Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Lord O'Donnell Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vinson]

It is a privilege to follow such an impassioned speech, as well as the extremely logical speech of the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater. I have spent a lifetime promoting wider share ownership, and was for 10 years chairman of the Industrial Co-partnership Association.

All the points that show this clause to be madness have been made. It is extraordinary, in view of the very sensible criticisms in Committee, that the Government have proceeded with this and have seemed to ignore every single comment that this House, with its great qualifications in this area, has put forward. I wonder who is on the receiving end of our help in trying to forge better legislation.

The noble Lord, Lord Flight, was perfectly right to say that legislation to safeguard employee rights has reached the point where it is now preventing jobs from being created. Far from protecting jobs, it has reached the point of job destruction. The right reverend Prelate raised the point about flexible working. Try running a small business, nursing home or anything you care to think of with everybody asking for flexitime. Who mans the ship? It is important that you have core staff working through, to more or less hold the thing together. Of course, there is a nice element of human relationships in small businesses, and they go out of their way to try to meet employee needs in that direction, but pretending that you can bring in a level of compulsion on flexible working would only be done by somebody who has never actually experienced the first-hand difficulties of a running small business.

In Committee I made the point, which has been cited today, that to encourage wider share ownership is good. To recognise that employee protection has possibly been overdone in a number of instances is also right. However, to muddle the two together, to make a quid pro quo in this way, strikes at the very heart of the trust and sense of common purpose that all businesses are trying to build up. Therefore, this clause must be resisted on all fronts.

[Lord O'Donnell]

My Lords, I support the amendment. On this Budget day, it behoves us all to think about how we stimulate growth. This particular clause would actually be very harmful to growth; I agree in particular with what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and others said.

When I was in the Civil Service, the Government set up the Red Tape Challenge initiative. That was really important, and there is a second round of that in the Budget today. It is hugely important that we tackle the issues that are holding businesses back, but I am not sure that this proposal emerged from the Red Tape Challenge or that businesses came forward with it.

How does the proposal fit with the Government’s policy of pushing mutuals, which I strongly support? There is a technical point as well: what we economists call adverse selection. If an employer is offering this, they are probably the kind of employer that you do not want to go near. If an employee accepts it, it is probably because they do not really understand what they are doing. On those grounds, it is bad.

I also take the point of the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Morris, about the moral case. I expected to hear the biblical reference: we know that in the old days the price of slavery was 20 or 30 pieces of silver. Is it now £2,000?