Employment Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Turner for moving the amendment, which, as she said, has been drawn more narrowly and specifically than the previous one. We are grateful to her for the work that she has done on it. I am afraid that we still feel that the amendment, even as newly drafted, is unworkable. My noble friend Lord Jones wrote to Members of the Committee on the matter, but it is still useful to remind ourselves to which seafarers the minimum wage applies at present. Under present legislation, all resident and non-resident seafarers are entitled to the minimum wage while they are in the UK’s internal waters. A seafarer on a UK-registered ship anywhere in the world is entitled to the national minimum wage unless his employment is wholly outside the UK or he is not ordinarily resident in the UK. The position is that, at the moment, a wide range of people who work in the seafaring industry are due to receive the national minimum wage. Our problems with the amendment are as follows. First, it would extend the minimum wage to all seafarers on UK-registered ships, including seafarers who do not ordinarily live in the UK or who work wholly outside it. It was never the intention of the minimum wage legislation to extend rights to workers who have no link with the UK. There is also the real possibility that the amendment might have damaging consequences for our own merchant fleet. Extending the minimum wage to all seafarers on all UK ships wherever in the world they trade carries with it the risk that, as my noble friend herself pointed out, companies could change the flag of their ships to that of another country to avoid paying the minimum wage. The seafarers would be no better off and the UK would suffer a considerable disadvantage in terms of the number of ships carrying the UK flag, which I understand to be a matter of great significance in the maritime world. The amendment would also extend the right to the minimum wage not only to mariners on UK-registered ships but to those on foreign-flagged ships. Attempting to apply the right on foreign-flagged vessels would raise difficulties, of which we also spoke, about the right of foreign vessels to enjoy innocent passage in our territorial waters. Because of the existence of this right, which is indeed enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UK-flagged ships will not be interfered with off the coasts of other states. We argue that it is dangerous to interfere with this diplomatic balance. Some ships plying trade between two UK ports—for example, between Aberdeen and Lerwick in Shetland—will spend part of their journey outside internal and territorial waters on the high seas. The new amendment would apply the minimum wage to ships of any flag on these services, as well as to services to the Channel Islands. The UK certainly does not have jurisdiction on foreign ships while they are on the high seas, so this would not be possible; there is no way in which we could insist that it were done.