Private Equity (Transfer of Undertakings and Protection of Employment) Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. A couple of months ago, when I first embarked on this process, I was fairly clear that I knew very little about private equity takeovers or the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981; now, however, having spent a few months going through it all, I am certain that I know very little about them. I found most of the language, and most of the drafting of the Bill, very confusing. I need notes on the explanatory notes. It is a lot more complex than I believed it would be. I therefore approached it not as any kind of expert, but in a common-sense way by looking at the problem and, without going into the legalistic jargon, trying to understand how ordinary people would see it. This all started because I thought that I had identified an anomaly in the law, and I still think so. When a company is taken over, TUPE applies, which means not only that the workers have protection but that the business has protection. People forget this, but TUPE is not just about the protection of workers' rights; it is also intended to ensure that there is proper competition, so it protects business as well as workers. Under a normal takeover, business and employees are allowed that protection, but when it is done through a transfer of equity—a transfer of shares that gives a controlling interest—for some reason they are not allowed the same protection. It seemed to me that there was an easy way around that—all I needed was a very simple Bill that would allow the TUPE rules to apply to people in those circumstances.