Sir Alec Shelbrooke

I will speak to the amendment, especially about the Bill being rushed through without full consultation. On 13 May 2014, I tabled a ten-minute rule Bill on the Prohibition of Unpaid Internships, as Members will see in volume 580 of Hansard, column 593. On 14 November 2016, I tabled a private Member’s Bill, the National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships)—volume 616 of Hansard, column 1156. On 27 October 2017, Lord Holmes of Richmond tabled the Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition). And on 5 February 2020, I co-sponsored the Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition) Bill introduced by Alex Cunningham, the former Member for Stockton North, now retired. Despite unpaid internships being mentioned in the Government’s policy documents on work, they are not in the Bill. The Government have said that they will tighten up the ban, but there is no ban on unpaid internships—they exist, as they did in the last Parliament, not least with many a Member on the opposite side of the House. If there were such a ban, it would not have to be mentioned in policy documents. A ban should have been brought in alongside the Bill. There will be a lot of hubris on the Government Benches about bringing forward a landmark employment Bill, with Labour Members saying the Conservatives did nothing, despite all the evidence laid out by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) in his excellent opening speech. [Interruption.] It is all very well burying one’s head in the sand, but every one of the Bills I brought forward got kicked into the long grass, not least my private Member’s Bill, when the only Labour Member present was the shadow Minister. If Labour MPs had turned up, we might have been able to get a closure motion, but they decided not to. That has been the story throughout. If the Deputy Prime Minister does want the Bill to go through, she needs to fight off whatever it was that stopped it each time; I always started out with the commitment that it would happen, and then somehow people were convinced not to do it. I say that in a constructive way to the Deputy Prime Minister, who I know very well. An intern should be defined as a worker. We were talking about an amendment to the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 that says that work experience is important, but after 20 days or four weeks in work, an intern should be treated as an employee. Work should always pay, and if someone is contributing after that period of time, they are adding something to the business.