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

I certainly will not give way until I have set out at least my opening remarks. There is a powerful argument for creating more harmonious sets of regulation in all sorts of areas. I shall illustrate that with one small point: this week, my Select Committee, the Regulatory Reform Committee, considered a change to a set of rules that had been in place since 1974 within health and safety provisions—something that is absolutely fundamental to the well-being of workers and the success of our economy. Two bodies had been in place since 1974—the Health and Safety Executive and the Health and Safety Commission. I challenge any Member to read back through the Robens report of 1973 and the debates that took place in the House and the other place in 1974 and give me a simple explanation of why there ever were two separate bodies. They were illogical at the time, and they stayed illogical, and the Government have now created a integrated body, as part of their drive towards better regulation. That is the kind of approach that we ought to adopt. On 22 February, the House supported, with an overwhelming vote, the Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill—the private Member's Bill that I am seeking to take through the House. That, too, like my hon. Friend's Bill, is about ensuring equality in the workplace, and it would create a more level playing field. I should have thought that, on any logical basis, the business community would like greater equality in the workplace, business compared with business. Just as my hon. Friend rightly said in his examples, different workers in different circumstances are treated differently for no good reason. Exactly the same point applies to my Bill, as agency workers and permanent employees are treated differently for no good reason, except by people who deliberately want to depress labour rates and drive down employees' earnings. The only bad guys in the equation that my hon. Friend describes in his Bill are, of course, those people who are using an opportunity to take control of a business deliberately to depress employees' earnings or to get rid of large swathes of them. I accept that there may be perfectly good economic reasons for that in some circumstances. If a business is failing—usually, most business failures are caused by the failure of management—it is not unreasonable for the incoming investor to change the management team and even to consider, of course, having to change working practices and so on. That is a perfectly logical thing to have to consider. But there can be no moral basis on which such an investor should not have a duty of care towards those employees that he will either dismiss as redundant or retain under different terms and conditions of employment. There is no logical basis on which different categories of investor should be required to act differently. My hon. Friend has been frank with the House in recognising the weaknesses in some aspects of the drafting, but the important thing that the House should acknowledge is that he has hit on a very important issue in respect not only of fairness and the equal treatment of different categories of employee, but of different types of business as well. It would be totally illogical if, by use of the loophole that he has identified, an incoming investor cut a swathe through terms and conditions of employment, got rid of a lot of people and created an artificial competitive position against someone with a different set of requirements. From both the employer's and the employee's point of view, the principle that my hon. Friend seeks to address ought to be adopted across the economy. In the 1980s, I worked with private investors in the Merseyside economy as a director of the Merseyside Enterprise Board. We helped to support companies in the days before Margaret Thatcher—the noble Lady—abolished the metropolitan counties. Eventually the board disappeared—I will not go down that track, because you will rule me out of order, Madam Deputy Speaker—but before it did so, it worked in close partnership with private investors. When helping to develop investment in companies, we told the investors and entrepreneurs with whom we dealt that a condition of the assistance we provided with taxpayers' money was equality of treatment for employees in their businesses, as measured by the statutes in force at the time. That is not a new principle, and it has become more important, as the hon. Member for Shipley pointed out, because the scale of venture capital and equity funds has grown enormously recently, so we must deal with the problem. When my hon. Friend the Minister replies to the debate, I urge him to accept, as in other areas of the economy, that equality and the equal treatment of employees should apply, for the reasons set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, East, and because of the overall benefit to the economy of a more level playing field. The measure is beneficial to both employees and employers.