It is a pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. Apropos of the list the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill) gave earlier on, in Wales, we have a legislature that does not have its own jurisdiction, as the jurisdiction is retained in England and Wales. Wales is peculiar in that respect and, possibly, unique in the world.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) on securing this important debate and on her dedicated work campaigning for paid miscarriage leave. Like others, she has set out the case for devolving employment law to Scotland very effectively, and many of those arguments apply equally to the question of the devolution of employment law in Wales. I will refer to both countries in my remarks.
The tedious tit-for-tat we have seen in the last weeks and months around the Conservative leadership contest has demonstrated that Scotland and, even more so, Wales are very much an afterthought for Westminster. Our workers would be better protected by laws made in Scotland by Scotland’s Parliament and in Wales by our Senedd. As I said earlier, the situation was made clear when, in June, the UK Government announced their intention to scrap the Trade Union (Wales) Act—a law that was passed by our Senedd in Wales to protect Welsh workers. The UK Government’s response was to announce their intention to scrap it, demonstrating not only their disregard for Welsh workers, but their disrespect for devolution. We have, of course, seen moves to reverse devolution entirely consistent with the argument I am making.
In this regard, I should draw the Chamber’s attention to the Government of Wales (Devolved Powers) Bill, introduced in the other place by my friend and predecessor as hon. Member for Arfon, now Lord Wigley. This important Bill would enshrine in law the principle that powers devolved to the Senedd should
“not be amended or withdrawn without a super-majority vote”
of Senedd Members, which would introduce a safeguard—in the short term, at least—against the sorts of action proposed by the UK Government. The Bill is scheduled for Second Reading on Friday. Despite the Westminster Government’s hostile attitude to devolution,
further devolution and to devolution as a process—one that, I would say, is one way, not two way—I hope that Lord Wigley’s Bill will, in due course, come before us in the Commons.
Returning to the question before us, devolving employment law to the Scottish Parliament and the Senedd would allow the introduction of an enhanced package of support for workers, which, as others have said, could include paid bereavement leave and miscarriage leave as day one employment rights, outlawing fire and rehire tactics and bringing in properly funded carers’ leave. A further priority for employment law in Wales and, I am sure, in Scotland would be shared parental leave, which is key to enabling more equal parenting, tackling endemic pregnancy and maternity discrimination in the workplace and ending the gender pay gap.
As has already been said, in 2017, amid concerns that uptake of shared parental leave was low, the UK Government indicated that they wanted to re-evaluate the scheme. On 15 July 2022, the newly appointed Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt), told MPs that the Government were evaluating the scheme and would publish findings in due course. We are still waiting for those findings, so I would say to the Minister and any new Minister—devolve the power to a legislature that will act. For what is already clear is that this policy on maternity leave is failing. Using data obtained by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions, Maternity Action has calculated that since April 2015 just 47,000 of the 2.95 million new mothers who took statutory paid maternity leave have used shared parental leave to transfer some of their paid leave to the child’s father or other parent. That is just 1.6%. That is the measure of a policy that is quite clearly failing.
One of the main problems with the scheme, as well as the current flat rate of £156.66 per week, is that a parent must transfer the maternity leave entitlement to the partner. That transferability makes the scheme extremely complex and consequentially poorly understood by both employers and parents. There is also the question of eligibility with at least a third of working new fathers failing to meet the qualifying conditions because of their level of pay or employment type. In Wales we have a great deal of low pay and self-employment is a very common pattern. What we need, and what I believe we would get if powers were devolved, is a system based on individual non-transferable rights for each parent to have leave.
There are solutions for the problems that I and other hon. Members have identified today. What is missing is the political will to act. The incoming Prime Minister has signalled that she will restrict workers’ rights collectively to secure fairer employment. Wales’s Senedd and Scotland’s Parliament, empowered with the ability to legislate for employment law, would do things differently, and I sincerely believe that we would do things better.
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