Clause 4 - Statutory adoption pay
Employment Bill
4:45 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 149, in page 15, leave out line 8.
Amendment No. 149 seeks to remove new section 171ZL(2)(c). This is simply to establish—once again it is a problem of language—that we are not talking in this case about a person being eligible for statutory adoption pay when that person has ceased to work for the employer in the ordinary sense of the word rather than the tortuous sense of the word that we have previously discussed. It is important for the Minister to clarify that. In our previous debate on the subject, we convinced ourselves that it was probably acceptable—just—to think of someone who had gone away for six months or a year as having ''ceased to work'', although they had a right to come back, but that it was implausible to think that of someone who had gone away for two weeks.
Can the Minister clarify which version of ''ceased to work'' we are talking about and whether the paragraph refers to a previous employer, to a person who has ''ceased to work'' for that employer in the everyday meaning of the term—that is, given up work for good—or to a person who has no intention of giving up working for that employer but has simply gone away to enjoy his or her rights to statutory leave? Can the Minister explain which case we are talking about here? The fact that the question has to be asked underlines the confusion about the language.