Employment Rights Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Lister. I hope the Government, in this Bill or elsewhere, follow up some of those points as a matter of urgency.

I am prone to write my speeches at the last minute. When I noticed I was number 41 of the speakers, I wondered what the hell I could actually say that was original. I turned to a paper I had received but not read before: a submission to the TUC about worker conditions and trade union rights. The paper compared rights here with the average situation in the rest of the OECD. It showed systematically that the average position in other OECD countries, for both individual rights and collective trade union rights, is substantially better than it is here. This covered a whole range of areas, such as hours of work, holiday, conditions of employment, dismissals and overtime, and collective aspects such as union recognition, collective bargaining and rules covering strike action. There were differences between different countries but, on average, on every single item, bar one or two, it is better in the rest of the OECD than it is here. One exception was redundancy provision, which means that you walk away with more money in the UK, but that also makes redundancy more likely. This was systematic across a whole range of conditions.

There is one other macro feature of the difference between our workforce and those in other OECD countries. Can you guess what it is? It is that, on average, productivity has risen far faster in the other countries than it has here. There is at least some degree of causal relationship between the terms and conditions in which workers and unions operate with employers and the fact that other countries’ productivity has risen substantially faster. The Government, and all those who purport to speak for British employers and industry in a hysterical way regarding the provisions of this Bill, should address that. Improved productivity would be a serious contribution towards our growth targets and the betterment of our economy as a whole. That is a macro point which speakers opposite have failed to recognise, and need to.

I want to mention another few points. I am a little unclear—perhaps my noble friend the Minister can clarify this—on what the fair work agency will do and how far it will replace other agencies. When I was the Minister responsible for agriculture, I seized on a Private Member’s Bill to introduce the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, which, to some extent, brought some order to a feature of modern slavery. We will have a debate on modern slavery tomorrow, so I will not go too far into that. One of the difficulties of not having direct regulators and enforcement agencies having too large a responsibility for one new quango is that some of the injustices that arise, which were identified by my noble friend Lady O’Grady’s committee on modern slavery, will not be tackled. I would like more detail about what the fair work agency will do and how it relates to existing bodies.

For some reason, I was never general-secretary of the TUC, but I was general-secretary of the Labour Party, and therefore I warm to the point of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, about the political levy. I sat on his committee for part of its time, and I largely agreed that we needed to tackle the question of political funding more broadly—not only the political levy but the way in which our political parties are financed in total. That goes beyond this Bill considerably, but it needs addressing. Continuously switching from opting in and opting out of the political levy is not the way to deal with it.

Employers: Fire and Rehire Tactics

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

I welcome the noble Lord back to Questions. I think that is a very good proposal; we can put it forward to the relevant department.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, this Session has been plagued by thick Bills. To effect the change that my noble friend calls for would take only a very simple Bill. Can we expect it to be announced in the King’s Speech in November?

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

As we have said clearly, we are consulting and there will be a code of practice. This practice is used very rarely. Even the TUC in 2020 indicated that only 3% of employers had used fire and rehire and only 9% of employees had experienced it even as a threat. Therefore, the code is the right way forward in this case.

Car Industry

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 17th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

A number of automotive businesses are investing in this country and will continue to do so. They realise the opportunity: we have a very good workforce and we are extremely good at R&D. I can see no reason why we should not continue to play an important role.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, during the passage of the Bill we have just dealt with, there was a move at an earlier stage to make sure that the European standards for vehicles—on emissions, parts and safety—were not revoked, just like that, by the Bill. The Government refused to do that, and yet none of the investors we are trying to attract are British-owned and most of them have big investments in Europe. For us to depart from our vehicle standards by anything significant would be destroying any ability of the industry in this country to compete. Will the Minister indicate that we will keep in line, broadly speaking at least, with European vehicle standards?

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

Virtually all vehicle manufacture is integrated throughout a number of different countries, and I can see no reason why we would not continue to follow the route that we have done in the past, and that of course involves our relationship with the EU. I know that the Secretary of State has been in close contact on this very matter.

Subsidy Control Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, in introducing the Bill, the Minister said that we are getting away from an overburdensome and prescriptive European system. I will comment on that in a minute but, until we get detailed guidance from the Minister, we cannot tell quite how prescriptive and overburdensome this legislation will be. We are being asked to buy this Bill without knowing the form it will take and in particular its impact on the devolved authorities, local authorities and administrative bodies in this country.

When I chaired one of the sub-committees of the European Union Committee, we found that the European Union state aid regime was indeed very centralised and authoritative but, as my noble friend Lady Blake and the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, said, we did not actually put to it many of the propositions that other member states did. Germany and France had more than twice as much state aid as the UK, because the UK system was overcautious and, in many cases, anti-intervention. Ministers in Whitehall were always faced with civil servants telling them, “This will not pass the state aid regime”. In reality, the European system was not disproportionately unfavourable towards British propositions—those propositions were never put, to the detriment of many of the most deprived areas of our country.

The history is not correct, and nor is the future. The devolved Administrations have very serious concerns about this Bill; for example, it is not clear whether they can invent streamlined schemes themselves, whether they can appeal against decisions by the CMA or whether they will have any representation in the whole process. As I understand it, at the moment the Welsh and Scottish Governments are not prepared to put the appropriate legislation through their Parliaments. That is a serious constitutional issue, one which we need to understand a bit more about before finishing the process of the Bill in this House. I leave it to others to demonstrate the serious problems businesses in Northern Ireland may have with double jeopardy in this area. Scotland and Wales have tried to co-operate with the Government on this and other post-Brexit issues, yet they are not prepared to give the amber light to the Government on this. That is a serious constitutional issue, and this House should consider it.

The Government may well intend to be more flexible, but we do not know yet. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, that, when we have framework Bills of this nature, the Government cannot expect the House simply to nod them through without seeing how they will really be implemented.

I have three other quick questions for the Minister. First, the Government have resisted calls to exclude agriculture, although the CAP used to be excluded from the European regime. There will be very significant differences between the post-CAP regimes in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, so will the Government reconsider special rules for agriculture? They have provided some for energy and the environment—they need strengthening but they have provided them—so can they do that for agriculture?

Secondly, how does this operate in relation to local authorities and procurement? Public procurement is one of the areas the old state aid regime used to be concerned about; if my council of Dorset awards a contract to a firm because it is giving special preference to local employment, will it fall foul of this regime? Finally, what does the £500,000 apply to—the value of that contract or the differential between that contract and what could be applied, shall I say, from Wiltshire?