Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-240)
23 MARCH 2004
LORD WHITTY
AND MR
GEOFF WEBDALE
Q220 Chairman: No, it is an answer,
but it is not the answer I was seeking.
Lord Whitty: Possibly not, but
there you go!
Q221 Chairman: Let me ask I again. Are
you discussing, or have you discussed with the Leader of the House
or in the LP committee, a contingency plan that if Mr Sheridan's
bill runs out of time to complete its stages as a private member's
bill the government will take it over, yes or no?
Lord Whitty: No. No, I would not
be involved in those discussions were they to have taken place.
Clearly, if it ran out of time as a private member's bill there
would be an issue the government would then have to face, in conjunction
with all other pressures for parliamentary time. It is premature
to ask that question, and I am not giving you a premature answer.
Q222 Chairman: Who is gong to take it
on in the Lords then?
Lord Whitty: If it goes in the
normal way through the private member's procedure in the Commons
and succeeds in the Commons, then it will be taken on as a private
member's bill in the Lords by my very good friend Lord Carter.
Q223 Chairman: Is it bomb-proof to the
kind of imaginative repositioning of labour in the country? If
an illegal gangmaster buys a smallholding in East Anglia and happens
to have a very, very large labour force and he gets a phone call
from his next-door neighbour which says, "I've got a field
of lettuces that desperately need cutting, can you send your lads
round", and no money exchanges legitimately but one farmer
does a favour for another with a very large gang of people and
then subsequently some money is exchanged in the pub at night,
does the bill cover that kind of circumnavigation of normal employment
relationships?
Lord Whitty: I am not sure it
covers every circumnavigation. It is important that the statutory
instrument includes provision of labour by the gangmasters themselves
as well as providing labour which is then employed by somebody
else.
Q224 Chairman: You said earlier on that
you and your colleague ministers have been discussing Mr Sheridan's
bill, and one of the essentials in good legislation is to scenario-play
through where a proposal may have ways in which people can get
round it. Have you done that?
Lord Whitty: Yes, which is why
the terms of the bill are likely to be drafted in fairly broad
terms, and some of the details would have to be put in secondary
legislation; but the secondary legislation would be designed to
cover as many loopholes as possible. I am not sure we would be
able to cover every transaction in a country pub late at night;
but with somebody acting as a gangmaster they could not cover
that up (as some gangmasters already do) by also owning a farm
and calling a workforce of 200 their farm labourers. That would
be excluded by the bill. There are, of course, numerous examples
in agriculture of farmers helping each other out. I do not think
that would be caught by the bill and nor should it be caught by
the bill; nor should traditional agriculture contracting be caught
by the bill. There are some fairly detailed ways in which we want
to block off loopholes, without catching people who are not really
concerned with this area and are perfectly legitimate operating
as they do.
Q225 Ms Atherton: Will the secondary
legislation be brought before the House before the summer recess?
Lord Whitty: No, it cannot be
until the bill has proceeded through both Houses of Parliament.
We may be able to give an indication but it would not be brought
in—
Q226 Ms Atherton: But you would anticipate
it coming to the House at the very first opportunity?
Lord Whitty: Yes.
Q227 Alan Simpson: The Committee has
had considerable evidence of gangmasters breaking all sorts of
laws at the moment. What makes you think that they will take any
particular notice of the licensing scheme you are proposing to
back? It is the cowboys I am asking you about?
Lord Whitty: There are a lot of
cowboys about but, at the end of the day, the cowboys have to
sell their services. If it is the case that this Jim Sheridan
bill is backed not only by the T&GWU, the NFU and the fresh
produce people and by the retailers, then parts of that backing
must be that, once a licensing system operates, they undertake
as far as they can to ensure that the produce they sell in their
shops is not provided by somebody who has used an illegal gangmaster.
Their understandable excuse (and I am not being pejorative about
this) so far as been, "How can we tell? There is no list."
This creates an offence on the farmer, the grower or the pack-house
owners in the first place for using non-licensed labour, or being
provided in breach of the licence, and it provides that there
is a list which the whole of the food chain can enforce. Whilst
obviously enforcement activity sanctions in the bill are very
important, the real sanction here is that somebody who uses illegal
labour will not get their produce appearing in Tescos.
Q228 Alan Simpson: That is the critical
test?
Lord Whitty: Indeed.
Q229 Alan Simpson: I am a passionate
supporter about a national licensing scheme, but when the Committee
received evidence from Zad Padda, who is a legitimate labour provider,
one of his concerns is that there is a certain amount of duplicity
in the position taken by major supermarkets. Many of them say
they would like a national scheme, but the pressure on the suppliers
is "Who can provide us with the cheapest deal?" The
pressure is always to look for the cheapest labour in that process.
In your submission to the Committee you make a point that you
want to ensure that the bill will make provision for an offence
of engaging the services of an unlicensed gangmaster. That to
me seems to be the critical lynchpin on this because that, presumably,
is where you would bring in a legal liability in respect of maybe
farmers, food processors and supermarkets. Will that be matched
with penalties?
Lord Whitty: The legal liability
is on the user of the labour and the provider of the labour. The
legal liability would be on the grower or the pack-house owner
and not further down the chain. The point I was making about further
down the chain was, if the supermarket or the processor than takes
produce from somebody who is in effect in breach of that regulation
they will be contrary to all their assurance schemes.
Q230 Alan Simpson: You are saying this
is an offence?
Lord Whitty: The offence is the
use of the labour.
Q231 Alan Simpson: Will that be a criminal
offence?
Lord Whitty: It will be a criminal
offence to use the labour. It will not be a criminal offence to
provide the produce. The criminal offence is on the person who
uses the labour or provides the labour.
Q232 Alan Simpson: Your submission to
us states exactly the opposite. At page 6 of the submission, paragraph
22 at the top of the page, you say you want to ensure that the
bill will "Make provision for an offence of engaging the
services of an unlicensed gangmaster"?
Lord Whitty: Yes.
Q233 Alan Simpson: The person who commits
the offence will be a farmer, a food processor or a supermarket?
Lord Whitty: No.
Q234 Alan Simpson: If you buy through
a gangmaster you are engaging their services to supply—
Lord Whitty: If you buy through
a gangmaster—but that is not the way the supermarkets operate.
They buy from a farmer or from a wholesaler.
Q235 Alan Simpson: There will be a legal
offence on the part of the farmer, the food processor, the wholesaler
if they purchase from an unlicensed gangmaster?
Lord Whitty: If they use labour
from an unlicensed gangmaster. To engage the service of an unlicensing
gangmaster will be an offence. Tescos do not engage the services.
What they do, will do and are committed to, is to ensure, as part
of their process, that they do not provide contracts to anybody
who has used unlicensed labour. Hitherto they have been unable
to check on that and have hidden behind being unable to check
on that. Once we have got a national registration licensing scheme
they will no longer be able to do that. The offence is on the
part of the person who engages the labour, or the person who provides
the labour.
Q236 Alan Simpson: It will be the farmer
or the food processor?
Lord Whitty: Yes, the food processor.
You are talking about somebody who is a first-line processor using
casual labour, which is not the person with the big factories
but the person who is, for example, topping and tailing vegetables.
Q237 Mr Lazarowicz: On the question of
research which is to be commissioned by Defra and the Home Office
on the whole issue, can you tell us either today or, if not, in
writing, when were these tenders sought? When do you expect to
award the tender and, most importantly of all, when do you expect
the work to be completed on this research project?
Mr Webdale: The tenders were sought
just before Christmas; bids were in by the end of January; and
we are in post-tender negotiations at the moment with the one
firm that came forward with a firm bid. We are hoping to commission
the work within the next few days, assuming that those negotiations
are successful. The plan is that there will be an initial report
towards the end of May on some of the key aspects of the work
that relate to the new manual harvest worker category that the
Wages Board introduced last year; and a full report should be
available within about six months.
Q238 Mr Lazarowicz: Six months from?
Mr Webdale: From the date we commissioned
it.
Q239 Mr Lazarowicz: How big a project
is this research work? How extensive is the scope of the inquiry?
Mr Webdale: The scope of the inquiry
effectively looks at all aspects of the food chain where there
is a use of gang labour in one shape or another; and also looks
at the use of SAWS labour within that; the demand for SAWS labour;
the impact the EU Accession countries will have on the supply
and demand for labour; and also seeks to look at the possible
need or size of the source quota in future years. It is fairly
all-embracing, which is why it has taken some time to set the
work up, and why we had relatively few tenders because of the
complexity of the work we are asking people to do for us.
Q240 Ms Atherton: Are we implying they
only tender for easy work?
Lord Whitty: It has been known
in universities!
Chairman: Minister, thank you very much
indeed for joining us this morning. You will have a little shopping
list from us and we look forward to hearing from you in due course.
We thank you most sincerely for your evidence. If, in addition
to the things we have asked for, there are any further points
of clarification or information you would like to respond to,
the Committee as always would be delighted to hear from you. Thank
you.
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