Work and Families Bill

I welcome this opportunity to make a small contribution to this debate. As I said on Second Reading, I support the Bill because it introduces important new rights for workers. However, I also find myself strangely in agreement with much of what the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) has said about small businesses, although I should gently remind her that I ran a small business during the 1980s and 1990s, and regulation under the previous Conservative Government was every bit as bad as under any Labour Government. Whoever is in power, the amount of regulation for small businesses never seems to get any less. My experience of running a small business leads me to support the new clause. I was surprised, however, to see that it stipulates the figure of 50 employees, as any business employing that many people would be considered relatively large in my neck of the woods these days, given the direction that the rural economy has taken over the past few years. Before I was elected to the House, I ran a small business as a country solicitor, and I recognise the hon. Lady’s description of her father’s frustration. The reality of running such a business is that employers do not do the VAT, the tax and the PAYE between the hours of 9 to 5 while they are in the office. That is when they try to make some money. They do those things in the evenings or at weekends. They go home at night and sit up until midnight, or often later, wrestling with these things. I was a solicitor but I am afraid I never truly got to grips with PAYE. The Minister must realise that we are not just talking about tax regulation and maternity and paternity pay. Every business is subject to regulations from many other agencies as well. The cumulative effect of all these regulations, and the amount of time that anyone running a business has to spend dealing with them, will have an impact on that business. In my own case, there were masses of regulations that had built up from the Law Society of Scotland and the Financial Services Authority. Eventually, we decided that it was not worth the candle to go through all that, and that it would be better to junk our financial services business altogether because of the amount of regulation involved. There were good reasons for those regulations, because of what had happened in the financial services industry, but they became a huge burden for small businesses, which were doing their best to provide a service in small-town areas. The time spent dealing with those regulations impacts on a business, because it eats into the time that can be spent doing other things, such as spending time with the family. A particular difficulty with these regulations could be the complexity of the interaction between the times when a mother and a father take their maternity and paternity leave. There could be difficulties with dealing with the statutory pay involved. That is another reason for considering ways of making it easier for small businesses to deal with these regulations, because they could get into difficulties if both parents were not working for the same employer. There would have to be interaction between the employers involved, as well as the Inland Revenue, and that could present problems. Transferring the obligation to the Revenue might provide a way round that, but there could still be an inherent difficulty if one party were with the Revenue and the other were not.