Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Paula Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab) [V]]

Earlier this year, I engaged proactively with the Government on the plight of domiciliary care workers who are so often and routinely not paid for travel time between home visits. Ministers said that they recognised the scale of underpayment of the national minimum wage across sectors such as social care and childcare. They underlined their opposition to my Bill on the very basis that these issues would be tackled head-on by their own legislation, not mine, in the form of an employment Bill. So I must ask: where is the Bill?

The basis of my private Member’s Bill that never was was to secure beyond doubt that the lowest-paid would receive their full entitlement under the law. That was it—nothing more, nothing less. It was hardly a sweeping change. However, this small but significant change, which would have made a difference to hundreds of thousands of care workers across the country, was rejected on partisan lines.

This type of issue is one of the many that could have been addressed by the Government’s employment Bill—one that many Opposition Members expected to be on the parliamentary calendar during the coming autumn. So too could it have been an opportunity to address the many other inequalities that exist among the modern workforce. Young workers, for example, often find themselves at the mercy of low pay and precarious employment in sectors such as hospitality, the service sector and the wider gig economy.

As with many things, this is yet another example of the Government talking a big game, but when it comes to the crunch leaving our people wanting. Furlough will soon end, and HR departments will be pumping out redundancy notices. While the pandemic has ripped through our communities, with the economic shock waves to be felt for some time to come, too many bosses have used this moment in time—a moment of unrelenting human misery—as a smokescreen to mount an outright assault on their workers. So too could the Government have brought forward a commitment to end the practice of fire and rehire, the likes of which we saw most recently with British Gas, at the heart of any employment Bill.

Above all else, the Government talk their biggest game on levelling up, particularly for the regions of this country that have for far too long been left behind by the politics of austerity, deindustrialisation and the rampant privatisation of our public services. How can they look my constituents in the face, asking them to take their levelling-up agenda seriously, when too many in our great northern towns and cities remain at the sharp end of the labour market? Without a genuine and meaningful offer to workers, there will be no levelling up, only words and empty slogans, and it is my people—my constituents—who will pay the price.