Corporate Insolvency and Governance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-06-23
Topic: Labor
Peter Hain (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, following the excellent speeches of my noble friends Lord Hendy, Lady Bryan and Lord Kerslake, I wish to support Amendment 75 There was a moment during the response of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, in Committee to various amendments aimed at protecting the interests of a company’s workforce in the moratorium process when I was reminded of the Hatton Garden safe deposit robbery in 2015, the biggest burglary in British legal history. The conspirators in that crime called carving up the proceeds "the slaughter". One of the gang nearly missed out on the slaughter. He had bailed out after the first attempt to break in because he did not want to risk returning to the scene of the crime. Some of his co-conspirators felt that he had thereby forfeited any share of the proceeds. Fortunately for him, there was honour among thieves, and they relented and gave him a cut The Minister argued that workers are already well protected and that consulting employees or their representatives in the moratorium process is unnecessary because the aim of the Bill is to keep companies in business. In his view, consulting employees would risk publicising a firm’s problems before it could be protected from creditor action, leading to more company failures—in short, that the workers should know their place, run along and let their betters deal with the problem. If he had patted them on the head, I would not have been surprised. Surely there should be a less patronising attitude to people who may have invested much of their working lives in a company that is now facing financial distress For workers, insolvency puts more than just their jobs in jeopardy. They may have back pay at risk. Their pension rights may be in danger. Their redundancy rights may be under threat and their tax and national insurance responsibilities may be in doubt. Indeed, the company may even have defaulted on payments to HMRC already deducted from their pay. Their employer may be defaulting on its equal pay and equal rights obligations Workers have a vital interest in the insolvency process. They deserve a voice in the consultation process and surely the Government cannot deny that; otherwise, they will be left where they are now—on the outside, at the end of a long tail of unsecured creditors, unrecognised, unheard and unwelcome, while the professional insolvency practitioners practise their black arts. Britain’s workers deserve better, and that is the purpose of Amendment 75 The amendment is very modest, simply requiring companies to consult their workforces. It imposes no vetoes by employees on the moratorium process and specifies no hurdles that have to be surmounted; instead, it simply imposes an obligation to consult. Surely the Government must agree to that principle or, alternatively, endorse an attitude that says in effect that company owners’ rights matter, creditor and debtor rights matter but employee rights do not. I urge the Minister—and, if not, then your Lordship’s House—to support Amendment 75 or, alternatively, as I now understand he might do, at least to give some proper guarantees that employees will not be left in the lurch.