Employment Bill [HL]

I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness not only on her amendment but on the examples that she gave and the spirit in which she moved the amendment. My mind turned to the history of British employment protection legislation, beginning with the chimney sweeps in 1803 and going on to the Factories Acts of the 1830s and later, which especially provided protection for young women whose hair got entangled in the new machinery into which industrial society had moved. In a sense, her examples are a historical postscript to that era in our own times, when workers, especially young workers, have the benefit of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act and volumes of regulations which exist but do not cover many of the situations which the noble Baroness described. However, I should be grateful if the noble Baroness could deal with one question in her response to the debate. In speaking about certain aspects, she said that no employee can be allowed to remain in a certain place. I looked again at proposed new subsection (4)(d) in the amendment, which speaks of, "““adequate and secure transport back to the place from which the employee was collected””." The noble Baroness will remember that when, in a previous Grand Committee sitting, we moved amendments from this side of the Committee concerning agency workers, we proposed that the notion of an agency worker becoming an employee of the user should become a standard presumption, certainly in any fixed employment agency relations. In her response, can she say who is the employer when she talks of the employee? Is she saying that the agency becomes an employer? That would normally be rejected in the contract that the agency makes with the worker. Does she accept in these amendments the still rather general notion that the presumption should be that the worker becomes an employee, in legal terms, of the end user who becomes, in legal terms, the employer? In that sense, the amendment would support the approach that we suggested in earlier sittings should be general in our law.