Employment Rights Bill (Third sitting)

Michael Wheeler Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 28th November 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I call Michael Wheeler to ask a very brief question, which should receive a brief answer.

[Michael Wheeler (Worsley and Eccles) (Lab)]

Q Thank you to the panel for your evidence so far.

I will just circle back to guaranteed hours. Although I appreciate that flexibility is of value in the sector, if the hours are there in the business and regularly being worked, would you not agree that that demonstrates there is a need for those hours in the business to be worked, and therefore, in the interests of fairness and financial security for workers, should those hours not be guaranteed for them?

Helen Dickinson: Again, it comes back to how. A lot of people who work flexibly want to vary their hours because they have other commitments, either family commitments or caring commitments. From an employee perspective, they should absolutely have the right to request flexibility, or to be able to have future hours that reflect something that they have over whatever reference period it is, whether it is 12 weeks or longer. If the regulations end up requiring that reference period—and, by definition, requiring employer to offer whatever that period is to the employee, just by process—peaks and troughs around peak trading periods and employees’ other commitments will cause the company to end up in a continual process of changing people’s hourly patterns, all the time and for a lot of people. When a company has multiple locations, and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees, it could be quite difficult.

I think we are absolutely agreed on the principle. The question is how you implement it, and whether there is a way to implement it that gives the employee the right to request, rather than putting the onus on the company to put in a whole load of process that actually, at the end of the day, might not be what the employee wants.

[The Chair]

Order. I have to bring this session to an end. We have run out of the allotted time, and sadly, there are some Members of the Committee who did not get the opportunity to ask the questions that they wanted to ask. However, I thank the witnesses for the time they have spent with the Committee.

Examination of Witnesses

Joanne Cairns and Liron Velleman gave evidence.