Employment Rights Bill

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th April 2025 Lords Chamber

Much of this seems to be an unknown, which begs the need for a detailed impact assessment of the creative industries. My noble friend Lord Freyberg has put down an amendment to that effect that we will hear later in the Bill. Such an assessment should be a deep dive into the differing kinds of jobs and work status in this sector. The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, was introduced only on Friday, belying its considerable importance to the creative industries. I hope that he will bring it back on Report, because we need time to hear differing views from the full range of stakeholders on this issue.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I was prepared to put my name to this amendment because I believe that the whole nature of the creative industries, and theatre and festivals in particular, depends on flexibility. Let me give noble Lords an example. When I joined the board of the Royal Opera House, there were in place at the time union restrictions which meant that several operas in the repertoire would go beyond them because they could not possibly fit into that time. The unions and management got together and worked out a flexibility that would allow operas—Wagner’s, for example—to go beyond the hours without penalising people. It is a give-and-take situation. The arts need the flexibility that the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, is suggesting in his amendment, and I simply rise to endorse it.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I am going to stick with being very brief. We have had three exceptionally powerful speeches. Amendment 16 is, in a sense, tackling a subset of a debate that this Committee has already had on Amendment 7 in the name of my noble and good friend Lord Goddard. I hope that the Government are beginning to accept that not all work comes in steady flows; it can have peaks and troughs and be disrupted by events way beyond anybody’s control. I hope that the Minister is going to take this away and work out how the current drafting needs to change in order to make the necessary allowances, whether it is for theatres, festivals, farmers or food and drink. A whole series of activities that experience those irregular patterns must be incorporated into this Bill.