Employment Rights Bill

Lord Storey Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 111A and 111B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I declare an interest as a governor of King’s College London Mathematics School and as a member of its finance and pay committees.

I have been trying to get my head around the implications of these clauses for support staff ever since the Bill was introduced. The more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems to be. As the noble Baroness pointed out, the complexity of support staff roles and the way they vary with different types of schools has become much greater in the last 20 years.

My experience is of a rather unusual 16-to-19 academy. We do outreach and projects in collaboration with charities and the university. We engage in a large number of things that are not about just standard school teaching. The standard scales for teaching staff are not a problem for us but, for support staff, we have specific roles that are suited to the particular activities in which people are engaged. We certainly pay as much as we can afford to; in the London market, we do not have much choice.

The point that I want to stress is that, while it is very welcome that the Government recognise that people’s pay should not be reduced as a result of this, the real problem is that there are huge numbers of important and central jobs and roles out there, which vary hugely according to the nature of the school, the nature of the environment and what people are doing. The complexity that this will introduce when we do our workforce planning and try to work out where a new role fits on these scales really worries me. I hope that, as things roll out, the Government think very hard about how to move forward in a way that allows successful schools, which are going beyond traditional classroom teaching and doing a huge number of important things, to continue to create support staff roles that fit what they are trying to do.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a governor of King’s Leadership Academy in Liverpool. Schools face two challenges, some might say crises. First, the shortage of staff is becoming quite a serious concern. Secondly, there are real pressures on school budgets.

It was easy when all schools were local authority schools, because they all had the same framework and structures. We now have a very different landscape, which we all accept. There is no difference now in how we see that landscape. Half the schools are what I call maintained schools and the other half, with a preponderance towards secondary schools, are academies within large multi-academy trusts, which in a sense are bigger than the local authorities. The local authority where I worked for a number of years had 50 schools. There are multi-academy trusts with far more schools than that.

We want a system that is fair to all our non-teaching staff. We do not want to see anybody seeing a cut in their salary. But we also have to recognise that you have to have a system that is not bureaucratic and gives the freedom to schools in both cases to be able to do what is best for their staff. I fear that that will not be the case if the Government have their way. I am hopeful that the Minister will give us real reassurance on this.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, that we have a more varied system, but I slightly disagreed with her when she said, “All schools, particularly the successful ones”. It is all schools, not just the successful ones, that will face difficulties.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I totally agree with the noble Lord.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey (LD)]

So I hope that the Minister will really consider this. It is a huge issue. We cannot see our schools have to face more costs, and we do not want to see any staff disadvantaged by a well-meaning move by the Government.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

My Lords, we are dancing on the head of a pin with these amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, is right that these are welcome amendments that begin to address something I never knew anything about, which is that support staff have never had a baseline figure. That should be addressed.

I spoke to the Minister the day before yesterday or today—time flies—and the fact is that there are 520,000 of them. That is 52% of everybody employed at schools. That is more than teachers. Those support staff have a whole range of duties and the majority are tailored to their specific needs, as other speakers have said. Government Amendment 114 provides that, where an SSSNB

“has been unable to reach an agreement about a matter and the Secretary of State makes regulations about the matter, the regulations cannot alter a person’s terms and conditions of employment to make the person worse off, and do not prevent an employer from offering more favourable terms and conditions than those provided for by the regulations”.

We agree with that.

All that the amendment by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would change is that it would prevent

“the SSSNB from blocking employers who wish to adopt new or improved employment terms and conditions”,

provided that they meet the standards of minimum support. What we are trying to say here is, where they cannot come to a negotiation, the Government can step in by regulation, if that is what they want to do, but, where a body comes to an arrangement, why should you stop somebody wanting to offer more, above the floor and above the base—there is no argument about that; we all agree to the base—and say, actually, why would an SSSNB want to block some employer offering an employee better terms? If the Government reject this amendment, that is the alternative to what we are arguing.

If somebody wants to pay somebody more, above the base, that is surely better for the employee. Surely that is better than somebody saying, “Well, you can’t”, which is what the Government might do. The difference is quite subtle. Sooner or later, somebody will have to work out the maths for 520,000 people and then go to all those local authorities, academies and private schools, all of a sudden, as I have said before, there are bound to be winners and losers, unless you make set the level at a sufficiently high so there are no winners and losers. I cannot imagine what that number will be, because it will be a high number.

If this is about empowering people and lifting society, I am all for that. But, again, there is a level of detail. This is not a small group of people; it is an enormous number of people. It is more than the number of teachers. The teachers have had pay, and more pay, and are now going on strike for more money. Support staff do not do that. Support staff are vulnerable. They do not have that power to take industrial action to fight their corner. They negotiate their terms individually with local authorities and academies and, by and large, none of these people is paid below the minimum wage or the living wage. So, this is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

I get the principle. I understand that there has been no base figure, and that should be addressed. But, if the Government are addressing that, and it is a philosophical Labour belief, they must put a price tag on it, because people need to know what the costs are, not only for their local authority but for every local authority and every academy in the country. If the noble Baroness is willing to push this to a vote—I do not know whether she will or will not—we on these Benches will support her.