Examination of Witnesses (Questions 98
- 99)
WEDNESDAY 25 FEBRUARY 2004
MR IAN
BRINKLEY AND
MR PAUL
SELLERS
Q98 Chairman: May I say welcome to the representatives
of the Trades Union Congress; we are very glad that you were able
to come along. As you know, we are on a fairly tight timetable
which is not determined by us, but by the European Commission,
who set a consultation period which only goes to the end of March.
We are obviously trying to get the views of those who are primarily
interested, so that we can make at least a short report which
could influence the future. Thank you very much. We have two sessions
today: one with the Trades Union Congress and afterwards with
the British Medical Association and if any of their representatives
are here already, they will learn a few things about the mechanics
of how we do things here. First of all, welcome. We are all labelled,
as you can see, and the first point I want to make is that the
proceedings are being recorded and can be broadcast or webcast,
so all of us have to remember that if we make light asides, they
still may be heard somewhere. There will be a transcript of everything
here and you will receive a copy of that which you can correct
and we would hope to get it back in seven days or so because we
are running on rather a tight timetable. We have a number of questions
for you, but if you would like to make an opening statement, of
course we should be delighted to hear that and we have had the
benefit of your written evidence, which I must say I found very
clear. I think we are up to speed as far as you are concerned,
so if you wish to make a statement, please do so.
Mr Brinkley: Perhaps we will go straight into
the questions, given the time constraints on you.
Q99 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
We are going to ask questions which are broadly divided by topic,
because there do seem to be quite a lot of topics which have become
accumulated into this question of the Working Time Directive and
its possible amendment. I am going to ask the first one which
is about the importance of the current opt-out to the UK economy.
How far do you think that flexibility which it gives is useful
for British competitiveness? Do you think it has been quantified
or could be quantified accurately? On the assumption, which of
course we do not know, of the loss of the whole opt-out, every
bit of it, would you think there would be some loss—there
might be some gain, but would there not be some loss as well?
It will be no surprise to you, that others have told us they think
it is very good to have this flexibility, but I would like you
to comment on that rather general point first.
Mr Brinkley: In general we would not regard
it as dealing a blow to British competitiveness and certainly
we cannot see the possible loss of the opt-out in the future having
any great effect. If you look at the various comparative measures,
on productivity, on trade balance, on general GDP per head, there
is no real evidence that the long-hours cult, which is essentially
what the opt-out is trying to preserve, has given us any competitive
advantage. There are two things which may actually reduce competitiveness
and reduce flexibility: one is that part of the long-hours culture
has actually become institutionalised; it has become almost a
permanent feature of the working hours for some groups of workers
rather than something which responds flexibly to changes in demand.
Secondly, it is a concentration just on one dimension of flexibility,
on numerical flexibility, when what we should be concerned about
is functional flexibility; in other words, the flexibility you
get from changes of work organisation, the introduction of new
technology and all those changes which flow from it. Our view
is that if you have the long-hours culture, it is easy for employers
to load on the hours rather than address these more fundamental
questions, which we think are important.
Chairman: If nobody else wants to comment
on that point, perhaps we could go more directly to the point
about productivity which is in a way linked with it. There are
ways in which you could improve productivity, even if you go to
shorter hours.
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