Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 13th July 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly and with great pleasure to follow the noble Lords, Lord Hendy and Lord Knight of Weymouth. I could not possibly repeat large amounts of what they said. I will just add a couple of points.

First, Amendment 186 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, and signed by the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Monks, looks at excluding suppliers for other improper behaviour, particularly the mistreatment of workers. This a change to the Bill that I think would be welcomed by many good employers, because it would help them to ensure that they can compete against cowboys and potential cowboys.

It raises a point that I raised in our earlier discussion about supporting small and medium-sized enterprises; there is continuing debate on this issue, which I am sure we will take to Report. In many cases, we have seen that small and medium-sized enterprises, although not all of them are angels, know their workers as individuals. They are very often better employers, whereas large multinational companies treat their employees like blocks of labour to be moved around on a chess board. I would assert that ensuring that bad labour practice is punished would be of benefit to small and medium-sized enterprises, which noble Lords all around the Committee agreed was a good idea.

Moving on to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, particularly Amendment 54 and the linked Amendment 535, it is really useful to put this into context, so I will refer to a UNISON report entitled Outsourcing the Cuts: Pay and Employment Effects of Contracting Out. It focuses on some very detailed case studies and looks at what we have seen, particularly over the past decade: an increased work intensity forced on staff, with greater job insecurity and low or non-existent increases in pay. That has happened right across the UK economy, but it has particularly been the case with outsourced contracts of the kind we are talking about here. As the report says,

“outsourced public servants are at the sharp end of this pressure.”

Those are the circumstances we have been in.

I want to pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, alluded to: that the quality of life we have in the UK, and the quality of our economy, is acutely related to the nature of that work. Amendment 54 in particular says that the

“contracting authority must take into account the impacts … on local good work”.

We have low productivity; extremely poor public health, both physical and mental; and communities that have truly been hollowed out by low pay, where no one has any money to support local independent businesses. This is a spiral downwards, and we have to get out of that. These amendments are working towards putting in provision to change that. I point to the Government’s levelling-up agenda, which is regionally based, so I believe that they do indeed want to address this.

I will pick up on one practical point and an example of how this might be used. Let us imagine that we have two bids for a contract, one of which is from a company that is trialling—as many now are, and as many have fully implemented—a four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay. I suggest that this amendment says that the impact that could have on the local community must be taken into account. Think of all the extra time people would have for volunteering or for childcare, and the impact that would have on the quality of local life. This would build in things that the Government say are part of their agenda. Perhaps it was more Cameronian, but I think the idea of communities providing local services and volunteering is probably still part of the Government’s agenda. So these amendments would deliver things that the Government say they want to deliver, and I believe they would be truly impressive improvements to the Bill.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 54, 104 and 535 and will speak to Amendments 67 and 116, which I have signed, which were all so well introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I declare an interest as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Future Of Work.

My own interests, and indeed concerns, in this area go back to the House of Lords Select Committee on AI. I chaired this ad hoc inquiry, which produced two reports: AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able? and a follow-up report via the Liaison Committee, AI in the UK: No Room for Complacency, which I mentioned in the debate on a previous group.

The issue of the adoption of AI and its relationship to the augmentation of human employment or substitution is key. We were very mindful of the Frey and Osborne predictions in 2013, which estimated that 47% of US jobs are at risk of automation—since watered down—relating to the sheer potential scale of automation over the next few years through the adoption of new technology. The IPPR in 2017 was equally pessimistic. Others, such as the OECD, have been more optimistic about the job-creation potential of these new technologies, but it is notable that the former chief economist of the Bank of England, Andrew Haldane, entered the prediction game not long ago with a rather pessimistic outlook.