Employment Rights Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 8th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

I will write to noble Lords about when the regulations will be available. This may well be part of the implementation plan, which is still awaited. Noble Lords can genuinely take it from me that they will receive it as soon as it is available.

We will consult on the contents of the draft regulations and engage with a range of stakeholders, including trade unions and businesses. The noble Lord, Lord Fox, asked whether we could have further discussions about this. Of course I am happy to talk to noble Lords in more detail about how this might apply, because I want noble Lords to be reassured that the flexibility they seek is already in the Bill in its different formulations of wording. But I am happy to have further discussions about this.

I hope that that provides some reassurance to noble Lords. I therefore ask the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I join the noble Lord, Lord Fox, in saying that I would really appreciate the opportunity to look at how this Bill deals with lumpy demand— not only predictably lumpy but randomly lumpy. I ask the Clerk at the Table to transmit to the Clerk of the Parliaments a request to tell us how the Bill will affect the House’s employment practices, because we are a great generator of lumpy demand, not least on the Public Bill Office. I would really like that immediate understanding of how the Bill affects a substantial organisation, but one with a very unpredictable set of demands such as the Houses of Parliament.

This lumpiness is a characteristic of, say, the NHS, which may suddenly get a demand and have to do things. Suddenly something emerges and the pattern of working has to change. Will the Bill fix those longer hours so that they become set and cannot be rowed back from when the lump disappears? A good understanding, before we reach Report, of how the Bill will work in practice and interact with a range of real businesses would be really valuable, and I hope the Minister can offer it to us.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I thought I had already offered to have further discussions, but I take the noble Lord’s point.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

21A: Clause 2, page 19, line 11, after “notice”, insert “of no more than 24 hours”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to define a reasonable maximum period of temporary work for agency workers in primary legislation will help remove any uncertainty for businesses worried about genuine temp work being caught in the new zero-hours regulations.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I hope this amendment will come under the “lumpiness seminar” we have been promised. It is about what “reasonable notice” means in the Government’s intentions and how this will work in practice.

This again comes back to my request to the clerk. How did this work in the case of Parliament being recalled to deal with the Government’s rescue of the steelworks? How would it work in connection with the NHS’s response to a train crash in its neighbourhood? What about the need to change working patterns suddenly and quickly and for the workforce to be flexible? Although I have kept this amendment simple, I would like to reflect in our meeting on the equivalent provisions in Schedule A1, which deal with agency workers. How is this all going to work in practice?

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[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank the noble and right reverend Lord for his intervention. I can say only that I thought we were all agreed that flexibility is a good thing, and I am sure we do not want anything in the Bill that would restrict either an employee or an employer from making a reasonable judgment on a case-by-case basis. On that, I rest my case.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his analysis of my amendment. I certainly do not intend to press it today, but I very much look forward to taking up the issues when we sit down with the team to discuss lumpiness.

On the noble Lord’s preference for keeping “reasonable” broad, I can see the attractiveness of that. If a business is wiped out by a flood, postponing employees’ work for the next day at zero notice but saying, “We’ll want you in the day afterwards so you can start the clean-up” would presumably be reasonable. At the same time, giving very little notice when it is obvious that more notice could have been given would obviously be unreasonable. But allowing the whole pattern of this to be developed slowly through individual cases in tribunals does not seem to be the right way of going about it.