Employment: Terminal Illness

Lord Horam Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I too am grateful for the opportunity to support my noble friend Lord Balfe in this important debate. I am also glad to hear the remarks of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester, which went much wider and were very moving in the context of bereavement, terminal illness and degenerative disease.

I want to approach this from a slightly different angle, if the Committee will bear with me, because it may not be obvious to begin with. I have just finished reading a book by Professor Sir Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism. He is the professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford and makes an interesting point which is relevant to this debate, narrow though it may seem in that context. He says that the ethos of a typical company has been changing. I imagine that he is probably now in his 60s or possibly even his 70s, but as a young man he was brought up in Sheffield, where there were lots of steel companies. As he says, at that time everyone was proud of producing wonderful steel. Sheffield was the steel city of the world and, on the whole, workers were treated well, with strong trade unions and strong rights.

My first job was with Rowntree’s, which is well known as a part of the Quaker tradition. It has now been taken over by Nestlé while the other big Quaker confectionery company, Cadbury’s, has been taken over by an American company. Those companies built houses for their workers and had a proper approach to welfare. There was also the Rowntree Trust, which was involved in social policy.

Paul Collier’s book is very interesting, because he relates it to the nature of capitalism and how we deal with workers. His point is that since the 1970s, things have changed slowly. We have steadily introduced the idea of a company producing not the best product it can but shareholder value, which rules the roost. Companies are now expected to adhere to shareholder value in their basic philosophy. The professor has worse examples than that. For example, he mentions that at Goldman Sachs, people were sent out to find suckers to sell their products to. That is the level we have got to in some parts of our financial industries. As a consequence, this is in effect globalisation. Globalisation has been immensely good in many ways. It has lifted millions of people out of poverty in China and India, but it has had a downside. It has meant greater inequality, less care than there perhaps was previously for workers’ rights and, generally, poor- quality jobs.

This growing inequality is one of the things that I think led to Brexit, for example, to the rustbelt in America, the protests in France and the problems in the Mezzogiorno of Italy. With that downside there is less care for the workers, as opposed to the overall demand of a company to maximise profits and pursue consumer satisfaction, at the expense of workers’ rights and experience.

The obvious answer is more active government. I was glad that my noble friend made the point that there is a possibility of doing something through a statutory instrument to address this issue. I hope that the Minister has something positive to say about that. Today I understand that Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, is setting out some further examples of how the Government are tackling workplace problems and worker rights and I hope this can be included in that general agenda as well as in the specific question which my noble friend raised.

As Professor Collier states in his book, the truth is that government cannot do everything. I think the right reverend Prelate will agree with this point. We also have responsibilities. Companies have responsibilities and individuals have responsibilities as well as the state. The state simply cannot cover the waterfront and get all this done. It is simply too much to ask, especially when we have this wretched Brexit and the bandwidth of government is totally occupied with other matters. Companies have to reacquire—this is the point that Professor Collier makes in the book—the moral and ethical dimension which many of them once had but which is less prevalent today. My noble friend mentioned some companies which have already adopted this idea of help with degenerative or terminal illness, and I was glad to hear that, but he also mentioned that it was not mentioned in the advice given to his daughter and daughter-in-law who are in the HR field, so clearly there is a real problem about companies not recognising the issue.

My plea is not only for the Government to look at this issue and do something about it but that companies, perhaps through the TUC campaign, get on board. It is wonderful that Jacci Woodcock is here today. I am delighted to see her; we are full of admiration—I certainly am—for all that she has done. It is remarkable and it will be a great tribute to her if we could rack up examples of companies voluntarily doing something about it, not waiting for a statutory instrument to be passed by your Lordships’ House and the House of Commons. That would be a wonderful tribute to the work she has put in.