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

I am not giving way; I did not intervene on anyone else and I am going to be brief. I am not going to talk out my hon. Friend's Bill. I hope that if, for some reason, the Bill does not make its way through the normal parliamentary stages, there will be continuing discussion between the Minister, in whom I have enormous confidence, and people who understand what modern industry at this stage in the millennium is actually about, as opposed to the prejudices and ideology to which we have been subjected over the last couple of hours. The Bill is, I believe, based on fair play—something that the British people recognise. Things have gone very badly wrong with industrial relations in Britain when that fair play does not exist, whether on one side of industry or the other. In my view, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, East is trying to do the decent thing in industrial relations. He has looked into TUPE and recognised that, by and large, it is working well, but there are defects that can be put right. That seems to me a reasonable approach. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) made the important point that TUPE is evolutionary and that there have been changes to it. Most of what I have heard about it has been positive, but when things have gone wrong, we have tried to correct them. Here we have a very decent little Bill, which would do exactly that in the case of private equity transactions. I shall address some of the points that Opposition Members made before I turn to the positive aspects of the Bill, which will be recognised as such in my constituency. I was frankly astonished when the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) said that employment legislation was about giving people the opportunity to work. It was as though the quality of work did not matter and exploitation would be acceptable at this point in our industrial history. It was pretty much the old-fashioned idea of ““hands wanted””, beyond which nothing much mattered. I thought that we had made progress since those days. The hon. Gentleman's argument was also advanced in the debates on the 2006 regulations, but there has been no evidence to justify it since. Indeed, the same argument was made against the proposal for the minimum wage. It was argued that all we should do was give people jobs—period. People said that our proposals would mean the loss of jobs, but there is not a shred of evidence that that has happened. Those arguments are no more valid now, when used to oppose this excellent little Bill. The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly), the Opposition spokesperson, endorsed the view of the hon. Member for Shipley. At this stage in our history, when we are seeking partnership and agreement between employers and employees, he made an outright attack on the trade union movement. I could hardly believe my ears. I thought that the modern Conservative party knew about the demands of the modern world and wanted to respond to them. That was not what we heard this morning, and it is not what my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, East was entitled to expect. In this little measure, my hon. Friend proposes protection. It is not unreasonable to ask for protection for my constituents who have done shift work, year after year, in appalling conditions. They have contributed far more to companies that have been taken over than some of those involved in private equity have. I do not include all those involved, because I have no desire to attack private equity concerns in the way that the trade unions were attacked by the Opposition at the Dispatch Box. However, there have been abuses, of which I shall shortly give an example from my constituency. When there are abuses of employment law, we in Parliament have a responsibility to put them right. Some Members give the impression that that is not our role. I have enormous respect for colleagues on both sides of the House, but people who are following the debate will say that we have not done a bad job of protecting our own employment rights, including our pensions. We must act when there is evidence that private equity concerns with a controlling interest have ignored representations from trade unions—or from employees' representatives if there is no trade union, which I find unacceptable.