Deregulation Bill

Lord Monks Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, will comment on a small number of proposals in this Deregulation Bill and touch on two issues that are not in the Bill but are relevant to it. The first issue is the concern expressed by some other noble Lords who have contributed to the debate—Clause 1, which aims to limit the general duty on the self-employed to comply with the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. Only those who are definitely picked out would be covered by the Act in future if the Bill goes through.

As the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Rooker, have made clear, this is a pretty big change to the existing provisions and is a genuflection to those who consistently sneer at the health and safety culture, which may have its ludicrous moments from time to time but generally has served this country well. If you look at international league tables on, say, skills, health and safety, industrial relations or productivity, the one that Britain comes top in now is good health and safety. On the others we are languishing in a lower position than is comfortable. Therefore, this is an area of excellence and I pay tribute to all those who have done a good job in making it like that. It seems to me now that to give the self-employed the impression that they are going to be outside the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act is a big error. A process of prescription would no doubt be controversial, rather costly and protracted. Different sectors will argue like mad about whether they should be in the scope of the Act. I think that more red tape rather than less is being introduced.

I am not alone in thinking that this prescribing will be onerous, so the effect of Clause 1 will, I think, be to remove most of the self-employed from the general duty under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act. I know other figures have been given but it is going to be quite a process arguing whether you are in or out. It will be confusing to the average self-employed worker who is thinking, “Am I covered, am I not covered?” and will be referred no doubt to a lawyer and to the subsections in a particular piece of legislation. I recognise that this was recommended by the majority of the Löfstedt review of health and safety regulation, but the subsequent consultation by the Health and Safety Executive has shown many to be against it, arguing that confusion and possibly increased risk will result.

The present system covers everybody. At least it is straightforward; it works. The message is, “Don’t take risks with other people’s health and safety—or, indeed, your own”. Under the Bill, will that change? Will the impression be different? It could well be, and many will not bother to take it quite so seriously as they did in the past. Worse, people who control a workplace with many self-employed people—often bogus self-employed; they are doing the same jobs as employees—will tend to think that they have no duty of care and guess that they are exempt from the law. The most dangerous industries, such as agriculture and construction, have a high proportion of the self-employed. The confusion from this clause in those sectors could cause complacency and poor practice. The Government have today published a consultation on health and safety, proposing that construction becomes a prescribed industry, but the exact borders of that are not clear. I understand that already a lot of questions are being raised about it.

On self-employment in general, the fatality rate per 100,000 is already twice that of employees. Self-employment is rising quickly in this country: 9%—330,000—since 2008, while 40% of the new jobs that have been created since 2010 are self-employed. Going freelance has been very much the fashion, or maybe the only option, for many. The increase has been marked in all sorts of occupations that you do not associate with self-employment or freelance working: admin, secretarial work, sales and customer service and, perhaps more traditionally, personal service occupations. It would be naive to think that all these people were budding entrepreneurs. Many of them are the bogus self-employed, relieving an employer of his obligations under PAYE, national insurance, pensions and employment law, with many of the workers concerned thinking that they are going to get a tax advantage out of being self-employed. This measure could be a further incentive to go self-employed, or to be forced to give up employee status. It is wrong and it could be dangerous. It is encouraging to see Members of the House on all sides raising questions about this. I hope that the Government will consider these representations seriously.

There is a complete change with my next concern. Clauses 10 and 12 on private hire cars and taxis were touched on by my noble friend Lord Stevenson. The purpose is to reduce the effects of the current rules that apply to taxis and private hire. I will not go into detail, but there will be more unlicensed and less controlled private hire and taxi drivers flooding the streets than before if this goes through. The risk, particularly to women travelling in cabs and taxis at night, is being highlighted by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, the Local Government Association, Unite, the GMB and RMT, the main unions concerned with workers in this area. I ask the Government to take this threat, particularly to women, very seriously indeed.

The role of the local authority licensing body becomes much more difficult under these provisions. In a sense, one risk of deregulation is that you merely move the pinch point somewhere else. Licensing these people, and being responsible to a degree for what goes wrong in this area, will become a new industry if we are not careful. It would be a real problem.

I mentioned that I wanted to talk about a couple of things that are not in the Bill. I can do that very briefly. I was looking for the deregulation of trade unions. After all, as Members of the House will know, we are awash with scrutineers and assurers. The lobbying Bill added £500,000 to the costs of the average large trade union just recently. We are swamped with regulation. The fact that a strike is scheduled for later this week seems to have prompted the Conservative Benches to suggest all kinds of new regulations in relation to strikes, as if a law every two years on trade unions, when the Conservatives were in power, was not enough. I think that it would have been a very good idea to apply the Deregulation Bill to trade unions, but that does not seem to have crowded on to, at least, the Conservative Party’s agenda. I want to encourage them, in a genuine spirit of helpfulness, to go down that road. I do not even have to be consulted too much about it, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, suggested, if a new clause comes in.

On the second area, I am pleased to see that the Bill does not propose to make further changes to the Sunday trading rules. A big lobby has been pressing for provisions in the Bill and I am pleased to say that the Government, so far, have not accepted them. Long may that continue.