Employment Rights Bill

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 23rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, it is very late and I will be very brief, but I want to associate these Benches with all that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, has raised. Apprenticeships should be for those starting out in working life. A level 7 apprenticeship is surely a contradiction in terms, but the perversity of the apprenticeship levy has meant that many employers choose to use their contributions on existing employees rather than face the possible problems and uncertainties of employing an untried and untested young person.

We need many more opportunities for employment for those young people who have been turned off by the academic programmes of schools. Many will have the very skills that the country needs but were not encouraged at school because the Conservatives stressed knowledge, not employability, and practical and artistic skills disappeared from many state schools.

The measures in the Bill for day-one rights for all employees will not encourage large or, particularly, small employers to take the chance on a youngster new to paid work. We have been encouraged by some of the words from Ministers, and we hope that they will look again at managing to exempt apprentices from these privileges and finding ways for employers actively to look for opportunities to enable the young not in education, employment or training to fulfil potential and make a contribution to the economy, instead of gearing up to a lifetime on benefits.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I put my name to the two amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Wolf because I entirely share her concern that the Bill as drafted could have a damaging effect on apprenticeships, especially for young people and especially in small firms.

I am very grateful to my noble friend for her kind words, but I do not think that in this particular debate I would be greatly missed, because she and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, have said everything that I could possibly have said—so I am not going to add a great deal to that. It is just as well that I did not choose 24 July as my departure date because, if I had, I would turn into a pumpkin at midnight and apparently we would have to adjourn the House for me to continue my speech—it has been done in the past.

I very much welcome the fact that the Government are undertaking some important consultations in this area, including on employment status. It is very important that they should look at the issues impacting apprenticeships for young people and in small firms, and they should, I hope, come up with some evidence for what sort of action might be needed to address those issues and prevent the kind of impacts that my noble friend described. That may well involve recognising, as so many other countries do, the fact that apprenticeships are a different form of employment from other forms and involve commitments on behalf of both the apprentice and the employer that will make undertaking particularly the day-one employment rights much harder to live with for the small firms involved.

With that, I encourage the Government to look very seriously at this and to consider the possibility of a separate legal employment status for apprenticeships. I will look forward to some sort of positive response from the Minister before I turn into a pumpkin—or wave a white flag, like the noble Lord, Lord Goddard.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

My Lords, very briefly, I was a bound apprentice for four years, from when I was 17 or 18 on a council estate outside Greater Manchester. Apprenticeships are a little jewel in the employment Bill that have somehow been missed. We need to advocate the opportunities for apprentices and the pride that apprenticeships give to young people, especially NEETs, and there should be no one better to do that than a Labour Government who are trying to generate income, prosperity and jobs. There is a little place there and, with more consultation—I have spoken to Ministers, who are mindful to be supportive of that—if we can get this right for apprentices and take away the obstacles to creating apprenticeships, more people will take them on.

Apprentices tend to stay with a company. If you are an apprentice and you have been trained for three or four years, you will tend to stay with that company and repay the loyalty they have given you in giving you a skill that will carry you through your life. So we support the sentiment and hope that the Government will say some kind words tonight, at least to stop the noble Lord disappearing at midnight and looking for Cinderella’s glass slipper.