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Employment Rights Bill

My Lords, when this Government came into office, we made a commitment to deliver the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation—a commitment

I particularly support, given that I have been a proud member of UNISON for many years. We promised to introduce a Bill focused on improving workers’ rights and creating the necessary conditions for long-term economic growth within 100 days of taking office. This was delivered in October last year, fulfilling a key manifesto commitment.

This Bill addresses the pressing issues workers face today. Workers have waited too long for change due to the legislative stasis over the past decade and more. Average salaries barely increased under the previous Government and the average worker would now be over 40% better off if wages had continued to grow as they did leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. This lack of action means that there are far too many people in low-paid and insecure work. As few as one in six low-paid workers moves into and stays in better-paid work, and 2 million employees report feeling anxious about hours worked or shifts changing unexpectedly.

This is why Labour committed to making work pay as a key pillar of our election manifesto last year. In that manifesto, we were clear that our core mission as a Government would be not just economic growth but growth which raised living standards in every part of the United Kingdom so that working people have more money in their pocket. The mandate that the British people returned was clear. Further polling by Opinium and Focaldata since the election has highlighted that there is broad and strong support across the political spectrum for the policies in this Bill. British people have waited long enough. They now urgently want protections in their workplaces from day one of their job, an end to exploitative zero-hours contracts, and greater flexibility so that work works around their lives.

This legislation was developed in close collaboration with business and trade unions, and we are committed to ongoing engagement to ensure that all stakeholders, including SMEs, receive appropriate time to prepare for the ensuing changes. The improvements it offers in improving workers’ well-being, increasing productivity, reducing workplace conflict and creating a more level playing field for good employers would grant significant benefits worth billions of pounds per year. The Bill seeks to address the gaps and outdated provisions in current employment law and helps us turn the tide on the debilitating trend of in-work poverty.

I will now speak to the specifics of the Bill. Part 1 introduces changes to various high-profile areas of employment law. Here, we make good on our commitment to end exploitative zero-hours contracts. The Government are committed to ending one-sided flexibility, ensuring that all jobs provide a baseline of security and predictability so that workers can better plan their lives. The changes set out will require employers to offer qualifying workers guaranteed hours, reflecting the number of hours they work regularly during a reference period. This will be set out in regulations but is expected to be 12 weeks.

We will also require employers to provide in-scope workers with reasonable notice of shifts, as well payment for shifts that are cancelled, curtailed or moved at short notice. Corresponding rights are being introduced for agency workers who may also experience that one-sided flexibility. These changes could improve

the security of work for around 2.4 million people, which is approximately 8% of all employed people in the UK.

On flexible working, this will be made the default, except where not reasonably feasible, to benefit workers and their families. Businesses also benefit from this change, as it will help give them access to a larger pool of candidates. However, we recognise not all workplaces can accommodate requests for flexible working. Businesses will still be able to reject unfeasible requests, provided the decision is reasonable and based on one of eight business grounds.

On statutory sick pay, the Government’s view is simple: no one should feel forced to struggle through work when they are unwell. This legislation will mean that the 1.3 million lowest-paid employees will have access to the safety net of sick pay at a rate of 80% or the flat rate, whichever is lower. We are also removing the waiting period for SSP, meaning employees will be able to access it from the first day of sickness, benefiting millions of people.

The previous Government took laudable steps to improve the law around tipping. We are building on this by strengthening the law to make it mandatory for employers to consult with workers at the place of business when developing their tipping policies.

Turning to entitlements to leave, we will improve access to paternity and unpaid parental leave by making them day-one rights and by allowing paternity and shared parental leave and pay to be taken in any order. This will give employees the peace of mind that changing jobs will not affect their access to this leave, and it will provide working parents with greater flexibility.

We will also establish a statutory entitlement for a day-one right to bereavement leave. Under this, at least 900,000 workers will benefit from bereavement leave following the death of a loved one every year. This sensitive issue is one we will consult on, with the detail to be set out in secondary legislation.

Regarding harassment in the workplace, it remains a sad reality that too many people often find their workplace unsafe. This can have a detrimental impact on people’s lives and careers, and this is particularly true for women. We are clear as a Government that we will do all we can to tackle this. We are legislating to strengthen the legal duty for employers to take all reasonable steps to stop sexual harassment before it starts, including harassment by third parties, and we will strengthen protections for whistleblowing to make it clear that, if an employee speaks up about sexual harassment, they can qualify for whistleblowing protections.

We are making changes around dismissal as well. First, we will make it unlawful to dismiss pregnant women and mothers during maternity leave and for a six-month period after their return to the workplace, although there will exceptions to this in specific circumstances. Secondly, we will create a new automatic unfair dismissal right for employees who have been unscrupulously fired and rehired, or fired and replaced, ending the unnecessary threats of these practices. Thirdly, we will ensure that all employees are better protected from unfair dismissal by making it a day-one right, benefiting nearly 9 million people.

Turning to Part 2, changes will be made to collective redundancy. These will ensure employers fulfil collective consultation obligations which will be triggered where 20 or more redundancies are proposed at one establishment, as is currently the case, or where a threshold number of employees are proposed to be made redundant across the organisation. The threshold number will be set in regulations following consultation with those with a stake in good employer-employee relations, and we will set the thresholds for this requirement at a level that balances the needs of growing business and protecting employee rights.

We are also amending notification requirements so that employers must notify the Government when they are proposing to make employees redundant across their business, and when they meet the new threshold. This will ensure employers acting in bad faith cannot circumvent their consultation obligations by proposing smaller numbers of redundancies across multiple worksites, allowing more employees to benefit from those collective consultations.

We are closing a loophole in the maritime sector to ensure seafarers have the collective redundancies protections they deserve.

We will also deliver on our commitment to reinstate and strengthen the two-tier code on workforce matters. This was first introduced by the last Labour Government and repealed by the coalition Government of 2010. By reinstating the code, we are taking a step towards ending unfair two-tiered workforces, where employees hired from the private sector to work on an outsourced contract have less favourable employment terms and conditions than those transferred from the public sector.

Our country has a national gender pay gap that stands at over 13%, so we are also taking overdue action through action plans. These will require employers to take action to improve gender equality, as well as to better support staff during the menopause. This is good for women, economic growth and our country as a whole.

Part 3 addresses pay and conditions in specific sectors. Chapter 1 will reinstate the school support staff negotiating body to give a voice to support staff, who make up roughly half of the school workforce. This body will not only negotiate pay and conditions but advise on training and career progression to properly recognise the vital role these staff undertake. While an important part of reinstating the body is to improve consistency, it does not commit us to a one-size-fits-all approach. Our intention is for support staff in all state-funded schools in England to benefit from a core pay and conditions offer, while allowing the flexibility for all schools to respond to local circumstances, above minimum agreements reached. We will be consulting on this over the summer. The body will help address the recruitment and retention challenges that state schools of all types face and drive up standards to ensure we give every child the best possible chances in life.

Chapter 2 will establish a framework for fair pay agreements in adult social care in England, and, after constructive discussions with the Scottish and Welsh

Governments, this will be the case for the adult and children’s social care sectors in those nations too. This will help empower workers’ representatives and trade union officials, employers and others in partnership to negotiate pay, terms and conditions. The introduction of sectoral agreements aims to ensure that care professionals are properly recognised and rewarded for the important work they do. It will help tackle the long-standing workforce issues in this sector and improve the situation for workers and those for whom they care across Great Britain.

Chapter 3 focuses on two measures relating to seafarers. Together, these changes will benefit our seafarers, who are the present-day standard bearers of the UK’s proud maritime history, and send an important signal that we will continue to be a world leader in international maritime employment law. The first change will deliver a legally binding seafarers’ charter. This will be achieved by expanding the scope of the Seafarers’ Wages Act to provide powers to require harbour authorities to request safe working and remuneration declarations from operators in scope. It will require operators to confirm that they are meeting the requirements of these declarations, the exact details of which we will consult on in due course. Secondly, we will give effect to international maritime conventions the UK has ratified, such as the Maritime Labour Convention, which will fix a powers gap that has been left following the UK’s exit from the European Union.

Part 4 focuses on trade unions and the right to take industrial action. First, we will introduce a legal duty for employers to inform workers about their right to join a trade union. This aligns with the Government’s focus on empowering workers by ensuring they are fully informed of their rights. We will also be providing for a right of access for trade unions. This will provide a framework for the negotiation of access agreements between employers and trade unions. Once agreement is reached, trade union officials will be able to access the workplace to represent, recruit or organise members and to facilitate collective bargaining. These agreements can also cover digital forms of communication.

Changes will be made to the conditions for trade union recognition too. Where an employer refuses to recognise a trade union voluntarily, currently it can apply to the Central Arbitration Committee to obtain statutory union recognition. There are, however, unnecessary hurdles that apply to that CAC process that hinder the recognition process. The Bill will tackle these hurdles by, for example, deleting the current requirement for unions to have the support of at least 40% of the workforce in the proposed bargaining unit in a trade union recognition ballot. In future, unions will need only a simple majority of those voting, ensuring greater fairness in the process.

Other changes we are making include strengthening the existing right to reasonable paid facility time for union representatives to carry out their duties, simplifying the information required for industrial action notices, changing the law around blacklisting, ensuring those lists produced by predictive technology cannot be used to discriminate, protecting against detriment for those who take industrial action and protecting against dismissal for taking such action.

Turning to the punitive trade union legislation passed by recent Governments, we will be making repeals to the Trade Union Act 2016 to effectively return the law to its pre-2016 position. There are three exceptions to this. First, we will retain the industrial action ballot mandate expiration date but extend it to 12 months. Secondly, we will shorten the notice period for industrial action from 14 days to 10 days, rather than the seven days it was before 2016. Thirdly, we will retain the independence of the Certification Officer from political control.

We are also repealing the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, which has failed to prevent a single day of industrial action. The framework set by the Bill will foster a new partnership of co-operation between trade unions, employers and the Government.

The current system of state enforcement is fragmented and inefficient, which is complicated for workers and employers. Part 5 focuses on the enforcement of labour market legislation and lays the groundwork for the establishment of the fair work agency. This agency will deliver upgrades to enforcement of workers’ rights. It will bring together existing state enforcement functions, including the regulation of employment agencies, national minimum wage enforcement, gangmaster licensing, action against serious labour exploitation and the unpaid employment tribunal award penalty scheme. This will simplify the overall enforcement process and improve access to rights for workers, while levelling the playing field for the vast majority of businesses that already operate in good faith.

We also expect the agency to be able to make more effective and efficient use of the resources currently used by enforcement bodies. Creating this agency is more than just shuffling deckchairs. It will have a wider remit than just the existing enforcement bodies, such as enforcing holiday pay for workers. These reforms will help to ensure that non-compliance does not pay. That is fair for workers and fair for businesses, too.

Finally, Part 6 contains provision to increase employment tribunal time limits for making claims from three to six months. This will benefit both employees and employers by providing more time for disputes to be resolved internally, potentially reducing pressure on the employment tribunal system. The additional time will support employees to consider the merits of bringing a case to the employment tribunal, which will help improve the quality of claims entering the system.

The Bill is a significant upgrade to legislation and I look forward to the forthcoming debate, including the maiden speeches from my noble friends Lady Gray and Lady Berger, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton.

In the context of our ambitions to make work pay, I hope noble Lords will agree that this Government are delivering on improving workers’ rights. I emphasise that this legislation seeks to benefit employers and the economy by levelling the playing field between good employers who already go beyond measures in the Bill and the less scrupulous ones. These benefits are recognised by many of the businesses we have engaged with throughout the Bill’s development and passage to date, including Centrica, the Co-op, Richer Sounds and Thomas Kneale & Co.

In the words of Nick Cooper, managing director of the Manchester-based SME Adept Corporate Services,

“fair treatment and job security aren’t luxuries—they’re the foundation of a high-performing workforce”.

When less scrupulous businesses are challenged, it is those that are already doing right by their workers—as the vast majority already do—that benefit.

I urge the House to support the Bill and the commitment it represents to improving the lives of millions of people and growing the economy. I beg to move.

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