Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Peter Kyle and Damian Hinds

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

In the positive spirit in which the Secretary of State speaks, will he commit on the Floor of the House that the reference period used to calculate hours for sectors that have serious seasonality—we have heard about boat building, hospitality, tourism and farming—will not be a ridiculously short period, such as 12 weeks? Will it be long enough to reflect the seasonal nature of that type of work?

[Peter Kyle]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for the passion with which he speaks. That is a very important point, and that is why we are consulting on the time threshold; we want to get it right. As my predecessors and I have said repeatedly, this Bill is good for workers and good for business, and that is the spirit in which we will continue.

Let me move on to fire and rehire, on which hon. Members will know there has been a long-running campaign led by trade unions. The provisions in the Bill will ensure that employers are no longer able to use cruel fire and rehire practices. No longer will unscrupulous employers be able to fire employees to replace them on low pay. The Bill also ensures protection for employees replaced by non-employee workers, such as agency staff, to do the same role. As we said in our manifesto, these reforms are a pro-business, pro-worker set of measures. They strike a balance, curbing misuse while allowing fair businesses time for adaptation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Kyle]

We will work on it.

[Damian Hinds]

I am very grateful to the Secretary of State for suggesting that he will try.

I turn to the provisions dealing with guaranteed hours and zero-hours contracts. I understand why it is attractive to the Government and the Labour party to seek to restrict the availability of contracts that do not have a guaranteed number of hours. From listening to Labour colleagues, it seems almost as if “exploitative zero-hours contracts” is one word. It is as if those words must always go together. We all want to end exploitation—that is why, in 2015, the then Government passed legislation to stop employers imposing exclusivity. We said, “If you are not going to guarantee your employee a minimum number of hours, it is not all right to say that they must not work for somebody else.” But not all zero-hours contracts are necessarily exploitative.

One of the biggest users of zero-hours contracts in our country is none other than the national health service, through its use of bank staff. I notice that the Liberal Democrats announced a new policy today, which would require extra pay for people on zero-hours contracts; I do not know whether they have yet costed that policy. By the way, for many of the people working as bank staff in the NHS, that is not their primary job but a second job. This allows a hospital or other setting to respond to spikes in demand. For many people with a zero-hours contract job, it is their second job, not their primary source of income. Zero-hours contract jobs are also very important to people coming back into work, as the hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray) said powerfully in an intervention.

Many people on zero-hours contracts are students. Particularly in hospitality, there is a pattern of work whereby an employee lives in two places: at home, and at their term-time address. They can stay on the books of their employer at home—it might be a local pub—while they are away studying during term time. It could be the other way around: they could have a job in their university town, and stay on the books when they come home. They can dial up or dial down their hours; for example, many students do not want to work a lot of hours, or any hours, during exam time. Contrary to what we might expect, and contrary to the all-one-word conception of “exploitative zero-hours contracts”, some people actually prefer a zero-hours contract.