Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill

My hon. Friend is right. Many Departments employ temporary and agency workers. It would be interesting to know what policy the Government employ on the treatment of their temporary workers, and whether they enjoy the same pay and conditions as permanent staff. The Government and Labour Members want to inflict such measures on businesses, and it would be nice to know that they are setting an example. I am certainly interested to know how the public sector treats its temporary workers. It does not need to wait for the law to change to implement best practice as it sees it. If the measure is so important, the public sector can implement it in its workplace. No one needs to wait for particular legislation to be introduced before doing that. I am happy to give way to the Minister if he wants to indicate the Government's policy on their treatment of temporary and agency workers that they employ. He does not seem to want to get into that, from which we will have to draw our own conclusions. An impasse seems to have been reached at a European level on the text for a temporary and agency worker directive, and that appears to have prompted the calls for a national Bill. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) said, the debate has been going on in the European Union for many years. My understanding is that the Government have always played their part in trying to kill off the proposal at a European level, which makes it all the more surprising that they do not have the courage of their convictions to vote against the Bill on Second Reading. They have been active behind the scenes in Europe on opposing the Bill, but it appears that they will be reticent in a public vote of the House of Commons for people to see where the Government stand on it. A number of organisations fundamentally oppose the Bill, and I shall go through each in turn to see what they think of it. The British Retail Consortium, which I know well from my time working for Asda, has fundamental objections to the Bill. The first, which was also made clear by my hon. Friends the Members for Wealden (Charles Hendry) and for Ribble Valley, is that agency workers are already covered by all key employment rights. Health and safety was also mentioned, and they are protected by health and safety legislation as well. They are also protected by discrimination legislation, just like any other worker, so on many levels, the Bill is not required. The flexible labour market, which the Bill seeks to undermine, benefits not only businesses but the people who work for them. Of course, it allows companies to meet peaks in demand, but it also allows workers to manage their work alongside other commitments. Temporary working means that people can work when they want to work, and not necessarily always at the times that their employer wants them to work, so they can conduct other activities. The British Retail Consortium believes that temporary working offers a valuable route into the workplace. Last week, I spent four days working in St. George's Crypt, which is a homelessness project in Leeds. It does a fantastic job in tackling homelessness in Leeds and helping people with addictions. People who work there regularly told me—and I saw this for myself—that we have to instil a work ethic in people in that position. There are many families in which no one has worked for generations. They do not have any experience of work, so they do not know what it is like to get up in the morning and go to work. Temporary and flexible working gives those people the opportunity to gain a work ethic. They may work only a few hours a week to start with, or a few hours a month, but at least that gets them into a routine. If we seriously wish to help vulnerable people—homeless people and people with addictions—to have a normal life which, to my mind, means going out to work every day, temporary working is a valuable way of giving them a work ethic. If we imposed extra burdens on businesses to employ temporary workers, it would, at a stroke, take away the opportunity from many of those people to get a foot on the work ladder. Equal pay between agency temps and permanent employees cannot always be justified, as we must take into account differences in loyalty and experience. Many good employers make a point of rewarding the loyalty of employees who have worked for a company for a long time by giving them bonus payments. Are we really saying that, under the Bill, someone who wishes to work for only a few weeks for their own benefit and convenience should, at a stroke, be paid the same as someone who has been a loyal and faithful servant to a company for many years? If that is the route we are going down, it will be bad for employees and undermine employers' attempts to reward loyal employees. Such an approach would also lead to prohibitive costs, preventing companies from using agency workers at all. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston said that his Bill is not designed to end the practice of agency working, but if we made it expensive to employ temporary workers, that would be the practical outcome, as the Bill would stop people using temporary workers. We have got ourselves into that situation, because time after time, the Government have made it more expensive to employ people. One need only speak to businesses in one's constituency to discover that it is a nightmare to employ people. They say that it is time-consuming, bureaucratic and expensive to take people on as permanent staff. If staff do not perform properly, the hurdles employers have to overcome get rid of them are a nightmare. Many small businesses cannot cope with that. My hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley made a point about the different needs of big businesses and small businesses.