National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships) Bill

Debate between Margot James and Philip Davies

Friday 4th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Margot James]

The hon. Gentleman takes my example a little too far, but one can only imagine such an outcome as being highly likely.

Now, let me introduce Jack. Jack’s father works for a landscape-gardening company and just about makes average earnings, and his wife works part-time as a carer. As a family, they are just about getting by and they think Jack will get on fine because he is a bright boy. But Jack is already disadvantaged by some of the choices he made at GCSE which ruled out the sort of A-levels the Russell Group universities favour. He has no contacts in London and his family cannot afford to support him through an unpaid internship. Unlike Susan I think Jack would probably be one of the 40% of young people my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell indicates would reject an internship if offered on an unpaid basis. Those case studies illustrate to me that my hon. Friend is really on to something in challenging the concept of unpaid internships under the conditions set out in his Bill.

However, we believe that good, worthwhile, genuine internships certainly have a part to play, alongside other routes such as work experience, apprenticeships, work placements and work shadowing, all of which we have heard a great deal about in our debate. I believe we all recognise that young people learning about the workplace, developing skills and getting training can produce networking opportunities in and of themselves. Employers can also benefit from fresh thinking and from finding potentially great new permanent employees to join their team in future.

There are many different types of internship. The Gateways to the Professions Collaborative Forum, for example, represents about 60 professional bodies. We have heard about the excellent programme of paid internships that is run from the Speaker’s quarters in this House. In the attempt to define high-quality apprenticeships as an arrangement whereby individuals work and can gain some compensation, there is also the prospect that they will develop professional skills and an understanding of a profession. Those are all good experiences and we would not want obstacles to their fulfilment to be created unnecessarily from any unintended consequences of legislation.

There are many excellent resources, such as the Government-backed graduate talent pool, which is an initiative designed to help new and recent graduates to gain real work experience across Government. It advertises quality internships with a range of desirable employers in numerous competitive sectors. Most significantly, 100% of the vacancies advertised through the graduate talent pool are for paid positions. A 2011 survey of more than 500 people registered with the pool found that over 60% of respondents were motivated to join in order to improve their long-term prospects and gain general work experience, and it showed that over 80% of interns would recommend the experience and scheme to others.

Another example is the popular RateMyPlacement website, which I heard my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley mention—I think in relation to some experience he offered to a young person from his constituency. Graduates and interns can share their experiences of placements anonymously on the site and often find specific guidance on such things as interviews and general careers advice.

There is an increasing wealth of information out there, for employers as much as anyone else, about what well-managed, high-quality internships look like. However, we all know that not all the internships we are debating today are good quality and properly managed, and I think we all, across the House, aspire to improve our system such that there ends up being just good-quality, preferably paid—and certainly compensated—internships in future.

Let me turn to the point that several hon. Members have made: that workers do have rights. Workers have a contract with their employer under which they perform work to agreement and both parties must get something of value from the arrangements. The contract does not have to be written and the value provided to the person performing the work might initially be the opportunity to gain experience or the promise of future work. Other factors to consider are whether a person has the right to send someone else to do the work and whether the person is better viewed as working for the employer rather than being engaged by an independent contractor.

A genuine worker has a “day one” right to be at least paid the appropriate national minimum wage or the national living wage if he or she is over 25. When a court looks at a person’s employment status, it will always consider the reality of their working arrangements and not just how those are described. Simply labelling someone as an intern is not enough to exempt them from the rights associated with being a worker.



However, there is no universally agreed or accepted definition of the term “intern”, despite many attempts to define it today. I sensed considerable sympathy for the view expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North that it was perhaps a glorified Americanism used to describe what is effectively work experience. We must acknowledge that there are bad examples of work experience and internships, but let me make it absolutely clear that the Government believe that all people in the UK are entitled to fair wages for fair work.

[Philip Davies]

If we complicate this too much, is there not a danger that employers trying to avoid having someone classified as a worker would simply get people in to do menial things such as making the tea, rather than doing a proper job? Most people who do work experience really appreciate being able to muck in and do something worth while. It would be a strange state of affairs if employers were deterred from offering meaningful work experience lest they fall foul of the legislation.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Margot James and Philip Davies

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I always feel that I must be doing something right if I manage to wind up Opposition Members who hold idiotic views. It will be time for people on my side to worry when the Opposition start to agree with what they are saying. That should tell them that they are on the wrong side of the argument.

We know that the present policy is not working because the countries in question have not developed as much as they should have done. The question that I would pose to everyone is this: what do they think are the root causes of poverty in some of those countries in Africa? Is it that those countries are not getting enough aid? Does anybody really think that that would get to the root cause of the problem? Or is it perhaps that those countries have terrible governance and that the rule of law means nothing there? Could it be that outside companies will not invest in those countries, even though such investment would create wealth and prosperity, because they could have all their assets confiscated within a few weeks or months? We need to sort out all those factors if we want to sort out the problems in Africa, rather than simply handing over an ever-larger cheque every year and thinking that that will sort out all the problems of the developing world. It is idiotic and simplistic to think that that will work. Let us deal with the root causes and tell those countries that they need to get themselves sorted out—

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Philip Davies]

I will not give way.

The reason that people want to invest in this country is that the rule of law is important to us. That is what we need to export to those other countries. We do not need to export cheques; that really does not work.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James]

If I had had time to make a speech—I now will not—I would have pointed out that I observed many examples in Africa in the 10 years I was involved in development before I came to this place where the money spent by this country and other donor countries has made a remarkable difference. Such examples can be found in Uganda, Nigeria and Botswana—there are many of these places. May I conclude my intervention by saying that some of these countries are so vulnerable, having had to deal with the Ebola virus, terrorism and so on, and they do not have the infrastructure that we are so lucky to have in the west? Could my hon. Friend not give some consideration to those points in his speech?

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. I do not doubt that she is taken to all the successful programmes there have been, but I wonder whether she was taken to the following one. I wonder whether she was taken to Kenya. Forget about poverty and all this kind of thing, because apparently the most important priority in Kenya is graffiti. We gave to a £6.7 million aid project called Making All Voices Count, which pays for political graffiti in Nairobi. The spray murals are said to be useful as they

“engage with artists to spread data-based information in slums in order to empower citizens to make data-driven arguments”.

They are, apparently, also justified because they target police corruption through awareness. You couldn’t make it up: we are literally spraying money away. With £16.5 million of aid allegedly being stolen by Kenyan Ministers and officials in the past few years, it is nonsensical to suggest that all of this aid budget is going round doing all this good. A load of old nonsense is going on.

Let me talk about a project in Ethiopia. It is not about creating life opportunities through work or educating people. It empowers women through music, and we gave money to the so-called “Ethiopian Spice Girls”, a five-strong girl group called Yegna. That may bring a smile to people’s faces, until we realise that this is part of a bigger programme called the Girl Hub, to which DFID handed over £3.8 million. As a justification for that excessive expenditure the point was made that Ethiopian girls

“faced challenges such as forced marriage, violence, teen pregnancy, and dropping out of school”.

Of course they do—we all agree with that—but I think I must be out of touch because I thought the best way of tackling those things was to target those issues; I did not realise that the way to tackle them was to finance a girl group to sing about those problems. You could not make this up, but it is true.

It all goes to show that DFID has so much money that it does not know what to do with it, so it is scratting around for any kind of nonsensical, politically correct project to throw its money away on. But it is not throwing away its own money—this is our money. It is our constituents’ money that DFID is throwing away with gay abandon. It might make DFID feel good, but it does not do a great deal for my constituents who are seeing their money go up in smoke. What I want to know is who in DFID actually sits around a table and says, “I know, I think we should fund the ‘Ethiopian Spice Girls’. I think that is a good use of public money.” We can just imagine the discussion in the Department, where everyone around the table says, “I think that is a marvellous idea.” Does nobody in these Departments say, “Do you not think that’s a crass way to spend taxpayers’ money?” Is nobody there speaking up for taxpayers? I do not believe anybody is. This is just being done to satisfy the egos of politicians; it is not about doing anything to alleviate poverty.