Employment Bill [HL]

My Lords, as ever, I must emphasise that I speak as a non-lawyer, but I have been a frequent customer of the employment laws for a long time, often in difficult and complex circumstances. As such, I was extremely surprised and concerned, in the debate on 17 December on the statutory instrument on employment agencies, to discover that aspects of the law that were apparently set down in the 1978 employment legislation had been widely, easily recognisably and consistently broken since then and that the Government appeared to be unaware and not in the least bit concerned about that. In response, they actually asked me for evidence of where those breaches were occurring. I hope that the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, found in his e-mail the answer to that question; I sent him details of at least half a dozen of the companies concerned in that breach. My concern this evening is that it is quite unreasonable that a Bill of this importance, which effectively, by implicit consent, endorses the breach of those laws, should go forward. It does not set out to rehearse them and ensure that they are understood. These breaches are surely failures of comprehension, clarity and rigour in the management and application of the law. The first breach that concerns me relates to the requirement enshrined in the original 1978 legislation and reiterated in the statutory instrument passed by this House on 17 December that no fees should be taken by an agency from a jobseeker; they should be taken only from a job provider. This requirement has been breached for a great many years through the function known as the outplacement agency, whereby a redundant executive goes to an agency and asks it to represent him in finding job opportunities for which he can apply. The agencies appear to have been in breach for most of the past 39 years or so by ignoring the fact that they cannot take the fee directly from the jobseeker. That is still happening to this day, although to a very much lesser extent than used to be the case. During the debate on 17 December, I witnessed considerable surprise on the government Front Bench when I announced that at times the fees for representation by these agencies were as high as £2,000 per month per individual. That figure is correct. Since then, I have been doing further research and have found that the agencies have now decided that they are not strictly outplacement agencies according to the old concept but consultant agencies helping to improve candidates’ prospects of getting a job by being better groomed and turned out and by putting them through a process of mock interviews to prepare them for the rigours of getting a job at the tough end of a market. That would be all very well except for the fact that their fee structures still range from a simple £500 for teaching someone how to dress for an interview to £5,500 for teaching a person how to access a database that will tell them where the opportunities are and enable their CV to be better prepared and written. These agencies also provide the opportunity for people to spend time on their premises, where they are given an endless supply of coffee and access to newspapers and databases. In some cases, as sadly I know, people who have been made redundant have not told their wives that they are out of a job but have hidden in these places throughout the day, spending their entire redundancy money there until it has all gone. In one case, an individual was found in his potting shed three weeks after he had died—his wife had left him. Therefore, these places have a dubious background and ethic, and it is wrong that they are not regulated or brought within the compass of the Employment Act. I invite the noble Lord, Lord Bach, to consider whether the Government can introduce their own amendment to provide for at least the establishment of a code of practice whereby these organisations would gather together in a trade representation body and agree to be bound by sensible rules enshrined in the law. I do not think that they should be allowed to continue in this undisciplined manner any longer. That is my first, serious concern. If the Minister has an appetite for it, I can provide him with half a dozen names for him to investigate in addition to those that I gave him this morning. My second concern is one on which we have to be very cautious because it deals with a matter that is sub judice. I shall not identify it but it deals with the group or collective block-booking of large numbers of temporary staff for a single assignment—for example, the catering staff for a sports event. I refer to a number of young people who live away from home and not necessarily in well controlled conditions as regards their upkeep, welfare, moral oversight or anything else. These young people are block-booked and I am concerned about the pressures that they are put under and whether the agencies exercise due responsibility for their moral and physical welfare. That matter was touched on in our debate on Regulation 7 of the instrument that went through on 17 December but I do not believe that it was addressed anywhere near toughly enough. Since then, there have been some unfortunate allegations of misbehaviour elsewhere in this country, which, had they come about a week earlier, would surely have provided a different focus for our debate on that instrument. Therefore, again I ask the Minister to consider the possibility of correcting the imperfection of the regulations passed on 17 December by bringing about a stricter, more vigorous and more rigorous control over the future recruitment of temporary staff by that sort of block-booking, because I think that it is quite wrong as it stands. Those are the two concerns that I present to your Lordships with a specific request for amendments. I think that it would be better if those amendments came from the Government and I invite them to consider that. I wish to raise two other points, which are requests for clarity. The first relates to the apprentice system, which is a matter for later debate. My recollection of apprentice control dates back to my days of running a very high-skill shop floor, when we were heavily dependent on toolmakers and so on. Over the past few days, I have been asking some of my former colleagues what happens today. They all looked at me and said, ““We didn’t know that you had taken the title of ‘Lord Dinosaur’””. ““Why so?””, I asked. They replied, ““We don’t have anything like that nowadays. We don’t bother with those high skills any longer. We just buy it all from Italy. We don’t need apprentices in high-skill categories””. When we come to look at the apprentice issue, could we consider whether there should be a more positive, proactive element in the Bill to bring about more unity between the workforce, management and unions by sponsoring the return of some of those higher-grade skills? They do not appear to be there at the moment and this would surely be a good opportunity to encourage their reintroduction. There was once on the government Benches the great and much lamented Monty Finneston. In 1977, he wrote a magnificent report in which he was all too prophetic about what would happen to the skill base of British industrial society. Because it was so good, it was largely completely ignored and unused but it provided an absolutely brilliant analysis of what the future held, and that is what we have today. There are no skills and very little high-skill industry. There is all the electronic stuff but that is what we have learnt latterly. We still do not produce the good industrial floor skills that we had. My noble friend Lord Hunt said that we should be looking at job creation, but what about job protection and protecting the skills that we have and what is left of British industry? Are we doing enough to bring about a positive factor involving the co-operation of the unions and management? In my time, the shortfall in apprenticeships lay in the fact that the unions would not sanction the payment of an adequate wage for an apprentice because it would eat into the wages of the master teaching him. That is no longer a factor and to some extent the situation is covered by the minimum wage, but should there perhaps be a separate and higher minimum wage for people taking high-skill apprenticeships? That is the only way that they will be kept going through the five long years of serving to become a toolmaker. Without it, we will not succeed in providing an adequate additional incentive. Those would-be apprentices could certainly earn enough to marry a pretty girl at the age of 19 by being a bus conductor but they could not do so by being a tool apprentice. That is something about which the Government should think very hard in the debate on apprentices. My final point is also a request for clarification. One factor that has been a thorn in my side but which I would not be without is trying to work within TUPE. As I said, it is a pain that I do not wish to be spared. I should like to know whether TUPE is a British institutional law that will work independently and whether it will be secure against the privations and invasions of Europe. For example, if I sell a business in Basingstoke and its assets to a company in Bradford and I have 500 unemployed people in Basingstoke, I have a responsibility for those people, regardless of the fact that the expanded market may produce 1,000 jobs in Bradford. That is fair enough, but under the present laws I would have a potential liability of £50,000 per head for the people whose jobs were transferred to Bradford. That total of £50,000 a head for 500 people would be too much, so I would not go ahead with the deal. However, what would happen if, instead, I sold my company in Basingstoke to a company in Bayonne or Hamburg? Would I have the same rights and the expectation of being able to call on the same compensation, and would it have the same impact on the viability of that deal? I should like clarification on how far TUPE is matched by European law or whether it comes outside that law and can be subverted, diverted or avoided. Those are serious points which should be considered. The first two are essential for inclusion and on the latter two I seek clarification.