House of Lords - European Union - Twenty-Sixth Report

Select Committee on European Union Twenty-Sixth Report

Working time and temporary agency workers: towards EU agreement

1. This report describes the developments up to September 2008 in the search for agreement among EU Member States to the Commission's proposals: (a) to amend the present Directive 2003/88/EC[1] on working time; and (b) to introduce a new directive on the working conditions of temporary agency workers.

2. On 10 July 2008, the responsible UK Minister—Mr Pat McFadden MP—gave evidence to us about the agreements reached in Council on 9 June about the two Directives. Subsequently, on 15 September 2008, the General Affairs and External Relations Council formally adopted the Common Position on the Directives and on 22 September these were submitted to the European Parliament for Second Reading.

3. At the time of preparing this report, we had just seen the 7 October 2008 decision[2] of the European Parliament Employment and Social Affairs Committee to approve the Council Common Position on temporary work, without amendment. The Committee expressed the wish that the six year old proposal for a directive should enter into force without further delay. We note, however, that amendments may nonetheless be tabled at the plenary session of the European Parliament when the Council's Common Position is discussed.

4. This report makes available for the information of the House, the evidence relating to the agreements reached in Council, which we heard from Pat McFadden MP on 10 July. The evidence was taken by Members of EU Sub-Committee G (Social Policy and Consumer Affairs), whose names are shown in Appendix 1.

Background

5. Both these Commission proposals are of very long standing and it has been politically difficult for the Ministers representing EU Member States to reach agreement on them at meetings of the Employment Council[3]. The Committee has taken a keen interest in both proposals since their publication and has conducted extensive correspondence with the Government about the progress being made towards agreement on them.

6. In 2004, the Commission conducted a consultation as part of its preparation for its 2005 proposal to amend the Working Time Directive. The Committee conducted an inquiry and published a report[4] as an input to that review. The Government responded to this report[5], and it was debated on 2 July 2004[6].

7. Despite attempts by successive Presidencies, agreement on the two Directives could not be reached in Council until the 9 June 2008 Employment Council meeting. In advance of that meeting, the Secretary of State for the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), John Hutton MP, wrote to the Committee setting out the background. Attached to Mr Hutton's letter was a copy of a Joint Declaration by the Government, CBI and TUC on the subject of temporary agency workers.

8. The Committee replied to the Minister expressing our support for him to seek agreement in Council on texts that satisfactorily removed the long-standing UK problems with both the Commission's proposals. We went on to confirm that we wished to explore the issues further with the Minister for Employment Relations—Pat McFadden MP—when he came to give evidence to us after the Council meeting.

9. Copies of the correspondence between the Committee and the Government before and after the 9 June Council meeting are shown in Appendix 2 to this report, and a copy of the Joint Declaration by the Government, CBI and TUC on the subject of temporary agency workers is shown in Appendix 3.

10. The Council documents from the 9 June meeting setting out the political agreement on the Working Time Directive[7] and on temporary workers[8], as well as a joint statement by certain Member States about the agreement on working time[9], are all accessible on the Council's website.

The Minister's Evidence

11. The topics we explored with Mr McFadden on 10 July were as follows. The full transcript of the Minister's evidence is printed from pp 1-9.

Texts for directives agreed at the 9 June 2008 Employment Council meeting (QQ 1-3)

European Parliament Second Reading and beyond (QQ 4-11)

Working Time Directive: SiMAP/Jaeger (QQ 12-13)

Working Time Directive: the individual opt-out (QQ 14-17)

Working Time Directive: reconciliation of work and family life (Q 18)

Temporary Agency Workers directive: application of national agreements (QQ 19-23, 25)

Statistics of agency and temporary workers (QQ 23-24)

Temporary Agency Workers directive: joint declaration with the CBI and TUC (QQ 26-29)

Working time Directive

12. Mr McFadden explained that there would no longer be any requirement to phase out arrangements that Member States wished to operate in order to allow individuals the right to opt out from a 48 hours maximum to their working week. It would also now be possible for Member States to exclude inactive periods for workers who were on call from the calculation of average weekly hours. This latter flexibility would be of particular relevance in the context of arrangements for on-call working in the National Health Service which had been affected by the SiMAP[10] and Jaeger[11] judgments in the European Court of Justice[12] (QQ 1, 12-13).