Employment Rights Bill

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 5th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran in her amendments, as I am rather confused by how this will improve the education system.

I speak as someone on the front line. As of today, my academy trust employs 717 non-teaching staff across our 18 schools. We provide high-quality benefits to our staff. We have to match the terms and conditions of the local authority, including a very generous pension, and we are proud to do so—but we go much further. For example, we offer a health scheme for all our teaching and non-teaching staff, which provides an online consultation with a GP and online access to prescriptions, so that they can get treatment far more quickly than through the NHS backlog, and we provide a dental scheme which gives access to one hygienist appointment a year, as well as theatre and retail discounts.

On top of that, we have been very assertive in pushing through apprenticeships for our non-teaching staff. We have put 69 staff through apprenticeships over the last couple of years, which is a pretty high percentage of the 700-odd staff we employ. We did that knowing full well that we would lose a lot of them as they became skilled and moved on to jobs elsewhere, which is what they have done.

How will this improve anything for teaching? It will add another layer of administration and costs, and more HR resource will have to be deployed to wade our way through these regulations. Listening to my noble friend Lady Barran, they sound extraordinarily impractical because, frankly, an IT support staff member in, say, Thetford, which is where we have our most westerly school, is in a very different market from anything in Cambridge. Indeed, what is an IT role? The role is changing almost monthly, as we try to create data lakes to access a large language model for our own teaching data. These things are undefined—you will have to create bands that are so wide as to be meaningless.

To the point made by my noble friend Lady Barran, we cannot afford to go higher and we cannot go lower, so what is the point of all this? I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments.

[Lord Prentis of Leeds (Lab)]

I rise to speak in favour of the proposed school support staff negotiating body, as set out in the Bill. Noble Lords may remember that such a body was established in 2010. All the things that have been said in the Chamber today on this issue were talked about prior to that. Unfortunately, there was a change of Government. The coalition came in and even though the arguments were dealt with, everything was set up and moving forward, and the school support staff negotiating body—which we had great hope in—had met once, the coalition’s first act was to abolish it.

Through the Employment Rights Bill, we can rectify something which was wrong. The new body referred to in the Bill is long overdue. It will work towards a number of goals for support staff, some of which have already been mentioned. It would give them a voice in the education debate, achieve fair pay, which is the law of this land, and create unified pay and conditions across the country—what is so wrong with that? Local government, which has been mentioned, negotiates on behalf of millions of local government workers who do different jobs in different communities, with different arrangements in place to meet the local conditions where the service is being provided. All that has been in place not for decades, but for a century. Look at our National Health Service. We all applaud joint working and the implementation of fair pay and conditions—fair pay for work of equal value— across the NHS and all the different disciplines it provides in our communities. Collective bargaining works well. Those bodies address and deal with any issues as they arise.

We are talking about a group of school staff who, for many years, have seen teachers have collective bargaining—which we obviously support. Other school staff have nothing; they are at the whim of the headmaster or headmistress, and of local conditions. Little is done on their behalf, which is why school support staff across the country welcome the re-establishment of the school support staff negotiating body.

The TUC is a voice for good. It is at the heart of the trade union movement and is respected by employers and governments alike. If there are differences or issues that need to be tackled, why not go to the heart of the trade union movement and ask for its advice and assistance? It has been doing it for nearly 100 years and doing it well. There is no reason whatsoever why it cannot be part of the arrangements for establishing the new body. I am proud of the work the TUC does.

Employment Rights Bill

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

My Lords, may I rather impudently congratulate the Government on their Amendments 112 to 116 and 117 to 119? In Committee, I moved a series of amendments to similar effect; namely, that the output of the negotiating body should not impose a detriment to existing terms and conditions and should permit any enhancement to existing terms and conditions by negotiation or otherwise. I am not so immodest as to imagine that there is any causal connection between my amendments in Committee and the appearance of these amendments on Report. I recall that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, also had amendments to similar effect; it may be that she had much more traction with my noble friends on the Front Bench than I had. Whatever the process—it is of course irrelevant—I congratulate my noble friends on the Front Bench for the introduction of these amendments, which make solid that this is a floor and not a ceiling.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran in her Amendments 111A, 111B, 116A and 116B. I have not spoken on the Bill before, so I refer noble Lords to my registered interests, in particular as a founder of a multi-academy trust with 18 schools and around 1,400 staff.

This new negotiating body—a central bureaucratic body dictating terms and conditions and pay for all to obey across our whole nation—literally drives us back to the 1970s. It would remove any ability to take note of local employment conditions. My own multi-academy trust completed a secondary school core structure review in 2022 and we have just finished the same review for our primary schools. We now have in place posts and grades that meet the needs of each school and, most importantly, those of our pupils.

We have set out a grading system to reflect the local conditions in which we operate. Primary and secondary staffing levels are strong and sustainable. The SSSNB would undo all this, and the cost of going through this new legislation would be bureaucratic and increase the overhead in our human resources. Administering these changes would take resources away from the front line with no meaningful benefit. I congratulate the Government on at least accepting that there is a floor to this whole arrangement, but it still leaves an extremely complicated central bureaucracy.

To provide good education we need flexibility. We operate harmoniously with our unions; we share a common mission and believe we have created a first-class cadre of support staff. Indeed, only two weeks ago, one of our support staff saved the life of one of our children, who had a cardiac arrest on a playing field when playing away. The local defibrillator had broken and he kept the child alive for 20 minutes.

I am looking at this whole Bill more widely. If we zoom out beyond the area of education, we start to see the impact of the aggressive anti-employer strategy being deployed by this Government. We have already seen the impact of VAT on private schools, with them going out of business and staff losing their jobs. We have already seen the escalation of employers’ national insurance and the widening of the bands, which has contributed to some 60,000 jobs being lost in the hospitality sector. Last week, we tried to warn the Government about the banter clause, which will drive another nail into the coffin of the hospitality sector.

Private sector employment market vacancies are under great pressure. At the beginning of last year, there were 900,000 vacancies and, by May this year, that was down to about 720,000. We heard earlier in the debate from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on AI, and we are already seeing the impact of this—perhaps more dramatically in the US, where Microsoft has got rid of 15,000 staff in the last two months.