Employment Law: Devolution to Scotland

[Sir Edward Leigh in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the potential merits of devolving employment law to Scotland.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward.

The Minister will recall that I have spent many hours in this place calling for reform to employment law. She will also be aware of the backlash from unions at an employment Bill being nowhere to be seen in the most recent Queen’s Speech. Indeed, Frances O’Grady of the Trades Union Congress highlighted that vital rights that Ministers have promised, such as flexible working, fair tips and protection from pregnancy discrimination, are at risk of being ditched for good. The fact is that this Government need to get a grip on workers’ rights. If they refuse to do so, then now is the time to devolve employment law powers to Scotland to allow the Scottish Government to enact our own reforms.

The SNP Scottish Government are doing everything in their power to improve workers’ rights where they have devolved competence. Throughout the pandemic, the Scottish Government have worked to prioritise workers’ rights, calling on employers, trade unions and workers to work together during this challenging time to ensure that workers are treated fairly. The SNP Government refreshed their Scottish business pledge to align with the fair work principles, and they established a new learning network and an international fair work summit. They also published a fair work action plan in February 2019, which set out a range of measures to support employers to embed fairer working practices. That is supported by trade unions across Scotland.

Additionally, the Scottish Government published a gender pay gap action plan in 2019, bringing together a cross-Government group to approach the gendered impact of inequality in the labour market. The Scottish Government are also a champion of the real living wage, which is of the utmost importance during the cost of living crisis. There are nearly 1,500 living wage-accredited employers in Scotland, giving Scotland the highest rate of workers in the UK earning a real living wage.

With the limited powers that they currently hold, the Scottish Government have worked hard to tackle in-work poverty and support those on low incomes and, ultimately, to condemn exploitative zero-hours contracts by establishing a fair work convention to support the fair pay and conditions agenda. However, with employment law reserved to the UK Government, Scotland can only go so far; it is only able to address part of the problem. Full devolution of employment law would allow Scotland to go even further by creating fairer workplaces, increasing wages, reducing insecure work and fundamentally tackling in-work poverty head on. Shifting that power to the Scottish Government would allow them to stop the race to the bottom on workers’ rights that we are seeing in the post-Brexit UK.

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The Taylor review reported five years ago and recommended things that the Government should do quickly, including simplifying worker status. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the Government have sat on that report for five years with no action?

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. The Taylor report gave the Government a comprehensive list of items that they could address, but sadly they have been sleeping on the job.

Although there was no commitment in this year’s Queen’s Speech to bring forward the promised employment law reforms, perhaps the Government now have an opportunity to do so. Will the Minister tell us why we should trust this Government to treat workers’ rights as a priority when, three years after that promise was made, no employment Bill has materialised?

We have already seen the ambitions of the UK Government slip. Now we are knee deep in pandemic recovery, a cost of living crisis and a looming recession. It is imperative that the Government make a concrete commitment to improving workers’ rights.

We can expect the Tories to denigrate or at the very least be uncaring on workers’ rights, but we have to be honest: the Labour party, certainly in Scotland, has questions to answer too. It denied—indeed, it fought—equal pay for women for decades, and then the minute it left office in Glasgow, it started campaigning for it; it voted against higher offers to council workers; and it stopped the devolution of employment law in the Smith Commission. Had it supported the SNP in the Smith Commission, I would not have had to introduce three Bills to outlaw fire and rehire. Does my hon. Friend agree with that?

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is fair to say that the Labour party, like the Government, has been sleeping on the job when it comes to protecting workers’ rights in the UK. It has failed to stand up for workers and it has often been missing on picket lines.

The pandemic has exacerbated a steady entrenchment of precarious working conditions across the UK. More people than ever before in the UK are relying on zero-hours contracts and participating in the gig economy. It is a sad fact that workers sometimes have to turn away a job because it would cost them more to drive to collect an item than they would receive to deliver it. They simply cannot afford it because the wages are so low. How is it that here in the UK wages are so low and workers’ rights are so abysmal that a worker cannot even afford to attend work to earn money in the first place? It is absolutely absurd, yet that is the position we find ourselves in, with the Labour party, which is set, potentially, to take over at the next general election, also sleeping on the job.

What the hon. Lady says leads me to think that we need reform of UK employment law rather than devolution of employment law, which would create new barriers to doing business and running services across the UK. Although I would wholeheartedly support the reform of UK employment law, I worry about the implications for companies such as RBS, which has staff all over the country, and the nightmares it could cause in terms of employment rights and breaking up the single market.

The hon. Lady makes a number of points. Given her ardent belief in the Union, she would argue that this is the best place in the world for the protection of workers’ rights, yet we on the SNP Benches have repeatedly—in every facet, in every forum, in every piece of legislation—attempted to encourage the Government to reform employment law and they have failed to do so.

Does my hon. Friend, like me, find it rather bizarre that the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) seems to have overlooked the fact that the predecessor of my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) was an employment Minister in a Lib Dem coalition? If there was such a need to reform employment law, why did the Lib Dems not do that?

Absolutely. There was ample opportunity when the Lib Dems were in the coalition to transform employment law, and that did not happen.

I want to make some progress, but I will come back to the hon. Member.

There are more and more people in insecure work, more and more people with insecure wages, and more and more people with insecure rights in the workplace. More people are under-employed, and more people are holding down multiple jobs and yet struggling to support themselves. Sadly, more and more people are struggling to invoke their workplace rights and unionise.

In real terms, that means more people have been plunged into in-work poverty and are unable to rely on stable incomes, which is invaluable to those trying to make headway through what will be a bleak winter for many families as we approach a cost of living crisis. The impact of the pandemic is clear, the impact of Brexit is clear, and the impact of this Government’s stagnation and failure to act is blatant. I call on the UK Government to either act now or let the Scottish Government do so. I would love to have every competence that this Government have to bring forward an employment Bill and transform employment rights. They have failed to do so, and they do not appear to want to.

I was deeply disappointed that there was no commitment in the Queen’s Speech to improve workers’ rights. The decision to shelve the employment Bill represents a missed opportunity for this Government to make serious progress on changing employment law. They have missed the opportunity to update policies on flexible working, carers leave and paid miscarriage leave, which I have argued for time and again. They have failed to strengthen protections against workplace sexual harassment and other equalities protections.

The Minister will recall that I have spent many hours in this place calling for the introduction of paid miscarriage leave. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) has pursued relentlessly the right for neonatal leave and pay, and I welcome the Government’s commitment to introduce those measures. I have pursued numerous vehicles in Parliament to try to ensure that the important policy of paid miscarriage leave is introduced but, sadly, I feel I am reaching the end of the road. The policy has cross-party support, yet it has been unable to succeed because of the archaic working practices of this place and this Conservative Government’s failure to commit to legislating on the issue. That reinforces why this system will never work for Scotland. It is becoming clearer by the day that we cannot trust this Conservative Government to prioritise workers’ rights. Instead, we see the further entrenchment of socioeconomic inequality in our society.

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; she is being very generous. Does she share my concern and that of many others that the Government seem to want to roll back trade union rights further, and are threatening trade unions that they are going to raise thresholds and make industrial action more difficult?

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I know that the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) wished to intervene too.

I will make two brief points. I find strange the argument that multinational companies are somehow unable to adapt their practices to the conditions required by individual independent countries. That is a fallacy and a fiction. Let me also point to a particular reversal of rights, which I will refer to in my speech if I am fortunate enough to be called. The Government have demonstrated their hostility by intending to scrap the Trade Union (Wales) Act 2017—a law passed by our Senedd to protect workers in Wales.

I thank the hon. Member for that salient point. We can be under no illusion: not only are this Government not interested in protecting workers’ rights, but they are not interested in protecting the devolution settlement in Wales, Scotland or anywhere else, and they are not interested in listening to people across the UK who are crying out for urgent action on the energy cap.

Workers in Scotland and across the UK should be under no illusion: this Government are responsible for one of the most egregious attacks on workers’ rights for over a decade, and there are no signs that that will change. Given the performance of the Scottish Government in this area, does the Minister recognise that the UK Government are hindering the Scottish Government’s ability to act to protect workers’ rights in the way that we would have done if we had remained in the EU?

It is clear that the UK Government are reluctant to take any steps necessary to overhaul employment law and catch up with the realities of work in the current decade. If the Minister remains unwilling to address the failures of this Government, will she give the Scottish Government the powers to do so? I must ask the Minister to give serious consideration to the devolution of employment law to Scotland, and to stop holding us back from delivering vital support and protections to those who need them most, especially now.