Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Mark Lazarowicz Excerpts

Tuesday 16th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

I was going to make that point. There is an element of complexity in this scheme which will lead to small businesses coming to us in about six months’ time and saying that it is part of the overburdening of regulation.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

On that point, the assumption has been made that all employees will opt for this status, but in many cases some workers will, while others will refuse, leading to two types of worker in the same business and even more complexity for the very small businesses that we are trying to support.

[John McDonnell]

That leads on to my second point—I do not want to delay the House. This measure opens up the process of recruitment, retention and promotion to potential victimisation and abuse. Despite the formal protections that the Government assure us will be put in place, the reality is that informal pressures will be put on those who wish to be recruited, retained or promoted and these will override the formal protections. Those who have represented people at tribunals and elsewhere will know that it is extremely difficult to prove victimisation and bullying in the work force. Those informal pressures will eventually undermine the credibility of the scheme. My fear is that they will also undermine the credibility of employee share ownership schemes overall.

Thirdly, I look forward to reading the draft regulations and guidance on protections for jobseeker’s allowance. However, ministerial statements on JSA protections in recent months, as recorded in Hansard, have proved not to be worth the paper they are written on. I refer to assurance after assurance we were given that there were no targets for sanctions in individual jobcentres, when we now have concrete evidence that that is the case. Ministerial assurances on the operation of JSA have so far not proved to be effective. I believe that, at the end of the day, they will prove not to be effective in this case either, because the same informal pressures will be put on jobcentre workers to meet targets for sanctions overall.

Finally, this measure sets an extremely dangerous precedent. The idea of selling rights could creep into other areas of policy making. For example, will landlords in future be able to offer reduced rents for reductions in security of tenure? Will consumer rights be sold for a reduction in the price of particular goods? That is much more significant than the scheme being proposed in this debate. The idea that rights can be sold in any sphere of government activity sets a dangerous precedent for the future development of rights in this country.

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[Julian Smith]

I want to speak briefly in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) and talk about the narrative that is developing among Opposition Members. We heard the same bleating for settlement agreements and we have heard the same rhetoric for these proposals. We have heard no tangible idea from the Opposition of how we might make life easier for the thousands of small businesses in North Yorkshire that are creating the bulk of the jobs in my constituency or for the tiny companies across the UK that are struggling with the six regulations a day that Labour piled upon them.

The proposals that we are discussing are part of a suite of proactive measures to make business easier in this country. Business was laden with regulation, taxation and more and more bureaucracy by the Labour party in power. We—our party and this Government—are doing absolutely the right thing by looking at every opportunity to find ways to make life a bit easier for the hard-working men and women who are waking up in the middle of the night, worried about whether they can pay staff the next day. I commend these proposals and the others that the Government are making across the range of their enterprise policies.

[Mark Lazarowicz]

I, too, would like to say a few words about this proposal of shares for rights. Of the various types of employment legislation that have come before this House over the years—these provisions are basically employment legislation—there can scarcely have been any with as few friends, on either side of industry. I welcome the fact that the House of Lords did its revising job well and removed the offending clause. I am only sorry that the coalition parties, Conservative and Lib Dem, have chosen to bring it back today, instead of withdrawing quietly and gracefully.

Given that this provision has so few friends, I suspect that very few employers will want to make use of it. That is because employers who want to extend employee share ownership, of which I am a great supporter—the year after I entered this House I introduced a private Member’s Bill to promote it—will not want to do so in ways that force their employees to give up important rights at work. The type of employer who wants to work with their employees is not likely to be one who at the same time wants to alienate them by taking away their rights, which is what this measure would force such employers to do if they made use of it. Of course, it is hard to see any employees volunteering to adopt such an arrangement either. I suspect that employers who would make use of the measure would be those who are in difficulty.

I take the point that was made earlier about businesses that want to start up and take on more workers making use of the scheme, but the problem is that, although a new business could behave with the best will in the world in involving its workers in a collective enterprise, it will be when things go wrong and people fall out that those workers will need the protection that is enjoyed by the workers of this country. That is why we should be loth to throw that protection away.

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[Mr Speaker]

Order. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is interested in hearing a few seconds of reply. He is not obliged to be interested, but if he is, he will need to resume his seat.

[Mark Lazarowicz]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I shall end by saying that I hope the House will not support the Government’s proposals today.

[Michael Fallon]

With the leave of the House, I should like briefly to respond. I am afraid that we have had a fairly predictable debate today. We have heard the voices of the employment lawyers on the Opposition Benches, and the voices of entrepreneurs on this side of the House. I have made it absolutely clear that the proposed status will be entirely voluntary and optional, and I have introduced a further change today to make it absolutely clear that those who are on jobseeker’s allowance will be fully protected. Nobody has to take up this status. Nobody can be harassed or bullied into taking it up, but there are plenty of businesses that are ready and willing to do so.

I should like to finish by citing Miss Becky McKinlay, who said that she would have welcomed such a scheme when she set up her company six years ago, because she could not afford to outbid her peers on wages. Her company is called Ambition, and we should be ambitious—