Fixed-term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) (Amendment) Regulations 2008

My Lords, it seems to me that from time to time strange things happen in your Lordships’ House, and the subject of today’s debate and where it is taking place are two of them. Taking the second one first, one would expect that a non-contentious order such as this to be debated in Grand Committee, but the powers that be clearly decided otherwise. I accept that that decision was not in the Minister’s hands, nor in those of his officials. The other matter is very much in the hands of his department. As he said in his clear exposition of the reasons behind the regulations, the courts pointed out a lacuna in the law on statutory sick pay. This leads to my first question, because in legislation statutory sick pay and statutory maternity pay have certain links, do they not? The question is whether statutory maternity pay is included in this order, although the Minister did not mention it. It has quite rightly always been the Government’s intention that the two benefits should apply to all employees paying national insurance contributions, whoever they work for. This was intended to cover agency and other part-time employees. It was not until the matter was tested in the courts that the Government discovered that agency workers were not covered, and thus some of them did not receive benefits, while others did. The situation, as the noble Lord explained, is even more complicated than that. I understand that the confusion dates back to 2002, when the law was last amended. One rather wonders why this manifest unfairness was not spotted at the time. It is not only an unfairness—if I may be allowed to use such an inelegant expression—for people employed by agencies, which have viewed the law differently, but between full-time and agency employees. There is no doubt that Parliament slipped up and it is impossible to blame any individual. However, over the past few years I have come to the conclusion that all proposed legislation, whether primary or secondary, should be read by a lawyer outside the department that is to propose it. A certain amount of that is done already in the modern invention of draft Bills, by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, and the fairly new Merits Committee. None the less, occasional annoying lapses occur and the law has to be returned to the original policy intention—as in this case. Inevitably, I have a few questions on the detail of the regulations. The first is based on my rather shaky knowledge of statutory sick pay. If the illness falls towards the end of a period of employment and extends beyond that point, what recourse does the sick or injured person have to state benefits? Secondly, my colleague in another place, while welcoming the regulations, as I have done, asked a question which the Minister’s ministerial confrère in another place failed to answer. My honourable friend had noted that if an employee became sick in their current employment and had been on incapacity benefit within the past two years, they should claim incapacity benefit, not statutory sick pay. Given that the two incidents may be totally unrelated—the first, perhaps, for a back injury and the second for influenza or something even more serious, like meningitis—there seems to be no logic at all to that. I am giving the Minister another chance to answer. While the Minister is at it, he might, with advantage, remind the House of the rates of incapacity benefit and statutory sick pay, and of the new employment and support allowance, which will be up and running for new payments within days, I understand. Also, can we be assured that statutory sick pay law covers part-time, non-agency workers, as it should? I note that one of the effects of the original policy, as amended by the order, is to save 2,000 reams of paper as a result of not having to process incapacity benefit claims. How many civil servants will be made redundant or, more likely, moved to another job within the department as a result? I also note that this measure will, according to the Explanatory Memorandum, save the Exchequer some £14 million—although I think that the noble Lord mentioned a marginally lesser figure of £13.5 million. That does not really matter, because it is not a lot of money in government terms. In these constrained and straitened financial times, any money that the Government do not have to borrow to support banks or speed up the increase in the national infrastructure must be a bonus. Will the £14 million, or whatever the figure is, remain within the departmental budget, or will it be returned to the Treasury? If the answer is the former, what will it be used for? Notwithstanding these matters of detail, we on these Benches—all of us—support the order.