Clause 37 - Use of alternative documents to give particulars
Employment Bill
6:30 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
It is generous of the Minister to place it on the record that he is willing to debate the remaining areas of the Bill. I look forward to discussing maternity and paternity leave in due course.
After the heated discussion of the previous amendment , I am pleased to return to matters purely semantic. I had doubts about tabling the amendments, but the more I looked at the Bill, the more I concluded that I have never come across the concept of meeting an obligation. One discharges an obligation, and as far as I am aware, that terminology has been used in other legislation. The clause would be much more elegant and much more readily understood if it said at line 40 on page 39, ''the document contains information which, were the document in the form of a statement under section 1, would discharge the employer's obligation under that section,'' and so on. The remaining amendments repeat the change of the word ''meet'' to the word ''discharge''. I should be fascinated to hear which professor of etymology or whichever science is relevant here—I have probably got that completely wrong and am inadvertently talking about the study of insects—has determined this radical departure in drafting language so that we now have the bizarre concept of meeting an obligation. Where does one meet this obligation? In the street? In the pub?