Employment Rights

Part of Opposition Day – in the House of Commons at 6:08 pm on 18 March 1996.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Denis MacShane Denis MacShane , Rotherham 6:08, 18 March 1996

Given that, in 1876, Benjamin Disraeli—who I think was a Conservative—passed a law introducing the 56-hour week in this country, I find the fuss made over the reduction to a 48-hour week in 1996 absurdly exaggerated. The President of the Board of Trade said that this measure would help small businesses. He is wrong. Since 1979, there have been 450,000 business failures—at the moment, there is one business failure every three minutes of every working day. Since February 1995, 1,000 new statutory instruments have affected small businesses—a new regulatory burden.

The Asylum and Immigration Bill, which was debated recently, obliges small businesses to act as unpaid immigration sneaks—they have to check the immigration status of their employees. Self-assessment, to which I referred during an earlier intervention, will impose a massive new burden on small businesses and will cost them—according to Government figures; I was on the Finance and Services Committee that discussed this issue—£130 million a year. The Government claim to be a friend of small business—there is no small business in the country that would accept that nonsense.

The President of the Board of Trade was also wrong about employee rights. We have to distinguish between the rights that are there to protect small businesses—good small businesses support adequate fire regulation, do not want to produce dirty food and do not want to construct unsafe buildings; those rights need to be enforced and regulated on a partnership basis—and the fundamental rights of citizens that may be taken away.

Frankly, I did not even understand his speech and the dispute that he is currently having with the Deputy Prime Minister. He talked about increasing conciliation processes. We know that that may open the road to any employee—as is the right of every discontented employee—to appeal to ACAS. I fear that, if one removes existing rights, one will open the way to a lawyer's paradise of judicial appeals and judicial reviews, which might impinge far more heavily on small businesses.

I do not have time to report, as I had hoped to, many cases from my surgery of people woefully and badly mistreated in terms of their rights at work. I pay a short tribute to the work of citizens advice bureaux, which now are in the front line of representing so many citizens.

The aspect of workplace rights that most concerns me is race discrimination, on which Britain has a record that other European countries do not. We should be proud of that. Unfortunately, appeals to industrial tribunals on race relations grounds have been increasing. The work of industrial tribunals should be reduced; the number of cases should be reduced as fast as possible. That can be done by moving to a culture of workplace consultation and representation. Rather than causing the return of the feel-good factor, that would create a "feel-fair factor".

While the President of the Board of Trade, the invisible kilt in the Cabinet, continues to represent two-nation Britain—my goodness, we have heard it tonight—the "feel-fair factor" will not return to our workplaces. When it does, such legislation will not need even to be discussed, because I hope that, in a partnership economy, employers and employees will solve their problems and build together the new firms, the new jobs and the new added value we need to make Britain a great, prosperous and full-employment country again.