Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2017-10-27
Topic: Labor
Robert Maurice Lipson Winston (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, on his altruism, the way that he has produced this Bill and the sentiments behind it. I will yet again violently disagree with my noble friend Lord Mitchell—I am always having arguments with him, as I will on this occasion as well. I am surprised to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, on getting to the kernel of this matter. I completely agree with her. The Bill is of course extremely well-meaning but it has deep flaws and, as it stands, would prevent the very things which the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, would like to promote. The real issue is that it would discriminate against the people he wants to promote My father died when I was nine and my mother was left destitute. I realised only recently, reading some of the things she wrote when I was a teenager, just how poor she was and how she managed. I went to do my first work experience—unpaid, of course— when I was just of school leaving age. As it turned out, I worked as an assistant caretaker in a girls’ school, clearing the gym. It was a very exciting experience for me and it might well have shaped my subsequent career—I am not certain. Thereafter, I spent a couple of months in a radio factory playing around with electronics. Those two jobs focused two aspects of my career. They made me understand, for example, what it was to be in a work environment, and talking to the man lagging the pipes in the basement of that school made me understand the issues associated with industrial diseases, which turned out to be quite important during my medical career To be serious for a moment, there are many types of employment in this country for which work experience is extremely difficult to get. For example, the National Health Service is a disgrace in this aspect. It is very difficult for young people to do any kind of useful work experience in the health service but unless they do, they cannot then apply for a course—whether that be in nursing, medicine or any of the other caring professions—at university. In fact, I had a letter this week from a 19-year-old who wants me to help her with her work experience but as I am not now employed by the health service, I know it is appallingly difficult for me to help her get any kind of experience in a hospital. It is important for the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, to understand that if we pass the Bill, working for a month as a hospital porter or any kind of really trivial job in the health service will probably be insufficient for most people. That really needs to be looked at in this circumstance I want to mention my middle son, Joel. When he was just at school leaving age, my lab was having great difficulty with a piece of analysing equipment the purpose of which was to understand various proteins and sugars. None of us scientists in the lab could get the damn thing to work, even though we had spent some hundreds of thousands of pounds on it, and because it was out of warranty we just left it on the shelf. Joel came in, looked at the machine and, having worked with the scientists for about a month, suddenly found himself quite useful. He took it apart, fiddled with it and, using his electronics expertise, after about six weeks he got the thing working so well that he ended up being named on the paper when the work was published. It would never have been published otherwise and it was his first scientific publication. I do not doubt that that achievement helped at his interview when he went to Cambridge, as he was obviously able to talk about how he could work in a laboratory profitably One very common problem in science is that people who come into a laboratory for just four weeks are not only useless but dangerous. They can make your work more difficult and destroy things. It takes a lot of experience. At the moment, I have a place for somebody who I would love to see as a research assistant but I know that for the project I am involved with, it would take a minimum of two months’ intensive training before we could find somebody suitable. That will of course cost us quite a lot of money and time. Thereafter, one might well be able to pay such a person, but that is important Finally, I will mention one thing which is close to my heart at the moment. Just this week, I am applying for some intellectual property which we think we will exploit. With some luck, I believe we may revolutionise one aspect of reproductive medicine. One of my junior colleagues who works with me at the Genesis Research Trust at Hammersmith Hospital is largely involved with this work. She came to me as an undergraduate student, while doing a scientific degree in another university, and said, "I think I’ve made a mistake. I really would like to work in a research laboratory. Could you accommodate me during my holiday?". She worked throughout her entire holiday, for two months in the summer and again over Christmas. She was of course unpaid but she became extraordinarily good at that work. At the end of her time, she said, "I’ve been looking at what you do and I want to apply for medicine". She did not come from a privileged background; it took a long time for her to get into medical school. Eventually, having qualified in medicine, she got a particularly good degree and in the same year, remarkably, having got that she applied for membership of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and of the Royal College of Physicians. She got both those extremely difficult exams in the same year and has now completed her PhD doctorate This young scientist now has the most promising career ahead of her, which would not have been possible had she not had that long-term contact in the lab. Eventually, of course, we found work for her and she was paid, but there was no possibility at all that she would have been taken on under the rules of the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, must understand that if we put the Bill in place as it stands, it will be more difficult for people to come into the health service or into highly technical jobs to get the kind of training and experience which is necessary to progress their career. That is a very damaging aspect of the Bill, and I wait to see how we can amend it as it goes through the House.