I, too, would like to say a few words about this proposal of shares for rights. Of the various types of employment legislation that have come before this House over the years—these provisions are basically employment legislation—there can scarcely have been any with as few friends, on either side of industry. I welcome the fact that the House of Lords did its revising job well and removed the offending clause. I am only sorry that the coalition parties, Conservative and Lib Dem, have chosen to bring it back today, instead of withdrawing quietly and gracefully.
Given that this provision has so few friends, I suspect that very few employers will want to make use of it. That is because employers who want to extend employee share ownership, of which I am a great supporter—the year after I entered this House I introduced a private Member’s Bill to promote it—will not want to do so in ways that force their employees to give up important rights at work. The type of employer who wants to work with their employees is not likely to be one who at the same time wants to alienate them by taking away their rights, which is what this measure would force such employers to do if they made use of it. Of course, it is hard to see any employees volunteering to adopt such an arrangement either. I suspect that employers who would make use of the measure would be those who are in difficulty.
I take the point that was made earlier about businesses that want to start up and take on more workers making use of the scheme, but the problem is that, although a new business could behave with the best will in the world in involving its workers in a collective enterprise, it will be when things go wrong and people fall out that those workers will need the protection that is enjoyed by the workers of this country. That is why we should be loth to throw that protection away.
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One objection has involved the suggestion that tax dodges and loopholes could be taken advantage of as a result of the measure being introduced. The Government
say that they will ensure that that does not happen, but we all know that tax lawyers will find new ways round legislation and that Governments will have to try to catch up with them, no matter what measures are introduced to prevent that from happening. I suspect that, in a couple of years’ time, measures to deal with new loopholes and tax dodges will have to be quietly introduced in a Finance Bill, in the hope that no one notices the embarrassing results of the changes.
There is a possibility that the scheme will lead to a growth in the number of workers with fewer rights, and to the deregulation of the labour market to which the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) referred. If that were to happen, it would be insidious to see a spread of businesses or employers giving up some of the most important rights to be won by workers and their trade unions over many decades. Incidentally, a different Liberal party was proud to speak up for those rights in the past, but in its current guise it seems happy to see them taken away.
It is also foreseeable that businesses making use of the scheme might eventually have to implement redundancies and lay-offs in which people lost their jobs. It is precisely at such times that the potential for legal challenges would arise. I do not have time today to go into all the possibilities, but it does not require much imagination to understand the prospect of all sorts of legal challenges—