Employment Rights Bill

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

In the positive spirit in which the Secretary of State speaks, will he commit on the Floor of the House that the reference period used to calculate hours for sectors that have serious seasonality—we have heard about boat building, hospitality, tourism and farming—will not be a ridiculously short period, such as 12 weeks? Will it be long enough to reflect the seasonal nature of that type of work?

[Peter Kyle]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for the passion with which he speaks. That is a very important point, and that is why we are consulting on the time threshold; we want to get it right. As my predecessors and I have said repeatedly, this Bill is good for workers and good for business, and that is the spirit in which we will continue.

Let me move on to fire and rehire, on which hon. Members will know there has been a long-running campaign led by trade unions. The provisions in the Bill will ensure that employers are no longer able to use cruel fire and rehire practices. No longer will unscrupulous employers be able to fire employees to replace them on low pay. The Bill also ensures protection for employees replaced by non-employee workers, such as agency staff, to do the same role. As we said in our manifesto, these reforms are a pro-business, pro-worker set of measures. They strike a balance, curbing misuse while allowing fair businesses time for adaptation.

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[Andy McDonald]

We want to get through this consultation as quickly as possible and to get this Bill on the statute book so that the position is clear, but I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. We need to move on these issues as a matter of urgency, and he is right to point that out.

Lords amendments 23 and 106 to 120 propose to reduce the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from two years to six months. We cannot support that halfway measure. Our manifesto is clear: Labour will deliver day one rights. Accepting these amendments risks entrenching insecurity and delaying meaningful reform. Workers should not have to serve a probationary period of six months or two years before being protected from arbitrary dismissal. We will fully consult on probationary arrangements to get them right, but we will not compromise on our principle of security from day one.

I must urge the rejection of Lords amendment 62, which seeks to retain the 50% turnout threshold for industrial action ballots. The threshold was a deliberate barrier imposed by the Trade Union Act 2016. No other democratic process in this country faces such a hurdle—not parliamentary votes or local elections. This House was elected without such restrictions. Trade unions must not be uniquely singled out. Removing the threshold restores fairness, strengthens industrial relations and honours our commitment to repeal draconian Conservative legislation.

Finally, Lords amendment 121 would permit academies to deviate from pay and conditions agreed through the school support staff negotiating body, which risks entrenching inequality. It could mean teaching assistants in the same trust being on wildly different terms, creating a postcode lottery in education and exposing staff to equal pay disputes. Instead of undermining sectoral bargaining, we should be expanding it, ensuring fair, consistent and collectively agreed standards across the board. Let us be frank: after years of pay erosion, school support staff truly need a pay restoration deal that values the vital work they do.

In every case, the Lords amendments before us risk weakening rights, not strengthening them. Our task is to make work pay, end one-sided flexibility and ensure fairness and dignity for every worker. If this legislation does not go far enough to meet union demands for sectoral bargaining and a single worker status, Members of this House will rightly call for a second employment Bill this autumn. We cannot sustain this anathema of fragile, insecure work for so many millions of people in this country; they need that security to plan their futures, and they need to have the protections that those in employment enjoy. In addition, were they to be brought into that architecture, the Treasury would benefit to the tune of more than £10 billion per annum, opposite the uncollected tax and national insurance contributions.

Working people have waited long enough. It is time for us to deliver the stronger rights and protections that they truly deserve.

[Damian Hinds]

I intend to speak mainly to the provisions dealing with guaranteed hours, but I begin with a word of thanks to the Government for what they have announced about special constables. It is not quite as good as adopting the amendment, but I welcome the review. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) for the work he has done. I hope the review will report quickly, and I hope for a growth in the number of special constables, not only in neighbourhood policing, which my hon. Friend rightly mentioned, but among people working in the tech sector. We need cyber-specials to tackle the scourge of cyber-crime and fraud, which is now the single largest category of crime, and is, sadly, growing once again.

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[Peter Kyle]

We will work on it.

[Damian Hinds]

I am very grateful to the Secretary of State for suggesting that he will try.

I turn to the provisions dealing with guaranteed hours and zero-hours contracts. I understand why it is attractive to the Government and the Labour party to seek to restrict the availability of contracts that do not have a guaranteed number of hours. From listening to Labour colleagues, it seems almost as if “exploitative zero-hours contracts” is one word. It is as if those words must always go together. We all want to end exploitation—that is why, in 2015, the then Government passed legislation to stop employers imposing exclusivity. We said, “If you are not going to guarantee your employee a minimum number of hours, it is not all right to say that they must not work for somebody else.” But not all zero-hours contracts are necessarily exploitative.

One of the biggest users of zero-hours contracts in our country is none other than the national health service, through its use of bank staff. I notice that the Liberal Democrats announced a new policy today, which would require extra pay for people on zero-hours contracts; I do not know whether they have yet costed that policy. By the way, for many of the people working as bank staff in the NHS, that is not their primary job but a second job. This allows a hospital or other setting to respond to spikes in demand. For many people with a zero-hours contract job, it is their second job, not their primary source of income. Zero-hours contract jobs are also very important to people coming back into work, as the hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray) said powerfully in an intervention.

Many people on zero-hours contracts are students. Particularly in hospitality, there is a pattern of work whereby an employee lives in two places: at home, and at their term-time address. They can stay on the books of their employer at home—it might be a local pub—while they are away studying during term time. It could be the other way around: they could have a job in their university town, and stay on the books when they come home. They can dial up or dial down their hours; for example, many students do not want to work a lot of hours, or any hours, during exam time. Contrary to what we might expect, and contrary to the all-one-word conception of “exploitative zero-hours contracts”, some people actually prefer a zero-hours contract.

[Andy McDonald]

And some people do not.

[Damian Hinds]

And some people do not, as the hon. Gentleman quite rightly says.

When I was working at the Department for Work and Pensions, the issue of zero-hours contracts became a totemic issue under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), the immediate predecessor of the current leader of the Labour party. There was this idea that there had been a huge increase in the number of people in the country on a zero-hours contract. We discovered that less than 3% of people had a zero-hours contract as their primary source of income, and the average number of hours those people worked was not zero or close to zero, but 25. Even more unexpectedly—this was the bit that really got people—the average job satisfaction of people on a zero-hours contract was higher than it was for the rest of the workforce.

I think we understand why the Labour Government wish to legislate in this way. It is something for Labour MPs to bring home. When so much else in their manifesto is falling apart before our eyes, they can say, “At least we’ve killed off this modern scourge, this huge growth in zero-hours contracts.” As I say, the number of those contracts is not nearly as big as most people think. If you think about it, we have always had zero-hours contracts in all sorts of forms, whether it be piecework, commission-only sales, agency catalogue work or casual labour. In fact, it is possible that today, there are fewer people on a zero-hours contract than ever before in the history of the labour market. Many colleagues might reflect on their first job. Mine was washing dishes in a restaurant. We did not have the phrase at that time, but it certainly would have been a zero-hours contract, apart from the fact that there was no contract at all.

If the Government wish to reform this area, as they may, I ask them to consider the situation in sectors with great seasonality, including hospitality, tourism and retail, and to please look again at the concept of a 12-week reference period, which does not reflect the reality of seasonality. I know that this will be introduced through regulations, not the primary legislation, and I welcome what the Secretary of State said; I think he indicated that the Government were open to looking at a more sensible length of time. The Government could also do things differentially by sector; there could be one period for employers in general, and another for sectors or sub-sectors that have particularly strong patterns of seasonality.

I also ask the Government to reconsider the requirement to not just offer guaranteed hours once, but keep on doing it. That is introducing unnecessary bureaucracy. If the Government want to make changes in this area, I encourage them to at least ensure that once an employer has made the offer once, the right can become an opt-in right.

The Government think that these provisions are something for Back-Bench Labour MPs to take home, but I ask Labour colleagues whether they really want to take them home. Do they want to take home higher unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment? Do they want to take home fewer opportunities for people returning to the workplace after many years away? Do they want to take home fewer opportunities for ex-offenders—those furthest from the labour market? Do they want to take home—because this will come as well, as night follows day—a further trend away from permanent employment and towards fixed-term temporary employment? Do they want to take home a shift from waged or salaried work to more self-employment? Is that really what Labour wants to deliver?

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

I start by saying a massive thank you to the new ministerial team and the new Secretary of State, who I welcome to his role, for keeping in clauses 14 to 18 of the Bill, as well as for their warm words at the Dispatch Box. It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), but we heard all those arguments before from Conservative Members when they opposed the minimum wage, which did none of the things they warned about.

I turn to my declaration of interests. It is a shame that the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith), is not in his place, because he asked all Labour Members to declare our trade union affiliations. I will proudly do so—they are in my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—but my interest in this Bill does not stop there. I have worked a zero-hours contract, and I would have benefited from this Bill. I have been a care worker who would have benefited from the collective bargaining that this Bill will introduce, and the Bill would also have meant that I was paid for time spent travelling between the jobs I had to travel to. I am proud to stand by my declaration of interests. It is a real shame that the shadow Secretary of State did not mention that he used to be a non-executive director for Just Eat, a company that has faced a number of claims for giving employees bogus self-employed status. Perhaps that would have been of interest to everybody in the Chamber.

The Employment Rights Bill has been called lots of things by lots of critics, but to me, it is about ensuring that all people can work safely, with respect and dignity, and have security in their work. For the past 15 years, we have seen people at the sharp end. We have heard stories of businesses struggling, and nobody wants that, but we have not heard the stories of what the previous Government subjected working people to. They called it a living wage, when actually it was a minimum wage, which ensured that people were stuck in in-work poverty. A woman is 34% more likely to be stuck in a zero-hours contract than a man. If we are talking about black and Asian minority people, that figure reaches 103%. Disabled workers are 49% more likely to be stuck on such a contract. This Bill is about protecting all workers, not just some.

On the right to sick pay, no one chooses to be sick. There are 1.3 million people without the right to any sick pay whatever. That is the difference that this Bill will make, and the difference that a Labour Government will make to working people’s rights. As has been mentioned, where are the grifters who sit on the Opposition Benches? They pretend that they care about the ordinary working man—not often mentioning women; often they talk only about the working man—but where are they? They probably have their hand out for some more of Elon Musk’s bitcoin, shall we say.

I will talk about clauses that touch on our work on the Women and Equalities Committee. The parental leave review, although not specifically in this Bill, will impact on so many workers. It is a pleasure to hear that being talked about under a Labour Government. We know that parental leave is also a problem for self-employed people. We have heard a lot about the impact of bogus self-employment and rogue bosses, but we have not heard enough about the protections for self-employed people. In the course of our Committee’s parental leave review, we heard that 31% of self-employed people do not take a single day off after their child is born. That is a shocking statistic. It is damaging not just for our economy, but for individuals and families.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Heeley (Louise Haigh) and all the campaigners for their work on misogyny in music and on banning non-disclosure agreements following sexual harassment and bullying. We heard loud and clear how many people in the music industry are self-employed, and many have been subjected to NDAs. That goes unreported and is unknown. The measure before us will make such a difference for so many people in many sectors, and it is so important that we get it through. The Conservatives and the Lib Dems talk about bits of the Bill that they do not like, and they list things that will be problems, but I ask them to think of the people we are trying to protect, because there will be a real impact.

Lords amendments 14 to 18 concern an issue that has a special place in my heart, and the hearts of many people, both in this Chamber and outside it. I am pleased that in spring the Government accepted the principle of two weeks of bereavement leave for parents who lose a pregnancy before 24 weeks. There is no sliding scale on pain for bereavement and loss, particularly for expecting parents. As a result of this change, grieving parents will no longer need to push through their pain to carry on working. Women who experience baby loss will not need to use sick leave, which implies that their body had something wrong with it. Arguments against the measure were founded on, “Well, you can always just take sick leave,” but a person who has lost a child blames themselves. It is natural instinct. Your first reaction is, “Did I do something wrong? Could I have done something differently? Should I have not eaten that? Should I have not done this? Should I have not jumped? Should I not have gone to an exercise class?” You think of all the things that you could have done to prevent it. For someone to go to their employer and say, “I need to take sick leave”, as if there is something wrong with them, is fundamentally different from how society sees pregnancy loss and miscarriage now, and I am grateful for that.