Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Whitchurch and Lord Fuller

Committee stage
Monday 16th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, this nation must earn its place in the world, and, regrettably, we are losing to some of our industrial competitors, particularly in energy-intensive industries such as steel, aluminium and so on. We must live by our wits, and that means increasingly leaning on highly skilled, knowledge-based employment in an economy that values strong intellectual property rights, the rule of contract and property rights themselves. That requires an economy with flexibility and agility.

Earlier today, along with other noble Lords, I sat on the Home-based Working Committee. We are seeing firsthand how the world of work is changing, not just in the way that we go to work but in the way that we sometimes work from home. The entire technological underpinning of our economy is changing too. We have not yet seen the end of artificial intelligence and what it might do to low-skilled, somewhat transactional arrangements.

It does not help the economy, and by extension those who work in it, if all participating employers and unions do not recognise that we have a duty to move with the times. We cannot put a wall around our economy and create some high-cost walled garden as the rest of the world trades its way to prosperity, leaving us behind. I strongly support Amendment 256 and want to give more power to the officer who, more than anyone, can cajole and encourage workers’ representatives to recognise the world as it is, rather than the world as they might wish it to be.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, for tabling Amendment 256. We fully recognise the importance of supporting growth and international competitiveness across our economy, and we will of course continue to pursue policies that will deliver on our economic ambition. However, we do not consider this duty to be appropriate for the certification officer.

The certification officer is not a traditional regulator; they are an independent quasi-judicial officeholder. Their core functions are to oversee regulatory compliance fairly and impartially and to ensure trade unions and employers’ associations adhere to statutory requirements in relation to their finances and governance. This includes investigating complaints, maintaining accurate registers and ensuring that democratic processes are upheld. Imposing a duty to promote growth and competitiveness would cut across this role. It risks introducing competing priorities, blurring legal clarity and ultimately undermining confidence in the CO’s neutrality. We cannot require the certification officer both to conduct their judicial and regulatory functions and to deliver economic outcomes. The certification officer has no role in relation to the international competitiveness of the United Kingdom economy or its growth in the medium to long term.

As noble Lords will know, this Government have been active in requiring a number of regulators to apply a growth duty. Those bodies to which the growth duty currently applies are purely regulators—regulators that set strategies and make decisions that significantly affect the type, scale and location of economic activity in important sectors. The decisions regulators take can set the parameters for economic activity across the economy, and, of course, we recognise that; but the certification officer does not have this responsibility or power. We share the noble Lord’s commitment to economic growth, but it must be pursued in the right way. Furthermore, requiring the certification officer to follow a growth duty would not be practicable, and there is no evidence that imposing such a duty would have any meaningful impact on the UK’s growth or international competitiveness. It would be like asking a court to consider cases based on their impact on economic growth rather than on the evidence of the case.

For those reasons, I must ask the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, to withdraw Amendment 256.