Employment Rights Bill

Sarah Edwards Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders]

I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which includes an election donation from the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers and my membership of the Unite and GMB unions.

I welcome the Bill’s return to the House and the opportunity to consider the amendments made in the other place. I also welcome the new Secretary of State to his place and thank him for his kind words. I also welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Kate Dearden), to her ministerial position—undoubtedly the best job in Government—and wish her every success in that role. I know that she will be a champion for workers and that she will be committed to introducing the “make work pay” agenda in full, as we promised in our manifesto.

I am speaking a few rows back from where I had expected to be today. The shadow Secretary of State mentioned getting a short-notice cancellation payment—I am afraid that has not winged its way to me yet. However, I am delighted to be speaking in any capacity, because this Bill really is what a Labour Government should be delivering on. I was able, alongside my right hon. Friends the Members for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) and for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), to take the new deal for working people—a policy programme carefully developed in opposition—and turn it into legislation that was laid before the House within 100 days of taking office, as we promised we would. While I started my ministerial role as I ended it—fired with enthusiasm—my hopes for the meaningful change that the Bill can deliver remain undimmed.

That we are here entering the Bill’s final stages is testament to the hard work and dedication of those who developed the policy programme both in opposition and in government. I place on record my thanks to those in the Department for Business and Trade who helped shape those manifesto commitments into the Bill. I also pay tribute to Baroness Jones of Whitchurch, who did a sterling job of guiding the legislation through the other place amid intense scrutiny and opposition, which of course we will talk about.

I will not go through every Lords amendment; I will just pick out a few of those I consider to be most damaging and undermining of the intentions that we set out in our manifesto about how we will rebalance the workplace to make it work for ordinary people. First, Lords amendment 1 completely undermines the principle, set out in our manifesto, of banning exploitative zero-hours contracts. The amendment would water down the commitment we gave to provide workers with an offer of a guaranteed-hours contract to a right to request guaranteed hours.

There has long been a misunderstanding—perhaps a wilful misunderstanding—of how the policy operates. It does not prevent those who want to remain on zero-hours contracts from continuing to do so, and neither does it prevent employers from hiring seasonal workers. It simply provides the opportunity for those who want certainty about the hours they work, week to week and month to month, to have guaranteed hours. We understand that not everyone will take advantage of that, but it might just be a lifeline for those who struggle to balance fixed costs such as bills, housing and childcare by taking out the stress of the potential variations that we see so often in zero-hours contracts at the moment. This is a very good thing for the Government to be doing, because one of the key principles in the Bill is the need to restore security and dignity at work, which would be damaged by the amendment.

I understand that the noble Lords argued that the wording of the amendment would prevent employers from rejecting guaranteed-hours requests. It is presented as a reasonable compromise that achieves the same outcome, maintaining workers’ rights to guaranteed hours while removing the employer’s requirement to make offers. I disagree with that analysis. It shifts the right from one that is passively applied to one that has to be actively invoked by workers. This means that an individual would have to know their rights and have the confidence to approach their employer in order to benefit from them.

As the Secretary of State said, those working on zero-hours contracts are some of the least empowered workers in this country, their contracts are inherently precarious, and those working on them are more likely to be younger, working part time and in low-paid sectors. There are plenty of examples out there of how the allocation of hours has been used by management as a tool of control and, in some cases, a tool of abuse. The Bill already sets out a number of anti-avoidance measures, because we know that that massive power imbalance has to be addressed, and this amendment would fatally undermine all that good work.

I have similar concerns about Lords amendments 6 and 7, which seek to impose 48 hours as a reasonable notice period. If passed, these amendments would remove any chance for workers or employers to make representations in a consultation process, and instead force an arbitrary cut-off of 48 hours. Throughout my time as a Minister, we were committed to consulting widely on changes and incorporating the feedback we received into our approach. I remember the Conservatives complaining during the original passage of the Bill that we were not consulting enough, yet now they lend their support to amendments that would chop that consultation off entirely.

That said, I must welcome the comments from Opposition Front Benchers in the other place, who indicated that they supported the principle of compensation for cancelled or curtailed shifts. I note that Lord Hunt of Wirral said:

“We are fully in agreement that workers deserve reasonable notice of shifts. That is a fair and modern expectation.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 July 2025; Vol. 847, c. 1612.]

Quite how that fits with the Tory pledge to scrap the entire Bill, I do not know. Of course, it is to be expected, as night follows day, that they will object to measures that improve the rights of working people, but that would mean scrapping things that I thought even they supported, including ending non-disclosure agreements for victims of sexual harassment, a new right for bereavement leave for those who have suffered a pregnancy loss, and finally an end to fire and rehire, which they did so much to condemn while in government but did nothing of substance to deal with. That is the Conservative position on this, and it is something that the British people will completely and wholeheartedly reject.

Lords amendment 23 relates to unfair dismissal, which is something I know rather a lot about. It seeks to impose a six-month qualifying period for unfair dismissal rights rather than day one rights, which everyone on the Labour Benches has campaigned for. This is another brazen attempt by the other place to remove a clear manifesto commitment. I and other Labour Members were elected on a mandate to introduce basic rights, including unfair dismissal rights, from day one. How can we allow people who essentially have a job for life to prevent millions of people in this country from getting basic employment protections on day one? It is fundamentally wrong that workers can currently be treated so disposably, and that they can be dismissed arbitrarily with no legal recourse for two years. This is about fairness. A worker deserves to be treated with dignity, fairness and respect, no matter how long they have worked for an employer.

[Sarah Edwards (Tamworth) (Lab)]

I commend my hon. Friend for the work that he has done and that the Department continues to do on this. One of the interesting things about this provision is that, in 2013, the Conservatives changed the period from 12 months to 24 months. They increased the amount of time that people were in an insecure position in the workplace. It is essential that we support working families and working people, so does he agree that this is absolutely the right step forward?

[Justin Madders]

I certainly do. In my conversations with employers, I did not come across any who were prepared to defend the status quo of a two-year qualifying period for unfair dismissal, because they recognise that is an awfully long time to be in employment without any protection at all.

The Government are sensitive to concerns about hiring, however, and we have included provisions in the Bill to establish a statutory probationary period during which an employee’s performance and suitability can be established, and a lighter-touch dismissal procedure will apply during that time. This will mean that, to coin a phrase, if a new hire is not working out, an employer will be able to follow a lighter-touch procedure to dismiss them fairly. But crucially, there will still have to be a process; there cannot be an arbitrary dismissal without explanation, as happens far too often now.

We know that recruiting someone is an expensive and time-consuming business, if it is done properly, so why would we not expect the same care and attention to be put into determining whether someone had a future in the business at all? This country, to our shame, has one of the least regulated approaches to dismissal protection in the OECD, leaving an estimated 9 million workers vulnerable to dismissals without protections. How can someone plan their life, make financial commitments and so forth if they can be sacked at the drop of a hat? We believe that this must change. People deserve greater security and dignity at work, and they deserve to be treated fairly, not just as disposable commodities.

This Bill strikes the right balance, and although much of the detail is to be determined by consultation and regulations—I will come back to that later—it sends an important message that we will not accept the race to the bottom any more and that dignity and security at work start from day one. That is the lodestone of what a Labour Government should be about.

I am delighted that the Bill is on track to become law in a matter of weeks. It is a landmark piece of legislation that will end the race to the bottom and provide the biggest uplift in workers’ rights in a generation. We on the Labour side have long been clear that it will benefit everyone across the country. It will be good for workers and it will be good for businesses.

Passing this Bill is not, of course, the end of the matter. There is so much more that needs to be done outside the Bill, particularly on finally ending the industrial-scale exploitation that is bogus self-employment. We cannot have a Bill that massively increases protections for millions of people at work but fails to address the growing scandal of a deliberate manipulation of the law to deny people the same basic protections. Over the coming years, there will be a range of secondary legislation, codes of practice and guidance issued to implement the Bill’s provisions. I wish the new Minister every success in working through and navigating the 80 or so statutory instruments that will be needed to ensure that the Bill is implemented in full and that we stick to the road map that was published earlier in the summer. I welcome the Secretary of State’s comment that the road map remains in place in full.

However, given the volume and complexity of all this—the details of the consultations, the scope of the regulations, the language in the codes of practice and even the commencement dates—it goes without saying that there are plenty of opportunities for those who do not want to see workers’ rights improved in this country to chip away at the strong baseline that the Bill represents, and of course it is far easier to do that in some stuffy Committee Room away from the main Chamber. I do not think that is the Minister’s intention, but I am not sure that everyone shares our enthusiasm for improving the rights of millions of working people, so we will all be looking at this closely and encouraging the Minister to keep to our manifesto commitments that we all believe so strongly in.

On that point, I know how enthusiastic Labour Members are about the Bill, and how enthusiastic many of the people we represent are about it, so let us see that enthusiasm replicated across the whole of Government. What better way to demonstrate that we are still the party of working people, and what better way to show that democratic politics can still make a difference than by championing the many ways that this Bill will improve people’s lives? From the shop worker on a zero-hours contract who for the first time will have a right to guaranteed hours, to the social care assistant whose voice will finally be heard through a national negotiating body, to the warehouse operative who will be able to have a trade union collectively bargain on their behalf, this Bill can be the antidote to the politics of division and despair. Let us not be timid in our backing of improved employment rights. Let us not apologise for at last restoring balance to the workplace. Let us be confident, and committed to all the good things the Bill can achieve, and let us shout them from the rooftops.

This Bill is Labour at its best. It shows us what can be done when the broadest experiences and the voices of our movement are harnessed together to deliver change. I am proud that I played my part in that, and I will do all I can to ensure that we deliver on the promises we made to the British people to truly make sure that work pays.