Clause 29 - Statutory dispute resolution procedures
Employment Bill
10:15 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
Clause 29 provides for schedule 2 to have effect and subsection (2) gives the Secretary of State certain powers in relation to the way it takes effect. Schedule 2 provides the minimum statutory dispute resolution procedure. One of the abilities that the Secretary of State is given in subsection (2) is, in effect, to extend the application of the statutory dispute resolution procedure beyond employees.
That brings us to the now familiar debate about workers versus employees, which by the end of our proceedings will no doubt have become even more familiar. The subsection uses the rather bizarre means that were described in one of the briefings that I have received as ''impenetrable''. It provides, as only legislation can provide, that for the purpose of the Bill a person who is not an employee can be an employee and the person who is not his employer can be his employer. We move into an Alice in Wonderland world in which people are what they are not for the purposes of legislation.
It is not a small matter to treat someone as an employee when he is not, or to treat someone as a person's employer when he is not. I expect that other hon. Members will comment on the broader issues. I simply want to ask the Minister what classes of non-employees he intends to make employees for these purposes. Does he want to extend the scope of the clause to all workers? The term ''worker'' is perfectly well defined in law and we know what it means: we have had these debates before and we have legislation that refers to workers. If he is going to use the power to apply the statutory dispute resolution procedure to workers rather than to employees, and to the people for whom they work rather than to employers, he should have the courage of his convictions and say so now.
It is disingenuous to produce a Bill that refers to a procedure applying to employees and employers and that contains a clause that allows the Secretary of State to redefine the terms ''employee'' and ''employer'' so that they include people who are not employees and employers. If the Minister intends to use the power only at the margin to deal with hard cases or specific exceptions, we must understand precisely what he has in mind. If he intends to use it on a much broader scale to change the fundamental effect of the clause, we need to know that now, not later.
All of us as non-employee workers and Members of Parliament would like to know whether we will be caught within the scope of the clause. Many others who are not employees will also be interested to know that. To be honest, even more people who are not employers might be interested to know whether, for example, contractors to them will be brought within the remit of the statutory dispute resolution procedure. That would quite a startling change if it were to happen.
When we consider schedule 2, procedural questions may be raised about how the steps it describes would be carried out. We need to exercise our minds about the types of people who might be covered by any extension and how the procedure would deal with them. The Minister should—in the words of a trade union leader whom I quoted earlier—come clean about what he intends to do. If he intends to apply the procedure to workers rather than employees, he should use the word ''worker'' in the Bill.