Employment Rights Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 23rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

In conclusion, these amendments are not designed to obstruct the Bill but to strengthen it. They seek to ensure that freelancers, particularly those working in the arts and cultural sector, are heard, supported and protected. I beg to move.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I declare an interest as a freelance television producer. Although I was not able to add my name to Amendment 160, my support for it is undiminished. Fortunately, I was able to add my name to Amendment 161, which I know would also give much needed clarity to freelancers.

Much of the creative industries’ employment, particularly in television, is in crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people working in the industry are unemployed, and many of them are freelance. Action needs to be taken now to protect some of the most skilled and experienced talent in this country. They need support in legislation, and urgently. The actions suggested in Amendments 160 and 161 would go some way to help their predicament.

Like my noble friend Lord Clancarty, I support the Government’s creative industries sector plan, which will set up a creative freelance champion. I welcome the Government saying that the champion’s role will be developed in discussion with industry. However, I have spoken to freelance advocates in various sectors of the economy and they all say that the champion’s powers need to be laid down in the Bill if they are to be effective.

I echo my noble friend Lord Clancarty in his concern about the powers of the champion. As it stands in the industrial strategy document, the champion will be giving out advice, which might make the Government feel good but will not definitively improve the lot of freelancers.

My fear is that the new champion will be nothing more than a data collector, whereas the problems of freelancers need to be addressed with decisive legislative powers. Their success will come down to the powers they wield. Noble Lords have only to look at the Office of the Small Business Commissioner. The outgoing commissioner, Liz Barclay, has done extraordinarily well as a vigorous campaigner for small business, but she has limited powers to mediate. She cannot make decisions, nor take enforcement action. I believe that proposed new subsection (6), to be inserted by Amendment 160, especially paragraph (b), would be some remedy when setting up the freelance commissioner.

The Good Work Review sets out a whole series of commitments to the self-employed, including badly needed strengthening of their rights to a written contract, action to tackle late payments, and extended health and safety protections, all of which are obstacles faced by freelancers and many of which cannot be tackled by the freelancer themselves without damaging their reputation and limiting their careers. Amendment 160 would give specific powers to the freelance commissioner to deal with this problem.

If the Government are not going to accept this proposal for a commissioner, I press the Minister on what kind of action can be taken to implement effective solutions in these areas. I am particularly exercised over the area of contracts. How will the new champion examine the myriad contracts in existence and the variety of issues they tackle? For instance, many freelancers are asked in their contracts to opt out of the Working Time Regulations so that they can work up to 15 hours a day and, on some days, 18 hours a day. This trend is increasing in the current climate of diminishing budgets and ever-tightening schedules.

This plays into one of the most pressing issues for freelancers: health and safety. Many big film and television productions set up discrete, single-vehicle companies solely for the period of the production. They often do not have an HR person or anybody who is concerned specifically with health and safety. These vehicles are dissolved once the production has ended so that there is nobody with long-term responsibility for what happens to a production team. As a result, so many companies create schedules in which 15-hour working days are becoming the norm, rather than the exception, as used to be the case. A freelance commissioner should be able to examine and stop these abuses.

The commissioner also needs to examine the financial issues faced by freelancers. The nature of their work has the advantage of flexibility and variety, but many disadvantages when it comes to pension provision. Most are covered when in work, but often there are lacunae between contracts which leave freelancers with poor pension provision. A commissioner needs to be able to sort out a hybrid pension product, like a lifetime ISA. This would give an option of adjustable contributions or those that could be paused, or consolidating retirement savings into a single annual event.

Just as importantly, the commissioner would need to champion professional career development. At the moment, there is so little training or continuous career development for freelancers. Successful training programmes would create qualified and technical staff for the industry. The solution should include tax relief, with a structural cap on expenses relating to career development.

Part of the problem in protecting freelancers is defining who they are. So many production workers operate on non-permanent contracts. They are technically classified as self-employed, but their working conditions do not support the definition. They cannot negotiate the hours nor send substitutes in their place, nor operate with genuine autonomy. The creative industries sector plan lists a range of self-employed categories which could be covered by the freelance champion—these were mentioned by my noble friend Lord Freyberg.

This brings us to Amendment 161. The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Freyberg, set out many reasons why this amendment is crucial to ensure that freelancers are treated properly. Definition is crucial in so many areas of work in the creative industries, which once again brings me to highlight the lack of health and safety enforcement for freelancers. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 says there needs to be adequate training of staff to ensure that health and safety procedures are understood and adhered to. Unfortunately, so many independent production companies regard only their small full-time core teams as staff, and not the majority of the production team, who are freelance and treated differently. One result is that the production company pays only for the core team to go on health and safety courses, and the freelance staff are forced to pay hundreds of pounds to fund themselves to go on the same courses, which are essential for the safe delivery of the production. Even when the production company does pay for freelance staff to go on these courses, there are problems. I have spoken to health and safety course providers who say the productions have asked them to drop the module on long working hours.

If Amendment 161 is accepted, the confusion over what constitutes “staff” would be clarified. Freelancers have problems with the IR35 status when HMRC claims that the freelancer is employed and so cannot benefit from the tax advantages of being self-employed. It can take time for a freelancer to prove their status.

I know that the Minister and the Government are on the side of freelancers, but we need to make sure that the freelance champion can do so much more than just deliver warm words. A freelance commissioner would have clearly defined, effective decision-making and enforcement powers. Only then will many hard-pressed freelancers be properly supported.