Member

For all the Government’s talk about providing clarity for businesses through these reforms, it is remarkable that the Bill as drafted fails to define “low hours” at all, despite introducing a raft of measures that depend on this very concept. This omission is not a minor drafting point; it goes to the heart of the Bill’s workability. It is crucial that the threshold for what constitutes a low-hours contract is set appropriately. If the threshold is set too high, we risk severely constraining businesses’ ability to adjust staffing levels in response to short-term changes in demand. This will increase administrative complexity, bring more workers unnecessarily into the scope of guaranteed-hours provisions and in doing so undermine operational flexibility, which is vital in sectors such as retail, hospitality, holiday parks and many others, as we have heard.