Employment Rights Act 1996 (Protection from Detriment in Health and Safety Cases) (Amendment) Order 2021

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her explanation of what she quite rightly describes as a small but important change. I congratulate the Independent Workers’ Union on its court victory and the work done in relation to tackling what is not a new challenge but something that emerged many years ago with the lump, the dock labour schemes and the challenges of ensuring that those who were not self-employed but not directly and fully employed obtained the rights that the rest of the nation and employees take for granted.

Thinking back to my time as Work and Pensions Secretary, it is strange that we always assumed that workers and employees were one and the same thing. It has to be said, I had never come across “limb (b)” before. I hope I do not again, because I do not find it a very attractive proposition. With the vast changes now taking place in the labour market, securing rights for these workers—who, strictly speaking, are not employees, at least at the moment, but have the partial rights that employees have—needs to be taken with the view of what is happening, the challenges that will come and the way in which people find themselves in a kind of limbo.

I hope that, when she winds up, the Minister will concede that there is still much to be done; for instance, on the TUPE, or transfer of undertakings, rights of these workers—let us call them limb (b) workers—where there is a change of owner of the company that, strictly speaking, employs these workers, whose health and safety rights we are securing today with this clarification arising from the court judgment last November.

It is important that we get on the record that there is still work to be done in this area. I note that there will be a further statutory instrument later in the year, but it would be really helpful—given the Minister’s welcome commitment to workers’ rights in the context of being a great country in which to work and to be employed—if we indicated that consideration of these further areas is being undertaken. This will ensure that the flexibility in the workforce that she described morphs into something more acceptable in terms of the Ubers of this world, and that those who find themselves working in entirely different ways to the past—sometimes knowingly and with their consent, sometimes because of necessity and without their wholehearted willingness to do it—obtain the rights and privileges that others have.

The better off you are, the more lucrative your employment is likely to be and the more likely you are—until you reach the dizzy heights of portfolio working—to have really secure conditions and effective rights. Of course, the corollary at the other end of the spectrum is that you do not. Those who have are once again given unto, and those who have not sometimes see the little they have taken away. I hope that the Minister will reflect on this in responding.