Employment Rights Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Debate between Michael Wheeler and Laurence Turner

Committee stage
Thursday 12th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

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

As ever, it is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. As usual, I draw the Committee’s attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and particularly to my membership of the USDAW and GMB trade unions.

I am sure it will not surprise the hon. Member for Dundee Central to hear that I share some of his concerns about the practice of fire and rehire, and I welcome the significant steps taken in the Bill to outlaw the practice. However, I disagree with his amendment 160. What might be seen by some as a loophole is actually an important safeguard against the perverse potential for the law to mandate redundancy when there might have been other options on the table. I am sure that none of us would want to be party to including that in the Bill.

As I said, I share some of the hon. Gentleman’s concerns, and I hope the Minister will look closely at proposed new section 104I(4) of the 1996 Act, because the words

“likely in the immediate future”

are doing some precariously heavy lifting. However, if the amendment were accepted, the focus on a business being a going concern, which is the most important part of that subsection, would be removed completely. When we are passing legislation that protects jobs and promotes good employment, we absolutely cannot allow the unintended consequence of mandating redundancy when there are other options.

I look forward to the Minister’s comments. I understand the concerns of the hon. Member for Dundee Central, but this is a sledgehammer of an amendment to crack a nut of a possible loophole, with significant potential consequences.

[Laurence Turner]

Like my hon. Friend, I have intense sympathy with many of the arguments put forward by the hon. Member for Dundee Central, but the “Make Work Pay” document published earlier this year, which was subsequently endorsed in the Labour manifesto, stated:

“It is important that businesses can restructure to remain viable, to preserve their workforce and the company when there is genuinely no alternative, but this must follow a proper process based on dialogue and common understanding between employers and workers.”

We all want to see both parts of that carried through, and I look forward to the Minister’s comments on that. If amendment 160 were accepted, would it not have the effect of invalidating that part of the Government’s manifesto commitment?

Employment Rights Bill (Eighth sitting)

Debate between Michael Wheeler and Laurence Turner

Committee stage
Thursday 5th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Laurence Turner]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for raising that point. It is a shame that our Liberal Democrat colleagues are not able to join us, because we could have an interesting discussion about the consequences of the 1919 police strike, and the promises that Lloyd George made and subsequently broke, which led to the creation of the Police Federation rather than an independent trade union, but I will not detain the Committee on that matter. I will just say that we are operating under the international framework for employment law, which sets out very clearly that there are exemptions to the normal right of freedom of association—let us call it what it is—and that includes industrial action. I do not think that the Bill is the right place to diverge from that international framework.

I had reached the end of my points. As I say, there are good national security reasons for rejecting the amendment.

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

It is, as ever, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. As this is my first time speaking today, I draw everyone’s attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my trade union memberships. I want to pick up very slightly on some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield.

I fully appreciate that we are talking about a probing amendment. I will not revisit my use of the word “ridiculous” on Tuesday—we stayed in that territory for long enough—but the shadow Minister perhaps underestimates the ability of different sectors to accommodate flexible working and to overcome the challenges that he believes the flexible working measures in the Bill might present. In fact, GCHQ already operates a flexible working policy. On its website it is proud to point out that

“Work-life balance is important to us”

and that its

“flexible working patterns…are designed to help work fit… alongside…personal lives.”

If anything, exclusions for entire services sectors would be a retrograde step in places where flexible working provisions are already working perfectly well.

Moving on to the broader point, as demonstrated, I believe that sectors, businesses and employers can cope with this change. There are adequate measures for reasonableness in the Bill. Access to flexible working is an incredibly important right for workers in a modern, evolving workplace. Measures such as these gear the world of work for the future by enabling people to enter the workforce and to stay in it—something that the shadow Minister has expressed a concern about. Anything like this amendment that would exclude sectors, groups or organisations wholesale feels unnecessary, especially in the light of how the measures would work in practice.

Employment Rights Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Michael Wheeler and Laurence Turner

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th November 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Michael Wheeler]

Q So far, we have heard an awful lot about flexibility and risk, from you and from previous panels. Would the panel accept that, currently, flexibility is too far in favour of the employer, that the risk is borne by the employee and that this Bill seeks to rebalance that? In which areas do you believe that the measures in the Bill do not work towards that?

Dom Hallas: I think that cuts to the question that Steve asked, which was about the different sectors and impacts. I can only speak for the tech start-ups and scale-ups that we work with. In practice, as I said, you have a very highly paid and mostly highly skilled sector, where the benefits and rights afforded to employees way outweigh any current statutory requirements. It is a highly competitive labour market, but that comes with the trade-off of flexibility. These businesses scale and they fail very frequently; that is part of the nature of the business. I think that, in truth, both employers and employees go into that relationship in our particular space with their eyes pretty open to that. So in our particular part of the world, I would challenge that assertion a little bit.

What I would say more broadly though—I think this is important and cuts to an area where we think the Bill could be improved for our space from both an employer perspective and an employee perspective—is that one area where we see potential further progress is banning non-compete agreements. In California, where really successful technology ecosystems have been built in silicon valley, one of the cornerstones of that has been that there are no non-compete agreements allowed in law. That offers more flexibility from a labour market perspective in many cases, but it also benefits employees significantly, because that flexibility comes to their benefit as well.

From our point of view, employers are, frankly, scrambling like hell to try and find the employees to fill these tech jobs, and the employees are very highly paid. If those businesses fail, or their needs change, that is, in our view, part of the trade-off with those kinds of businesses. I appreciate that that might not be the case across every sector, but providing that flexibility is a core part of that trade-off.

David Hale: Typically, flexibility is a demand from employees rather than a demand from employers. Most employers would love the same people to turn up each week for the same shift; most employees would like to be able to work their shifts around their day-to-day lives. Most workplaces come to an accommodation on that, with things like shift-swapping.

What I am not clear on is where there is gain. Take zero hours and the scenario where this Bill ends up meaning that somebody who has worked the same hours for 12 weeks in a row is offered a contract. Somebody who an employer has employed for the same hours for 12 weeks in a row is likely to be either somebody they would like to give a contract to or somebody who has worked in a seasonal role. Those are the two scenarios. That employee is unlikely to be the employee who wants more hours or regular hours, because the employer is already giving them that. So there is not really a gain that is very obvious. What there is, is a lack of flexibility, because the response to the legal risk will be for employers to say to employees, “Actually, I need to keep an eye on precisely how many hours you are working each week for a reference period. So, no, you are not allowed to swap shifts.” That is a damage to flexibility, with no obvious gain for people who have been working 12 weeks in a row, who, frankly, the employer probably wants to agree a permanent contract for, but does not.

[Laurence Turner]

Q We heard quite a balanced account from the previous panel; there were measures in the Bill that they welcomed, alongside measures that they wanted to see changes to. Mr Hallas, I notice that you have said that gaps in employment law are becoming an increasing challenge. So I want to ask the same question to both of you: are there individual measures in the Bill that you welcome and, if so, what are they?

Dom Hallas: When I talked about employment law in that context, it was as part of a broader range of work we do with what we call platform businesses. They might be traditionally known as gig economy platforms, sharing economy platforms or online marketplaces that have two sides—someone who wants to sell something and someone wants to buy something, whether that is services or goods. The gaps in law that exist there are an increasing problem, because many of these platforms want to be able to offer support to the people who leverage them, but they are not able to do so because of the restrictive nature of employment law.

The challenge at the moment is that the Bill does not necessarily address that. There is clearly a way of potentially having further conversations on that. Obviously, some of that is being discussed down the line, including whether there is a single status for workers. We are not sure whether that is exactly the right approach, but there is a conversation to be had with Government about what is the right approach.

In the meantime, what we have is a structure built by court case, which I do not think is helpful for anyone concerned. It is frustrating for a number of unions and workers’ rights organisations that have been campaigning on this issue, but also for a wide variety of platforms—they are not the very biggest ones that are taking things all the way to court. They would prefer some clarity so that they could potentially offer additional benefits to people who leverage their platforms. That is the first thing to say.

A significant portion of the Bill is made up of things that we either have no view on or that, broadly speaking, would be fine. The reality is that I am not going to sit here and say that it is going to be catastrophic for the tech start-up community. In truth, it is not going to be.

David Hale: There are steps in the Bill on strengthening paternity and maternity protection, and that is one of the reasons why I talk about splitting the Bill up. Those seem like good things that probably have a positive impact on the workforce as a whole. As I said, because of the overwhelm, we are still going through the detail, but those seem like good measures. Would it not be better to focus on good measures, and things where the risks, costs and trade-offs are understood, and to make a decision to proceed positively with those?

Compared to the last speakers, we are less likely to have a particular view on the trade union aspects of the legislation. On the trade union aspects, it is fairly well understood what the measures are and what their impact will be—that is decision-ready. The bits that are not decision-ready are the proposals around unfair dismissal and zero-hours contracts. The bit that could be decision-ready but is not is probably around SSP and the question of a rebate.