Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition) (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-11
Topic: Labor
Paul Stuart Scully (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on his success in the private Members’ Bill ballot. Clearly, there is not a lot of time to respond to the detail, but I want to cover a couple of areas to show this issue the respect it deserves. I will mention one or two specific issues before I get on to the substance The hon. Gentleman talked about Members of this place taking on people and, as he rightly pointed out, the distinction that gets blurred between volunteers, interns and those on work experience. It is an uncomfortable truth, which we need to sort out ourselves. The W4MP—Working for an MP—website, from which some colleagues on both sides recruit their staff, states that, as a response to such campaigns in recent years, it does "not generally accept adverts for work that does not pay at least the current rate of national minimum wage/national living wage" The exceptions include adverts for volunteers for political parties, including voluntary work for MPs, and any ad accepted for an unpaid role will include reference to its being voluntary. When we did a search for interns on that website, it showed 11 jobs that were all paid. A search using the term "unpaid" found no results and, similarly, "voluntary" and "expenses only" found zero results. We cannot be complacent and we must make sure that we are leading from the front, as he said The hon. Gentleman talked about national minimum wage prosecutions, and I think he was specifically talking about this aspect. However, in general terms of prosecutions—to update the House—there are currently seven cases at various stages of the criminal investigation process involving not paying the national wage across the board, although not necessarily in the field that we are talking about. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which tackles this, has issued seven labour market enforcement undertakings this year. Since 2007, 15 employers have been successfully prosecuted for underpaying the national minimum wage. Prosecution tends to be reserved for the most egregious breaches of national minimum wage law. In most cases, it is not necessarily the best approach to help workers. Criminal sanctions against companies can mean that workers, the ultimate beneficiaries of enforcement, end up waiting considerably longer for their lost earnings to be paid back I agree wholeheartedly with the hon. Gentleman that it is wrong to exploit workers through unpaid work experience, including internships. The rights of workers to be paid at least the minimum wage must always be upheld. An individual’s entitlement to the minimum wage depends on whether they are deemed to be a worker for minimum wage purposes. If someone is deemed to be a worker, their employer must pay at least the relevant minimum wage rate from their first day of employment. I will come back to this if I have time, but I should like to provide reassurance that most internships or work experience placements are likely to constitute work, and therefore individuals are likely to be deemed to be workers who are entitled to be paid at least the minimum wage.