Clause 32 - Information supplied by worker and employer
Employment Relations Bill
10:45 am
Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Employment Relations, Competition and Consumers), Department of Trade and Industry; Bradford South, Labour)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to explain clause 32. I shall try to answer his questions. The basis of the Bill is about the performance of previous Acts, how they work in reality and the need to update them. I do not have to hand the historical facts, but I shall ensure that he receives a letter about them—unless the information arrives mysteriously today. I am not aware of a mistake. I think that the clause is an update based on previous experiences of enforcement officers.
Sections 15 and 16 of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 deal with the use and supply of information obtained by enforcement officers. No specific power permits officers to disclose information that they have obtained from an employer to his workers or information obtained from the workers to their employer. That means that officers cannot cross-check the different versions of events given by the worker and employer. It makes it more difficult for them to decide whether the employer is complying with the legislation.
The clause amends those sections to make it clear that some disclosure is allowed. It allows information obtained from an employer relating to a particular worker to be shown to that worker and information obtained from a worker relating to an employer to be shown to that employer. It would be helpful, for example, to enable the enforcement officer to ask the employer about the existence of particular work patterns, working times and so on and ask the worker whether the employer's answers were correct and what that means for his case. I stress that the Inland Revenue will take great care not to pass information on to employers in a way that allows them to deduce the identity of the complainants unless they have given their consent for that to be done.
As for home workers, I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman shadows me so closely and congratulates me when I get things right, although I am sure that he will hit me when I get things wrong. That is his role. I was pleased to announce yesterday fair rates for home workers. It has been a long-standing issue in connection with the national minimum wage. I am aware of some of the practices to which he referred, and I shall study them in more detail.
I am not making an attempt to lose home workers their jobs or affect their incomes. We want to achieve a level of fairness and regulations will come before the House for further discussion in due course. We will be in a position whereby employers agree with their employees rates on work study programmes, so people achieve the aims of the minimum wage. I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman supports that process. Given his party's worries about the inception of the national minimum wage five years ago, it has come a long way since then and now supports it. We have worked closely with the National Group on Homeworking, which has been assisting us to reach our decision about home workers' rates. The original provisions were drafted too narrowly for the reasons that I have expressed. That is why we have drafted clause 32, which I commend to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 32 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 33 ordered to stand part of the Bill.