Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Lord Cunningham of Felling Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

I think that I am being tempted to answer in an uncharacteristically charming way. The people who are going to make these decisions are, if I may say so to an old friend and civil servant of mine, civil servants. I want this House to be a little bit careful about that, because very few civil servants have ever run any business in their life. It is one of our biggest problems that we have a system in which business is not understood by those who make most of the decisions. I want to know much more about what this regulation would be. If we agree to an open-ended provision that regulations shall be made, I am not sure that I would be happy to trust such regulations without a closer understanding of what they would be.

[Lord Cunningham of Felling (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, who seems to have got to the nub of this issue: the amendment is not about abolishing anything; it is about abolishing exploitation at the lower end of this employment policy. I could not disagree more with what the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, said, which seemed to be a hagiography of the system. He seemed not to recognise that vulnerable people are regularly and deliberately exploited by it. I believe that the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Hollis is aimed at correcting that exploitation and nothing more. It is not about abolishing the system, as the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, seemed to imply—I apologise if I have misinterpreted his comments. The noble Lord, Lord Butler, has got this absolutely right. That is why I urge the House to support my noble friend’s amendment.

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment and I do not share the difficulties which it is obvious are felt by the noble Lords, Lord Stoneham and Lord Deben. If those difficulties have any force, they were surely answered by my noble friend Lord Butler.

I support the amendment on the simple grounds of fairness. It is not confined to zero-hours contracts, but one imagines that those will be the most frequently affected. The facts in relation to them have been clearly set out by the two noble Baronesses who introduced the amendment. If an employee on a zero-hours contract is given notice by his employer that there will be work for him the following morning, and if he turns up having incurred expense and finds that his shift has been cancelled, it seems only as a simple matter of fairness—I think that that was how it was put—or of justice that some compensation should be payable.

I suggest to your Lordships that that is how we would all behave in our private lives. If I had a gardener, which I do not, and they turned up hoping for work and found then that the weather was against them or that the ground was too hard, of course I would offer them any expenses that they might have incurred in coming for work which in the event was not available. If that is the way in which we would behave in our private lives, is it not sensible that that is how we should require employers generally to treat their employees? I can see none of the difficulty seen by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in terms of employment drying up as a result. This is a simple matter of fairness to avoid exploitation—a word which was also used. That reason seems to me to be enough to persuade the Government to accept the amendment.