Baroness Noakes (Con)

My Lords, we come to an exciting part of this Report stage, having had several debates on this Bill. The Bill will have significant impacts on: some types of employers; some business sectors and sizes of business; some types of employees; and some types of the provision of public services by bodies which are not themselves in the public sector. More broadly, we have heard that businesses will face the double whammy of the minimum wage increases and the national insurance increases together in just a few weeks’ time, and they are likely to respond by taking actions to reduce their workforce and the hours that their workforce can work and reduce wages where they are not constrained by the national minimum wage. Prices are likely to go up, and profits are likely to go down. All this will have negative impacts on the economy. It is difficult to avoid opening a newspaper nowadays without seeing one or more campaign groups, industry representatives and charity representatives making their case for the harmful impacts of this Bill, but to date the Government have been completely deaf to all these entreaties. All this is bearing down on the economy, which is already flatlining. I can understand why the Government do not want to make any changes to a centrepiece of their growth-destroying Budget last October. We know there is almost no room left in their fiscal rules for any changes. There are lots of downside risks to the economy, and there are precious few upsides. These are all the results of choices that the Government have made in the last seven months, so I understand why the Minister’s response to every issue presented to him in Committee, and indeed again today, was that the Government reject the cases being made. My Amendment 39 provides for a very simple power for the Treasury to issue regulations that exempt categories of employer from the national insurance changes that this Bill introduces. There is not even a parliamentary process attached to the regulations. My amendment would therefore allow the Treasury to act quickly, once it faces up to the fact that it really has created some problems. There are no downsides to the Government accepting this amendment, as they need never use it, but it would be a useful backstop if things turn out as badly as many of us believe they will. It is not often that the Opposition Benches offer an unrestricted power to a Government to do things, but I and others are so alarmed by the potential impacts of this Bill that I think it is the right thing for the Government to take this kind of power in the interests of the country. We have passed some amendments today that have taken some of the roughest edges off this Bill, and I hope they will survive their passage through the Commons, but this has not made the Bill completely harm free. My sincere hope is that the Government will support this amendment, if not in its current form then in a reworded form to their own taste at Third Reading. I beg to move.