Zero-hours Contracts

Debate between Richard Bacon and Hannah Bardell

Wednesday 27th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bacon]

I completely agree.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing a debate on such an important issue. I think it would be fair to say that such employers are not in the minority. I agree with some of what he says, but not all of it. What assurances can he give to those on the Opposition Benches that members of his Front-Bench team will bring to an end exploitative zero-hours contracts and protect workers’ rights, as the SNP-led Scottish Government are doing through their Scottish business pledge and fair work convention?

[Mr Bacon]

Should the Prime Minister choose to appoint me to the Government, I will start to give such assurances. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing what assurances my hon. Friend the Minister will give.

I asked USDAW—the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers—to provide me with individual examples of exploitation. I was slightly surprised, but also pleased, when it told me that it had negotiated away zero-hours contracts in most of the places where its members worked. Its policy document states that “short-hours contracts” are in many ways an issue of bigger concern, but I am convinced that there is a problem. Actually, I believe that the problem is more extensive in the area of domiciliary care, where careworkers are often forced to rush from care appointment to care appointment without being given adequate time at each appointment, or time to travel between appointments, for which they are not paid.

A freedom of information request by the trade union Unison suggests that 93% of councils in England and Wales do not make it a contractual condition for the home care providers that they commission to pay their home careworkers for their travel time. That is despite its being the main reason why so many home careworkers receive pay below the national minimum wage. I believe that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is investigating some home care firms, and I hope that they will be named and shamed.

After I spoke with Unison, it sent me the testimonies of several careworkers, some of them anonymised because the workers are simply too frightened to be open. One such home careworker wrote:

“I am on zero contract hours…If I kick off, I have the fear that they can turn around and take me off my calls…I work six days a week, which accounts to me putting in forty five hours plus…But I am lucky if I get paid for 28 of those hours”.

Another anonymous home careworker wrote:

“Until very recently I was working in home care, visiting vulnerable adults with a range of problems, such as dementia, MS, Parkinson’s, acquired brain injury, mental illness and the effects of stroke. Because I was providing a vital service to people with acute problems, I found the work highly rewarding. I really wish I could say the same about the pay and conditions of the job! Because no hours were guaranteed, there was no job security and I remember feeling nervous about complaining, in case my hours for the following week were cut. I was on little more than the minimum wage and out of this meagre sum I had to pay for my uniform and fuel”.

That is back to the worst management practices of the 1960s and 1970s.

Unison also sent me the testimony of a home careworker called Helen, who said this:

“I’m a home care worker and have been for most of my working life. I really don’t ever think about doing anything else. I love my job, I love the variety, I love the people I am lucky enough to work with. I don’t like the insecurity, I don’t like the debts, I don’t like the nights I lie awake wondering when will I ever be financially secure. I have seen many good workers leave, frustrated at the poor pay and the way zero-hours contracts are used by way of punishment and reward. If you turn down a shift, hours you were depending on can be taken and given to others, sometimes with only hours’ notice. I have seen how many use this as a way to simply force out staff who may have complained about quality of care. Is this acceptable? ‘Duty of Care’ means that we have to raise concerns, yet many are too scared of the implications financially if they do. Isn’t it time someone understood their Duty of Care to us? Isn’t it time those with the power to make a difference respected and valued care as much as I do?

I want to say a brief word about housing schemes, not only because the Minister used to be the Minister for planning and knows of my interest in it, but because it is potentially directly relevant to the provision of home care. It is an extraordinary fact that when planners look at housing schemes they are not required to consider the overall social impact. It is true that the key watchword is “sustainability”, but too often that means no more or less than what an expensive lawyer at a planning inquiry wants it to mean.

With regard to thinking holistically about the communities we want to see—and then designing and building places for people to live in, rather than large numbers of identical boxes—we are still in the dark ages. For example, if a mature couple with grown-up children and elderly parents visit a show home on a typical new-build development and asks how much sheltered accommodation is integrated into the scheme, where their elderly mum could come and live so that they and her grandchildren could see each other more often and more easily, they are treated almost as if they are mad. But if we were to design in such care provision when building new communities, we could do a much better job, with some permanent residential home careworkers built into the equation, without spending more money, and quite possibly spending less, while getting a better outcome. I believe that in the domiciliary care sector, there is still what amounts to systematic exploitation. I hope that the Government will look at the matter carefully.

The best case for zero-hours contracts is that they can provide an economical and low-risk way for employers to take a good look at new workers. From the employees’ point of view, they can be a way of getting into the world of work and showing what someone is capable of, leading on to better, more secure and better paid employment. The contracts can also provide invaluable flexibility for small organisations, including charities.

The best argument against zero-hours contracts is that they provide opportunities for unscrupulous employers who are determined to exploit people and who engage in practices that they would not wish to endure themselves, and that, in certain sectors such as domiciliary care, the problem amounts to systematic exploitation.

It can be true at one and the same time that zero-hours contracts can provide a useful and even invaluable tool to some organisations and industries and that they can be misused by companies determined to engage in systematic exploitation of vulnerable workers in certain sectors—domiciliary care, for example. In a Westminster Hall debate on home careworkers the year before last, the then Minister for care, the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), stated:

“the idea of a zero-hours contract is, in most circumstances, completely incompatible with a model of high quality care, in which the individual really gets to know their care worker.”—[Official Report, 6 March 2013; Vol. 559, c. 262WH.]

This Minister needs to keep an eye on the issue. Zero-hours contracts are not going away. They have their place; they can even be invaluable. However, they are also a potential seedbed for gross exploitation.

I have five suggestions for the Minister. Will he undertake to keep a very close eye on the issue by establishing a small working group to keep him updated on issues around the use and misuse of zero-hours contracts? Secondly, will he undertake to work closely with the new Minister for Community and Social Care, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), an ideal appointment to that post, to ensure that firms providing care services are taking the required steps to stamp out bad practice and look after their employees? That could also ensure that the Government placed sustained pressure on such firms to do so.

Thirdly, will the Minister assist in establishing suitable whistleblower arrangements, or publicising existing whistleblower arrangements with trusted partners, so that vulnerable workers in areas such as the care sector feel confident about exposing malpractice? Will he work with HM Revenue and Customs, encouraging it to pursue cases where there are clear breaches of employment law—for example, the payment of the national minimum wage to careworkers who are not paid for travelling between appointments—so that unscrupulous employers have a justified fear of ending up in the courts?

Will the Minister work with the excellent Minister for Housing and Planning—or encourage others to do so; this may be outwith his remit—to encourage more truly holistic housing schemes that provide long-term care solutions that are better for those in need of care, their relatives, careworkers and taxpayers, rather than engorging a small number of private sector providers who are diversifying because of the thinner pickings now available from PFI?

In our excellent Queen’s Speech today, we rightly heard about the Government’s determination to be a Government of one nation. “One nation” means that we look after taxpayers’ money and look very sceptically before allowing large private equity companies to hoover up cash that might well be better and more effectively spent directly by local community care co-operatives. “One nation” means that we encourage labour market flexibility but do not tolerate exploitation. “One nation” means that we look out for all our people. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.