Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill

Matt Rodda Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner]

I will just make some progress, if I may. All too often, a new chief executive comes into a business and announces that they are going to drive up shareholder value. What they do is drive down workers’ wages through tactics such as fire and rehire and that money is then siphoned off to increase the shareholders’ dividends. Often, those employees are left as the in-work poor and they become dependent on universal credit, exactly as my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) said. That means that the rest of us in society are making up the shortfall in those employees’ wages. We as taxpayers are the ones forking out to increase that shareholder value. The chief executive has done what they promised. They go off to another company, but morale in the workplace has evaporated. All the good will that was once in the company is gone and productivity remains low. In the long run, the business suffers because the workforce has lost all motivation.

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. Further to the points about the dreadful events at British Gas, my experience as a local MP speaking to highly skilled, long-standing employees who work for British Gas in Berkshire is that the mistaken policy of fire and rehire did exactly that: it damaged the morale of highly motivated, highly experienced people working for British Gas, who were highly trained in a respected business that traded on quality. The long-term effect of that was to harm the business. It damaged the reputation of the business and it may have also led to people leaving it. These are highly skilled staff who are often difficult to replace, so my hon. Friend is making an excellent point, and I hope he would agree that this is about the style of business in this country. As other colleagues have mentioned, we need a different approach that looks to the longer term for the good of the whole economy and the whole community, and not just the very short term.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He makes a very important point that was reinforced when I met the British Chambers of Commerce. The lady I met said that before she came to meet me to discuss these issues, she had conducted a thumbnail survey of its chambers. She said that what came back from the chambers was, “It never ends well for the business.” So the economic argument is critical, and we need to understand that this is not only immoral, as the right hon. Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie) outlined, but a serious economic failing of this country.