Employment Bill [Lords]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is just as well that I did not give way to the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Michael Jabez Foster), as I would have been even further out of order. We have had a good-tempered debate today up to now and we have heard 10 good speeches from both sides of the House. I have quite a lot to say about them and I do not want to detain the House for too long, so I am going to limit the interventions I take. When I have had an opportunity to get properly into my speech, I will give way to the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye. The Bill started its life in the House of Lords as long ago as 7 January 2008. It is curious, then, to consider why it has taken so long to get here. It comprises 22 clauses and is divided into four sections. Clauses 1 to 7 deal with dispute resolution: clause 4 deals particularly with the determination of proceedings without a hearing; clause 5 with the circumstances in which ACAS is obliged to offer conciliation services; and clause 6 repeals section 18 of the Employment Tribunals Act 1996. Clauses 8 to 14 deal with the national minimum wage: clause 13 excludes cadet force adult volunteers from qualifying for the national minimum wage. Clauses 15 to 17 deal with employment agencies and clause 18 relates to trade unions. I intend to say something about all of those provisions. We have heard excellent speeches, not least on the Opposition side from my hon. Friends the Members for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker), for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) and for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries). I was particularly impressed by my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire, as what he said, speaking without notes on the basis of his huge experience in employment tribunals, was enormously beneficial to the House. He proved that the Government's rushed legislation of 2002, introduced by the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott) on the basis of his three-step and increasingly legalistic approach, was subsequently shown by the trade unions and others to be not the best way of proceeding with industrial tribunals. The Bill is welcome in that it starts to put right some of what the Government got wrong in 2002. My hon. Friend, along with the hon. Member for Blaydon and others on the left of the Labour party, demonstrated that the experience of members of employment tribunals counted for a great deal. It is a pity that the Government got this wrong in 2002; perhaps the Bill will begin to restore some of what was lost then. I worry about the timetable. As the Minister made clear, consultation on the code will not finish until 24 July, yet under the timetable we are asked to accept later this evening, all stages of the Bill must be concluded by 23 October. For most of that time, the House will be in recess, so it will be difficult for us to get together to discuss what is in the Bill. The timetable makes it very difficult for the House to consider the code, which is one of the key aspects of the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire alluded to the British Chambers of Commerce, which has conducted many surveys of its members who own small businesses. It calculates that the regulations introduced by the Government since they came to power 1997-98 amount to some £65 billion-worth of costs. She also quoted from the Federation of Small Businesses, which estimated that about 68 per cent. of its members do not employ anybody because they are fearful of employment legislation—in other words, they are one-man businesses. The Government should note that most of the employers in the small business sector have to deal with the welter of employment legislation on their own because they cannot afford to employ people to do it for them. I will move on to deal with disputes resolution and hearings, along with the three-step approach and Government studies. If the Bill can simplify the way we deal with disputes, and particularly how clause 7 deals with the enforcement of the award of compensation, that will be welcome. We have had a good amount of discussion this evening about how best to amend clause 7 to ensure that awards by tribunals can be enforced a little more quickly. Clauses 8 to 13 on the national minimum wage have been extensively debated. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne bravely said that if he had been a Member when the national minimum wage legislation had been debated and voted on, he would not—with the experience that he has now gained—have voted for it. That is probably true for a large number of Conservative Members. The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr. Brown) asked how he could have debated the national minimum wage in Committee from 4.30 in the afternoon to 1 am the next day and still have been in the same parliamentary day. The answer is, of course, that we remain in the same day until the House adjourns. He may be right that that was one of the longest-ever Committee hearings on the legislation.