Employment Bill [HL]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Henley, for using his crystal ball. If he had sat down for one more moment I would have got to precisely that point. Let me take the Committee to Leicester, to an employee who was threatened with excommunication from her own community if she continued to assist Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs with its inquiries. HMRC, with its current powers, could do nothing without her testimony. Somehow it had to get to the powers the Bill seeks. It had to be able to use those powers to get the evidence because, frankly, for very shameful but nevertheless real practical reasons on the ground, it was not going to get the help it needed from the employee in question. I repeat: if we are going to get good-quality employers to understand that this is important for them as much as it is for employees, HMRC needs those additional powers. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, asked whether the powers will be used often. I very much doubt it, but they have to be in the box of tools available. Based on investigations conducted so far, securing employee testimony in these areas is problematic. Employees face intimidation, physical threats and loss of employment, and in some cases they simply cannot afford the risk. What is the point of having this type of legislation if, at the end of the day, the very people it is designed to protect are the very people who cannot avail themselves of that protection? That is why there have been so few actions and why so many potential prosecutions have been abandoned, not because of a lack of resource and not because these new powers would end up increasing them. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, raised a valid point. I am grateful she raised it because I also feel that it is a worry. She asked whether this was the thin end of the wedge—the slippery slope—and something where we will give the taxman the right to get a foot into the door and then end up seeing the whole body go through the door for other stuff. I assure her and the Committee that we have no plans whatever to increase the powers of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in respect of any other non-fiscal function. Each case for additional powers must be taken on its own individual merits. Coercive powers in PACE can be used only in respect of indictable offences. Therefore, if the relevant legislation provides for summary-only offences, it will not be possible to apply these powers. For example, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs could not use PACE powers in respect of its enforcement of the statutory adoption, maternity—again, I can cover the ground mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Henley—paternity or sick-pay provisions excluded from the Finance Act, because those provisions do not include an indictable offence. Enforcement of the national minimum wage would be improved if Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs had the additional powers in Clause 12. As I said in an earlier answer, HMRC has often been forced to abandon potential prosecutions because it has been reliant on evidence that it just cannot get. I stand here as someone who believes that the provisions should be set at a level that can be used as a tool in a modernised economy; therefore, we must have the ability to enforce that so that respect is obtained in the employer community as well.