Employment Bill [HL]

I, too, support the amendment. It appealed to me to a considerable extent, and therefore I wanted to put my name to it. It seems to be a helpful opportunity to clarify the law in a difficult area which, as my noble friend Lady Turner said, may be particularly relevant for practical purposes to immigrant workers who are even more uncertain of the law and of their rights and could be harshly deprived of those rights if the law is not changed. There are sometimes amendments to a Bill that are just about inside the Long Title and the wording of the Bill. In this case, it seems to me absolutely right that one should try—my noble friend Lord Wedderburn has properly seized the opportunity—to improve the law in the way in which he has described. The law is in a mess at the moment, because different courts and different tribunals at different levels have come to contrasting views on the incidental illegality that the noble Lord described. For example, there are cases where PAYE is not paid and other cases where the illegality of the employment is much more fundamental—there is a distinction between those two. One wants to ensure that when a worker is claiming statutory rights for redundancy, unfair dismissal, national minimum wage or whatever, the same basic rules apply, which he has described as the tort approach, as distinct from the contract approach. The claim should be barred only in the circumstances mentioned in Amendment No. 27A where the employee or worker either had knowledge of or participated in the illegality to such an extent or degree that it would be inequitable to grant him the remedy. In other cases where it would not be inequitable, where the illegality is incidental, the claim should not be disallowed by the relevant employment tribunal or court.