My Lords, I welcome the Minister to his new role, although I feel rather sad for him that his debut is in promoting a Bill that most Members of the Committee will now recognise is a misrepresentation in its reference to the promotion of enterprise. I can say without any doubt after a career in business, including chairing a number of major public companies,
that almost nothing in this Bill will have any beneficial impact on economic activity or on the growth of the economy.
This is a rather tawdry Bill, and we are now being asked to look at rather a shabby amendment. It must have been very clear to Members of the Committee that the Minister’s predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Marland, did not really have his heart in the Bill at all. It was quite clear that he would much rather keep up his suntan overseas than put through legislation that will have such little economic impact.
The amendment has come about as the result of wholly inadequate consultation that is supported by evidence which is thin in the extreme, and the Minister will need to explain to the Committee why it is being proposed now. Why was it not incorporated into the original Bill? Why was it not mentioned, debated or discussed in the other place? Is it an afterthought? Was it overlooked when the Government were drafting not only the Public Bodies Bill but this Bill? If that is the case, those who work in the rural economy will have grounds for extreme grievance at the behaviour of a Government who can approach this issue, which is of great importance to them, in such a superficial and callous manner. My noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath has already pointed out that by putting this amendment into this Bill, a number of procedures and processes that Parliament approved in the Public Bodies Bill will be avoided.
I noted the Minister’s strong endorsement of the national minimum wage and I declare my past role as chairman of the Low Pay Commission. However, as I listened to him I felt, as he advanced his arguments for the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, that one could have made the same speech and inserted the words “Low Pay Commission”. What is it about the Agricultural Wages Board that is different from the Low Pay Commission? His arguments about freeing up the economy, allowing the market to operate and establishing a market clearing rate apply to the whole economy. I ask myself whether we are seeing this shabby amendment incorporated into this Bill at such a late hour as a precursor for a deeper and more fundamental attack on the concept of the national minimum wage.
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The Minister referred to complexities in the agricultural sector. I can assure him that similar complexities are confronted by the Low Pay Commission. We have to consider things such as interns, the employment of people who are offered accommodation as part of their employment, like a room above the bar in a pub, and people who are employed on duty but not working, perhaps in care homes. Complexity is a part of life in business and finding formulas which can manage complexity is part of the challenge of government. I put it to the Minister that his arguments that this is all too difficult, that life has moved on and that the simple rubrics of past approaches to employment legislation no longer apply, are false. They are false as far as the agricultural sector is concerned and as far as the wider economy is concerned.
What we are seeing here today is an attack on the rural economies—fragile economies, as my noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport described. We see a Government estimate of the economic impact of £250,000. That will come out of the pockets of farm workers—the money will come from nowhere else—and the essential protections that they have enjoyed through the Agricultural Wages Board will be removed.
I am a Cornishman and the agricultural sector is important in Cornwall. Like most people of my generation, we did not do internships at Goldman Sachs or such places, we worked on farms. I have done my fair bit of clearing out the pigsty and milking the cows. I was not very good at it and I certainly would not have been employed by the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, or his herdsman. I have worked at harvest time, thoroughly enjoying the colourful life of working on a farm. But I also know that it is a tough and hard life, particularly when the weather is inclement, as it frequently is in the winter in Cornwall.
I have noted that the Members of the other place who come from Cornwall tend to speak in Westminster with one voice and with an entirely different voice when they go back to Cornwall. I will be looking with particular interest to the Liberal Democrat Members of the other place who sit in Cornwall. After Monday evening I am not sure whether I should be describing the Liberal Democrats as my noble friends or not, but I shall be looking at what they do. My forecast is that I will read interviews in the Western Morning News, the West Briton and the Packet newspapers about how they are putting up a staunch defence of the rural economies, but they will march down the Lobby here to abolish the legal protection that the Agricultural Wages Board has provided for the poorest in the community. The impact of withdrawing protection from these people in a much more subtle and sensitive form than the Low Paid Commission can provide through the grading approach of the Agricultural Wages Board will be profound across the economy of Cornwall. I fear that in due course we will see the hypocrisy and two-faced approach of the Liberal Democrat Members of the other place in the West Country who say one thing to the local media and another when they speak or vote in the other place.
This proposal really does not make economic sense. As other Members have suggested, I doubt that the benefits will accrue to the farming community. I doubt that they will flow to good employers in the farming community. I was previously chairman of one of our largest retail groups. I have no doubt that the planning departments of our major retail groups are keeping a close eye on this initiative and they will be applying the squeeze—a squeeze that this Government acknowledge—that is frequently applied in an abusive manner in the promotion of the groceries adjudicator.
The Minister has said nothing about the impact of this proposal on the profitability and therefore the capacity of the farming industry to continue to invest. Instead, we have had inadequate consultation and a flimsy impact assessment. Quite frankly, if I had been a Minister taking this forward, as I did when I was a
Treasury Minister in the previous Government, I would have rejected the impact assessment for the superficiality of the analysis that supports it.
This unpalatable proposal has been tucked away in a Bill, proposed without any credible argument, and almost certainly provides a Trojan horse for further attacks by this Government on the weakest and poorest in our economy. If the Government are foolish enough to keep this amendment, I hope that when we come to Report it will be pressed to a vote and I am confident that we will be successful in that vote.