Zero-hours Contracts

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Wednesday 27th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bacon]

I agree that the picture is not all rosy. I started with the rosy news because I wanted to soften up my hon. Friend the Minister, but there are problems. That is why I applied for this debate. I will come on to some of those problems in a moment.

Mrs King told me:

“Just because it is not for everyone doesn’t mean it is wrong for everyone and that it is somehow toxic. Implemented legally and fairly, zero-hours contracts can be a brilliant way for small charities like ours to run more effectively.”

The whole issue of zero-hours contracts, as the hon. Gentleman said, featured in the general election campaign, particularly after the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), the former leader of the Labour party, said that the Labour party, if returned, would abolish zero-hours contracts, although the manifesto does not say that. It does not call for the complete abolition of zero-hours contracts. It says:

“Labour will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts.”

The hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), who was for a few minutes a candidate to succeed as leader of the Labour party, was quite explicit when he told the Labour party conference that Labour

“will act to outlaw zero hours contracts where they exploit people.”

Meanwhile, the Conservative manifesto promised to

“take further steps to eradicate abuses of workers, such as non-payment of the Minimum Wage, exclusivity in zero-hours contracts and exploitation of migrant workers.”

I am pleased that the new Government are now in a position to follow through on these commitments.

With reference to the comments from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), what struck me about the issue during the general election was how frequently voters mentioned it to me, unprompted, often while talking about their grown-up children entering the workforce, which suggests that it may be a bigger issue than the statistics suggest. In one election debate in a church, a member of the audience explained how his son travelled to Norwich each day to work in a retail outlet. When he got there at 9 o’clock in the morning he was told to go and sit in a store room at the back. Later in the morning, if it got busy, he would be called out on to the shop floor, for which he would be paid. He would then be ordered back to the store room to wait for his next slice of paid work later in the day.

I do not know anybody who would defend such arrangements. They are indefensible and, by the way, they are almost certainly illegal already, because the law states that “time workers” must be paid at least the national minimum wage when they are on standby at or near the place of work and are required to be available. I do not want to get this out of proportion. It is not a universal problem. Indeed, I met a young man earlier this week who was delighted with the flexibility that his zero-hours contract gives him, but who also said to me, “What you cannot do is take someone’s time and then not pay them for it.”

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I hope my hon. Friend will agree that the minority of employers who have got into that habit should be exposed in public, should defend themselves in public and should be condemned in public.

[Mr Bacon]

I completely agree.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Skills (Nick Boles)]

It is a great honour to be speaking at the Dispatch Box on this, the first day of the new Parliament. I suspect that it will be the only time in my life when Her Majesty the Queen has the first word and I the last, although we can agree that her audience was somewhat larger and that she was a great deal better dressed.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) on securing this debate on an important subject that thankfully, now that the election has passed, we can shed real light on. We can discover the facts and pursue the examples of bad practice that he outlined. He is right to say that zero-hours contracts are in and of themselves nothing new and that a relatively small proportion of the workforce are on such contracts. He also rightly referred to a recent study by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which found that 60% of zero-hours workers were satisfied with their contracts and 65% of them were happier with their work-life balance because of those contracts. He described a number of situations involving individuals who actually welcomed these contracts because of the flexibility they gave them and the ability they provided to respond to other responsibilities, goals or ambitions that they had in their lives.

However, that should never be an excuse for complacency or for a belief that this is good for everyone and that every employer who makes use of these contracts is doing so responsibly. My hon. Friend gave a number of important examples of abuse. I hope he is pleased to know that one of my first decisions as Minister responsible for employment law was to implement the provision in an Act passed in the previous Parliament by my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), that banned exclusivity clauses in zero-hours contracts. Exclusivity clauses did something simply outrageous. The point of a zero-hours contract is that it does not guarantee a specific number of hours of work in any period of time. To then require that the person makes themselves available constantly, waiting for a phone call, preventing them from going out and earning income from other work, is simply outrageous. It was happening, I am glad to say, with a relatively small number and small percentage of zero-hours contracts, but it was quite intolerable and we were right to ban it. I am very glad that we have implemented that ban. We will be making sure that that ban is not simply symbolic but is enforced.

I am happy to look at examples of other abuses. My hon. Friend described very eloquently the case of a young man—the son of one of his constituents—who was called into work, kept on standby and not paid. My hon. Friend speculated that this practice was already illegal. While I do not know the full details of the case, if it is as he described I can reassure him that he is absolutely right—it is already illegal. If his constituent would like to approach him, and he would like to pass on to me the specific details of that employer and that young man, I will be very happy to get HMRC and any other enforcement authority to come down like a ton of bricks on that kind of abuse. It is against the law, it is inhuman, and it must not go on.

My hon. Friend has asked for some further, very specific commitments. He is always cheerful and affable, but he never gives up as a Member of Parliament, as I know both to my cost and my pleasure in my previous role as planning Minister. If, in this Parliament, we see a revolution in the number of people who are able to secure a plot of land to build their own home, it will be very largely thanks to his doggedness on that issue. I have no doubt that he will continue to be as dogged on the issue raised in tonight’s debate.

On my hon. Friend’s first request, without absolutely committing to a working group—because I would want to know what its composition was—I can promise him that I will keep a very close eye on this. I assure him that I have already asked officials to look into other kinds of abuse of zero-hours contracts to explore whether there is something further that we can do to root out such exploitation of working people.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

As a practical solution, would it be possible at some stage, not necessarily tonight, for the Minister’s Department, or for him, to say where people should email or telephone if they have a possible abuse to report, so that there is a central place to collect this information, not necessarily for action on every case but at least to gather it together?

[Nick Boles]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that issue, which was the subject of the third request from my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk. I was going to say that I do not know what the whistleblower arrangements are, but I will undertake to find out tomorrow and make sure that they are better publicised to citizens advice bureaux and to relevant charities that can make sure that people are able to report abuse.

My hon. Friend’s second request, which will give me great pleasure to fulfil, is to work closely with the Minister for Community and Social Care, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt). He is one of the most popular Members of Parliament and former Ministers, who I am delighted to say will now be on the Front Bench again. He is a deeply humane man, and I know that he will want to make sure that the people looking after the most vulnerable in our society are not exploited by their employers.