Greg Smith MP: speeches

Speeches

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Eighteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The critical thing in what the Minister just outlined is that any information sharing must happen within the confines of our existing data protection laws. That is absolutely mission critical. Of course, everyone accepts that enforcement agencies must work with other enforcement agencies and that they need to work closely with other Government agencies at times, where there is a compelling need to do so. In that respect, our existing data protection laws will be the necessary safeguard, as well as the explicit recognition of the other agencies that might be conferred with. From that perspective, clauses 98 and 99 are relatively straightforward. I ask that the Minister to keep a close eye on the Bill as it passes through Parliament, becomes an Act and is enforced, to check on what we commonly call mission creep and to ensure that the powers exercised under these clauses do not, for unnecessary reasons, become too commonplace. For example, some agencies may unnecessarily share a little too information, in a way that is not relevant to an enforcement activity. We can all get behind enforcement activities where proper due process is followed, but there can sometimes be mission creep, which can stretch into realms that a reasonable person would not say was acceptable.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Eighteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  We accept the list, but welcome the Minister’s commitment from the previous debate to provide clarity on the organisations on it. We need greater reassurance on those, but for the time being I will certainly not object to the schedule. Question put and agreed to. Schedule 5, as amended, accordingly agreed to. Clause 99 ordered to stand part of the Bill. Clause 100 Restriction on disclosure of HMRC information Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Sustainable Aviation Fuels · Hansard source

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  May I, too, wish the Minister a very happy birthday? Estimates suggest that the SAF mandate provisions and the revenue certainty mechanism will still leave a shortfall, with a family of four facing over £300 extra to fly on holiday by 2040. That is a clear concern for consumers, as well as the airline industry. Net zero should not come at an additional cost to consumers or undermine freedoms—in this case, the freedom to fly. The test must surely be how to defossilise, decarbonise and allow people to do the same at the same cost. What steps is the Minister taking in conjunction with the Treasury to close the financial gap between incentives in the mandate and the actual increased cost of switching to SAF for the end consumer?

• 9 Jan 2025 · Sustainable Aviation Fuels · Hansard source

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  Of course, there is always another way. Much of the debate so far on SAF has been about fuels made from feedstocks and waste products. Unlike fuels that require feedstock, whose input costs will only ever go up, the industrial process that creates power-to-liquid synthetic aviation fuel will actually see its production costs reduce, with some predicting cost parity between the production of these synthetic fuels and the extraction and production of fossil fuels within a decade. Does the Minister agree that synthetics offer a much better long-term solution, and will he reprioritise the Government’s approach to SAF away from transitional solutions and towards synthetics?

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  There is my first question, prompted by my hon. Friend: does that include right hon. and hon. Members of Parliament who themselves are members of trade unions? Could that be the case? We are less clear on paragraphs (b) and (c). Paragraph (b) states: “persons appearing to the Secretary of State to represent the interests of employers”. That is a far less easily defined body of people. On the one hand, I can hear some potentially arguing that that is the representative bodies that gave evidence to the Committee, such as the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors. That would be a legitimate answer, until somebody came forward and made a compelling case that, as an individual employer, they should be considered to sit on the board.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Amendment 169 clarifies the specific obligations relating to the payment of statutory sick pay that are enforceable under part 5. Similarly, amendment 170 will ensure that those additional obligations relating to statutory sick pay that are imposed on employers by the Social Security Administration Act 1992 are enforceable under part 5. This goes back to our old friend, drafting errors being corrected that should really have been sorted out before the Bill was presented to Parliament in the first place.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 118, in schedule 4, page 128, leave out lines 11 to 16. This amendment is consequential on NC20 and removes those regulations from the list of legislation subject to enforcement under Part 5 of the Bill.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I fully acknowledge and appreciate the Minister’s point about negotiation with the Treasury, but even if we take it as read that it is right to bring powers into a single enforcement agency, there is always a cost to creating anything new, even if it is a consolidation. Surely, the Department for Business and Trade has a cost for that. There is legislation live, in front of us right now, that seeks to create the agency, so surely he must know the broad cost of setting it up and consolidating those powers.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  On the face of it, the clauses are not problematic: they are quite clear, and it is important that those things that are considered as enforcement functions are clearly defined. That is all well and good—until we get to clause 74(5), which states: “Arrangements under this section do not prevent the Secretary of State from performing a function to which the arrangements relate.” Therefore, a body with certain powers—admittedly in the Secretary of State’s name—is created; essentially, a quango is put in place, and people are given the clear job of carrying out the enforcement functions in the Bill. However, if the Secretary of State is not prevented from performing one of those functions, what is the mechanism by which they can overrule the quango they themselves set up to perform them? Of course, the ultimate buck must stop with the Secretary of State, but it is a pretty established convention that where a quango is set up and has powers delegated to it—I think of Natural England within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and many other quangos—it is very rare for a Secretary of State to intervene, overrule and perhaps come to a different conclusion from that quango. We will not oppose the clauses, but I would be grateful if the Minister could reflect on the circumstances in which he believes clause 74(5) would come into effect, to make clear the procedures a Secretary of State would need to follow to bring that subsection into effect.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I fully and totally accept that, but it is our job as the official Opposition, here and now in January 2025, to press the current Government on further measures that could be taken to work in the interests of everybody in our country—workers and businesses alike. Perhaps I accept the Minister’s point; perhaps we could have tabled an amendment to call for a review. Who knows? Perhaps on Report we might. But the fundamental position that I come back to is one that does not just accept the status quo, but is always challenging, always reviewing and always seeking to make things better in the interests of everyone. When the Minister goes back to the Department and prepares for the remaining stages of the Bill in the main Chamber and in the other place, may I gently urge him to consider in the round, with the Opposition’s support, whether there are tyres to be kicked and measures to be improved in the operation of the working time directive? May I also urge him to ensure—now that we are a sovereign country once more, having left the European Union—that this Parliament can make improvements should it so wish? I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister not agree that for any power held by any Secretary of State in any Department, the critical friend is a very simple concept? It is called Parliament—it is all of us.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  A lot of the detail is in the clauses that follow this one; as the Minister said, this is very much a building-block clause. Although I totally understand and appreciate the rationale for taking enforcement powers that are currently fragmented across multiple different agencies and consolidating them into one, the devil is always in the detail. Although it might seem sensible to consolidate the powers that are currently so spread out into one agency, this is very much a centralisation of power. The crux of clause 72 is about directly providing the Secretary of State with the overall function of enforcing labour market legislation. Whenever I see such provisions in any legislation, I cannot help but be reminded of the late, great President Reagan’s famous quote about the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” As my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater suggested in his intervention on the Minister, the serious detail is about the practical workings of the fair work agency as it is set up. What will be the total number of enforcement officers, employees and ancillary staff required—admittedly, some will be brought across from other agencies—to form it? What will be the cost to the taxpayer of putting that together? How many people are we actually talking about? I think that, as opposed to the powers that they will hold, was the crux of my hon. Friend’s intervention. As I said, we accept the rationale for bringing these powers together under one agency, but whenever such powers are granted to a Secretary of State, no matter what the field, there is always uncertainty and scope for never-ending expansion of the new agency, and of the size of the state, to do what is, in many cases, important enforcement work—I do not doubt that. Given the presumption that the Bill will become an Act of Parliament and that the agency will be set up in the way envisaged in clause 72, it would be good to have clarity about the plan for just how big the agency will be and whether the Secretary of State will put any cap on that from the get-go. How far does the Minister envisage the agency going?

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak to amendments 117, 118 and 119 and new clause 20, which stand in my name and in the name of my hon. Friends on the Committee. I make it clear that they are probing amendments; it will become clear over the next couple of minutes why we seek to probe the Government on the issue. The amendments would repeal the working time directive within one year of the Bill’s coming into force. Our reason for tabling them is not that we intend to abolish entitlement to holidays, lunch breaks and so on—far from it, and nobody is suggesting that. However, the working time directive has had a troubled history. One example is the difficulties that occurred between the Commission and member states when the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that employers—all of them public health and emergency services—did not calculate time spent on call as working time, when they should have done. The CJEU consistently declared that practice incompatible with the directive, arguing that inactive time spent at the disposal of the employer must be counted in its entirety as working time. Then, in 2019, the Court ruled: “Member States must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured.” The result of that judgment was never formally brought into British law, but as a result of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, it became part of retained EU law. Last year, the Conservative Government legislated to clarify that businesses do not have to keep a record of the daily working hours of their workers if they are able to demonstrate compliance without doing so; to amend the WTR so that irregular hours and part-year workers’ annual leave entitlement is pro-rated to the hours that they work; to introduce an accrual method for calculating holiday entitlement for certain workers; to revoke the covid regulations—it seems odd that we are still saying that—and to introduce rolled-up holiday pay for irregular hours and part-year workers. Consultation requirements under the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 to allow smaller businesses to consult directly with employees would be another measure. That is just the start of how it might be possible to simplify the working time directive. I would be grateful to hear the Minister’s thoughts on how well the working time regulations are working, and on whether any further changes might be made for the benefit of businesses to enable growth in this country.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  This is another example of a tidying-up exercise that we really should not have to be discussing in Committee. It should have been sorted before the Bill was introduced. Amendment 85 agreed to. Question proposed, That the schedule, as amended, be the Fourth schedule to the Bill.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair once more, Mr Mundell. Government amendment 84 looks to us like a drafting correction. We will not rehearse the arguments we have had so many times in the Committee about drafting corrections, but I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm whether the powers in the Bill, which are directly related to the amendment, for enforcement officers to enter and search business premises are any wider in scope than current enforcement powers and, if so, how and why.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I will be delighted to in one second, when I have finished my train of thought. Can someone be classed as independent if they are an academic or a university professor, perhaps with considerable knowledge of and expertise in employment law and matters relating to the Bill—someone we should all respect—but also a member of a trade union? Does their membership of a trade union count towards whether they are independent? Would that be at odds with paragraph (a)?

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I always bow to your advice, Mr Mundell. I will try to save the Minister the embarrassment of having that recorded in Hansard . Let me try to return to my point. While I accept that advisory boards of Government Departments often follow this formula, we have a particular definitional problem with this one. The problem is whether, in the example I gave before the intervention of the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles, the independence of a seemingly independent expert—most reasonable people would say a university academic, professor, doctor or whoever would normally fall into that category—would be influenced if they were a member of a trade union, and whether in that case their membership of the board would be compliant with the provision for an “equal number” of independent experts and those representing the trade union movement on the board. This is an important problem for the Minister to acknowledge. He must be very clear to the Committee whether the word “independent” in paragraph (c) would disallow anyone who is a member of a trade union from being a member of the board under paragraph (c), for fear of contradicting paragraph (a).

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and for what appears to be his support for the British egg industry. I encourage him to eat as many British eggs as possible and to support our farmers.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I hear what the Minister says about slowing things down, but it would be remiss of me not to comment that if the Government had perhaps taken their time a bit on the drafting of the Bill, we would not be spending so much time in this Committee considering the absolute deluge of Government amendments that tidy things up that should have been right in the first place. Sometimes it is best not to rush things. Sometimes it is better not to dive in head first and just go for the first thing available, but to be cautious, to review and to fully understand all the implications that new legislation such as this will have in the real world. That is what new clause 23, which stands in my name and those of my hon. Friends, seeks to double-check. It seeks to ensure that the Government are getting this right—not in our interests or those of anyone in the House of Commons, but in the interests of businesses and workers in the real world, trying to get on with their daily lives, get their jobs done and get their businesses growing and providing the growth and prosperity that we all want to see in the country. As I have said previously, we do not have a problem in principle with the establishment of a new body to oversee the enforcement of labour market legislation. I have made that clear, and hon. Friends who have spoken have made it crystal clear. But we also made a challenge in the previous debate, and that is what new clause 23 is all about. It is about ensuring that we fully understand the scope, cost and effectiveness of this new body. Any new body, be it a Government body or in the private sector—although the creation of new bodies in the public sector tends to be slower and often cost more than the private sector would manage—will take time and resources, and we would like to be reassured that this is a good use of time and resources. I repeat that our instinct is that it probably is. Our instinct is that it does seem to make sense, but we can never rely on instinct or on that which might look good on paper as the absolute cast-iron test. It is about the real evidence.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point. I believe in freedom; I have no problem with any hon. or right hon. Government Member being a member of a trade union. The point here is clarity and transparency. We have a Bill in black and white in front of us that refers to equal numbers but fails to define whether a member of a trade union could sit as an independent expert or would have to be categorised under subsection (4)(a) as representing the interests of trade unions. This is a matter of information on which the Committee and the general public deserve to have clarity before we allow this clause to become part of primary legislation in our country. As in all walks of life, there will be points of debate on that. I want to hear from the Minister’s own mouth whether he deems it to contradict the “equal number” provision. We could dance on the head of a pin all day, but when we are seeking to pass legislation, clarity is very important, and I look to the Minister to give it.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Yes, Mr Mundell. I am genuinely struggling to find the connection between my questions in transport orals this morning on sustainable aviation fuel and this Bill. I will gladly offer to have a coffee with the hon. Member for Birmingham Northfield to discuss my passionate view on synthetic fuel in the future, but it really is not relevant to this Bill. I accept the hon. Gentleman’s latter point, about previous reviews, but new clause 23 is specifically looking at the creation of this new body and is about ensuring that that is the right thing to do and that the cost of it will actually bring the benefit that the Minister and other Government Members have explained that they believe it will. It is incumbent on all of us, whether we sit on the Government or Opposition Benches or for the smaller parties, that we challenge everything put in front of us. Any culture in any organisation that does not challenge what is put in front of it is often weaker for it. That is what new clause 23 is seeking to do. Inherent in that, notwithstanding the Taylor review, is the aim to ask and double-check whether the rationale takes into account how effectively labour market legislation is currently being enforced and understand what research this Government—not former Governments, but this one—have undertaken on what will be done more effectively or efficiently with the creation of this new body. We would like the Government to assess how effectively the labour market legislation that will be enforced by the new body is currently working in that fragmented sense that the Minister spoke about earlier, and how effective the enforcement of it is, before setting up any new quango. Generally speaking, new quangos fill me with dread and fear, but this one may be worth while. However, we need the evidence. Will the Minister expand on how matters will change for businesses through the new labour market enforcement authority? What will feel different for them and what changes might they need to make as they prepare for it? New clause 23 tries to get to the heart of that.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am always pleased to delight the Minister in these debates. It was a probing amendment, and I can confirm that we will not be pressing amendments 117 to 119 or new clause 20 to a Division. However, I will briefly comment on the Minister’s response. I entirely respect him for it, but it was a full-throated defence of the status quo. Something that goes deep within my view of politics, of government and of public administration is there is always room for improvement in pretty much everything. I say that as much about measures passed by previous Conservative Governments as about those passed by current or past Labour Governments. I refuse to accept that something is as good as it possibly can be and is working as well as it possibly can in the interests of businesses and workers alike. There is some disappointment from the official Opposition that the Government do not seem to want to look again.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I hear what the Minister says in his explanation of the clause. Often, advisory boards are perfectly good and useful bodies, but I return to my earlier point that where a power rests with a Secretary of State, the accountable body to which any Secretary of State must submit themselves is the House of Commons, where they are a Member, or the House of Lords, in the rare case that they sit in the other place. Parliament is the advisory body—the critical friend—that the Secretary of State should submit themselves to. However, accepting that an advisory board is going to be established, I want to ask the Minister about its make-up. While the Bill seems to be quite clear, there are some gaps, and some unanswered questions that the public, businesses, employees and the trade union movement will no doubt wish to have answered. Probably the clearest definition in clause 75(4) is that in paragraph (a): “persons appearing to the Secretary of State to represent the interests of trade unions”. I think we can all understand that that means representatives of the trade union movement.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Sixteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  This is another bumper grouping for us to debate. As the Minister said, new clause 32 would require the Secretary of State to consider whether sufficient measures are in place to prevent workplace intimidation before making any order to allow balloting to take place by any means other than a postal ballot. The Bill liberalises the law on balloting and industrial action, and I am normally very much in favour of deregulation and liberalisation, but on this occasion, there are considerable concerns, which is why the Opposition tabled this new clause. The Bill lowers turnout and support thresholds and allows electronic balloting on industrial action. It is important that there are protections in place for workers in that. We want to make sure that, before allowing electronic balloting for industrial action, the Secretary of State is reassured that unions have sufficient measures in place to prevent workplace intimidation. If balloting can take place electronically, it can take place in workplaces, where it is much easier for pressure to be put to bear on union members in terms of casting their ballot—that hand on the shoulder, that peering over to see what someone is doing, or the potential requirement from those up to no good to demand proof of the way that someone has cast their ballot, be that on their mobile phone, iPad, tablet, laptop or computer, or whatever it might be. These are practices that I am sure every Member of this House would condemn and say are totally unacceptable and inappropriate, but that I can see happening without robust measures in place to prevent them. We want the Secretary of State to be able to reassure the House that sufficient protections are in place to ensure that ballots are free fr.om intimidation and coercion before they are allowed to take place electronically. I listened carefully to the Minister’s appeal to the Opposition not to move our new clauses, but I am yet to hear a compelling and reasoned argument why the Government cannot support new clause 32. Surely, we all wish to ensure that intimidation and coercion have no place in any part of our society, least of all in the workplace. I do not understand why the Government are so reticent to take what I would argue is a very moderate and reasonable step to strengthen the Bill and tackle intimidation and coercion. New clause 33 would prevent voting in trade union ballots and elections from being done in the workplace. Many of the arguments I made on new clause 32 very much apply here; in a similar spirit, we have tabled new clause 33 to create a little more balance and protection in the Bill. It is important that all those exercising their right to vote on industrial action can do so free from pressure from colleagues or trade union members, and that is why the new clause would stipulate that voting in trade union ballots and elections should not happen in the workplace. We also do not believe that workers should spend time when they are being paid to do their jobs voting on trade union matters. Such voting should be done in members’ personal time outside the workplace, and employers should be protected from having to pay for it. Before I move on to new clause 43, I want to emphasise that while that last point is important, it is a matter of principle that in this country, we believe in the secret ballot. If there was any suggestion that any of our elections, whether elections to this House, council elections or police and crime commissioner elections, could take place on someone’s phone in front of other people without the protections we all enjoy at the ballot box, there would be outcry—there would rightly be outrage. When it comes to something as significant as voting for or against industrial action in a trade union ballot, it is absolutely the same principle: the integrity of the secret ballot should be upheld, in the same way that we would expect in any other walk of life. Indeed, we have protections in the 1922 Committee in this House. We have the occasional leadership election, and mobile phones are not permitted into the room in which we vote, to stamp out the very possibility of people looking over others’ shoulders and the secret ballot being compromised. I am not sure what the parliamentary Labour party does. The secret ballot is an important principle enshrined in our democracy that should apply equally to trade union ballots. This moderate, measured request to ensure that those ballots do not take place in the workplace is an important step to protect the secrecy of the ballot.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Employment Rights Bill (Sixteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Nobody is suggesting that equalities issues should not be taken seriously. The point that I was making about our amendments is that the law is already very clear about equalities, and employers should be held to that law. There is no need to place this additional burden on the public sector or the private sector. Equalities are incredibly important—nobody in the Opposition is denying that—but we must find the right vehicle to ensure that equalities duties are enforced. This Bill is not it.