Summer Jobs

Debate between Scott Arthur and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 7th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

Good employers, who want to keep their employees, do not do stupid things that upset their employees. Good employers will always want to keep good people in order to build their business.

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Member give way on that point?

[Damian Hinds]

I had better not. Although, it always brightens my life to hear from the hon. Gentleman, so I will give way.

[Dr Arthur]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who has been taking a lot of interventions. Does he acknowledge that we are here to think about those not-so-good employers, not just the good ones? That is what the Employment Rights Act is about. At the weekend I met an employer who had minor concerns about what it was going to mean for him, but he said that, by and large, he was already doing a lot of this stuff. It is not about the good employers; it is about the not-so-good ones.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman is right, of course. I do not think anybody in the House of Commons would argue that there should be no employment or workplace regulation at all. [Interruption.] Well—actually, I do not think anybody does, genuinely. I certainly do not. I welcome very many of the rights that have come over the years. However, it would be totally ignorant to suggest that new inflexibilities and rigidities can be brought into the labour market without their having an effect on unemployment. Whenever there is an effect on unemployment, there is always a magnified effect on youth unemployment, and we want to ensure that young people can get into and stay in jobs.

I want to speak briefly about the costs of employment. This is much harder to talk about, because whenever anybody talks about the realities of equalising pay between younger people and slightly older adults—not that people do so very often—they can be vilified easily for being heartless, uncaring, discriminatory—you name it. However, sometimes being in this place as a politician and a representative and having the best interests of our constituents at heart means having to say difficult things. This difficult thing is something that I think most people here know—including, actually, most Labour MPs—but it is difficult to say.

Let me take a little bit of the heat and politics out of it by talking about a hypothetical situation. This is not the situation that we actually have today, because we have differential national insurance contributions by age. Imagine a situation where an employer has a job vacancy and they have two applicants who in all other respects are the same, but one is 30 years old and one is 18. Who is the employer going to employ at exactly the same wage, with all other things being equal? They are, of course, going to employ the person with experience—the person with both work experience and life experience, who has just been doing it a little longer, working with teams, dealing with colleagues and dealing with customers.

I use that hypothetical situation just to establish the principle that wages do have an effect, and that is why the Low Pay Commission—[Interruption.] The Minister can screw up his face again if he wishes.