Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

2nd reading
Saturday 12th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

We are here in the House to answer a very basic question: if we cannot trust a company, can we entrust to it a capability that we need, when that capability is so vital to our strength? That is one reason why the Select Committee has set up a new Sub-Committee on Economic Security, Arms and Export Controls. We will be reporting back to the House on the state of economic security in our country before the summer recess, and I look forward to the hon. Lady’s comments on that report.

The general point I want to land is this: what we value most cannot be entrusted to those we distrust most. The timing of the Bill is critical; we live in an age of intensifying insecurity. President Putin’s violence is unabated, China’s military build-up is unabated and now President Trump threatens to upend the free trading system. In such a world, to surrender our ability to make primary steel would not be a misfortune—it would be negligence.

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend will know that the Select Committee has spoken to defence companies about how necessary it is not to rely on imports at a time such as this. Does he agree that national resilience and defence rely on industrial security?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In this debate, we need to remember that 95% of our rail infrastructure is made by British Steel. British Steel also supplies three quarters of every major construction project in this country. Thanks to the Chancellor, we are about to invest £10 billion in the rearmament of this country; much of what we need to put in place will be made by British Steel. How can we afford to let British Steel go out of business today? How can we vote against the Bill? British Steel is not simply a pillar of British industry: it is a cornerstone of our economic security.

Terms and Conditions of Employment

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

This Government have made a solid commitment to make work pay and put more money into working people’s pockets. In my constituency, we have a large number of distribution jobs, and as a result of this Government’s actions, people in Kettering on the minimum wage will have more money in their pockets to last them through to the end of the month.

Having spent my career in business, I know how important it is for businesses to have a productive, motivated workforce with minimal turnover. That benefits not only businesses but workers. In Kettering, it means that people earning a decent wage will spend their money supporting our local economy. It is shameful that the Conservative party let this country get to a place where people who work full time are queuing at food banks to feed their family. The uplift in the national minimum wage is a huge part of the national renewal that Labour has promised this country, and will mean a pay increase for 3 million people in Kettering and across the UK.

Young people in my constituency deserve a minimum wage that reflects the work they do. I speak to many 18 to 20-year-olds in Kettering who face the same financial pressures as adults older than them. One of the best things about my job is visiting many schools and colleges across my constituency, where young people talk to me about their plans for their future. This uplift will mean a wage boost of 18% for apprenticeships in Kettering, so that we can incentivise young people to see apprenticeships as a financially viable option and start to fill the skills gaps that businesses across the UK face after 14 difficult years under the Conservatives.

The last Labour Government brought in the national minimum wage, and it is this Labour Government who will secure Britain’s future and make work pay.

“Chapter 4A

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lee Barron (Corby and East Northamptonshire) (Lab)]

I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I have said it before, and I will say it again: due to the virtue of my last name, I am the only legitimate union Barron in this place, and I am absolutely proud of it.

It is an honour to speak on this Bill again, and I commend this Government for bringing it forward. We made a commitment to working people before the election, and we are following that through. I welcome the Government’s new clause on agency workers. In Corby we have more employment agencies than any other town in Northamptonshire. We now see that those who work in agency jobs will receive fair treatment in pay, working hours and job security, which is to be welcomed as we aim to create a better local economy for the people of Corby and East Northants.

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. He and I are constituency neighbours. As he will know, there has been a lot of growth in Northamptonshire and increased distribution in the area, so the Government new clause will make a massive difference to our constituents.

[Lee Barron]

It will indeed. I thank my hon. Friend for making that point so well.

This Bill has been a huge move in terms of sick pay, as far as the Government are concerned. It will bring 1.3 million people into getting sick pay for the first time, and we need to welcome that. We might need to have a look at some point in the future to see if there has been a drag downwards in terms of the people around the lower earnings limit, but we should certainly welcome this as a step in the right direction.

This is not just about legislation: we must change the jobs market and the perception of work that some people have in modern Britain. There are still some people who do not recognise the value that working people bring. I had a meeting last week with the parcel delivery company Evri, which operates in all our constituencies. It described the employer-employee relationship as a “master-servant” relationship. I turn around and say that that kind of view of working people is absolutely dated. Evri said that if it changed the status of its workers, it would want its “pound of flesh”—its words, not mine.

While we have those who treat and describe working people in such a way, we must bring in legislation to ensure that they cannot treat people like that. Working people are not servants, and they should be treated with the dignity and respect that they deserve. That is a fundamentally wrong, crass and outdated way to view employment in modern Britain, and as long as there are still those who think like that, we need to ensure that we change things for the better, and this Bill goes a long way towards doing that.

The question I often ask myself is this: why do those who want economic growth think that we make growth happen through insecure work, minimal wage rates and zero-hours contracts, under which people do not know what they will earn in order to support their family from one week to the next? Work should not mean a lifetime trapped in poverty; it should be the route out of poverty, and this Bill is a step in the right direction to ensure that is what it becomes once again.

I chair the all-party parliamentary group on modernising employment, and at our last meeting we heard from Zelda Perkins, of the Can’t Buy My Silence campaign, about non-disclosure agreements. Her testimony makes it absolutely clear that more needs to be done in that space, and if there is room to do so through this Bill, I urge the Government to accept the amendments that were described earlier. The APPG looks to the future of work and what good employment looks like. At the end of the month, the APPG is going to look at good work, the new deal and this Bill. We will look at the full effects of this Bill to see how we can take forward its benefits and transfer them into the modern world of work. In the 21st century, modern employment should look like security of work, well-paid and with progression opportunities, in order to keep families out of poverty. This Bill goes some way towards doing that.

In conclusion, I urge all Members to support this Bill, which bans exploitative zero-hours contracts. Saying that this will somehow stop flexible working is for the birds—it is not the case. We had flexible working long before we had zero-hours contracts. We survived then, we can survive now, and we will survive into the future.

Department for Business and Trade

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is an extraordinary champion for the city he represents, and for the industry that has made that city great over the centuries. He is absolutely right: when the industrial strategy is published, we must understand whether it is driving growth and better wages, and whether it is transforming people’s ability to earn a good life in every corner of the country. We cannot again have the situation that we had over the past 10 to 15 years, where 70% of the growth and wealth in our country has been concentrated in London and the south-east. We must genuinely level-up this country and pull together a cross-party consensus, to the extent that we can, on the changes that are needed. Why? Because if we can get that cross-party consensus, we can redesign the economic institutions in our country in a way that is sustainable for the long term.

I wish to flag three issues that pose questions to the Minister who is asking us to agree the estimates today. First, there is a real worry in the small business community about whether it will be adequately supported by some of the changes that the Minister is helping to drive through. We all know that what has bedevilled our economy for a long time is a long tail of underproductive, often smaller, firms. If we are to raise wages, raise the rate of economic growth, and become the fastest growing economy in the G7, we must transform the productivity rate of a lot of our small firms. How will new technology be diffused through supply chains? How can we ensure that small and medium-sized businesses have support in deploying new technology that could change their business?

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his chairmanship of the Committee. Given the Prime Minister’s recent announcements, and our increased defence spending, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is important to support small and medium-sized defence enterprises?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is a brilliant member of the Committee, and she makes a brilliant point. We know that we must come to a strategic culture and defence mindset in this country, so that our industry can innovate as fast as the battlefield changes. We all know that there are defence manufacturers—drone manufacturers in particular—that struggle to get the working capital that they need to fund and grow their businesses, month by month. We will have to change the way that we support smaller businesses, and that means transforming access to finance.

Time and again, the Committee has heard about business leaders being brought in once a firm gets to a particular size, and it being snapped up and shipped out, in particular to the United States, because we do not seem able to supply equity finance or debt finance of between £50 million and £500 million. We have to think anew about how we ensure that the British Business Bank, the National Wealth Fund, the private sector and the proposed changes to pension funds work together to completely revolutionise access to finance for businesses in this market. In the estimates, there looks to be a welcome £414 million increase in funding for the British Business Bank. Although it is hard to decode the accounts, it looks like about £127 million of that is provision for bad debt. Will the Minister clarify that? The Committee will continue to press for us to completely transform access to finance, including through an inquiry that we will launch later in the year.

The final fear that I wanted to flag, which is coming through loud and clear to Committee members, is that the Government just do not work for business in the way that they need to. We have heard over and over again about one Department doing something that completely undermines the work of another, or one regulator doing something that completely undermines what a different Department or regulator is trying to do. We do not yet see anything about how we can knit Government together in a wholly new way in either the Green Paper on industrial strategy, or any of the commentary about the estimates. In the good old days, when I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, what we were beginning to test—

Budget Resolutions

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

Like many of my hon. Friends, I have spent my career in business—specifically, in retail head offices—so I am proud to be a part of a Government that is pro-business and pro-worker. The last time a Labour Government delivered a Budget in this House, I was 12 years old. That Labour Government looked after our public services, focused on cutting crime, were ambitious about our education and invested in our NHS. It is because of those decisions that I had the opportunities that I did and that I am standing in this House today. Since then, those priorities have been forgotten and our constituents have had to bear the brunt.

People in my constituency of Kettering know all too well the price they have paid for the last 14 years of Tory failure: crumbling hospitals and schools, rising crime and a crisis in SEND. Working people in this country have not had a Government who have worked for them for 14 years. It is shameful that the previous Conservative Government promised funding that simply did not exist. They let our communities think that they were going to receive money, knowing that it was not there and that it would be someone else’s problem after the election.

We now finally have a Labour Government and a truly Labour Budget that prioritises working people. It is incredible to be the youngest woman in the House today, but it is even more incredible to have watched the first female Chancellor deliver the first Labour Budget in 14 years. It shows me and many young women that there is no limit to our ambitions. Regardless of what the Leader of the Opposition thinks, this was a glass ceiling shattered.

There are some hugely important measures in this Budget for the people of Kettering. Our public services deserve better than the treatment they have had for the last 14 years, and I am proud to be part of a Labour Government who are fixing the foundations and rebuilding Britain. People all over the country are waiting to see what this Government will deliver and, thanks to this Budget, we can give them hope that they will have an NHS fit for the future and a country that invites investment, without barriers to opportunity, and in which working people are at the heart of everything we do.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call Charlie Maynard. Not present.