Employment Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble Lord is being oversensitive. I suggested to my noble friend that it smacks slightly of a faint element of Stockholm syndrome, but I shall leave it at that. I shall explain the syndrome later if the noble Lord so wishes. I start by offering my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Jones, particularly for the letter that he so kindly wrote to us on 27 December. We admire his hard work and admire the fact that he took the trouble to come back from—I presume—Birmingham on the train if it was working, or perhaps a ministerial car brought him back to Victoria Street. It is an important letter because, as the noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, reminded us, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, will hold an open-house-style briefing session in the House of Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, put the point bluntly and said that he very much hoped that the noble Lord himself will take that briefing session. We appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, is an experienced Minister and has served in a number of departments in this House. But this is the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Jones. He has put his name to it and he has made the declaration that the Bill is compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights. He is the one responsible for the Bill and is answerable to the House, so he ought to be at that meeting. Secondly, as the noble Lord will know—this point was raised by my noble friend Lord Forsyth and others—we have agreed to take this Bill in Grand Committee in the Moses Room. I understand that the usual channels have already put together dates, which I have in my diary. It would be only right if we could get an assurance from the noble Lord—if he wants to interrupt me now—or a commitment that will have to be made by his noble friend Lord Bach that he will be present for the Committee stage of the Bill. I have been in this House for a number of years. I served as a Minister for some eight years so I know of the pressures on ministerial diaries and that we have to do other things on occasion. I know that Ministers sometimes could not be present for the whole or some part of a Bill. Illness may have taken them away, or something else, but in the main in all the 30 years I have been in this House—as long as the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn—I have always known Ministers to make every possible effort to be there for Committee and later stages of Bills. I have never asked this before, but on this occasion it is right to seek a firm commitment from the Government that the Minister will try to be here for the Committee stage of the Bill. One of the reasons why we have Bills in the Moses Room is to give greater flexibility on dates to allow Ministers to fit them into their diaries. If the Minister has other duties that will take him away on the dates that have been discussed by the usual channels, I am sure that we and noble Lords on the Liberal Benches will be prepared to look at our diaries to find other dates that will suit the Minister, but all of us would like to see him take the Bill—his Bill—through all its stages in this House. That brings me to the question of consolidation. I find I am in agreement with both the Liberal speakers on this occasion—it is rather nice to be in agreement with them. As many noble Lords will know, the Bill was originally entitled the Employment Simplification Bill. We know that the Government are very keen on spicing up the names of their Bills to imply that they do more than they possibly ought to, just as they spice up the names of their departments. The Minister now represents something called the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—whether it achieves any of those things is another matter. This Bill was originally called the Employment Simplification Bill and it is now purely the Employment Bill—simplification has been dropped. Is that an admission that for all its good intentions—and there are some good intentions in the Bill—it does not amount to very much, as my noble friend Lady Wilcox put it and that, as my noble friend Lord Hunt put it, it lacks a theme? Like Churchill’s famous pudding, the Bill lacks a theme and does not amount to very much. It simply further complicates the statute book and brings in further unnecessary complications. As my noble friend Lady Miller and the noble Lords, Lord Razzall and Lord Cotter, put it, we need consolidation. We have had 29 Bills relating to hiring and firing since 1997 and I imagine that we have had 10 times that number of statutory instruments. Can the Minister say whether that figure is correct? How many more regulations will the Bill bring in? Since it was originally called the Employment Simplification Bill and comes from the department for regulatory reform, how many will it repeal? In passing, I shall say that I am quite grateful to see that the first two clauses relate to repeals. With all this extra complication, how can the poor employer, especially the small employer, cope? The Minister, with his former responsibilities and experience at the CBI, might feel he knows all about big business, but he does not necessarily know much about how small businesses cope. Does the Minister accept just how difficult it can be to employ people? I do not know whether he has come across the recent survey, which was referred to earlier, that found that one-third of businesses are prevented or deterred from employing people by the complexity of the legislation, particularly when it comes to getting rid of people. If you cannot fire people it is very unlikely that you will want to hire them. What does the Minister say to that? The case for consolidation seems to be overwhelming. I shall turn briefly to the Bill, which was described by my noble friend as lacking a theme. As the noble Lord made clear to us, it is in four parts. The first part deals with dispute resolution. In it we see the abolition of something brought in by the Government only two, three or four years ago. It seems to be an odd way of proceeding first to legislate, then to announce a review of that legislation and then to repeal it. I suspect that life might be easier if the Government accepted a few more of the sunset clauses that we occasionally suggest. It would save them the trouble of repealing parts before they brought in further changes. Like others, I noticed with amusement that the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, felt rather deeply that the role played by him, the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, in the opposition to the part brought in in the 1992 Act had been underplayed. In turn, he wanted to underplay the part played by my noble friend Lady Miller. We all know that she does not squeak. I was her Chief Whip for some years, and I know with some pain that she does not squeak and can howl and roar just like the best of them. The simple fact is that we did oppose it, as did the noble Lord, and the Government are now repealing it. The important thing is to ask them what next? As was stressed by my noble friend Lord Hunt, the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, and the noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, it seems to be difficult to know how we can discuss these matters if we cannot see the codes themselves, in particular, those in Clause 3(2)—if I have got that wrong, I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, will correct me. It is important to say to him that we want to see them. When will we see them? Can we have an assurance that we will have something to see—in the form of those codes—before we get to Committee stage? If not, could Committee stage possibly be delayed? It might also be convenient to delay it a bit longer for the noble Lord, Lord Jones. As the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, put it, we need to remove the uncertainty in the Bill. Turning to the national minimum wage, I echo everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, had to say about the cadet force adult volunteers. Like the noble Lord, Lord Bach, I served for a short while as a Minister in defence, and I hope we did what we could to support them. We always looked for a great deal more support from all other aspects of the Government and all other departments. I am very grateful that here is another department doing its bit to support the work of something that emanates from the Ministry of Defence but benefits the whole of society—the cadet force movement and the work of the adult volunteers. In passing, I shall put one brief point to the noble Lord in a genuine spirit of inquiry. It is something that we might want to come back to in Committee. Are there any other volunteers or people in an analogous position who might also have to be considered? For example, there might be some people in the TA or retained firemen. Are there others? I hope that the noble Lord will give that some thought—we will give him an opportunity to give it some thought when we reach Committee stage. There are one or two other Committee points that we will want to pursue at a later stage. In particular, I understand that offences will now be triable as indictable offences, not just summary offences, which will mean higher levels of fines. I move over employment agencies because that involves detail that might be more appropriate for Committee stage. The fourth aspect of the Bill is trades union membership—ASLEF v UK. The noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, said, with apologies to the residents of Barking, that he thought that this was truly barking. If one does not want to go that far, one might say it is at least two stops short of Barking—Upton Park. We can look at that in due course. The general point, however, that seemed to emerge from those who spoke—I am especially grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, and my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway—was to stress, following the considerable unease expressed by my noble friends Lord Hunt and Lady Wilcox, that there is no safeguard against abuse. That is our concern and that is what we want to pursue at a later stage of the Bill, whenever that may come. I look forward to the Committee stage. I repeat again that it is important that the Minister should make himself available to the House. I regret having to put it in those terms, but because there seems to be some doubt, it is important to do so. We look forward to Committee and later stages of the Bill and, this evening, we especially look forward to the reply of the noble Lord, Lord Bach, on behalf of the Labour Party.