Employment Bill [HL]

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Wedderburn for making a plea for fairness in the workplace. We all want that. I hope that his knowledge of the law would be such that he will respect another law: that of unintended consequences. France does not have the concept of agency workers in the same way at all. France has an enormously high rate of unemployment, and very low take-up of people coming into the workplace. Why? Because employers in a globalised economy vote with their feet. They go to places where they can avail themselves of a flexible labour market. Germany has high unemployment, and an even higher level of people who are not even entering the world of work for the first time. We excel in both those areas. One reason is that employers can avail themselves of agency temporary workers. The solution is a period when, at the start, an employer or someone wishing to avail themselves of agency temporary work can actually enjoy the same situation on both sides as exists today. But, after a period of continued work, the protection that my noble friends seek would click in. That would prevent so much of the abuse to which my noble friends so rightly draw the Committee’s attention, while providing the flexibility, for a few months at a time, that so many employers need to compete in a globalised economy and our society needs to fulfil full employment. We are trying to sort out what that period is with Brussels. I hope that the debate last week in the other place shed some light on it, and I am sure many Members of the Committee will have something to say about it. That is the solution. However, if you make it known and put agency workers in precisely the same position as those who are employed, you will suffer in a globalised economy because people will vote with their feet and go elsewhere. They will not create permanent posts to take those people’s places; they will merely take them to another economy, and that is what we have to guard against. That is not alarmist talk. We would much prefer to see clarity and have these abuses—which are dreadful and happen all the time—stopped for ever with well implemented regulation that is tough on people who cause distress to agency workers who are unprotected. That will happen after a period of time and is not for today.