of up to six months, as specified in an apprenticeship contract signed by the apprentice and the employer and where the apprentice is less than 21 years of age at the time the contract is signed.”

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 102, in the name of my noble friend Lady Wolf of Dulwich, who much regrets that she is unable to be here today to move it herself. I was delighted to add my name to this very specific amendment, addressing what I am sure is an unintended consequence of the Bill. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, both of whom have enormous expertise in apprenticeships, for adding their names as well.

Apprenticeships are key to developing the skills we need for achieving our national goals, including all the Government’s missions. The value and importance of apprenticeships is increasingly recognised, not least by young people and their families, but there are not enough apprenticeships available, and the majority are used by employers for upskilling or reskilling older people already in the workplace. We need many more apprenticeships for younger people, but the number of 16 to 24 year-olds starting apprenticeships has been declining. Only one in four young people in this age group who seeks an apprenticeship gets one, and the number of apprenticeships going to young people has declined from 41% in 2008 to 23%.

Small businesses have a crucial part to play in providing apprenticeships for young people. Some 70% of existing apprenticeships are in small businesses, and there is huge scope for small firms to offer many more apprenticeship opportunities. But it has proved consistently hard to persuade small employers to take on apprentices. One reason is cost, despite the extra payments available from government for small firms employing young apprentices, particularly if they have special needs. More important disincentives include the extra workload involved in training and supervising young apprentices, the amount of bureaucracy involved in navigating the apprenticeship system and, sometimes, the uncertainty about whether a firm will have a sufficient pipeline of work for the full term of the apprenticeship. There have been various schemes aimed at addressing these issues—group training associations, apprenticeship training agencies and now flexi-job apprenticeships—but in none of these cases has much impact been made on convincing more SMEs to offer more apprenticeships.

I believe there is a real danger that the day 1 employment rights set out in Clause 23 and Schedule 3 to the Bill could actually exacerbate this problem rather than helping to resolve it, by acting as a further significant disincentive to small employers considering taking on apprentices. My noble friend’s proposed amendment provides a closely targeted exemption for apprentices under 21 during a probation period of no more than six months, with a contract agreed by both the apprentice and the employer. This seems to me to be fair to both the employer and the apprentice.

For the employer, it helps to offset the high risk involved in taking on a young person who may—indeed, probably will—never have been employed before, and who may themselves decide within the first few weeks or months that the apprenticeship is not right for them. The existing risks and unknowns for an employer in taking on the costs, workload and duties of apprenticeships are hard enough to overcome without the additional burden of taking on full employment responsibility for an untried young person, probably in their first job, who may or may not turn out to have the attributes for or interests in that particular job.

These are not, after all, people with experience from previous jobs and a track record for a new employer to assess. Many of them may be among the almost 1 million young people currently defined as NEET—not in employment, education or training—whom the Government quite rightly are desperately keen to get into employment, for example through the planned youth guarantee. The amendment does not relate to people changing jobs, so it has nothing to do with labour market mobility, which this clause seems designed largely to promote.

I hope the Minister will be able to tell us what specific assessment the Government have made of the likely impact of this part of the Bill on the willingness of businesses, especially smaller businesses, to take on young apprentices. You would not need to talk to many small business employers to conclude that it could be very damaging. That would be bad news for such firms themselves, for our national skills needs, for the wider economy and, above all, for the potential young apprentices, who might miss out on attractive opportunities. This amendment would help to counter that, and I beg to move.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment, which was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, but has been very ably spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. He and I tend to find ourselves in the same Lobbies for just about everything to do with apprenticeships.

We only very recently debated a Bill abolishing the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education so that this amazing new body Skills England could emerge. We still know remarkably little about Skills England. It has a proud remit, but we do not yet know what it is going to perform.

As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, set out, this amendment is really important because there is a real problem in attracting youngsters into apprenticeships. An apprenticeship was always something for somebody starting out in a career, but the vagaries of the apprenticeship levy mean that they are increasingly being given to people mid-career, for advancing their careers. Unless there is more incentive to enable young people to access the workforce, we will be in an even more dire state. We have nearly a million NEETs now—young people not in education, employment or training—and, if they cannot access apprenticeships, that figure is only set to go up.

We know that, in other European countries, apprentices have a specific distinctive legal status, but they do not in the UK; they are simply employees who have received an apprenticeship learning contract. The Bill will apply to them all, whether they are an 18 year-old or a 50 year-old. This cannot be desirable. I beg the Government to look again at this, because it is hugely important that we do not deter employers from taking on youngsters.

I went with the social mobility committee up to Blackpool and The Fylde College recently, and we were talking to employers there who were already bemoaning the fact that it was incredibly difficult for them to take on apprentices. There was so much bureaucracy and burdensome stuff that they had to follow. They were all saying that, if this came in and if the apprentices had full employment rights from day 1, that would deter them even more. That really cannot be right, and I beg the Minister to listen to this amendment.

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With that said, I ask that the noble Lord on behalf of the noble Baroness considers the Government’s approach and withdraws the amendment.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken to this amendment. I add my good wishes to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for choosing to spend his birthday in support of my amendment, and I hope the rest of it is equally enjoyable. I thank the Minister for his response. I think all the speeches were in favour of the amendment, and the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, made some interesting comments on how it could be further improved.

However, to me, one of the most important messages that came across—which many of your Lordships mentioned—was that apprenticeships are different; they are not the same as a standard contract of employment, as many other countries have recognised by having different legal frameworks for apprenticeships. I believe that flexibility is needed. I think it was my noble friend Lord Londesborough who talked about an unduly rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to employment laws. There needs to be some flexibility to cater for the special needs and features of apprenticeships.

I am concerned that we are looking at two options. One is apprenticeships with day-one employment rights—jolly good; the other is no apprenticeships at all, because the employers will not offer them on that basis. I hope that, between now and Report, we can do some more thinking. The Government may come up with more thoughts about how we can ensure that we balance the advantages of having full employment rights on the one hand and the necessity of having firms—particularly small ones—offering apprenticeships on the other. Hopefully, we can have further discussion of that on Report, but meanwhile I beg leave to withdraw the amendment in my noble friend’s name.

Amendment 102 withdrawn.