Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 60)
THURSDAY 29 MARCH 2007
MS SUSAN
ANDERSON AND
MR TOM
MORAN
Q40 Lord Wade of Chorlton:
Could you explain that a little bit further? You are of the view
that it has not had an impact on productivity? Do you think productivity
is related very much to labour law generally or not?
Ms Anderson: Clearly if you have employees feeling
that they are secure in their jobs, if you have them having all
the skills they need so they can progress, then that gives you
security in the labour market. Certainly if you feel that you
have protection, for example, against unfair dismissal, protection
against unfair discrimination, that is going to make you a happier,
more productive employee. We have looked to see, especially in
respect of the national minimum wage, if there has been an impact
on productivity; we can see an impact on employee satisfaction,
it is hard to see—government has failed to see—any
impact that you can assign to any rights in terms of an impact
in productivity.
Q41 Lord Wade of Chorlton:
How do you think European labour law has affected our competition
with other parts of the world, particularly in the Far East as
we are now competing on a very different level?
Ms Anderson: We have seen a lot of legislation.
The UK legislation has tended to be to go with the flow of where
employers are going around labour market flexibility, around those
sorts of issues. When we see some of the legislation that has
come from Europe, for example, the principles can often look very
simple but when we have actually seen them implemented—such
things as the Working Time Directive where we have a lot of red
tape and bureaucracy and possibly uniquely in the UK—then
they have had a detrimental impact and they certainly had detrimental
impact in terms of the reputation of the UK to do business where
our flexible labour market has always been seen as a source of
strength. We asked our members as part of doing this report on
labour market regulation and they do feel that it is having a
negative impact, that the cumulative impact, the steady flow of
regulation. According to our survey not surprisingly three quarters
of employers said that they were spending more time on administrative
compliance and particularly the smaller firms felt it was taking
valuable senior management time. Around two-thirds of them said
that more and more senior management time was being taken with
the administration of new rights, for example implementing the
new age discrimination legislation required a lot of time to absorb
this new legislation without necessarily companies having to make
too many changes to what they were doing in terms of their workforce
practices.
Q42 Lord Wade of Chorlton:
You are of the view that the SME sector is more seriously affected
by legislation generally than the larger companies?
Ms Anderson: I would not say that is necessarily
true. What you tend to find with the large firms is that they
implement to the nth degree. They have HR practitioners which
the smaller firms do not so if new legislation comes in they will
crawl all over it, they will get the employment lawyers in, they
look at every aspect of their policies to make sure that inadvertently
they are not falling foul of the new legislation; they will follow
the progress of the regulations as they go through; they will
get worried because the employment lawyers may be telling them
that this is all going wrong, that they are going to have to do
X, Y and Z whereas we are busy beavering away at CBI trying to
ensure that the regulations do come in a common sense way so I
get worried so they will start to maybe thinking about over-implementing.
Smaller firms, on the other hand, do not worry about the legislation
until just before it comes in. They will then take a more practical
approach and say, "Let's think about what we're doing. Are
we being ageist?" and they will not have all the complicated
occupational benefits for example that a large employer will have.
If they are paying redundancy pay they will tend to pay the minimum
amount of redundancy pay as specified in the legislation. They
will not have an occupational redundancy pay scheme but they may
have to think about changing because it does not meet the requirements
of the legislation. I do not think you can make a very easy small/large
firm split but undoubtedly what I would say is that in the smaller
firm, because you do not have those HR experts and the guidance
is not always very accessible or indeed very simple (although
I do acknowledge that DTI are making strong moves to try to sympathise)
you can get employment lawyers who tend to worry you too much
and you do get the problem that you have the senior executives
who should be busy spending their time growing the company engaging
with the workforce, spending their time worrying about legislation
which really distracts them from the things that would probably
be a more valuable use of their time. Certainly more simple guidance
is part of the solution for those smaller firms.
Q43 Lord Wade of Chorlton:
I have one more question on productivity. We have seen in the
UK that poor productivity is probably the worst issue we have
in growth creation. Germany has higher productivity than we do
and yet they have tighter labour laws. Would that be true?
Ms Anderson: They do not have higher productivity
because they have more employment law; they have higher productivity
because they have a higher skilled workforce.
Lord Wade of Chorlton: I wanted you to
say that. We can only use what you say, not what we think.
Q44 Earl of Dundee:
Do you agree with the claim that the United Kingdom gold plates
European Union directives in general and therefore would be likely
to do so with any EU directive on labour law?
Mr Moran: The CBI has done quite a lot of work
on this both as part of our Better Regulation work and also as
part of the Davidson Review into implementation of the EU directives
into UK. This work was done last year and again we would be happy
to send you a copy of our evidence for that. The short answer
is yes, but I think the more nuanced answer is that that often
comes with the best intentions and the general impression we get
from our members in dealing with the various implementation processes
is that the UK crawls all over the legislation to make sure it
has got it absolutely right, to make sure it is compliant, whereas
other EU Member States simply do not report the same kinds of
problems and seem to get along fine without going through the
same fairly arduous process that we go through. I think there
were two key messages we got when looking at our work on the Davidson
Review on this specific process. One is that it often takes a
very long time by the time you have gone through the various consultation
processes to implement things into UK law in the equality regulations
that come out of the EU. The Equal Treatment Directive in 2000
is a good example of that; the age regulations of last year was
something that was poured over for a very long time, caused a
lot of problems in consultation process, potential impact on pensions,
on retirement schemes, on redundancy schemes, on the benefits
offered to staff. We were all going through this process, it was
all full and frank, but we were simply not having the same story
reported back to us from other EU Member States who were, of course,
bound to implement exactly the same directives. I think the Working
Time Directive is another one where again we see the UK making
sure that it has done its homework properly, but that does lead
to a lot of very complicated and often quite bureaucratic regulation
in the UK which does impact on the amount of time that employers
have to spend making sure they are compliant with it. One example
would be that some EU Member States have interpreted the 48 hour
limit on working hours per week as applying per contract rather
than per worker so you have people in some Member States happily
working potentially two jobs each of 48 hours per week which of
course the UK does not do, quite rightly. That is one example
of where the UK often goes well beyond where it may strictly have
to if it is implementing the directives.
Q45 Earl of Dundee:
A generous interpretation would claim that the UK does its homework
very thoroughly; a less generous one might allege that it holds
things up through scrutinising too much. So here in the UK we
may be too thorough. Other European states may not be thorough
enough. In which specific ways then should these separate camps
and approaches make adjustments?
Mr Moran: It is not so much relaxed or unrelaxed;
the UK in general has a better regulation agenda which we fully
support and it is something that is slowly being absorbed into
the Commission's mentality. Obviously they have these principles
of transparency, proportionality, accountability, consistency
and targeting to make sure that where regulation is necessary
it is no more than is necessary.
Q46 Earl of Dundee:
Do you think that flexicurity suffers in the UK, because we are
too good at our homework?
Ms Anderson: I think there is a certain truth
in that. I know you have spent a lot of time looking at the Working
Time Directive and it is one of those areas where the principle
seems quite clear, you are protecting vulnerable workers from
having to work excessive hours that could be detrimental to their
health. However, if you actually look at the Directive it is clear
what some Member States thought they were signing up to and it
is equally clear what we thought we were signing up to, but clearly
we were not signing up to the same thing. For example, when we
discussed it before, this definition of autonomous workers, these
are the people who do not need so much level of protection. In
some Member States you define an autonomous worker by the level
of your pay or whether your hours are actually measured. Typically
those people who are working set hours and are paid overtime,
let us protect them because they tend to be the lower paid people,
whereas the people who just do the hours needed to do the job
do not need so much protection. Everybody thinks they are clear
what they are signing up to because some of these directives have
very broad principles, but when they come down to the legislation
and because, for example, the EU directive talks about autonomous
workers being clergymen and senior executives, we think, "Hang
on, if that is autonomous workers, they are right up here in terms
of their seniority within a firm", but clearly that is not
what other Member States have said. Other Member States have said
that it is about protecting vulnerable people so they will not
have a very small group of people who are autonomous. The principles
seem fine until you start to look at the detail; whether this
is an argument for more detailed regulation I am not sure. I think
it is an argument about being clearer. Again, if we look at Working
Time and the whole SIMAP Jaeger case—what is on-call time,
what is not on-call time—it was clear that every state in
Europe apart from the UK thought that doctors who were in a hospital
who were on-call felt that these people were somehow not working
and therefore their time did not count. However, in the UK we
were pretty clear that somebody who is on-call, on the employer's
premises, that is their working time, particularly if they are
called up regularly. It is a fascinating study: how can different
Member States see things so differently? I think the other key
difference from other European states is the fact that they do
so much through collective agreements and not through individual
agreements. In the UK, even when we have collective agreements
an individual still has the right to take a case to employment
tribunal so we tend to find that this much more rights-based approach
leads more individuals to say that it is not clear or, to take
a case of discrimination going through with lots of big payouts,
this creates a whole climate of challenge because individuals
think that their particular rights have not been observed or that
they can see an opportunity, because of lack of clarity, to take
forward a tribunal claim. This makes us very risk averse in the
UK which is why our members call in the employment lawyers and
why we have everybody crawling over the regulations to try to
get them identified and specified to the nth degree. When we have
something clear-cut like the national minimum wage or the right
to request flexible working, these have worked well and they have
not given rise to massive amounts of tribunal claims because they
are clear and precise and in a way that some of EU legislation
just is not. I think if we can get the EU to back off our view,
going back to this Green Paper, is to say that we have the minimum
rights now, we do not need more European legislation. What we
need and what our counterparts in other European states are saying:
we want more of what you have around flexibility, we do not want
more legislation, in fact we want less. Our view is that the Commission
has finished the legislation of part of it, what they now need
to do is do that exchange of good practice, look at what countries
are doing around active labour markets. That is the way of the
future, not more legislation.
Q47 Baroness Gale:
The UK has this gold plated approach, is that beneficial to the
UK in terms of the rest of Europe and in terms of the business
and the employees? Do we benefit to a greater degree by adopting
such an approach?
Ms Anderson: I do not think we benefit at all.
I think we end up with confusion. We have smaller firms tearing
their hair out because of the Working Time Directive. Age discrimination
is a case in point. Other Member States say that they have something
in their constitution that says there is no age discrimination.
We have actually reached not a bad place but it took an awful
long time to get there on age discrimination. Even at the eleventh
hour we had problems, for example, with our pension schemes. We
set off with the right intentions and then we have some unintended
consequences. What happened on pensions was that clearly if you
close your defined benefits schemes to new members of staff it
is indirect age discrimination because new members of staff tend
to be younger people. Some of the civil servants had the bright
idea that it was indirect discrimination and therefore it must
be outlawed. The upshot of this, they thought, was that those
closed defined benefit schemes would have to be opened to let
in the younger members of staff. However, that was not likely
to be the result; the result would have been that the defined
benefit schemes would have been closed to everybody which would
have led older workers to have particular levels of disadvantage.
We managed to persuade them that that would have been the consequence
and then consequently they amended the legislation to allow DB
schemes to remain closed to new entrants. We had to fight that
particular battle twice, once with the DTI and then about a year
later with the Department of Work and Pensions. It is never over
until it is over and it takes a lot of effort to get these things
right. Eventually we do get them right, but had that gone the
wrong way—and it was not an approach they were taking in
Ireland, for example—we would have seriously gold plated
and come a real cropper.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland: I would like
you talk a little bit about how you see the balance between all
this legislation and things we heard from other witnesses about
better training and other advantages that would actually help
our productivity. I am still stuck on Lord Dundee's paradox which
is that if we are gold plating our issues and we have less than
Germany has—Germany has greater productivity—how do
we get to the point where we have the kind of flexibility that
we want and yet we still achieve the security for workers and
the productivity? That is what we are trying to seek. How does
Europe get those things into perspective? If people are achieving
things in different ways, what are the variables that are actually
going to help us to get to that position? I was also interested
in you talking about your report. You quoted £37 billion
and I wondered how much you measured social productivity as against
profit? Is that to do with profit as against workers being in
a better position to continue to work and a workforce being improved
by having workers in it because we can get more people from the
lower levels going up through the workforce? I wondered if you
had looked at that, although it is not necessarily a CBI issue.
The third thing which comes out of what I have been listening
to is how much do you think the over implementation of legislation
in this country is due to the standard of leadership in management,
which is a CBI issue? It seemed to me that the senior managers
should not be spending their time away from their strategic management
issues in order to implement, particularly if they have good HR
staff. Is that a leadership delegation issue rather than an issue
of real diversion?
Ms Anderson: On the final point, we were talking
about smaller firms there. Where you have a company employing
20 people the managing director is the HR director, the company
secretary, the finance director. You do not have an HR department.
Q48 Baroness Howarth of Breckland:
You were talking about SMEs.
Ms Anderson: Yes.
Q49 Baroness Howarth of Breckland:
Not large firms.
Ms Anderson: No. Education and skills are top
of the business agenda. Skills are really important at the moment.
When I am talking about the age discrimination legislation, that
is done by the HR department who have obviously sent something
up at some point to the board. The distraction of time is for
the smaller firms who do not have HR experts and probably cannot
afford an employment lawyer either. Tom will talk about flexicurity
because I think it is a very interesting development in the EU
and there is a lot of interest from the European Commission. It
is one of those concepts that is really growing apace, but I have
to say that a lot of people are using it as a peg to hang on either
a lot of security or a lot of flexibility. There is an interesting
debate there. On the skills point, it is the skills that are key
if we are going to look at where we stand in relation to our European
counterparts. It is in the area of skills that we are weaker than
many of our European competitors. So, for example, if we look
at basic skills we still have 20 per cent of the workforce with
poor basic skills. That compares to about seven to nine per cent
in Germany and France. We do well compared to them in terms of
degree levels; around 27 per cent of the workforce in the UK now
has a degree level qualification and that compares pretty well
with France and Germany, they have about 25 or 26 per cent. At
higher skills we are doing really well; with basic skills we have
problems but we are addressing them with government initiatives
both for the unemployed and for those in work which are designed
to raise those levels of literacy and numeracy. They are really
working. Then we have another issue around the intermediate skills
where, to be frank, we have a lot of people who are skilled but
without a qualification. For employers it is more important to
have competent people than those who have a piece of paper which
says you have qualifications. It is important for individuals
and certainly if you want labour mobility having more people with
qualifications would be an important aspect and that is something
we are turning our attention to now, to try to transform the qualification
system. Competence and qualifications are not necessarily the
same thing. If you compare our best firms and our high performing
sectors, they compare just as well with the best of Germany and
France. It is some of that underperforming tail where we tend
to lag, but if you look at our pharmaceutical companies, if you
look at our car manufacturers, they are just as productive, in
fact some of them are more productive. I do not think we need
lash ourselves too much, but certainly it is going to be the skills
that we need to focus on; that is not an area of competence for
the EU (and God forbid that it should be). We all have our own
particular problems to address at the national level. Other Member
States are concerned about their education systems as indeed sometimes
we are.
Q50 Baroness Howarth of Breckland:
If we are talking about flexicurity, the alternative to more legislation
is actually this imperative of encouraging the Member States to
improve skills, education and training.
Ms Anderson: Legislation does not do it. The
best security you can have is the security of knowing that if
you lose your job you will get another job either because you
have the skills that you need or because you have a labour market
that is growing and that we are creating jobs. That is the best
security that anybody can have and I think that is the whole ethos
of this flexicurity approach. May be Tom can add a bit on flexibility.
Mr Moran: Yes, and perhaps I can give a bit
of background about how we, as the CBI, and through BUSINESSEUROPE
have been involved in this. It kind of first popped up—I
do not know whether it is in the Oxford English Dictionary just
yet—and is certainly being used a lot as a phrase. I think
it is a way to get things in perspective. We have these priorities:
a flexible labour market, the need for adequate social security,
active labour market policies to encourage people back into the
labour market and Lifelong Learning is something that has been
added. It used to be the flexicurity triangle so presumably it
is now the flexicurity quadrilateral now or something similar.
It is a combination of what the Member States and the EU quite
rightly see as priorities. We welcomed it and our members have
welcomed it on that basis because clearly they are key issues
and things which we all need to draw our attention towards. I
think it is fair to say that we see the UK as strong in the flexible
labour market aspect but, as Susan was saying, we do have particular
issues with skills which we are working very hard to try to address
and it something that will hopefully improve our productivity
in the future. I think the records do show that you do get employment
security from knowing that you can get a job and whether you measure
it by the UK's national statistics or whether you judge it by
the EU's Eurostat markings, we have the third or fourth highest
employment rate in the EU; we are one of only four Member States
meeting the Lisbon target of 70 per cent employment. That is the
target for 2010 so we are obviously well above the pace that needs
to be set there although obviously we need to do more. I think,
delving down a bit more into where flexicurity is going, it is
clear from the various models that you have Denmark and also the
Netherlands which is actually a very different system and derives
its flexibility from a lot of part time work (they have the highest
incidence of part time work in the EU). What we would like to
see is more work on this but very much respecting the principle
of subsidiarity amongst the Member States. We think the UK is
a very good model but we would not seek to impose it on other
countries or tell them they should adopt it. It would not be appropriate
given the diversity and the detail of labour markets and social
models. As something to focus efforts it is very useful but we
do need to recognise the differences of social and labour market
systems amongst the EU and make sure that they can work to the
best advantage within the encouragement offered by flexicurity.
Chairman: Thank you very much; I am really
sorry to have to leave you now. It has been very interesting so
far. I am sure it will continue to be so under Lady Greengross's
chairmanship.
(In the absence of the Chairman, Baroness Greengross was
called to the Chair)
Q51 Baroness Neuberger:
You have largely covered my next question because as to the question
about policy actions relating to education and skills formation
I think you have made it very clear that that is where you think
the action needs to be. Given that the Green Paper does describe
this segmentation—the insiders and the outsiders—given
that you clearly feel it is education and skills training, do
you think, as we heard last week from Professor Shackleton and
Mr Meager, that social security needs to be added into that? What
do you feel needs to be done legislation-wise, if anything at
all, to deal with the insiders/outsiders question?
Ms Anderson: I think one of the interesting
things about the Commission's Green Paper is that it talks about
insiders and outsiders and we are pretty clear that the outsiders
are those people who are trapped outside the labour market and
unable to get in because so many Member States have restrictive
employment protection legislation. We do not consider part time
workers or fixed term workers or agency temps as somehow outsiders
or vulnerable workers or people who need extra levels of protection.
Q52 Baroness Neuberger:
They can be; it depends what kind of temporary workers they are.
Ms Anderson: I do not see that then need additional
levels of protection. They have the same employment rights as
anybody else in the UK so they have rights in the protection of
long working hours, they have holidays, they have national minimum
wage, they have protection against unfair discrimination. Going
back to what we have been saying, if you want another job as a
fixed term person you must make sure that your skills are right
and for many people fixed term work can be a way to break into
a new career. There are problems if people are abused; if people
do not get the national minimum wage or they do not get their
20 days' holiday, that is abuse and is against the law. There
are people who are vulnerable. Migrant workers, for example, whose
lack of knowledge of the employment rights in the UK are clearly
vulnerable. If they do not have the language skills then they
are vulnerable to abuse, but abuse is unacceptable, the law is
the law and we do not want good employers undercut by abusive
employers who do not pay the national minimum wage or, for example,
who make unreasonable deductions for things like accommodation
from migrant workers who happen to be working on a farm or whatever.
There is abuse there and where there is abuse it must be dealt
with. However, we do not think there is anything abusive about
a fixed term contract or working as an agency temp. Many agency
temps prefer to work as agency temps. They get much more than
their colleagues who are working on permanent contracts and they
are very happy with that and many of them do not want to be full
time permanent members of staff. Similarly, the vast majority
of people who are working on a part time basis are there because
they want to work on a part-time basis. Personally I think it
is rather insulting to suggest that somehow they are vulnerable
or atypical and need levels of protection. I just do not buy into
them being on the periphery of the labour market. I think we accept
that there are people who are abused and we are quite clear that
that is not acceptable and the best way to prevent that is by
having simple legislation that everyone can understand with very
clear rights.
Q53 Baroness Neuberger:
I think it is fairly clear that you do not really think there
needs to be much more in the way of labour law around that. I
was particularly interested in the question of social security.
One of the suggestions that was beginning to come up last week
was that if you really wanted to deal with temporary workers who
work for a bit and then have a patch when they are not working,
one of the things you want to do is to make the social security
system possibly be quite generous for a very short time.
Ms Anderson: There is an issue around people
on incapacity benefit who, for example, fear taking a job that
may not lead to a long period in the labour market because they
may have issues around health. I think there is an issue around
incapacity benefit but I do not think there is a real issue around
needing higher levels of unemployment benefit.
Q54 Baroness Gale:
I would like to ask a particular question relating to what you
have just said. Are you linking in the people who are on temporary
contract—not agency workers but temporary contract—which
can go on and on as a temporary contract? I know someone in my
family had a contract for four years and was not paid any sickness
benefit or holiday pay (he could take the holiday but not get
paid) and this is in recent times. I am wondering whether temporary
contracts are all right up to a point.
Ms Anderson: After a certain period there is
not much point being on a fixed term contract because you end
up with all the rights of a permanent member of staff so if you
constantly roll these contracts on you end up with the same levels
of redundancy pay as somebody who has not been on a fixed term
contract. If people are not getting their sick pay or their holiday
pay, that is against the law. This is a case where they should
be taking the employer to an employment tribunal.
Q55 Baroness Gale:
You wonder how they can be getting away with it with all this
legislation in place.
Ms Anderson: Yes, you do wonder how they get
away with it. There are some issues around people on fixed term
contracts wanting to take the holiday at the end of the contract.
It was called rolled up holiday pay. It was quite clear they still
had the holiday pay but they would take it at the end of the contract
so at the end of the 12 months they would still have another month
when they were paid on the basis that that was holiday pay. I
guess that was not happening to your acquaintance. It is unlawful,
it should not be allowed and he should be taking the employer
straight to an employment lawyer. ACAS, for example, can intervene.
Q56 Baroness Gale:
Moving on to temporary agency workers, I wondered what your view
was on the need for the proposed EU Directive on minimum standards
for temporary workers. Who should be regarded as the employer
of the temporary agency worker, should it be the agency or the
client employer?
Ms Anderson: It is quite clear that the employment
relationship should be with agency and not the user of the agency
temp because it is the agency that has the responsibility for
the holiday pay, making sure the person is paid the national minimum
wage, statutory sick pay, protection against dismissal. All those
things are the responsibility of the agency. Users of agency temps
would expect that the employer obeys the law. You should not have
to write that into the contract because everybody should obey
the law. The responsibility lies with the agency and not with
the user of the agency temp. Do we think there is a need for a
directive? We can accept there should be a directive. We do not
have a problem having a directive. What we do not like are some
of the earlier drafts of the directive and one of the ones that
is floating around at the moment suggests that the agency temp
ought to get the same pay as the user company's employees after
only six weeks. That to us does not seem a sensible provision
because they will not have the experience, the skills and the
competence necessarily of the permanent worker employee in the
user company. Often they do so there are many agencies who are
paid the same if not more because they come in as a temporary
secretary, for example, and are often paid a lot more because
they are only there for a short period and you want somebody who
can just pick up the ropes really quickly. In other areas that
is not the case. Going back to the earlier question about gold
plating, everybody else would happily sign up to equal rights
after six weeks but if we look at some Member States they put
all their agency temps on the trainee rate and therefore they
get the trainee rate and not the rate of the worker they are working
alongside so they say they have implemented the directive but
actually they have not implemented the directive because it is
not equal pay for people working alongside each other doing the
same job. We would not do that. I think there are problems with
the directives. There are countries which sign up to a principle
but in reality they are not providing equal pay. We do get cross
when these things are passed off as an acceptance when really
there is no reality.
Q57 Baroness Howarth of Breckland:
I want to talk about mobility now and to look at what the advantages
or disadvantages might be in the introduction of EU legislation
that ensured uniformity of employment rights for workers regardless
of the Member States in which they are working. I think I have
already got the drift of what you are likely to say in the answer
to this, but what do you see as the implications of EU enlargement
for labour law?
Mr Moran: In addition to what you quite rightly
guessed I might say about the already very comprehensive number
of employment rights that people do enjoy as EU citizens and EU
workers, I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done,
particularly in the newer Member States, simply around implementation
and enforcement and that sort of thing that we all recognise is
an issue. To be honest, it is not just an issue with employment
law because these countries have had a very turbulent recent past,
they are entering the EU, they have to implement all the legislation
and that is a tremendous undertaking by their public legislators.
BUSINESSEUROPE, with the ETUC, is doing a lot of work funded by
the Commission and also with the respective secretariats in building
what is known as capacity building firstly in terms of making
sure that employers' organisations and trade unions are able to
consult with government effectively but also making sure that
they are aware of how you do implement EU law because we all know
it is a very tricky subject and one where there is a great need
for expertise to make sure that there is—this is what we
are all aiming for—a level playing field across the EU to
make sure firstly that all workers have access to equal rights
but also workers in different Member States or companies in different
Member States are, as I said, operating on a level playing field
and no one country is able to undercut another. That is where
we see the priority in making sure that all workers and employers
are able to access and use the same rights.
Q58 Baroness Greengross:
It falls to me to ask you the last question. I am going to ask
you to be very, very brief and perhaps follow up, if you have
not made all the points you would like to, in writing afterwards.
My question is about the legal status of employee versus self-employed
people and whether there is anything else that you would like
to tell us about looking forward with regard to the infamous Working
Time Directive.
Ms Anderson: We do not think we need more legislation
in the UK or at the European level on definitions of worker, employee
or indeed of self-employed. I think these are well-known at the
UK level. There are always some anomalies around the edges but
they get sorted out pretty quickly. I do not think we need legislation
to tell us at a national level or at an EU level what the distinctions
are. In terms of the Working Time Directive, it is an on-going
debate. We have been very pleased by the way that the UK Government
has supported the principle of maintaining the opt-out. It is
interesting how many other Member States have come to back us
on that because they too see the flexibility of having the opt-out.
What I would leave you with is, do we think there should be scope
for simplifying the UK regulations or simply simplifying the guidance
on the Working Time Directive? I think that is something we have
set ourselves as a challenge and we very much want to work with
the DTI and TUC to see whether we cannot strip away some of that
excess baggage, particularly around this whole definition of who
is autonomous and who is not. What we want to do is very clear:
protect vulnerable people, ensure that they get their rights,
but remove all the red tape and bureaucracy that goes around because
a lot of the guidance is just so complicated. That is what we
intend to do.
Q59 Baroness Greengross:
I think that was very clear but if there are additional points
you want to write to us about that would be very interesting for
us. Could I thank you both very much; that was extremely interesting.
Ms Anderson: Thank you very much. We will send
you a copy of our formal response to the Green Paper and the BUSINESSEUROPE
response as well. We will leave the report with you.
Q60 Baroness Greengross:
Anything on the Working Time Directive would be very interesting.
Ms Anderson: We do come up with some suggestions
in here, but that is very much work in progress but we will keep
you posted on that as well.
Baroness Greengross: Thank you very much.
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