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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman is spinning wide of the scope of this group of new clauses and amendments. I suggest that he gets back to the main subject very quickly.
Mr. Bercow: I shall come back to it immediately, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I had not thought that I had strayed, but I accept your judgment in these matters.
We need light-touch regulation and, in some cases, businesses to be free of regulation altogether, in line with the American model. The direct relevance of that, if I may say so, Mr. Deputy Speaker, will now be blindingly obvious to every right hon. and hon. Member present. The relevance of my invocation of the example of the United States is that there, a directly comparable provision on parental leave is applied very differently from the way it is to be applied in this country. That is the relevance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I hope that you will accept that it is within the scope of the new clauses.
In the United States, as I have reminded the Minister for Small Firms and the Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry, the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney), there is legislation on family and medical leave--the Family and Medical Leave Act 1993. Moreover, that legislation does indeed provide for 12 weeks unpaid leave for parents and guardians in certain circumstances. However, it does not apply to firms with fewer than 50 employees, which is one good reason why we adopted the figure of 50 as the basis of our new clauses. I ask a simple question of the Secretary of State: why talk about American practice unless he is prepared to emulate it? It is not good enough for the Minister for Small Firms to tell me in his letter of 25 March that, in incorporating American ideas in the British context, one has to take account of British traditions and institutions, as an excuse for not doing in this country that which works extremely well in that country.
Mr. Deputy Speaker, as ever, you have been a model of tolerance and I am grateful to you for that, as it has enabled me to give six reasons--of the no doubt666 reasons--why the new clauses should be accepted by the Government.
Mr. Wilkinson
: The previous speech was a tour de force and I shall not attempt to emulate it. Nor could I emulate the authority with which my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) spoke. Suffice it to say, if I can be forgiven for being subjective, that my impressions of the merits of the new clauses stem less from long hours in Standing Committee--I applaud my right hon. Friend and his colleagues for their persistence in trying to amend the Bill in Committee, and regret that we have had to return to these issues on Report--than from my experience of running a small company of my own for 12 years.
I cannot believe that, in the current climate, it will be easy to induce people to enter the small business sector, because everything is stacked against them. The background is grim. Given that we have an overvalued currency, following the plunge of the euro, and given the imposts and directives under which a small business has to labour, those who run such businesses face an exceptionally difficult task. However, the Government should show willing and at least recognise that it is time to match their rhetoric with action. The new clauses contain proposals that are exactly in line with best practice, to use the current jargon, in the United States, as my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) clearly explained. I cannot see any reason other than bigotry and dogma why the Government should not wholeheartedly embrace the new clauses. I cannot see what they would lose by so doing.
Speaking as a London Member, I am grieved that the Bill will have an especially hard impact on family businesses, which in my constituency in the north-west of
the capital are often run by members of the ethnic community. We hear time and again from the Government protestations that they are on the side of the ethnic community and that their legislation is drafted to demonstrate that commitment. However, members of the ethnic community who start up small businesses will be extremely vulnerable to the complications of the plethora of burdens that are inherent in the Bill. Those who run a family business do not need explicit provisions on parental leave, because they know what is appropriate in their family's circumstances and in the interests of the business. I find the Government's prescriptive, dogmatic attitude objectionable.
Likewise, there is a huge divergence between the Government's protestations and rhetoric and their actions in respect of women, who will suffer especially from the Bill as it stands. Part-time workers, a large proportion of whom are women, are less likely to be taken on by small businesses because of the provisions of the Bill. This is exceptionally sad.
It is the experience of every economy that, time and again, small businesses prove to be the engine for growth. If they are to be fundamentally inhibited, the chances of our getting out of the proto-recession into which we have slumped under the current Administration will be fatally compromised. The process of emerging from the proto-recession will be protracted, more difficult and more painful. Many people would lose their jobs unnecessarily.
Mr. Christopher Gill (Ludlow):
My family has run a business in Wolverhampton for five generations, but I am somewhat diffident about taking part in this debate when I see so many experts aligned on the other side of the Chamber. However, the Government and I have different perspectives. I have run a business and converted a small enterprise into a bigger one, facing many trials and tribulations in the process. My son continues that business--he is the sixth generation family member to do so--and we have a joke in our family that I am here running the country while he is at home running the business. [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] I must admit that my son is having much more success than I--but not because of this Government. The Labour Government have continued to put obstacles in his way, as they are doing tonight.
There is a huge gulf between those who come from the public sector and big business and those who come from a small business background. Small business operators recognise that employment relations problems exist and that the Government wish to tackle them. However, as my
right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) has been at pains to point out tonight, many of those problems either do not affect small business or cannot be solved by legislative means. Legislation is singularly inappropriate in many cases, given that so many small businesses are struggling to keep their heads above water because of the existing legislative burden.
In my earlier days, I ran my own business when there were industrial training boards. I had served in the Royal Navy--the finest training organisation in the world--and, when I returned from sea, I was intent upon training my employees. The industrial training boards killed my enthusiasm and destroyed my involvement in training by imposing a huge bureaucracy upon that vital work. As a consequence, I had to employ a training officer and training personnel to assume those duties. The situation led eventually to an industrial tribunal hearing, which I won. I could tell you much about that case, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I must not digress.
The consequence of the Bill will be a downsizing of private businesses. Private businesses have no incentive to employ a lot of labour. The burden of employment laws--which are being added to tonight--leads many entrepreneurs to seek constantly to diversify into areas where they do not have to employ so many workers. The unemployment that results from such practices affects almost exclusively the least qualified section of society: those employees with fewer skills and qualifications.
For the benefit of the Secretary of State, I point out that the only practical difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business is the people we employ. Many of us in the marketplace buy the same raw materials to which we do the same things and then sell them to the same customers, often at the same price. The difference between success and failure is our people. I do not need the Secretary of State or a Labour Government to tell me about the importance of personnel: any small business man knows that his success depends upon his employees. For that reason, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right to make an impassioned plea that businesses employing fewer than 51 people be excluded from the legislation.
The reality of running a small business--this may be entirely alien to the Secretary of State's life experience--is that the owner is the production manager, the sales manager, the administrator and the personnel manager. He must also perform a raft of other functions. The more legislation of this sort that we impose upon the owner, the more difficult it is for him to attend to his most important function: creating a product to sell on the market at a profit, thereby generating wealth for the nation and employment in our constituencies.
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