Clause 1
Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill
9:45 am
Adam Price (Spokesperson (Communities and Local Government; Culture, Media and Sport; Defence; Transport; Ministry of Justice); Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Plaid Cymru)
I agree with the Minister; we cannot have an equal treatment Bill without some agreed measure of comparability. That is true whether, as he said, we are talking about full-time and part-time workers, or whether we are talking about equal pay between men and women. One has to have a way of measuring comparability and the pro rata temporis principle has been widely accepted in other legislation. If the amendment were passed, it would completely hollow out the Bill and there would be no mechanism to achieve its objectives.
The Minister is right that perhaps the debate that the hon. Lady wishes to have is what constitutes equal treatment and what we should include in the definition of basic working and employment conditions. It should be reiterated that the Bill does not say that there should be complete equal treatment—we are talking about basic working and employment conditions as set out in the Bill. That is, of course, the case in other contexts of equal treatment also, but the amendment would render the rest of the Bill completely otiose and that is presumably why the hon. Member for Huntingdon is going to speak against it. I urge the hon. Lady to withdraw the amendment because I am not sure that it would achieve the objectives that she had in mind when she drafted it.