Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill

Debate between Clive Efford and Laura Farris

Friday 22nd October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris]

I was referring to what I consider to be the breadth of the proposed section 187B. I think, with respect, that it creates considerable scope for any employee who is faced with an instance of fire and rehire to challenge it through the employment tribunal. It creates, I think, an obvious and unsustainable tension with common law principles—the common law principles that underpin the entire law of redundancy.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Laura Farris]

I will just finish this point.

There could be circumstances in which an employer had made the decision to change the terms of employment, to reduce wages, and the employment tribunal, applying every single correct common law principle, would find the decision to have been fair, but if the employer had breached one element of the consultation requirements—had not put one document or one meeting note before the trade union representative—the dismissal would be found to be unfair.

[Clive Efford]

I have listened carefully to the hon. Lady, and I am very respectful of her knowledge of this particular issue, but nothing she has said today suggests to me that her arguments could not be better deployed in Committee. My hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) asked Conservative Members to work with him to improve the Bill in Committee. I wonder why the hon. Lady is not taking that approach.

[Laura Farris]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I will continue to develop this point.

[Clive Efford]

The hon. Lady did not give me an answer.

[Laura Farris]

I hope that what I am going to say will answer the hon. Gentleman’s criticism.

There is another point that I cannot ignore. I invite every Member to turn to proposed section 187F, which deals with the proposed “Award of compensation” to be made by any employer who fails to comply with the proposed new consultation requirements. It states:

“ The amount of compensation awarded shall, subject to the following provisions, be such as the employment tribunal considers just and equitable in all the circumstances”.

That is exactly the same compensation measure that is used in whistleblowing and in discrimination law. It opens the door to uncapped compensation in the area of unfair dismissal, which has a cap, It therefore drives a coach and horses through the entire principle of compensation in unfair dismissal hearings. It would make fire and rehire the only form of unfair dismissal in which the employee could receive an uncapped compensatory award. If the employee had been dismissed for gross misconduct or for being bad at his or her job, the award would have been capped at 80 grand. That cannot be right.

What will all this do to the employer who is thinking about renegotiating terms of employment? The employer will be too nervous to do it, and will lay people off. Let us take the employer in the case of Garside & Laycock v. Booth 2011, who had proposed a 5% reduction in wages which every single balloted member of staff except one had accepted. Employers would not do that; they would lay off the whole workforce. Is it better or worse for people to take a less attractive variation in their terms of employment or to lose their jobs altogether?

Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Clive Efford and Laura Farris

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Laura Farris]

Q We heard evidence from Professor Iain McLean this morning, who said that one of the risks of the local ties argument is that, depending on whose hands that argument is in, it can be politicised in a different way, and what the Conservatives, Labour party or Liberal Democrats might determine to be local ties would vary according to which of them you ask. Do you agree with that analysis? If you do, do you think it supports the idea of a threshold being set somewhere?

Darren Hughes: I do agree with that analysis. Sometimes things are important but not very popular, or not very—[Inaudible]— or not very engaging. When we conduct elections, they are very important to millions of people, which is why around two thirds of people on the register turn out. We all wish that that was higher, but there is still a lot of interest in elections. Some of the mechanics of how we build the demographic architecture does not result in a huge amount of engagement. I think that on parliamentary boundaries, if you were wanting to involve them in a submission process, you either hire somebody to run that for you or you ensure that tweets and letters go out and so on. As I said before, it takes on an incredible cloak of authority for that community, even though it might not be entitled to the status that it receives. I agree that it is possible to happen, and I think in some cases the community argument is very strong, but in a lot of cases it is a shield for more of a partisan argument for that particular electoral cycle, which, as I say, is the sort of thing we should avoid.

Being able to have things like citizens’ juries or —[Inaudible]—citizens who are asked to come together to assist the commissions with information, with their feelings and the values of that area, and with people saying what they think the community interests really are, might be a more real way of being able to include the community, getting better quality information and ensuring that the final decisions reflect the reasonable view of the public, as opposed to those who knew that the consultation was on.

[Clive Efford]

Q Thanks, Darren, for giving evidence this afternoon. Following on from that, do you think that the Boundary Commission is incapable of telling the difference between political opportunism and genuine community concern about parliamentary boundaries and local representation?

Darren Hughes: I do not know, is the answer to that. I assume not, but sometimes when these processes are going on for a long period of time, and if people are appointed who might not have a lot of experience in dealing with active organised citizens pushing a particular view, these are the risks you run. It might not be the case in every cycle, but you would want to make sure that organised political activity dressed up as the concerned citizen was not able to take hold. That is an important thing. Secondly, if there are mechanisms to get very good quality information about what the general public think, like deliberative consultation processes enable you to do, that is pretty rich information for the commissioners to receive in addition to the demography data that they would be using as well.