Baroness Noakes (Con)

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group in the names of my noble friends on our Front Bench. I have a number of concerns about the guaranteed-hours provisions in the Bill, one of them being that they are drafted almost wholly from the perspective of workers and pay little heed to the needs of employers. I do not believe that is a good way to create employment law to underpin a healthy economy. On our first day in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Barber of Ainsdale, who is not in his place today, and the noble Baroness, Lady Carberry of Muswell Hill, both spoke about the work of the Low Pay Commission on zero-hours contracts. I was grateful to them for being pointed in that direction. I have a great deal of time for the work of the Low Pay Commission, which is always balanced and very careful, so I went back and looked at the 2018 report. Unsurprisingly, I found that it does not provide the copper-bottomed support for the Bill that noble Lords opposite have claimed—I should also say that the employment bodies represented on the Low Pay Commission have told us that as well. The Low Pay Commission did indeed recommend that workers should be offered guaranteed-hours contracts, but, importantly, it also recognised that there would be circumstances in which it would not be reasonable for the employer to have to do that. There is not a trace of that in the Bill. The Low Pay Commission was clear that the Bill should set out specific circumstances in which the employer would not have to offer guaranteed hours. The commission cited with approval some equivalent legislation which was at that stage going through the Irish parliament, which provided, among other things, that adverse changes in the employer’s business or the existence of temporary factors would allow employers not to offer guaranteed hours. Like the noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, I believe that Amendment 19A is eminently reasonable in that context. It does not give an employer carte blanche to ignore guaranteed hours but allows for some genuine business circumstances to be taken into account by the employer when looking at whether guaranteed-hours contracts should be offered. At the end of the day, if we do not have successful businesses, there will not be any jobs on any kind of contract available. As I said on our first day in Committee, I am particularly concerned, as is the noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, about small and micro-businesses, which really need to be allowed the flexibility if we are to protect the work opportunities of around half the private sector workforce. Even if those small and micro-businesses survive the incredible bureaucracy associated with these guaranteed hours, they will potentially not survive the substantive impact of the hours if they are required in all circumstances to offer guaranteed-hours contracts. Of course, this is particularly the case in the hospitality sector, the largest user of zero-hours contracts; my noble friend Lord Hunt spoke about the problems in that sector. There are also very large numbers of small and micro-businesses in that sector. Recognising some very limited flexibility, my noble friend’s Amendment 19A is actually very modest. It would go some way towards making this new requirement to offer guaranteed hours work in the context of businesses that have to face difficult circumstances, and at the moment the Bill pays no attention to that.