Baroness Noakes (Con)

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, but I also support all the other amendments in this group. Both the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and my noble friend have already fairly comprehensively treated the issues that concern a number of us, so I will not repeat all those points. I just underline three brief points. We are trying to look for a balance between the legitimate expectations of employees and employers, because we need those to work in harmony. At the end of the day—as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe pointed out—employers will be producing the growth that the economy needs, so their hiring plans will be critical and anything that harms this balance will damage the economy. From an employer perspective, anybody who has undertaken recruitment as an employer knows that most employers approach this extremely responsibly—it is not a cheap process to get the right people into the jobs—but we also know that, however diligent you are in screening, interviewing and assessment processes, you do not always get it right. You can usually test whether a person has technical skills, although sometimes you need to see them in practice before you know whether they really have them. The important area is whether an employee fits with an organisation. That is really difficult to tell until the person turns up and starts working. Do they share the same values as the rest of the workforce? Do they have ways of working that are just not compatible with the culture of the organisation? This is particularly important for small organisations: if you have one employee who does not fit in a very small organisation, that is a significant proportion of the workforce and can be very damaging to the business of a small business. The last point that I underline is that this Bill will make it much more difficult for the difficult categories of people who want to find a job but cannot. There has been much talk about NEETs, and ex-offenders are another case. Why would any employer want to take on an ex-offender with day-one rights? We know some of them make excellent employees but quite a lot of them do not. They can become quite difficult to handle in the workplace. If employers fear that they will not be able to easily overcome mistakes in recruitment they simply will not hire, which will harm people who want to work.