Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 142)
THURSDAY 26 APRIL 2007
MR OWEN
TUDOR, MS
HANNAH REED
AND MR
RICHARD EXELL
Q140 Lord Trefgarne:
I must say we have some evidence to the contrary of all that,
not least from the witnesses we had last week, the Federation
of Small Businesses.
Ms Reed: I thought it was important maybe to
bring to the attention of the Committee the Davidson review which
did a very thorough consultation. It may be something the Committee
would want to look at that.
Q141 Chairman:
I am conscious that we are now 10 minutes past your time, and
you are no doubt busy people and need to be somewhere else. There
are two questions we have not really tackled, namely the legal
status of the employee and self-employed. You have talked around
that quite a lot and I wonder if it would be possible for you
to put it on one side of a sheet of paper or send us your recent
pamphlet on the issue or something like that? I do not want to
make more work for you but this is quite a technical problem and
it may be more sensible to deal with it in that way. Then we also
have a question about the Working Time Directive which was Lady
Greengross' question and, again, this is quite a technical and
difficult subject but I am sure you have a written opinion on
all of this already and it would be very helpful if, on those
two subjects, you could give us something in writing.
Mr Tudor: We can certainly do that if we have
run out of time on working time!
Q142 Chairman:
Before you go, do you have any views on whether or not the EU
process of forming labour law is satisfactory, or is it a mess?
Do you have any view or vision about that?
Mr Tudor: I was going to say that we realise
you are busy but I hesitate to say we are flexible! In terms of
the process of forming labour law, there is good and bad; it is
curate's egg territory. The extent to which it involves social
partners in a structured form we find to be, as you might imagine,
an excellent innovation. We believe that the work that has been
done between unions and employers over the part-time workers'
directive and parental leave, where these things were negotiated
between both sides of industry before being passed at the European
level, is an excellent example of the way producing flexible legislation
improves people's lives. On the other hand, at a UK level we have
problems because we have no implementation mechanism other than
if the social dialogue agreements get turned into Directives;
we have no tripartite or bipartite implementation mechanism, and
overall at the UK level, and this is simply a matter of political
will rather than process, whilst there remains a deep reluctance
on the part of the Council of Ministers and the Commission to
give legislative backing to the negotiations of the social partners,
those social partner negotiations have a little less bite and
a little less urgency than they might otherwise have because everybody
who is involved knows it may not lead anywhere.
Chairman: Thank you for that, and thank
you very much for being with us. It has been a most interesting
session, and you have been most generous with your time. As I
say, we would like those bits of almost technical information
which would help us to round out our picture, and I hope we have
not kept you from important business of your own, or rather of
the trades union movement!
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