Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise (Con)

My Lords, I rise in support of Amendment 8 in my name. I declare my interests as stated on the register, in particular my role as chief executive of Next plc, the job I have held for 24 years, which makes me the UK’s longest-serving FTSE 100 chief executive. I add that Next employs over 25,000 part-time employees—and, I hasten to add, it does not use zero-hours contracts. I start by assuring the Minister that I have sympathy with the intentions behind this section of the Bill. Zero-hours contracts can leave employees feeling obligated to accept hours from employers, who can feel no obligation to provide work. I commend the Government’s intention to tackle this lack of reciprocity. In the Minister’s polling, I would have come out as one of those people not in favour of zero-hours contracts. Amendment 8 would increase the Bill’s effectiveness by clarifying the distinction between zero-hours contracts and legitimate part-time contracts, because there is a world of difference between tackling potentially abusive zero-hours contracts and eliminating the flexibility that legitimate part-time contracts provide to those who need and want them. My concern is that the requirement to offer additional contract hours to those who voluntarily work extra hours will inadvertently prevent those additional hours being offered at all. I am not exaggerating when I say that if the threshold for low-hours contracts is set too high, it will take a wrecking ball to the UK’s part-time economy. It will deprive millions of people of a valuable source of flexible income, and multiple industries of the flexibility they need to offer excellent services in sectors where demand is variable and volatile. It is important to understand the nature of flexible part-time work. The vast majority of part-time workers provide an important supplement to their household income but are not the mainstay. They are people such as a parent whose childcare responsibilities mean they cannot work full time, students balancing their studies with their earnings, carers for elderly relatives, and those seeking to transition into retirement. What this diverse group of people has in common is that they value the guaranteed regular income their part-time contracts provide but also appreciate and value the ability, at their discretion, to add hours of work when they have more time available: for example, during university holidays, during term time for parents of school-age children, or at times when household costs rise—for example, in the run-up to Christmas. These reciprocal arrangements benefit all involved. From a business perspective, sectors such as retail, hospitality, health and travel can maintain excellent services despite the intrinsically variable nature of demand in consumer-facing businesses. These flexible additional hours allow businesses to respond to seasonal peaks and unexpected surges in demand, and to do so in a way that offers voluntary additional hours to those who want them. I hope this gives some sense of how important flexible part-time work is for the 8.5 million part-time employees in the UK. This flexible work will be under threat if the threshold for low-hour work is set too high in the Bill. My worry is that the Bill will make it almost impossible for businesses to offer additional voluntary hours to workers with contracts below the low-hour threshold. There are two reasons why: first, the complexity of trying to comply with the law, and secondly, the risk it creates for businesses that offer additional hours to part-time staff that they will end up with permanent and unaffordable overstaffing.