Clause 1 - Paternity leave
Employment Bill
6:00 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
These probing amendments are rather diverse in their effects, so I shall deal with them one at a time.
Amendment No. 98 would delete subsections (3) and (4) from new section 80A to the Employment Rights Act 1996. I made the point earlier to the hon. Member for North Norfolk that it is bizarre to provide in subsection (1) that the Secretary of State shall make regulations, instead of putting detailed provision in the Bill, claiming, as Ministers routinely do, that regulations are more flexible and can be changed without time having to be made available for primary legislation, but then including in the Bill a detailed provision prescribing what the regulations must say. That is a strange way to proceed and totally undermines the argument that regulations are more flexible and more easily changed; they are, in fact, constrained by subsections (3) and (4). Can the Minister say what the justification is for using an architecture in the Bill that creates obligations to make regulations—prescribing that substantive regulation is to be dealt with by secondary legislation—while having primary legislation specifying, in some detail, what the regulations will say?
Amendment No. 104 addresses an issue that has been dealt with en passant. Line 17 of new section 80A specifies that there will be
''a single period of leave of at least two weeks.''
I assume that that was included in an attempt to be helpful to employers because it is a restriction on the flexibility that an employee enjoys. I understand that in many cases it will be beneficial to the employer to take leave in a single block of two weeks, but it is frankly silly that we could have a situation in which neither the employer nor employee wants the leave to be taken as a single block and yet the law requires it to be so taken. I suggest that if there is agreement, and only if there is agreement, between the two parties, leave can be taken in some other way. What would be the harm in that?