National Minimum Wage (Offshore Employment) (Amendment) Order 2020

Lord Wei Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wei (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as listed in the register. I, too, welcome this measure. As is the case for many other speakers, my main concern relates to enforcement. Given that there are limited resources and that many vessels go through our waters and work in our fishing and other industries, how will we police this? What do we do if there are bad actors who try to game the system and say that they are from other jurisdictions?

One question that I have for the Minister and for the wider team at HMRC is whether any plans exist to work with the industry both to weed out bad actors and to ensure that there is enforcement. I know that other sectors, such as in the mobile technology space with companies such as Apple, are starting to use satellite technology. This could be used, for example, to see how heavily the boats are weighed down or how many workers are on deck. Automation could be used to track the situation so that there are some teeth to this measure, rather than it being something that people regularly ignore.

Similarly, given the pressures that our fishing industry might face with Brexit and Covid, as mentioned by another noble Lord, what can we do to work with the industry to modernise it and ensure that resources are focused on paying people well and that they are looked after? There could be a danger that this measure will put quite a lot of our fleet out of business. I accept that there might be a number of bad actors who should not be in the game if they cannot make it work at this kind of wage level but, equally, we have a duty to work with the industry to make sure that it is sustainable and viable. There might be potential for the better actors within the industry to help both police this measure and improve practices with technology and so on, so that there is better transparency over how workers are looked after and so that we still have a viable and healthy fleet in fishing and other maritime industries in the future.