Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. The core of all this is sovereignty. Why should not we in the United Kingdom Parliament decide what terms and conditions should be imposed and what terms and conditions should be freely negotiated between willing employers and willing employees in the UK labour market? My inclination is to be on the side of the right-to-work campaign. Emphasising the other side of the argument, which places a lot of regulations and burdens on employees, often has the perverse consequence of denying people who have a natural disadvantage in the labour market the opportunity to exercise their own right to work and to choose their own terms and conditions. That regulatory burden is one of the main contributors to 2 million people, including 1 million in the younger age group, being unemployed. They are not unemployable, but it will be very difficult to get many of them back into the labour market unless we introduce more flexibility rather than reduce flexibility, which is the purpose behind the Bill. I understand that the Minister has to face up to the reality of an enormous split in the Labour party on this issue. He knows that as we approach a general election, the resources of the trade unions will be vital and that, if the Government do not deliver on the Warwick agreement, they will be in trouble as far as those resources are concerned. Even he has recognised that we cannot just throw in the towel to appease the trade unions under the Warwick agreement if that will cause a disaster for the UK economy. For many months, the Minister and the Government have stood out against this Bill and its predecessor and stood out against the ill-conceived European regulation covering the same subject. However, right at the end of the Minister's speech, during which he refused to take any interventions, and after setting out in great detail all the Bill's shortcomings, he said that the Government would not actually vote against it. It is disappointing that they do not have the courage of their convictions. It would be better for them to be seen to be going down fighting on behalf of the United Kingdom's flexible labour market. That would have sent a strong message to our European so-called partners ahead of the negotiations on the directive. I fear that the way in which the Government are dealing with the Bill is showing them as indecisive and the poodle of their backwoodsmen—and backwoodswomen, I imagine. The Minister especially criticised the Bill because it does not specify the moment at which equal treatment will be required for agency workers. However, he did not spell out the fact that because the Bill does not define that point—it was not defined in the similar Bill to which the Government objected on Fridays in the previous Session—the rights that it sets out would come into effect from the very moment that an agency worker was employed. No one in their right mind thinks that that proposal is sensible, but, interestingly, despite all the protracted negotiations that preceded the Bill's publication, the promoter and sponsors of the Bill have not tried to introduce a figure to meet the Government's objection. The Bill is fundamentally flawed for that reason, if for no other. I applaud what my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) has said from the Front Bench. These days, the Conservative party is sometimes accused of being rather wishy-washy—albeit not as wishy-washy as the Liberal Democrats—and of sitting on the fence. Journalists on The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, and elsewhere, think that we are especially wishy-washy on taxation and public expenditure. However, leaving that aside, I welcome the fact that we are not wishy-washy on this Bill. I doubt that we will be able to muster sufficient numbers to defeat the Bill on Second Reading—we will find out whether the Liberal Democrats vote for the Bill or abstain, as the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) indicated that they would—but it is more important to be right than to go along with the majority. During my time in the House, I have always been interested in defending minority rights. Agency and temporary workers are in a minority—that goes without saying. Their rights are important. Individuals who are out of work have a right to test out different types of work through different employers via the use of agencies, or job brokers, as they are increasingly called. The Department for Work and Pensions is setting up a network of job brokers, some of which will be encouraging employers to take on temporary staff and giving them temporary subsidies so that they can take on those staff. That will happen in recognition of the fact that the value to an employer and work force of an individual taken on in such circumstances is not as great as the minimum wage that must be paid. Such a proposal is a welcome introduction of flexibility and a way of avoiding the rigid consequences of the minimum wage legislation, which many Conservative Members criticised when it was introduced. The minimum wage has now been increased across the country to a level that puts employers in a position whereby they cannot afford to take on the inexperienced or those without much recent time in work without some sort of subsidy. The Government recognise that in the job-broking system, and that is a way forward. However, it is at odds with their approach to this Bill: they do not like it, but do not have the courage of their convictions to vote against it. At a time when our economy is entering, if not a crisis, but a period of significant downturn, with the prospects for growth far below what has been forecast by the Government, those organisations outside the House will want to see whether Parliament is on their side in ensuring that we get a more flexible labour market and that we do not put more people out of work. At a time when many of us are thinking about the implications of the Olympic games for our country, the points made about the Olympic Delivery Authority are pertinent. It is inconceivable that all the people who will work on the Olympic games, which will take place over a concertina period of three or four weeks, should be employed permanently. It would be ludicrous to say that. I suspect that some people who would have been taken on for four-year fixed-term contracts have not been taken on because we have not quite got to the four-year trigger point. The legislation to implement the regulations on permanent workers, on which the Bill is modelled, introduced a rigidity into the employment market. If someone is on a fixed-term contract of more than four years from 2002, that person is deemed to be on a non-fixed-term contract as soon as the contract reaches four years and, on the termination of that employment, is entitled to compensation for loss of office, to redundancy pay and so on. We have seen the consequences of that in the case of some chief executives of local authorities who were employed on fixed-term contacts on the basis that that would give them a higher salary. However, when the fixed-term contract has expired, they have still been entitled to severance or redundancy money because of the four-year rule.