My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, very kindly reminded the House of my words at an earlier stage, in which I used the expression “mystification”. My concern is that I start from rather a different position. I think that a kind of package could be put together that would represent that midway point between someone who was self-employed and someone who was fully employed, particularly in dealing with the kind of company that the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, has just pointed to; indeed, I thought that was the intention. I am dismayed because I do not want to remove the possibility of a sensible experiment that would enable small firms, in return for shares, to recognise that, to use a phrase, “We are all in it together”. That seems perfectly respectable.
I could not go along with what was being proposed, as a matter of principle, until the change that has now taken place. I thought it unacceptable that someone should lose their jobseeker’s allowance because they had not entered into what ought, right from the beginning, to be a different kind of arrangement, which would have to be voluntary. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that, because the job would be advertised in this way, somehow or other it was not voluntary. There are lots of jobs that people decide they are not going to take because of the terms under which they are presented. I do not find that objectionable.
What I find so difficult with the Government’s proposition is that it seems that it will not work. Frankly, it does not matter much what we decide on this because I do not think anyone is going to take it up and I do not think it is going to happen. That makes me sad—not for the reasons of the noble Lord, Lord Monks, but because I actually think that there is a place for a system that would enable a partial involvement in the beginning of a small company, which would of course mean that you took some cognisance of the fact that it was a pretty rocky position and in return you got some sort of special
advance. However, at every turn, we find that it does not quite work like that. All along the line, the sort of things that we might have liked do not seem to work out—not least, as my noble friend Lord Flight described, when it comes to the problem of how you pay for things and how you organise that. You begin to realise that this does not have the enlivening, enlightening and opening effect that the creators of this idea obviously thought it would have. I am not driven to the extremes of feeling that this is ghastly and awful thing, because I just do not think it is going to be taken up.
6.15 pm
I am very saddened by the fact that this is not the package that I think the Government intended to produce, which puts me in a very difficult position. If I vote in favour of the amendment, then we do not have anything at all. If I vote in favour of the Government, we have something that I do not think will be taken up. I find myself in an awful position, which is rather close to being a Liberal Democrat. I have spent my whole life avoiding that position so it is an extremely difficult one for me to take, and I have not yet decided precisely how I am going to emerge from this. I say to my noble friend, first, that he has worked valiantly with the material that he has—talking about bricks and straw would demean the triumph that he has established. We have the removal of the thing that made this absolutely unacceptable and some improvements on the margins that my noble friend Lord Flight has put forward.
I make a last-minute plea to the Minister. As long as you get rid of the extremists on both sides—those who would have nothing and those who do not really like employment rights at all, who I think cancel each other out fairly satisfactorily—a position could be created here which would be about share ownership in the circumstances of a joint contribution to the sort of risky endeavour that every new company is and every new high-tech company certainly is. That is the position that I think the Government were seeking to place, but I do not think that they have done it. I do not want to say to the Government that we do not want any of it, but I would have hoped that the Government could have gone a lot further in listening to the advice of people who did not wish them ill but wanted to find a better way through this. Although they have removed a thing that made it, in my view, impossible to support, I am not sure we have gone far enough along the lines that we ought to have in order to make this—