Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Debate between Mark Lazarowicz and Julian Smith
Julian Smith
I want to speak briefly in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) and talk about the narrative that is developing among Opposition Members. We heard the same bleating for settlement agreements and we have heard the same rhetoric for these proposals. We have heard no tangible idea from the Opposition of how we might make life easier for the thousands of small businesses in North Yorkshire that are creating the bulk of the jobs in my constituency or for the tiny companies across the UK that are struggling with the six regulations a day that Labour piled upon them.
The proposals that we are discussing are part of a suite of proactive measures to make business easier in this country. Business was laden with regulation, taxation and more and more bureaucracy by the Labour party in power. We—our party and this Government—are doing absolutely the right thing by looking at every opportunity to find ways to make life a bit easier for the hard-working men and women who are waking up in the middle of the night, worried about whether they can pay staff the next day. I commend these proposals and the others that the Government are making across the range of their enterprise policies.
Mark Lazarowicz
I, too, would like to say a few words about this proposal of shares for rights. Of the various types of employment legislation that have come before this House over the years—these provisions are basically employment legislation—there can scarcely have been any with as few friends, on either side of industry. I welcome the fact that the House of Lords did its revising job well and removed the offending clause. I am only sorry that the coalition parties, Conservative and Lib Dem, have chosen to bring it back today, instead of withdrawing quietly and gracefully.
Given that this provision has so few friends, I suspect that very few employers will want to make use of it. That is because employers who want to extend employee share ownership, of which I am a great supporter—the year after I entered this House I introduced a private Member’s Bill to promote it—will not want to do so in ways that force their employees to give up important rights at work. The type of employer who wants to work with their employees is not likely to be one who at the same time wants to alienate them by taking away their rights, which is what this measure would force such employers to do if they made use of it. Of course, it is hard to see any employees volunteering to adopt such an arrangement either. I suspect that employers who would make use of the measure would be those who are in difficulty.
I take the point that was made earlier about businesses that want to start up and take on more workers making use of the scheme, but the problem is that, although a new business could behave with the best will in the world in involving its workers in a collective enterprise, it will be when things go wrong and people fall out that those workers will need the protection that is enjoyed by the workers of this country. That is why we should be loth to throw that protection away.