“Chapter 4A

Debate between Peter Dowd and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd]

I am pleased the hon. Lady asked me that question, because it is patently obvious that better working conditions lead to less absenteeism, more resilience in the workforce and better productivity. It is not a magic potion, but what is known as enlightened employment. She may like to read about that, and if she wants, I will put her in touch with a few people who can talk to her about it.

In that study I mentioned, 71% reported reduced levels of burnout, 54% said it was easier to balance work with household responsibilities, 60% found they had an increased ability to combine paid work with care responsibilities, and 62% reported that it was easier to combine work with social life, and so on and so on. As I have said, the Bill seeks to put this issue on the agenda, because I believe it is inevitable—history shows it—that changes in patterns of work, working arrangements, the nature of work and other associated issues, such as artificial intelligence, will eventually lead to a four-day week over a period of time. So let us embrace the change and let us plan for the change. If we do want to get the country back to work, get the country working productively and get many millions of people without work back into work, let us do this as progressively as we possibly can.

Finally, if we are lengthening the time we ask people to work by an extra year, two years or maybe three years in the future—if we ask them to have a longer working life—the least we can do is to ask them to have a shorter week. What is wrong with that, and is it really too much to ask? I do not think so, and many employers and employees take the same view, so let us not make an enemy of progress. Why do we not just embrace it?

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I rise to speak to the measures on zero-hours contracts, and Opposition new clause 83 and amendment 283. It is absolutely right that we should pause to consider the effects of these changes on employment tribunals, but it is also right that we should pause to consider their effect just on employment. Of course, there are bad employers and those who would seek to exploit, which is a very bad thing. We should bear down on them, but there is no reason to believe that the measures the Government are bringing forward will achieve that.

I suggest that the Government want to get rid of zero-hours contracts not because intrinsically there is a great problem attached to them, but because of the special place zero-hours contracts have in Labour mythology. I want to take us back to the glory days of the modern Labour party when the leader of the Labour party was the current leader’s immediate predecessor, the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). I see the then shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) is with us in the Chamber, and as it happens, I was the Minister for Employment at the time.

When our Government came to power, unemployment had been 8%, and it then rose a little bit to 8.5% at the end of 2011. From then on, it came down, and it kept coming down. By late 2016, it was under 5%, and it would fall further still. However, that did not fit Labour Members’ narrative. They wanted to be able to say that this reduction in unemployment was not real: it was all fake employment or low-quality employment. That was not true, but it did not stop them saying it. In fact, three quarters of the increase in employment was in higher-skilled occupations, and three quarters of the jobs growth was in full-time work. At that time, employment was growing much more quickly than self-employment, and the No. 1 sector for employment growth was construction.

However, Labour Members still kept saying that the jobs being created were all low-quality ones, and at the top of the list of things to call out was the zero-hours contract. The then Leader of the Opposition used to talk about it weekly at Prime Minister’s Question Time. There were a couple of awkward moments, such as after his glorious appearance at Glastonbury, when it turned out that the Glastonbury festival—guess what?—employed people on zero-hours contracts. There was further embarrassment when it turned out that there were people working for none other than the Labour party conference who were on zero-hours contracts.

At the DWP we did some research, and it turned out that less than 3% of people relied on a zero-hours contract for their main employment. On average, it delivered them 25 hours of work a week, while, strangely, they had above-average job satisfaction, and most were not looking for more hours. People said the number had grown, but it is actually much more likely that that was because of growing awareness of the term “zero-hours contract”.

Thinking about our history, it has long been the case that far more than 3% of people have had irregular income patterns, where they have not had guaranteed hours of work or levels of salary—from casual labour to piece work, catalogue agents and commission-only sales. At a certain point, it dawned on me that my own first job had been washing dishes on a zero-hours contract—or at least it would have been, had a contract been involved at all.