Employment Bill [HL]

I support the noble Lord, Lord Henley, on that point, although, I make clear, on nothing else that he said. The noble Lord, Lord Razzall, may be relieved to hear that I am not a barrister, a lawyer or legally qualified at all like most of the contributors to the debates this afternoon. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Turner of Camden, I worked for the same trade union as her and at the same time, and took many industrial and employment tribunal cases. Therefore, I feel that I have a strong view that how the Bill is framed will not entirely meet the needs of those who seek to benefit from employment tribunals. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, that the point he makes has some validity. Some discussions are ongoing. Indeed, a Private Member’s Bill is currently going through the other place. I wish Mr Miller all luck with it. At the same time arguments are to be advanced in favour of agency workers which I believe are germane to the Bill we are discussing. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, I say that surely the Clerks know their business well enough that if they felt this was outwith the scope of the Bill it would not be in the Marshalled List for us today. I do not wish to rehearse the arguments in any great detail on behalf of my noble friends Lady Turner and Lord Wedderburn. But the point has to be made that it is not in any sense a contradiction in terms to argue for this amendment and for agency workers to have comparable rights to permanent employees—even if not the same rights—and at the same time deny that flexibility of work benefits both some employers and some employees. As I said at Second Reading, where it benefits employees, fine—let those employees work quite happily in situations and under conditions that suit them, perhaps because of family arrangements or semi-retirement or because they can only work at certain times of the year. That is fine, but there are many people seeking full-time employment whose only recourse is to agency work, which is the very antithesis of full-time, permanent employment. I was struck by the regular use of ““end user”” by my noble friend Lord Wedderburn. That seems utterly appropriate because it is what the end users are doing to the people whom they employ on an agency basis—they are using them. That is quite clear. I am sure that the term was not meant unkindly in that way, but that is what it amounts to and it has to be exposed for what it is. Many of the arguments were made in an excellent debate on Friday in another place. However, the bottom line is that there is insecurity for agency workers. I have not been an employer but I should have thought that any employer would want the people working for him or her to feel sufficiently secure in doing a job in order to contribute to the benefit of that business, service, voluntary organisation or whatever. As was backed up in some of the testimonies given in respect of the Bill in the other place, if people feel insecure—if they cannot join pension schemes, get proper paid holidays or get reduced sick pay—that impacts not just on those individuals but on their families. When we are talking about flexible working, there has to be an element of fairness, and I shall come back to that in just a second. We heard all sorts of stories on Friday about aspects of salaries—uniforms, travel and accommodation—that are directly deducted and over which people have no choice and there is no opt-out. People have to accept them whether they want them or need them. The final insult is being charged for cheque-cashing facilities at the end of the week. These are just employers’ ruses and I do not think that anyone can seriously seek to defend them. No training is offered and, as I said earlier, there is no security. Many such employees go well beyond the qualifying limit for taking cases to employment tribunals and it is iniquitous that they should not have the right to do that. If an employer acted in a way that would enable a permanent employee to take his or her case to a tribunal, the same should be true for someone who is not a permanent employee. My noble friend Lord Wedderburn said that this was really about the right of people to be treated fairly. When the Minister replied to the debate on Amendments Nos. 17 to 19, he reminded us that he was the first to speak up in favour of reducing what he termed the employers’ burden, but then he said that he was also the first to seek fairness in employment. That is exactly the nub of the argument here. This is about fairness, and fairness is a double-edged sword. You cannot have fairness on one side: if it is fair to one person, it must be fair to the other. When the Minister replies to the debate, I ask him to bear that in mind in relation to the right of agency workers to take their cases to employment tribunals.