Zero-hours Contracts — House of Commons, 2015-05-27
Topic: Labor
Nicholas Edward Coleridge Boles (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a great honour to be speaking at the Dispatch Box on this, the first day of the new Parliament. I suspect that it will be the only time in my life when Her Majesty the Queen has the first word and I the last, although we can agree that her audience was somewhat larger and that she was a great deal better dressed I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) on securing this debate on an important subject that thankfully, now that the election has passed, we can shed real light on. We can discover the facts and pursue the examples of bad practice that he outlined. He is right to say that zero-hours contracts are in and of themselves nothing new and that a relatively small proportion of the workforce are on such contracts. He also rightly referred to a recent study by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which found that 60% of zero-hours workers were satisfied with their contracts and 65% of them were happier with their work-life balance because of those contracts. He described a number of situations involving individuals who actually welcomed these contracts because of the flexibility they gave them and the ability they provided to respond to other responsibilities, goals or ambitions that they had in their lives However, that should never be an excuse for complacency or for a belief that this is good for everyone and that every employer who makes use of these contracts is doing so responsibly. My hon. Friend gave a number of important examples of abuse. I hope he is pleased to know that one of my first decisions as Minister responsible for employment law was to implement the provision in an Act passed in the previous Parliament by my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), that banned exclusivity clauses in zero-hours contracts. Exclusivity clauses did something simply outrageous. The point of a zero-hours contract is that it does not guarantee a specific number of hours of work in any period of time. To then require that the person makes themselves available constantly, waiting for a phone call, preventing them from going out and earning income from other work, is simply outrageous. It was happening, I am glad to say, with a relatively small number and small percentage of zero-hours contracts, but it was quite intolerable and we were right to ban it. I am very glad that we have implemented that ban. We will be making sure that that ban is not simply symbolic but is enforced I am happy to look at examples of other abuses. My hon. Friend described very eloquently the case of a young man—the son of one of his constituents—who was called into work, kept on standby and not paid. My hon. Friend speculated that this practice was already illegal. While I do not know the full details of the case, if it is as he described I can reassure him that he is absolutely right—it is already illegal. If his constituent would like to approach him, and he would like to pass on to me the specific details of that employer and that young man, I will be very happy to get HMRC and any other enforcement authority to come down like a ton of bricks on that kind of abuse. It is against the law, it is inhuman, and it must not go on My hon. Friend has asked for some further, very specific commitments. He is always cheerful and affable, but he never gives up as a Member of Parliament, as I know both to my cost and my pleasure in my previous role as planning Minister. If, in this Parliament, we see a revolution in the number of people who are able to secure a plot of land to build their own home, it will be very largely thanks to his doggedness on that issue. I have no doubt that he will continue to be as dogged on the issue raised in tonight’s debate On my hon. Friend’s first request, without absolutely committing to a working group—because I would want to know what its composition was—I can promise him that I will keep a very close eye on this. I assure him that I have already asked officials to look into other kinds of abuse of zero-hours contracts to explore whether there is something further that we can do to root out such exploitation of working people.