Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices

Maria Miller Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins. I congratulate the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing this really important debate. As he said, it is important because this report was published back in 2017, because we must keep scrutiny strong on progress with employment and because there can be nothing more important to our country at the moment than having a strong economy. The role of workers within that is crucial.

The hon. Gentleman could perhaps forgive me for thinking that the Government have been quite busy since he was elected in 2017. I have the privilege of having been elected a number of years before that. The pandemic and leaving the EU have been quite time-consuming issues. Not only that, but they have changed the very nature of our employment market and economy. It is a strength that we are coming to this afresh, as the economy is recovering very fast from the pandemic, and that we should take a long, hard look at how we can not only bounce back to pre-pandemic levels of work and growth, but also—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman would like to intervene, I am happy to give way.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

I am very happy to intervene. I am interested to hear the right hon. Member describe the Government as being “busy”. There is nothing more important than workers’ rights, and to think for one minute that they should somehow be relegated is quite frankly a staggering admission from her. Perhaps she would like to reflect upon it.

[Mrs Miller]

I am very glad to have had that intervention because many workers listening to this debate will remember how the Government furloughed many, many thousands of people—not just because it was the right thing to do to protect their jobs, but because it also protected their pay packets. Far from doing nothing, this Government have done more than any other Government in peacetime history to support the workers of this country.

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[Ian Lavery]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Mrs Miller]

I am looking at the Chair; I might give way one more time. I will give way to the hon. Lady, because the hon. Gentleman seemed to have a few—

[Ian Lavery]

rose—

[Mrs Miller]

Sorry; I said “the hon. Lady”. The hon. Gentleman should open his ears.

[Apsana Begum]

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. She said that the Government have done so much more than any other in peacetime history. However, in 2019 the Government promised that after exiting the European Union they would come up with an employment Bill, but they have not yet done so. Does she agree that there were promises about what would happen once we had exited the European Union and that since then we have seen at least three EU directives—one on zero-hours contracts, another on minimum wage and another on platforming workers—while we fall behind? Yes, we have been in a pandemic, but we are not levelling up. In fact, we cannot keep up with what is happening across Europe on workers’ rights.

[Mrs Miller]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I share her frustration about not seeing an employment Bill, but given the restrictions that there have been on this place, in terms of debate and people being able to be here, I can sort of understand why. Also, there are the changes that we have seen in the economy, which, as I said, are a result of the pandemic and of leaving the EU.

I can give the Minister the benefit of the doubt as to why the Bill has been delayed, but I want to hear from him today that that delay will not be a moment longer than it has to be; the hon. Member for Slough is right that there are some really important issues that people want to be addressed in an employment Bill. However, before I get dragged down that rabbit-hole, I will gently get back to the topic that we are discussing today, which is, of course, the Taylor review—it is important in itself.

I want to make the context of this debate very clear. When we go back to the documents that the Government produced before the pandemic, it really is quite startling to see what is in them. We have the opening to the Good Work plan, putting forward the consultation on the single enforcement body. The introduction to that document, which of course became available only months or even weeks before we saw a significant lockdown of our economy, referred to the record levels of employment in the UK and wages

“growing at their fastest pace in almost a decade”.

It said that the UK labour market was thriving, which it was. However, we cannot ignore the impact of the pandemic, and we have to put that into the mix today as we consider this really important debate.

The way out of this pandemic is not just about vaccination and boosters, as important as they might be; it is also about getting our economy growing as it was prior to the pandemic, so that we can not only pay for the cost of the pandemic but get back on to the sort of track that the people of this country had become used to under this Government.

The skills of the Great British people are crucial to that economic growth. One of the great successes of this Government has been the ability to bounce back since the pandemic hit its height, but we need to be able to use the skills of the British people to get back once again to the levels of growth that I have referred to.

The Taylor review was all about tackling imperfections in the labour market, which is important not only in its own right but in terms of getting back to those levels of economic growth. Many of the sorts of imperfections that Taylor referred to in his review are, in many ways, being tackled already. I saw that for myself when I visited my local Jobcentre Plus office in Basingstoke. We are not known for high levels of unemployment in Basingstoke, but through the pandemic we saw our unemployment rate double, despite the very significant levels of furloughing that the Government had enabled.

I am delighted to say that as a result of the work of Jobcentre Plus, and the tenacity of the entrepreneurs who live in my constituency, those unemployment levels have halved. The work of organisations such as the M3 Job Club is helping to ensure that people in longer-term unemployment also have opportunities.

[Ian Lavery]

On that point, will the right hon. Member give way?

[Mrs Miller]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I think the Chair wants to make sure I do not use too much time.

Organisations such as the M3 Job Club can ensure that the long-term unemployed get back into work as quickly as possible, again dealing with some of the imperfections in the labour market. Of course, the Government have set up such schemes around apprenticeships, and on Friday I saw a number of apprentices at my local technical college—Basingstoke College of Technology—who are studying apprenticeships in anything from engineering in F1 motorsport to supply chains in the airline industry. It is extraordinary that the college has got back on track as quickly as it has.

So there are already successful plans in place to deal with some of the imperfections we see around training, age discrimination and worklessness, but we need to ensure we work better, and that is what the Taylor review was all about. The review referred to a number of areas of concern, and in the time available today it is impossible to go into all of them. The ones I will highlight, over and above the ones that the hon. Member for Slough referred to, are maternity discrimination and age discrimination.

The Minister will know my long-term interest in issues around maternity discrimination. The Taylor review rightly pointed out that three quarters of mothers have been subject to negative or discriminatory actions in the workplace. On age discrimination, far too many people, particularly over the age of 50, are not in work. Those issues were not tackled in the Taylor review; they need to be tackled in the Government’s response.

Another area that the Taylor review did not tackle was family-related leave and pay. We know that the inability of fathers in the workplace to take parental leave can directly affect the way women can participate at work. Another area that was not referred to was the use of non-disclosure agreements to cover up wrongdoing in the workplace. Will the Minister be tackling those issues in an employment Bill, over and above anything that he wants to tackle from the Taylor review?

Before I close, I want to talk about the single enforcement body, on which the Government issued a consultation back in December 2019. The single enforcement body was at the heart of the Government’s response to the Taylor review. It has an important role in tackling the issues I have just outlined, which were not tackled in the way I feel they should have been in the Taylor review. In his response, will the Minister clarify the status of the single enforcement body? Does it remain at the core of the Government’s response? When will he look at extending the role of the single enforcement body to cover enforcement of the law that already exists, as well as new laws that might be required around NDAs?

I know that the Minister listens well—he has listened to me talk about these issues on many occasions—and I hope he finds this debate useful in refocusing the Government on what I agree with the hon. Members for Slough and for Poplar and Limehouse is an important issue that we need to tackle here and now.

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[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) has secured a really timely debate. I want to try and bring a human context to this, in the short time that I have to speak today. We are talking about human beings in the workplace; we are talking about people who go to work and rely on decent wages and terms and conditions in order to feed their families and support their communities. Everybody deserves the right to have decent working terms and conditions. They deserve the right to go out to work and come home safe, as well. They deserve the right to have decent wages that put food on the table and clothe their kids. We are not asking for anything revolutionary here—we are really not. We are just saying what should happen in a decent society, for heaven’s sake. Anyone would think we were trying to pull the back teeth out of Government with this! Where is the promised employment Bill? With the greatest respect to the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), we cannot keep blaming the pandemic as the reason we are not addressing issues in the workplace for people who are suffering greatly.

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Gentleman might reflect on the fact that the furlough scheme will have saved many thousands of jobs. That is a very real support, in a real-time crisis.

[Ian Lavery]

We should not try and rewrite history. I recall at the very beginning of the pandemic we had to pull the Government, kicking and screaming, to accept a furlough scheme. It was the TUC and the trade unions that put the pressure on the Government to come up with a decent scheme for furlough. I want to mention the sick pay scheme: it is £96 per week—that is for those who qualify, by the way. Hundreds of thousands of people in this country do not even qualify for £96 per week. For those who do, it is supposed to be fantastic. “You’ve got statutory sick pay. What are you crying about?” If someone lives on their own, what can they get for £96 per week. That needs to be addressed in an employment Bill.

We have a situation, with fire and rehire, where companies are firing individuals unless they accept, on occasion, up to a £10,000 reduction in wages and worse terms and conditions. That has got to be banned, it really has. I say to the Minister that it has to be banned. I give all credit to the zero hours justice campaign for highlighting that at every opportunity. In those zero-hour contracts, we have people sitting there on a Monday morning waiting for a text to say whether they are working that day—that is still happening. If they miss the text, they might not be able to go into work. Here is another statistic: GMB did a survey, prior to the Taylor review, in which 61% of employees went to work while unwell for fear of not being paid, losing their job or missing out on hours.

We have to put this in a more human context. The Taylor review was very weak, but better than nothing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Slough has said, the Government accepted 51 of the 53 recommendations, but they have only implemented seven of those recommendations to date. That is just not good enough.

My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) mentioned a new deal for working people and the employment rights green paper. He has put a lot of work into the green paper—and it is the answer. It actually addresses everything we need it to. I am sure the Minister has read it and taken some great hints from it, but this is what we need to be introducing: fairness in the work place. It mentions raising pay for all, ending in-work poverty, enabling secure and safe working and tackling discrimination and workplace inequalities. We are all in this place to try to help people in our communities. There is not any better way to do that than to increase protection for those in the workplace.