Damian Hinds

I rise to speak to the measures on zero-hours contracts, and Opposition new clause 83 and amendment 283. It is absolutely right that we should pause to consider the effects of these changes on employment tribunals, but it is also right that we should pause to consider their effect just on employment. Of course, there are bad employers and those who would seek to exploit, which is a very bad thing. We should bear down on them, but there is no reason to believe that the measures the Government are bringing forward will achieve that. I suggest that the Government want to get rid of zero-hours contracts not because intrinsically there is a great problem attached to them, but because of the special place zero-hours contracts have in Labour mythology. I want to take us back to the glory days of the modern Labour party when the leader of the Labour party was the current leader’s immediate predecessor, the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). I see the then shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) is with us in the Chamber, and as it happens, I was the Minister for Employment at the time. When our Government came to power, unemployment had been 8%, and it then rose a little bit to 8.5% at the end of 2011. From then on, it came down, and it kept coming down. By late 2016, it was under 5%, and it would fall further still. However, that did not fit Labour Members’ narrative. They wanted to be able to say that this reduction in unemployment was not real: it was all fake employment or low-quality employment. That was not true, but it did not stop them saying it. In fact, three quarters of the increase in employment was in higher-skilled occupations, and three quarters of the jobs growth was in full-time work. At that time, employment was growing much more quickly than self-employment, and the No. 1 sector for employment growth was construction. However, Labour Members still kept saying that the jobs being created were all low-quality ones, and at the top of the list of things to call out was the zero-hours contract. The then Leader of the Opposition used to talk about it weekly at Prime Minister’s Question Time. There were a couple of awkward moments, such as after his glorious appearance at Glastonbury, when it turned out that the Glastonbury festival—guess what?—employed people on zero-hours contracts. There was further embarrassment when it turned out that there were people working for none other than the Labour party conference who were on zero-hours contracts. At the DWP we did some research, and it turned out that less than 3% of people relied on a zero-hours contract for their main employment. On average, it delivered them 25 hours of work a week, while, strangely, they had above-average job satisfaction, and most were not looking for more hours. People said the number had grown, but it is actually much more likely that that was because of growing awareness of the term “zero-hours contract”. Thinking about our history, it has long been the case that far more than 3% of people have had irregular income patterns, where they have not had guaranteed hours of work or levels of salary—from casual labour to piece work, catalogue agents and commission-only sales. At a certain point, it dawned on me that my own first job had been washing dishes on a zero-hours contract—or at least it would have been, had a contract been involved at all.