Employment Rights Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st May 2025 Lords Chamber

I look forward to the Minister’s response to the points I have raised, and I hope His Majesty’s Government consider the arguments I have made today as the Employment Rights Bill makes its way through this place. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am very happy to add my name to the two amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, having worked for many years before she came to the House on domestic abuse issues.

Nobody would disagree with the Government having this priority to reduce violence against women and girls; it is a no-brainer, given where we are starting from. The examples in the workplace of things going wrong, often in plain sight, are embarrassing, and the list the noble Baroness put before us, which I will briefly repeat in part, demonstrates that it is just the tip of the iceberg.

When I was a head-hunter, for many years I specialised in HR—sometimes known as “human refuse” or “human remains”, but otherwise known as personnel—and Harrods was known as a revolving door for HR directors. Any personnel director who looked at an offer of employment from Mr Fayed—he actually was just Mr Mohamed Fayed; he added the “al” because it makes you sound posher in Egypt—and who had done their homework knew what they were in for. Even people who took a deep breath and, for a large amount of money, took on that role rarely lasted more than 12 months. It really was supping with the devil, and it was widely known, but nobody did anything about it.

The BBC has been mentioned, as well as the NHS. The fact that female employees, surgeons included, in the NHS have reported rape—both allegations of rape and actual rape—over many years is inconceivable in principle but is and has been taking place.

The case of Gracie Spinks was mentioned. I too had the privilege of listening to her father as he spoke of his anguish at the death of his daughter. That is an interesting example. The company where the person who killed her, and who then killed himself, worked, Xbite, had a grand total of 140 employees. So, as we think through how to deal with this, how can we help organisations such as that, which had started up only five years before, to understand the co-responsibilities they have with their employees to try to protect them in the working environment? But also, how do we make that practical and effective?

I was involved, with others, in the Armed Forces Commissioner Bill which has just left your Lordships’ House. Part of the reason that the Government brought that in is precisely because of issues of abuse in the workplace. The well-known tragic case of Jaysley Beck, who took her own life after years of repeated harassment by, shamefully, a series of her superiors, is a case in point. The Ministry of Defence itself also has a major issue in this regard.

The fact is that, as many of us will know, many of us—some of us—will indeed have married, gone out with or, heaven forbid, had affairs with people that we have met through interactions at the workplace. The workplace, outside of the home, is a major cause and focus of social interaction between people, and most of us spend a significant part of our lives there. To expect that to exist in a separate bubble and compartment and not recognise the issues that can often be engendered and amplified by the intensity of a working environment is to ignore the obvious.

So, should we ignore this in this Bill? I think we all agree that this is an issue that needs to be tackled. I think we all agree that we need to do better, but I think we need to ask ourselves: is this the right vehicle by which to try and do something about it? I have come to the conclusion that the answer is probably yes, not least because of the timing of the Government’s current focus on reducing violence against women and girls. What is clear at the moment is that there is a real lack of clarity and guidance, and ownership and responsibility, on how to respond in these kinds of situations.

We have a tangle of different laws and regulations dating back as far as 1974, with the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act. We have the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. We have the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. We have the remit of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. We have the Health and Safety Executive, and we have the International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 190. That is a complicated thicket to try and work your way through, and there are many inconsistencies in the way it is applied and an almost total lack of understanding by those employers who are perhaps trying to respond to some of the issues that their employees are raising as to how best to deal with it, because there is no clear path or clear outline of how to respond. Creating clarity in this area for both the victims and the employers is an opportunity we should not miss.

I look forward to the Minister’s response. I hope that he/she and their colleagues will sit down with Jess Phillips and Alex Davies-Jones to try and look at this in the round, because, in a way, it would fit in very neatly with some of the other laudable initiatives of the Government to reduce violence against women and girls. I ask the Front Benches: please can we work together, politics out of the window, to try and work out between now and Report whether there are ways we can try and pull all this together, give greater clarity and improve on the unacceptable status quo?

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I am speaking in place of my noble friend Lady Bennett, who is not able to be here today, and she has signed both of the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes.

The noble Baroness made an excellent opening speech and has covered almost everything, but I think it is worth repeating that what we are trying to do here is provide workplaces that are safe, free from violence and free from gender-based harassment. As we heard during an Oral Question earlier, sexism and misogyny are on the rise in our society, and that impacts on women and girls—probably girls, particularly—of all ages. It is crucial that the Government take this seriously.

We are not asking employers to sit down and think what they have to do from scratch, because this research has been done before. There is an excellent project conducted by the Fawcett Society that identifies five key requirements to create a workplace that does not tolerate sexual harassment: culture, policy, training, reporting mechanisms and the way that employers respond to reports. Successful and lasting change needs sustained commitment, and the Fawcett Society shows the way forward—or a way forward. Of course, that, with a great deal of other existing research, is something that the Health and Safety Executive could draw on.

The size of the problem is probably indicated by research from Scotland; there is no reason to think that the issue there is larger than anywhere else on these islands. Last year, a study reported that 70% of women in Scotland reported having experienced or witnessed sexual harassment in the workplace and that 80% of those never reported it to their employer. Those are absolutely terrible statistics. I am sure that the Government want to do something about this, not least because lower-paid and younger workers are particularly vulnerable. This is something that the Government will surely want to address because there are an awful lot of votes out there from younger people and, at the next general election, this Labour Government might need them.

--- Later in debate ---

I hope and trust that this will reassure the noble Baroness that the current legal framework for addressing violence and harassment in the workplace is both robust and comprehensive—

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I am grateful to the Minister for laying out the plethora of different types of Act and instrument that are meant to be woven together into a seamless whole to stop abuse in the workplace happening. He started off by mentioning an Act passed 51 years ago. He then talked about regulations enacted 26 years ago. He then spoke about the harassment Act of 18 years ago and the Equality Act of 16 years ago. With the greatest respect, if the combination of these regulations has been in force for as long as they have been and we are in the situation we now find ourselves in, with the evidence of what is happening in a variety of workplaces, large, medium and small, clearly all is not well.

The idea of bringing forward amendments such as these is not that they are word perfect from the word go. Everybody in the House knows that perfectly well. Committee is to probe; to try to see if we can come to agreement across the Chamber that it ain’t working and we need to do something better. With the best will in the world, standing up and trying to defend the status quo, when the status quo quite clearly is not working as it is meant to do in theory, is not helping anybody. So, I again ask and suggest—and I am sure the noble Baroness will say this when she responds to the Minister—that we accept that it is not working properly and that it would be a no-brainer to try to work together, across this House and with another place, to see if we can use this Act as a way to improve on what clearly is not working at the moment.

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, for that, and I hear what he says. But I stress here, with all the current legislation in place, that there must have been cases before us that we can learn lessons from. What we need to do, and do better, is use “black box thinking”, where we can learn from what has happened and hopefully share with other regulators what works and what may not have worked, so that we can address a problem rather than bring in more legislation. We can look at what has been successful and share those successes among other enforcers as well.

I conclude by saying that the Government remain committed to raising awareness of this important issue. I can confirm that the Minister, my noble friend Lady Jones, has already met with Minister Jess Phillips and Alex Davies-Jones, and we continue to work with them to try to see how we can come together on this. I therefore respectfully ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.