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Mr. Fabricant: I would not like to accuse my hon. Friend of plagiarism, but the House should know that it was not he who said that the directive was being gold-plated, but the CBI.
Mr. Bercow: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I, too, have had the benefit of the excellent, copious CBI brief, which speaks for itself. It is particularly lamentable that the Minister for Small Firms, Trade and Industry sits on the Front Bench without offering any answer. With no disrespect to the Secretary of State, I hope that the Minister will reply to the new clauses, or at least make his views known at some point in our exchanges. It is a matter of great importance because he is responsible for small firms. We need to know why he rejects the view of the authentic representatives of British business that small companies will be damaged by the proposals.
Gold-plating is unhelpful and unnecessary. It probably results from Ministers' lack of control of their officials. A good Minister guides officials. One has to assume from Ministers' rhetoric since 1 May 1997 that they do not want to gold-plate. If they do not want to, they should keep control of the process. If they wish to gold-plate, and I have underestimated their zeal in these matters, the logical corollary is that they have no right to claim to be small business-friendly. They cannot have it both ways. Whichever way they have it, they are the losers.
Miss Julie Kirkbride (Bromsgrove):
My hon. Friend is perhaps a little unfair to officials. The Government do not understand what they signed up to with the European social chapter. The right hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson), having signed it on behalf of the British Government, said that he would not accept any regulations that he did not like the look of. He clearly did not understand what he was talking about.
Mr. Bercow:
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. The right hon. Member for Hartlepool is a man of the broad brush. Far be it from me to accuse him of excessive preoccupation with detail or to suggest that beads of sweat appeared on his brow late at night as he ploughed through his red boxes, attending in the greatest detail to every feature of the legislation that he would subsequently have to defend in the House. He is a man of the general principle--the grand, high-falutin' declaration. Others have to pick up the debris from the ill-informed, misguided judgments that he habitually made as a Minister.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove(Miss Kirkbride), who accused me of being a little ungenerous--perhaps I was--to officials, should not understate her case.
Not only the former Secretary of State for Trade and Industry was naive and ill-informed on these matters. The Prime Minister himself is and has long been singularly under-briefed on the contents of the proposals and treaties to which he has given his signature. It is precisely because the Prime Minister frequently imagined that he did not
have to sign up to or accept things that he did have to accept that it has been necessary for the Conservative Opposition to table the new clauses. The Prime Minister sometimes fondly imagines that if he goes to a summit or conference and says that he is against something, it will not happen in this country. That simply is not the case.
We all know that there is an agenda in the European Union. The Foreign Secretary certainly knows it. It is called the European social model. EU countries want to impose it on us and export to Britain the high costs, slothful growth and increasing unemployment that they have long suffered. We are in favour of lower costs, better growth and higher employment, not unemployment. That is why we are against the Government's proposals and in favour of the sensible new clauses tabled by the Opposition.
Mr. Redwood:
While my hon. Friend is speculating on Secretaries of State of the broad brush and what they may have read in their red boxes, will he answer this question? Does he think that in recent days, when the Secretary of State received a copy of the oral statement that the Minister for the Cabinet Office was to give on modernising government, he read it, saw that it was a strong statement of the need to remove unnecessary regulation and fired off a letter to the Minister saying that the statement would embarrass him greatly today as he was unable to accept sensible deregulation proposals in new clauses tabled to the Bill? Or does my hon. Friend think that the Secretary of State just did not bother to read it?
Mr. Bercow:
I do not know what accounts for this extraordinary state of affairs, but my right hon. Friend, as usual, makes a highly pertinent point. The Minister for the Cabinet Office made a statement only a couple of hours ago on the modernisation of government and said, in response to questions, that regulations should be proportionate. That was the word that he used. It is a good word, and one that I commend to the House--proportionate--
Mr. Bercow:
And necessary, as my right hon. Friend helpfully points out from a sedentary position. I commend it to the House. The Secretary of State was no doubt genning up on his remarks for the afternoon at that point so whether he had the benefit of hearing from the Minister for the Cabinet Office, I know not, but he should have seen in exchanges of letters between Cabinet colleagues what the Minister proposed to say. In the light of that, it is extraordinary that the Secretary of State has not put his hands up this afternoon and said to my right hon. Friend, "You are absolutely right. We agree to the new clauses. We can proceed to make further progress on the Report stage of the Bill."
Mr. Boswell:
Is not one of the difficulties that the Secretary of State faces the fact that some of his other clients or friends take a different view. For example, the TUC explicitly acknowledges:
Mr. Bercow:
I am not surprised to hear what my hon. Friend says because we have always known that the
I referred a moment ago to the statement by the Minister for the Cabinet Office about the proportionality of regulations. That is relevant to what I have to say about my fifth reason why the new clauses should be accepted by the House this afternoon. My fifth reason is the regulations that flow from the Bill.
It is important that the public outside this place should be aware that the Bill is substantially a skeleton Bill. The devil is in the detail, and it is a lamentable abdication of responsibility on the part of the Government that there will be no opportunity to debate on the Floor of the House the detail of the regulations that will implement the Government's intentions as set out in the Bill. I am extremely anxious about the burden that the regulations will impose and that is a further reason why the new clauses should be accepted.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. I have been extremely generous in allowing the hon. Gentleman to make certain general points in relation to the new clause, but I have reached the limit of my patience. The hon. Gentleman is now moving away from the kernel of this particular group of new clauses; the new clauses relate to exemptions for small businesses rather than to general matters in the Bill.
Mr. Bercow:
As you would expect, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall immediately comply with your helpful guidance. That is why I say that we should support the new clauses. If they are passed, they will give small businesses an exemption from the regulations that will accompany the Bill. That seems to be at the heart of the debate.
In Committee, we explored the whole subject and discussed the possibility of exemptions for small firms. One of the reasons we did so was that, as Ministers are aware, the regulations flowing from the working time directive, which will have an impact on small and medium-sized enterprises in Britain, currently stretch to 72 pages of A4 paper. If people outside this place are surprised to learn that, they will be even more surprised to learn that the regulations that flow from the requirement to impose a national minimum wage--a requirement that is as applicable to small and medium-sized enterprises as it is to others--stretch to no fewer than 112 pages of A4 paper. Part of the rationale behind the introduction of the new clauses is that the Opposition are the friends of small and medium-sized enterprises and do not think that they should have to face
that burden. Quite apart from the work that those in such enterprises do to keep their companies afloat, to make them profitable, to sell products, to keep and, if possible, increase their staff, why should they have to devote a great deal of time to studying the regulations to see that their companies conform to them? That is a key weakness of the Bill as it stands and a good reason why the new clauses are required to improve it.
The cost of compliance--and the cost of discovering whether one is complying--will be a further burden on micro, small and medium-sized companies. Although business organisations have been almost uniformly critical of those aspects of the Bill, little attention has been paid to the comments of our old friends the lawyers. I am not a lawyer--I say that with pride--but I am aware that many make their living from the practice of the legal profession. A leading member of Bevan Ashford said recently that the passage of the Bill would result in a great deal more work for him unless certain provisions were removed or amended.
The reason why that greater work will result is that companies will not know whether or not they are in conformity with the regulations, they will naturally consult and pay lawyers, time will be taken, and references to the courts will be required--none of which activity is remotely relevant to the overriding task of a small business, which is to stay afloat, make a profit and keep its staff. It is precisely because of that damage that we need to act.
"The arrival of the full Social Chapter procedure is both timely and crucial for the creation of a European system of industrial relations."
It goes on at length in exactly the same vein.
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