Philip Davies
Main Page: Philip Davies (Conservative - Shipley) National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships) Bill
Philip Davies Excerpts
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I have raised this matter in the Chamber on a number of occasions, not least when I presented a ten-minute rule Bill to ban unpaid internships on 13 May 2014. Despite a Division being called by the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), that motion passed by 181 votes to 19. Today, I am delighted, having been drawn in the private Members’ Bill ballot, to introduce a Bill that makes provision for the remuneration of individuals undertaking workplace internships.
The Bill will bring an end to a practice whereby employers regularly flout national minimum wage legislation by taking on unpaid interns to work for up to a year, often in London, for no pay but with the promise of experience and the hint of a future job. Unpaid internships are the acceptable face of unpaid labour in modern Britain today and should have no place in a meritocratic country that aims to work for the many, not the privileged few. This is a Bill to stop young people being exploited by those who gain from their unpaid endeavours. It sets about bringing an end to a new rise in the class society that means only those from a wealthy background can gain a privileged leg-up with an unpaid internship in their chosen profession. This is a Bill to level the playing field for many of my constituents in Elmet and Rothwell, who, like many parents across this country, cannot afford to pay for their child to work for up to a year with no pay.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend set out how many of the current unpaid internships he objects to will become paid and how many will just not happen at all?
Alec Shelbrooke
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention, and if he will bear with me I will give several statistics as I go through my speech.
The starting point of today’s debate must be to define what a workplace internship is. It is already illegal under the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 to employ someone without pay, so, in principle, unpaid internships should not exit—but they clearly do. Let us look close to home as a starting point. A quick scan of w4mp, the work for an MP website, shows about 22 MPs advertising for unpaid interns, outside the politics and parliamentary studies scheme. As we are talking about 13 Conservative MPs and nine Labour MPs, among other parties, this is not a left-right argument; this practice takes place across this House, and it sends a message to businesses across the UK that exploiting the will of young workers is acceptable.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I will elaborate on the argument as I move on, but a job is a job, and if work is adding towards an output, it should be paid for.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend’s Bill does not distinguish between people who advertise seeking somebody to work for them on an internship and those who ask, “Can I come into your office to do some work experience?”, but I wonder whether he does. There is a massive difference between those two things, but the Bill draws no distinction between them.
Alec Shelbrooke
My hon. Friend makes an important point, which is that there is a difference between people advertising for unpaid internships and people coming in on a voluntary basis because they have taken the initiative to see whether they could do something. However, that still removes opportunity for others, because there may not then be the need to advertise for a paid role. I will address that issue later, because I have specific points to make about the voluntary side of this and the charity sector.
Many of the interns in this place, much like those who work in private businesses, are undertaking day-to-day activities similar to those that many of us employ staff members to help us with in our offices. The fact of the matter is that, despite your commendable efforts, Mr Speaker, working in Parliament has often been a matter of “Who you know, not what you know,” and young people who are eager to work here and with the financial means to do so for free will find that there are Members taking on interns and refusing to pay at least the minimum wage for their labour.
I remember an exchange of views in this Chamber with the former Member for Bolton West. When I pushed her during an Opposition day debate on the national minimum wage on whether she would accept unpaid internships, her response was
“I have volunteers—I do not call them interns—and I have no money in my budget to pay them.”—[Official Report, 15 October 2014; Vol. 586, c. 350.]
When Members have access to a staffing budget of more than £140,000 a year, it beggars belief that a Labour Member would stand in this place and defend a practice of workplace exploitation with a claim that she could not afford to pay her staff. Imagine the outcry if large multinational firms across the UK stopped paying their workforces because of similar arguments. It is the exploitation of this “volunteer” loophole that means young people are not being paid for their labour.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am delighted at that intervention and those from my other hon. Friends, as they show that we can often assess all these arguments with the same eyes, and I will deal later in my speech with every point that has been raised so far. This all shows a certain amount of probing from colleagues.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is talking about clause 1, which says that these provisions will apply to people who undertake “regular work”. Will he tell us what the definition of “regular work” is, because the Bill contains no such definition?
Alec Shelbrooke
My hon. Friend moves us on to a point about specifics and definition. To get the Bill to this stage, we have opted for a more general approach. If, as we hope, the Bill gets to Committee, we could get more into that detail, because he makes an important point. It is difficult to pin these things down, but this is where these loopholes occur and it is how they are exploited. In response to what my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) said, I am going to elaborate on the Bill and how, for example, the Institute of Directors showed a neat way to get around this issue.
This Bill simply brings interns in line with all other workers in terms of the right to be paid for their work. Importantly, it also removes the requirement for employers to pay national insurance, as is the case for apprenticeships, and therefore offers incentives for businesses to take on paid interns.
The loophole I refer to is regularly exploited, not only in this place, but in the world outside—a starting point is the IoD. Until shortly after the First Reading of my Bill, the IoD’s website included a helpful “model internship agreement” for its members, which said:
“This letter confirms the arrangements relating to your unpaid internship. The purpose of this letter is to describe reasonable expectations between us. This letter is not intended to be or give rise to a legally binding contract between us and your internship may be terminated at any time by either of us.”
I now come to the important part, which said:
“You will have no fixed hours of work, but we hope that you will usually be able to attend during our normal office hours on Mondays to Fridays.
We expect you to perform the activities and achieve the learning objectives to the best of your ability”.
That last bit is fair enough. It continued by saying that interns should
“maintain appropriate standards of behaviour at all times.”
Again that is fair enough. It continued:
“We also expect you to comply with our rules, policies, procedures, standards and instructions.”
Learned Members in the Chamber will know that all contracts are agreements, but not all agreements are contracts. That loophole is exploited by some companies that issue internship agreements under which it is expected that an intern will perform workplace activities, but that refuse to pay a wage because no formal contract of employment is signed. Under current legislation, an intern is not explicitly described as a worker and can therefore be exploited for their labour, but the law offers employers protection via this loophole.
Alec Shelbrooke
But they can well be fearful about their future livelihood.
The campaign group Intern Aware has long campaigned to encourage those who have had internships and experienced this problem to speak out. It remains the UK’s leading campaign group against unpaid internships, and I thank it for its support over the past three years.
It is right that we today attempt to give people the protection they need against hugely wealthy organisations such as Harrods and Sony. We must not forget that this is about young people submitting themselves to a process to increase their social mobility, and that their entire future is reliant on its success. It is fundamentally a Conservative principle that the state should encourage, and do all that it can to allow, people to better their lives. Successive Conservative Governments have used their time in office to allow people the social mobility to move forward, whether it be through the 1819 cotton mills and factories Act, the Factory and Workshop Act 1901, the Factories Act 1961, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, policies such as right to buy and Help to Buy, universal credit or the national living wage. The key to social mobility is ensuring that everyone, regardless of background or affluence, has the same opportunities in the working world. The driver of many of our reforms and policies is, and has been, the idea that hard work should always be rewarded.
Philip Davies
I understand that my hon. Friend wants to level the playing field, but his philosophy appears to be that he would rather that no one had an opportunity than that somebody had it. That sounds rather like a socialist principle, rather than a Conservative one.
Alec Shelbrooke
Once again, my hon. Friend pre-empts me; I will give my justification for my stance later in my speech. I am sure that he has the grace to let me explore the argument.
Only those from wealthy backgrounds are able to do unpaid internships without fear, and in years to come that will mean that those who have the most influence on our society come from an elite minority. To quote from the Government’s May 2012 report on social mobility by the right hon. Alan Milburn, progress has been made on moving away from the top jobs being the preserve of those with elite backgrounds. The civil service is quoted as an example. In 2009, 45% of senior civil servants had been privately educated, but by 2012 the figure had been reduced to 27%, with 18% having attended comprehensive school, as I did.
In other professions, there have not been similar reductions. The legal profession, in which, as we all know, would-be barristers have to do a pupillage, is dominated by those whose parents could afford to send them to private school. The last figures that I had, from 2012, showed that 15 of the 17 Supreme Court judges were privately educated; 26 of the 38 lords justices of appeal attended private schools; and 43% of barristers went to fee-paying schools. It should be borne in mind that only 7% of the population are educated at private schools. The foreword to the 2012 “Fair Access to Professional Careers” report by Alan Milburn said:
“The exponential growth in internships in the professions adds up to a profound change in the British labour market. Access to work experience is a new hurdle that would-be professionals now have to clear before they can even get onto the recruitment playing field. Given their centrality to young people’s career prospects, internships should no longer be treated as part of the informal economy. They should be subject to similar rules to other parts of the labour market. That means introducing proper, transparent and fair processes for selection and reasonable terms of employment, including remuneration for internships.”
Alec Shelbrooke
I am exceptionally grateful for that intervention from my hon. Friend, who has identified what I initially wanted to do with this Bill. However, my advice from the Clerks and from people who understand legal matters far better than I do was that it would be full of so many legal loopholes that it would be worthless. We therefore moved to the current position. I hope that is a matter that we could explore in much greater depth in Committee and reach a simpler and more robust legal definition. My hon. Friend has touched on an important aspect. I am a mechanical engineer, not a lawyer, so I have to take advice from those who are more learned.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am sure my hon. Friend speaks from experience.
The disparity between words and action is starkly highlighted by the Institute of Directors, which describes itself as an organisation that opposes long-term unpaid internships yet publishes a model contract for members to get round minimum wage legislation.
I come to some of the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby raised.
According to YouGov, 39% of young people—almost two in five—have turned down an offer of an unpaid internship for financial reasons, and only 4% believe they could definitely afford to do one. That is an important statistic, because all the examples I have heard about the opportunities people have been able to exploit, and some of the interventions that have been made on me, have almost tried to paint a picture suggesting that I am removing opportunity and bringing forward just circumstantial evidence. However, almost 40% of people offered an internship have had to turn it down because they cannot afford to live. That is not an insignificant statistic, and it is not insignificant in terms of the value of this argument.
Some 43% of young people aged between 18 and 24 believe that the need to do an unpaid internship acts as a barrier to their career choices. I genuinely fear that the opportunities available to young people today are decreasing; they are certainly much harder to acquire than they were for me. Like most young people at our local comprehensive school, my sister and I were taught that hard work and determination would help us make something of ourselves in the world of work. Our supportive parents made us work part-time jobs around our education—something that taught us the real value of money, something that we had to do to run our first cars, and something that taught us how to budget, which was a valuable lesson for later life. Unpaid work was simply not an option for me or my sister. Had an unpaid internship been a prerequisite for access to our chosen professions, it would have been a barrier to our getting into the workplace.
The Sutton Trust estimates that expenses-only internships in London cost a young person around £1,000 per month, but there are still people who believe that they are being generous by offering lunch expenses. With 81% of law internships and 61% of PR internships in London, what example does that send to firms carrying out internship programmes?
It is not just those who cannot afford to do an unpaid internship who miss out; it is also businesses and, ultimately, the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) made it clear that the legal profession recognises that point as well. Essentially, creating a system in which only 4% of people feel they would face no financial restrictions to entering unpaid employment could mean that a talent pool of 96% of the rest of the market remained untouched.
It is well recorded that private schools in this country give a marvellous and privileged education to those lucky enough to attend, but in every job I have worked in so far it has been apparent that those with state educations have been just as capable as, and in many cases more capable than, those whose parents were rich enough to send them to a fee-paying school. I do believe there is a role for private schools in the UK, and I believe in parental choice, but it is also the responsibility of the state—
Mr Nuttall
I am very honoured to hear that; to be perfectly honest, I am humbled to hear it, because I am not sure that my speech is worthy of that. Perhaps I have gleaned one or two things from looking at my hon. Friend’s Bill that will genuinely help. I will certainly be able to draw his attention to one or two details, which will assist him.
Philip Davies
Does my hon. Friend agree that we and our hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) are on exactly the same side when it comes to social mobility and wanting to extend opportunities, but that we feel that the Bill will restrict opportunities rather than enhance them? If I can catch your eye later, Mr Deputy Speaker, I might be able to suggest to my hon. Friend how we can work together to extend opportunities, as we both seek to do.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I am sure that you will be able to catch my eye, Mr Davies, subject to the length of Mr Nuttall’s speech.