Business and Planning Bill

Lord Hain Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, although the Bill provides a welcome range of measures to help businesses post Covid-19, it also represents a missed opportunity. For example, there is no acknowledgment of the call by the trade union Unite for the Government to involve the country’s 100,000 trade union health and safety representatives to help with test, track and trace, and with finding safer ways of working, to deal with the ongoing risks from Covid-19. The crisis is also an opportunity to make workplaces more productive, by encouraging closer co-operation at work and challenging both sides of industry to boost productivity by working in partnership. For example, in May, the Food and Drink Federation and the GMB, Unite, USDAW and the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union highlighted how partnership between food and drink manufacturers, trade unions and employees has enhanced both the safety of workers and the effective running of workplaces.

The Government should encourage employers and unions to explore new ways of working together and embracing radical change. The Covid-19 crisis has shown that very many established ways of working are outdated. Many are inflexible; they hinder, rather than help, firms’ efforts to match their product or service to customers’ requirements; they undermine, rather than underpin, employers’ efforts to keep up with the competition; and they often alienate, rather than motivate, employees by treating them unfairly or locking them in to unrewarding routine tasks. By working together, unions and employers can deliver dramatic improvements in performance, boosting productivity and profitability, lifting living standards and enhancing job prospects. Instead of routine, robust co-operation between employers and unions, of the kind practised in Germany, Britain has low employee motivation, lagging productivity, lost competitiveness, jobs in jeopardy, shocking skills gaps, grossly unequal rewards and grotesque discrimination at work.

Instead of world-class standards of product quality and customer service, British businesses too often settle for second best. With a few notable exceptions, we have seen our market share drop and jobs disappear. The Prime Minister was right to cite Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as an example to follow, but he omitted to mention that the New Deal also radically reformed industrial relations in the United States, bringing in the National Labor Relations Board to even up the balance of power between bosses and workers and encourage union recognition. That did not create fair pay overnight, but it took a big step in the right direction. The Business Secretary and Treasury Ministers have held a productive series of sector-by-sector meetings with trade union and business leaders. The next step should be government backing to bring both sides of industry together in sectoral bargaining, to put a floor under pay and conditions of employment, raise and protect standards, and stop responsible employers being undercut by irresponsible rivals and workers being exploited unfairly.

Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a crisis go to waste, but turn it into an opportunity”—a chance to do things that might never have seemed possible before.