Employment Rights Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Lister. I hope the Government, in this Bill or elsewhere, follow up some of those points as a matter of urgency.

I am prone to write my speeches at the last minute. When I noticed I was number 41 of the speakers, I wondered what the hell I could actually say that was original. I turned to a paper I had received but not read before: a submission to the TUC about worker conditions and trade union rights. The paper compared rights here with the average situation in the rest of the OECD. It showed systematically that the average position in other OECD countries, for both individual rights and collective trade union rights, is substantially better than it is here. This covered a whole range of areas, such as hours of work, holiday, conditions of employment, dismissals and overtime, and collective aspects such as union recognition, collective bargaining and rules covering strike action. There were differences between different countries but, on average, on every single item, bar one or two, it is better in the rest of the OECD than it is here. One exception was redundancy provision, which means that you walk away with more money in the UK, but that also makes redundancy more likely. This was systematic across a whole range of conditions.

There is one other macro feature of the difference between our workforce and those in other OECD countries. Can you guess what it is? It is that, on average, productivity has risen far faster in the other countries than it has here. There is at least some degree of causal relationship between the terms and conditions in which workers and unions operate with employers and the fact that other countries’ productivity has risen substantially faster. The Government, and all those who purport to speak for British employers and industry in a hysterical way regarding the provisions of this Bill, should address that. Improved productivity would be a serious contribution towards our growth targets and the betterment of our economy as a whole. That is a macro point which speakers opposite have failed to recognise, and need to.

I want to mention another few points. I am a little unclear—perhaps my noble friend the Minister can clarify this—on what the fair work agency will do and how far it will replace other agencies. When I was the Minister responsible for agriculture, I seized on a Private Member’s Bill to introduce the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, which, to some extent, brought some order to a feature of modern slavery. We will have a debate on modern slavery tomorrow, so I will not go too far into that. One of the difficulties of not having direct regulators and enforcement agencies having too large a responsibility for one new quango is that some of the injustices that arise, which were identified by my noble friend Lady O’Grady’s committee on modern slavery, will not be tackled. I would like more detail about what the fair work agency will do and how it relates to existing bodies.

For some reason, I was never general-secretary of the TUC, but I was general-secretary of the Labour Party, and therefore I warm to the point of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, about the political levy. I sat on his committee for part of its time, and I largely agreed that we needed to tackle the question of political funding more broadly—not only the political levy but the way in which our political parties are financed in total. That goes beyond this Bill considerably, but it needs addressing. Continuously switching from opting in and opting out of the political levy is not the way to deal with it.