Employment Rights Bill

Lord Murray of Blidworth Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 8th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments in the names of my noble friends Lord Sharpe and Lord Hunt. I notice that Clause 9(3) inserts a subsection into the Employment Rights Act which allows for the refusal of a flexible working application in conditional circumstances under two criteria:

“only if … the employer considers that the application should be refused on a ground or grounds listed in subsection (1ZA), and … it is reasonable for the employer to refuse the application on that ground or those grounds”.

A double test is being applied for the decision to refuse an application for flexible working.

Then, the list that the Government have provided in the Bill, at subsection (1ZA) lists grounds from (a) to (i). One might think that this list had been prepared by the unions, because it sets out perhaps a very one-sided view of what the flexible working application might apply. It is indeed pretty abstruse in its expression. It sets out that the grounds mentioned are

“the burden of additional costs”,

the

“detrimental effect on ability to meet customer demand; … inability to re-organise work among … staff; … inability to recruit additional staff”.

All of this is going to be the subject of considerable debate, one would anticipate, in any future employment tribunal claim, and has an air of unreality about it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, this debate has been more interesting than I expected. In looking at Amendment 65, we should acknowledge that the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, with his former ministerial responsibilities, had considerable interaction with the services that he described, so we should take him seriously.

In Amendment 65A, he sets out certain sectors. However, in seeking to deliver unambiguity, I think he has introduced new ambiguity. Sector-specific exemptions are bringing their own problems. I asked the noble Lord, Lord Murray, what a journalist is. Is it a card-carrying member of the NUJ or is it someone who blogs and calls themselves a journalist, or a group of people? That is just one example of the ambiguity that a sector system brings in. So I am drawn to the idea that we have something like subsection (1ZA) in Clause 9(3).

If noble Lords are worried about the wooliness of it—I am not sure that was the word that the noble Lord, Lord Murray, used—we can work to firm that language up. But to describe the job, rather than try to think of every single job title we want to include in primary legislation, is a better way of going about it. If the description is too difficult to nail, I am sure it is not beyond the wit of us all to find a better way of describing it.

Had the noble Lord, Lord Murray, been here a little earlier, he would have heard the shortcomings of the tribunal system being well exercised, and some comments from the noble Lord to the effect that the MoJ is looking at it. To return to that point, in my speech on the last group I asked for a meeting, so perhaps the Ministers could facilitate a meeting with interested parties on the Bill and the MoJ to find out how it is moving forward on tribunals; we need some line of sight on that. It is something of a capitulation if we say, “The tribunals are no good, so we’re not going to make the right legislation because they won’t be there to uphold it”. We have a duty to make the right legislation, to put it in place and to make sure that the tribunals can deliver.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I share much of what the noble Lord, Lord Fox, says. But the point I was making was that the answer from the Government is, “We’re going to provide imprecision in this legislation, and we’re going to let the employment tribunal sort it out and tell us what it means”. My point was twofold. First, that will take far too long because of the chaos in the tribunal system, and secondly, structurally, the employment tribunal cannot give an answer to that at first instance because it is not a court of record.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

Those are good points. Again, had the noble Lord seen an earlier episode of the soap opera of this Committee, he would have heard noble Lords from all around talk about firming up imprecision, which is why I talked about firming up the imprecision of that list of attributes rather than trying to produce a list of businesses and activities that somehow should come into this—an impossible job, frankly. Of course we should have a war on imprecision but, in the end, there are going to be some things that tribunals rule on that will be important, and we need to have the tribunals active and quick to do so.

To some extent, there is an element of creativity around the fungibility of some of these criteria—I think the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, made that point. If we have some flexibility of interpretation, schools and other organisations that want to hang on to valued colleagues will find a way of using it in order to do that. If we start to rule out professions or rule in very hard and fast rules, we lose the opportunity to retain and attract certain groups of people. I understand the point made, that the more of that fungibility there is, the more so-called imprecision, and there is a balance between the two. That is why I still think that if we have ideas around new subsection (1ZA), that is the way forward on this rather than a list of jobs.