Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill

My right hon. Friend speaks with authority given his responsibility in taking that Bill through the House. A solution that might wake up some civil servants is to put agency staff in Whitehall. They might think a bit differently then. I remind the House that the stories of doom and disaster that we have heard from some quarters are based on precisely the same arguments that we heard when we introduced the minimum wage—threats that 250,000 jobs will be lost and threats about the slow-down of the economy. We face the same doom merchants, recycling the same speeches. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. My Bill, if introduced with care, will not impact at all on our competitiveness. I want to consider the substance of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister's interview in Davos on 25 January this year, when he said:"““You've got to look at what the skills you can offer are. If you are unemployable because you've got no skills…we will give you help to get the skills. If you're a young person, we want to get you on to an apprenticeship or a junior apprenticeship. If you're an adult, we want to get you basic skills that you may never have had before.””" He went on to say:"““The next stage is skills.””" He was trying to develop a vision for what he saw as the 2020 economy, in which the 6 million unskilled jobs in the British economy are replaced by a much smaller number of jobs. He then said:"““The rest have got to be skilled. If you don't get the skills, you'll not get a job.””" That is precisely right. It is a very good analysis of what the economy needs and what British workers need to do to help us to get the economy moving in the right direction in the race for the top. It is that model that we should be targeting, not a model that is based on exploiting workers at the bottom end of the pile. If Britain, and indeed Europe, intend to compete in that race, that will undoubtedly be based on a highly skilled and highly motivated work force. Although temporary workers will continue to be needed to fill the peaks in demand and to help us to deal with unexpected circumstances, the notion that the number will remain the same as today's figure of approximately 1.4 million runs contrary to any logic. We simply cannot achieve the goals set out by the Prime Minister without addressing the issue that we are dealing with today. Doing nothing provides a short-term advantage to some businesses, but it does little to provide the necessary ingredients for us to reach that 2020 goal. After all, few agencies have any clear training objectives. So my first argument in favour of the Bill is that it is in the best long-term interests of the economy to encourage employers to plan for the long term and to establish a well-trained and well-motivated work force. The second argument, which has brought so many of my colleagues together, is that what the Bill proposes is morally right, which is surely the basis on which we should legislate. At the end of the day, that should be a powerful motivator, and it should be central to our thinking in Parliament. How can it be right for people to work alongside one another with the same skills doing the precisely the same task, yet one category of employee is worth less than another? The concept of equal value should surely apply to anyone in such circumstances. I am not arguing that there is no need to use agency workers, as they create the flexibility that is sometimes needed, but I am arguing that they should not be routinely used as a means of dodging the cost of sick pay, holiday pay, pensions and any other part of the package available to permanent employees.