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Mr. Lindsay Hoyle (Chorley): Like joined-up thinking.
Mr. Fabricant: We have joined-up running of companies simply because one poor guy has to do it all. On top of that, such people will have to try to implement the Bill's provisions.
Mr. Ian Bruce: Is my hon. Friend not being too generous about the Government Front-Bench team? Ministers completely ignore the regulations that they introduce. They do not seem to worry about the working time directive. We even have a Minister--the Minister for Small Firms, Trade and Industry--who is working for nothing, despite the minimum wage regulations which are coming into force on 1 April.
Mr. Fabricant: The Minister is to be complimented on working for nothing. Under minimum wage legislation, one can be paid nothing, such as when one works for a charity. Of course, when people are paid under £3.60, it does not exactly help other charities--but I will not go into that, because it would be out of order.
The legislation will put people in a very difficult position. The whole situation was summed up by Mel Lambert, who is head of human resources at IVEC/Fiat, when he said--I do not have the memory of my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham, who can quote from a marvellous mind without referring to paperwork, so I shall use my notes for accuracy:
Mr. Fabricant:
My hon. Friend reminds me that Sainsbury plc started as a small corner shop.
Mr. Stephen Day (Cheadle):
And Marks and Spencer.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. That is quite enough of historical tales.
Mr. Fabricant:
All large businesses start as small businesses. If small businesses are strangled at birth, there
This Government are fond of using cliches; I shall use one that is accurate. They inherited a golden economic legacy, they have started to ruin it, and it will be destroyed still further by this thoughtless, pernicious, vindictive legislation.
Miss Kirkbride:
I rise to continue the plea from the Opposition Benches for the Government finally to listen to our concerns and adopt our amendments, so that some of the most onerous restrictions on business will not be placed on those that employ 50 or fewer employees. We on these Benches feel so passionately because we cannot understand why the Government, having learned many lessons from the previous Conservative Government--we should bear in mind some of the programmes that they have instituted and some of the messages that they gave the electorate during the general election campaign--cannot learn one of the most serious ones from our period in government and our record on employment.
When the Labour party was elected in May 1997, it inherited rapidly falling unemployment. In 1995, it had a programme to put 250,000 young people back to work. By the time it came to office, half those young people were already in work. We must ask ourselves why that happened. Unlike countries on the continent, we in the United Kingdom have a relatively unregulated economy. Obviously, we have provisions on health and safety at work and the right conditions for people at work, but we do not have the onerous regulation that has resulted in unemployment of about 12 per cent. in comparable countries on the continent. Over here in the UK, unemployment is 6 per cent. Indeed, due to our inheritance, there has been some further success in reducing unemployment and increasing employment.
Some of us on the Opposition Benches, who, sadly, have been considering these regulations in great detail over the past few months, see the Government's complete failure to understand why they inherited such a fantastically performing economy. We fear that we are seeing the trade unions' payback after years of a Labour Opposition.
Mr. John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings):
My hon. Friend talks about the Government failing to learn such an important lesson. Perhaps our hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Mr. Fabricant) was right in saying that such a lesson cannot be learned academically, but must be learned through experience and gathered wisdom. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride) agree that, as not a member of the Cabinet has ever bought or sold anything for a living in business, they are very unlikely to have that necessary experience and wisdom?
Miss Kirkbride:
My hon. Friend is entirely accurate. One would have thought that the Government might be capable of learning from our experience in power and from our record on employment when we started getting things right--sadly, that is not so.
Mr. Ian Bruce:
Has my hon. Friend seen the long-term unemployment and youth unemployment statistics? After
Miss Kirkbride:
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who has been very assiduous in studying the real statistics on the new deal and youth unemployment. Despite Government statistics, which are deliberately intended to confuse the picture, the record on youth unemployment is not anything like the Government pretend it to be in public pronouncements.
I shall provide some elucidation. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a business breakfast club, and I was pleased at the attendance for a speech by a Conservative Member of Parliament. Indeed, the number of people turning up to listen to a speech by a politician at 8.30 am was much greater than normal. I wonder whether that was because the message about how unfriendly the Government are to business is finally getting through. I told the people there many things that the Government propose to do and gave them a copy of the 76-page working time directive, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) referred. I suggested that they might want to go home and read it, because they would certainly have to know of its provisions.
Sadly, I was not able to give the people present a copy of the 112-page minimum wage regulations. They had not been published, despite the fact that the minimum wage is being introduced on Thursday, and were not even available two weeks ago for my constituents to read so that they might be aware of the conditions.
Then I began to tell my constituents what else was coming down the track, which was unfair: it was Friday morning and they were looking forward to the weekend, but I was busy telling them that, if all that was not enough, they had to consider other measures, such as three months paternity leave for staff: a small business may have secured a big contract, but the production manager may want his three months paternity leave. One can think of legioned examples where dislocation and huge upset would be caused for small businesses, denting their production and wealth-creating capacity.
Mr. Bercow:
My hon. Friend is developing an extremely powerful argument. Given that the Secretary of State did not dispute in the debate on Second Reading on
Miss Kirkbride:
My hon. Friend again makes an excellent point that goes to the heart of our concerns about the Bill. We hear one thing from the Government, but we get another. We hear that they are against regulation, but the regulations that they are introducing are so fantastically complicated and expensive that they are sufficient to make our eyes water. We hear that they think that America has some really good ideas about how to do things, but they suggest that the American model is not the one that they are introducing to the United Kingdom.
Labour Members often said that America has a minimum wage, but we were never told that it does not apply to small firms or that it was considerably less than the minimum wage that the Government intend to set in the United Kingdom. Although some of the provisions that the Government intend to introduce through the Bill are in force in America, others achieve precisely what we hope to achieve through the new clause: they exempt from regulations small firms employing fewer than 50 people.
The impact is obvious for us all to see. Over the past 20 years, there has been no net creation of private sector jobs in the EU. Some companies have gone to the wall and others have been created, but the private sector has not created any extra jobs. America's record on net job creation runs into millions. If we are to have a successful and prosperous future--not only in the United Kingdom, but throughout the whole EU--we have to get real. We must understand that the world is changing and that many other countries seek a standard of living similar to ours. We are being caught up, rapidly.
"It puts these (small) companies in a very difficult position. They are minnows compared to union professionals."
In the short term, trade unions will fight for the so-called rights of their employees; in many ways, that is laudable, but it will be at the expense of their long-term security and long-term employment. The House should mark my words: these provisions will be a long way from fostering the growth of small business. Let us remember that it is the small business that becomes the large business.ICI did not suddenly appear out of the blue. It was originally a small company which was set up in the 19th century. Even BT was once a very small corporation.
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