Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Clark, induces me to get to my feet, if only to correct him. He made that lovely, sweeping statement that all those on this side of the House are landowners and farmers, particularly those who spoke on 1 December. If I may correct him, I am not a landowner and I am not a farmer. I was a land agent. I acted for farmers, I acted for landowners, I acted for tenants and I acted for farm workers. Therefore I have no interest to declare and I do not fall into the category in which he sought to portray me.

We are all extremely grateful to see my noble friend Lady Byford back in her place and active again. She adds a great deal of common sense and a huge amount of knowledge to our debates on farming and the environment. I thought what she said was very soundly based, as indeed was what the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said in Committee. I listened with care to what the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, said. I found nothing new from what she said in Committee, although she did praise the strength of the arguments for those supporting her amendments in Committee. I would only praise the strength of the arguments against.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I apologise to noble Lords that, because the House has made such good progress today, I was not present at the beginning of the debate. However, as my name is attached to the amendment, perhaps I may touch on two issues, neither of which has been mentioned since I have been in the Chamber. If either has already been mentioned, I apologise.

The first point follows on from what my noble friend Lord Clark has just said. The structure that the Agricultural Wages Board sets does recognise skills throughout this sector. The fact that many workers in many parts of the country are paid more than the legal minimum does not take away the need to have that structure. The requirements of agriculture are becoming more and more sophisticated at one end, but less and less sophisticated at another. At the higher end, those skills need to be rewarded. The structure provided by the AWB allowed individual farmers and farm enterprises to base their actual wages on a similar structure.

The noble Lord, Lord Henley, will know by now that every farmer you meet will tell you that every cost saving that he makes is immediately recouped by the supermarkets. One of my fears in this is that, once it is known that there is a reduction in the legal minimum, which sets a floor above which voluntary payments by employers stretch to quite high levels for some workers, the supermarkets and the big processors will say, “Your labour costs need to go down by the same degree as the legal minimum goes down”—that is, in proportion to the difference between the wages board minimum and the statutory minimum wage. For the total bill, that is an enormous amount of money and therefore a saving to the supermarkets. I know that the Government intend to address other pressures that the supermarkets put on the agricultural sector, but this will be one more excuse for them to lean on farmers to reduce their prices and therefore to reduce their wages. If the noble Lord wishes to start that process, there will be real dangers, and the skilled force will begin to disappear.

At the other end of the labour force, a lot of agricultural labour, and particularly seasonal labour, depends on migrant labour and is operated by a set of gangmasters. There is nothing wrong with labour providers, provided that they obey the rules. But one of the main ways in which the exploitation by some gangmasters of the workforce is identified is that they are not meeting the legal minimum set out in the Agricultural Wages Board regulations. Once that is seen—and it is a relatively simple thing to establish—all sorts of other abuses over conditions of health and safety, immigration status and tax and national insurance become apparent. As a result, the Gangmasters Licensing Authority has been able to clean up a lot of that end. It has been a very important way in which the authority can do so. If we remove that clear legal minimum, I fear that it is one less lever for us to clean up the supply of labour in what has been, in some parts, a very exploited sector.

There are all sorts of reasons why, historically, there is an attachment on this side of the House and in the Labour movement as a whole to the Agricultural Wages Board. I am a Dorset man myself these days, so I come from a great Tolpuddle tradition, but I am not simply relying on history. I am relying on the effect that the removal of this one remaining legal-minimum, sector-specific wage will have on the quality and quantity of the workforce in agriculture and how it is treated. In the end, if that happens it will be to the detriment of agriculture as well.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak in this part of the debate, and I apologise to the House that I have not spoken about this in Committee, but I take up and endorse a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I declare an interest as co-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking. One group that is potentially trafficked and has been trafficked in the past comprises agricultural and horticultural workers. I was extremely glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, speak about the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, which remains in great danger of being abolished, although Schedule 7, where it appeared, is no longer part of the Bill. I would be very much more concerned about the loss of that authority, which has a specific requirement to look after those exploited in the fields and the horticultural industry, than I am about the loss of the Agricultural Wages Board, which does not specifically deal with that migrant group, part of which is capable of being trafficked.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Borrie has hinted, I declare a recent interest as a former chair of Consumer Focus. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, is one of my predecessors, as is the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, who is here as well. This might seem to be a slightly esoteric debate, but it is not. Consumer Focus, the National Consumer Council and the other bodies that preceded Consumer Focus have done decades of work on behalf of consumers. They have influenced Governments, regulators, business behaviour and behaviour in the public sector. It is important that that role is preserved along with that level of expertise.