Member

Thirdly, the Bill already has escape routes for the employer, and these amendments are designed simply to increase the ways in which employers can evade the obligations of a guaranteed-hours contract. There are three that I notice. One is short-term contracts: we would see a deluge of short-term contracts introduced to evade guaranteed-hours contracts for zero-hours workers. Secondly, because these provisions relate only to employees, there would be an incentive for employers, in order to evade guaranteed-hours contracts, to re-categorise their workers. Again, the industrial reality is that it would be very difficult for the zero-hours employee to resist re-categorisation as a self-employed worker. Thirdly, there is the issue of the reference period itself. As I mentioned on the previous day in Committee, because the reference period is to be 12 weeks, we are already talking about more than a million workers who will never at any point reach that reference period and so be entitled to the benefit of a guaranteed-hours contract.