Queen’s Speech

Lord Hendy Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

My Lords, I follow my noble friends Lady Donaghy, Lord Monks and Lord Haskel in regretting that the Government have again broken their 2019 election promise to introduce an employment Bill. An employment Bill has been promised many times in this House and in the other place. On 6 April, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Woodley, I put to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, the simple question: when do the Government intend to introduce the employment Bill? The Minister’s response did not answer that question. We now know the answer: there will be no such Bill. However, there will be a Brexit freedoms Bill, no doubt to remove many of our workers’ rights derived from EU legislation, yet the need to strengthen employment rights and to enforce them gets stronger by the day. More than 9 million people live in poverty in working households. The real value of wages has not increased since 2008 and is falling. We are facing a cost of living tsunami.

On St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, P&O Ferries demonstrated once and for all the almost total failure of our labour laws to protect workers. P&O flouted the right to be consulted over redundancies; the right not to be unfairly dismissed; the right not to be dismissed on a transfer of undertaking; the right not to be discriminated against on grounds of nationality; the right not to be made an offer to end collective bargaining; and the right not to be penalised for trade union membership and support for collective bargaining.

Because compensation for breach of most of those rights is statutorily capped, the employer was able to make offers that were inevitably irresistible to those faced with the alternative of pursuing tribunal claims that were unlikely to be heard within 12 months because of underfunding of the Courts & Tribunals Service, where successfully obtaining awards exceeding the offers was unpredictable and where statistics show that half of all awards made by tribunals are not paid in full.

The result was that 786 seafarers were left on the beach. The law had not protected them. Yet the law also denied them an industrial remedy: to put pressure on P&O by inviting secondary industrial action by dockers, lorry drivers and others would have led to an immediate injunction, since all secondary action in the UK is prohibited by statute.

Make no mistake: P&O’s ploy will be an exemplar for other employers. There will be a race to the bottom. The situation cries out for an employment Bill. The measures in the all-Peers letter of 31 March from the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, will be useful but they do not go far enough. An employment Bill is required to do at least the following: restore the right to take secondary industrial action, particularly where the employer has avoided primary industrial action by sacking the entire workforce; provide for a right to an injunction to enforce the duties exemplified in this case; and remove the statutory caps on compensation so that compensation matches the actual loss suffered—as in virtually every other area of the law.

I hope the Minister will feel able to say that an employment Bill is now essential and that the Brexit freedoms Bill will not reduce any employment right currently enjoyed by a British worker.