Business and Trade Committee
Oral evidence: Employment rights, HC 479
Tuesday 30 June 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 30 June 2026.
Members present: Liam Byrne (Chair); Antonia Bance; Chris Bloore; John Cooper; Sarah Edwards; Alison Griffiths; Leigh Ingham; Justin Madders; Mr Joshua Reynolds.
Questions 1 - 45
Witnesses
I: Tom Ironside, Director of Business and Regulation, British Retail Consortium; Joanne Thomas, General Secretary, USDAW; Sampson Low, Head of Policy, UNISON; David Sheen, Public Affairs Director, UK Hospitality.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Tom Ironside, Joanne Thomas, Sampson Low and David Sheen.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to today’s session of the Business and Trade Committee as we pursue a one-off investigation into employment rights and the consultations that the Government have outstanding. Thank you very much indeed to our witnesses for coming along and giving evidence today.
If I could start with you, Joanne Thomas, we are very concerned about some of the content of the Government’s consultation on zero hours. Could you just give us your view, from USDAW’s perspective, on where the Government have got it right and where they have got it wrong?
Joanne Thomas: Yes, of course. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present this and, in particular, our concerns. If I start off by saying where we think the Government have got it right, the manifesto commitments, particularly around the Employment Rights Act, were an element to ensure that everybody had the right to a contract that reflects the hours that they work.
Of course, this has been an issue for decades, particularly in retail but across the whole of the workforce, where workers are on a contract but regularly work over and above their contractual hours. What happens is, when they are taken away, they cannot then evidence that they are on a contract to get the likes of decent mortgage rates, or decent rates that they might want to get a loan. They have difficulty finding childcare or making arrangements, and just being able to plan their life, and do not have the security of a contract that they can build their life upon.
In addition to that, if you have a worker who maybe has a low-hourss contract, and it is flexed up and down, or they have not got that contractual security, they cannot get another job, because the primary employer needs them to be available 24/7, basically. It does cause real issues in being able to plan their life, plan a good financial structure and just give a quality of life that every worker should have access to.
Where the Government have it wrong is in relation to the threshold, which, in my opinion, should be non-existent. It should be an opportunity for every worker to have access to that contract that reflects the hours that they work, and not just somebody who is on 20 hours. Where you have this situation, if the Government were to proceed, you would have unintended consequences, because what you would have happen is that some of the employers would see that there is a big loophole here, and they would give the overtime to those to avoid giving the legislative right.
What that would enable in that unintended consequence is a real financial detriment to a group of workers who, I can tell you now, will be women and disabled workers. There is a real issue around that.
Q2 Chair: Do you think the risk, therefore, is that the Government will undermine the intent of their manifesto commitment?
Joanne Thomas: Yes, absolutely. They will not just undermine it, but we will end up in a situation where you bring in an Employment Rights Act that could leave workers worse off.
Chair: That is quite an achievement.
Joanne Thomas: It would be phenomenal. It would be catastrophic and would go against the whole spirit of the Employment Rights Act, because it is about improving opportunities for workers and just bringing about that balance. At the end of the day, what we are asking for and what the legislation was intended to do was to bring about that balance, but improve working conditions and improve the opportunity for workers to get access to that financial security that they have needed for so long.
Q3 Chair: Sampson, you represent lots of workers in similar predicaments, including many in the social care sector. What is your view about where the Government have got it right and wrong in this consultation on hours?
Sampson Low: We would like to back up what Joanne said. The social care sector, and particularly the domiciliary home care sector, where workers visit clients in their own homes, has highly variable hours, as Joanne described, and runs the same risk of very variable shift patterns, or employers potentially gaming the system. If a threshold is used and announced, it could become an artificial point of employment that does not bear any resemblance to the regular shift patterns that those care workers receive. We would have similar concerns as USDAW. The domiciliary home care sector has very similar patterns to casualised employment in retail.
Q4 Chair: Is it your conclusion, therefore, that there should not be a threshold?
Sampson Low: Yes, exactly. People need the right to work a guaranteed hours pattern, if that is what they choose. The more hours an employer offers, the less likely the worker will be very satisfied. It is an offer. The worker could always stick with the original offer, but it is the right to an offer of guaranteed hours and, if it suits your personal circumstances, to lock in security and the ability to get a loan or plan childcare, as Joanne said. We would like that offer to be available to all who want a degree of certainty in their lives, whether for family reasons, personal reasons or caring reasons, or having second or third jobs as well.
Q5 Chair: Tom, let us just help fill out the picture from your point of view. What have the Government got right and what have they got wrong?
Tom Ironside: From the point of view of the retail sector, we fully support the overarching intent of the Employment Rights Act. There are all sorts of areas of it where we support the central thrust of the measures—everything from the creation of the Fair Work Agency through to flexible working, fire and rehire, and bereavement and other parental leave. Similarly, we think it is right to target exploitative zero-hours contracts, so we are supportive of that.
Where we diverge from the evidence given so far is that we are concerned that, if an overly stringent approach is taken, notably in relation to guaranteed hours, that could significantly reduce the industry’s ability to offer flexible jobs and extra hours that many workers value.
From our point of view, it is all about getting the detail right. Proposals must reflect real-world retail demand, or employers will inevitably offer fewer flexible opportunities in the future, which is what we see as the core choice that needs to be made.
Q6 Chair: When you say “overly stringent”, what do you mean?
Tom Ironside: To be clear, we think that the reference period currently being suggested is too short. We would prefer at least 26 weeks. Twelve weeks, basically, aligns to the seasonal peak during the pre-Christmas period. From our point of view, that would not work. In terms of the threshold, we are proposing eight hours.
Q7 Chair: David, what is your perspective?
David Sheen: It is very similar in hospitality to retail, which Tom has outlined. We would go back to what we believe is the purpose of this, which is to ban exploitative zero-hours and low-hourss contracts. That was the thrust of the policy. As Tom mentioned, that is a position that we can support.
Where Government potentially have it right is that a lot of thought has gone into this consultation, in our view. There is still a lot of detail, so there is a lot that could go wrong and that could potentially be damaging, but it could come out as a workable solution. All of those details need to be worked through in terms of what regular working is and where the cut-offs are. I share Joanne’s concerns about some of the unintended consequences that could arise if you got some of those thresholds wrong.
From my perspective, it is glass half full, in that we could get to a reasonable place. We have had some very nervous members who have been quite scared, and some reported employees who are like, “We really do want to keep zero-hours contracts”. That was assured in the Government’s consultation document, so that flexibility is important, and we do need to get it right for worker and employee. This is not the end of the story, I do not think.
Chair: That is very helpful, thank you. Let us get into some of the detail with Justin Madders.
Q8 Justin Madders: I want to aim my questions mainly at the employers’ representatives at the moment, just to dig a little bit more into the issue of the 12-week reference period. At the moment, we have the agency worker regulations, which have been in place for 16 years and which also use a 12-week reference period. Is there a particular problem with how that works that has informed your position on this?
David Sheen: Agency working in hospitality tends to be very different from some of the more directly employed seasonal work in terms of length of pattern. Agency working tends to be much shorter-term than a seasonal contract, so that is where we think there is a divergence, and a longer reference period would reflect more reasonably the peak seasons that we have.
Q9 Justin Madders: Can I just unpack that a little bit? In my understanding, a season is about three months, which is about 12 weeks, so where is the difference there?
David Sheen: It is in terms of the type of worker. The agency route in which you employ that person for us is not as likely to be a full season. It is likely to be covering the odd shift here and there, whereas a directly employed person would then work for a full reference period. That could be a November through Christmas peak of around 12 weeks, or, equally, summer, which, depending on where you are in the country, could be anywhere from 12 to 16 weeks.
Tom Ironside: Retail makes relatively little use of agency workers across its various estates. The issue for us is that using directly employed people across that period means that you would be using a reference period that equates to the seasonal peak, so trying to arrive at a guaranteed hours solution as a result of a period that equated to a seasonal peak would be very difficult. That is where the nub of the issue is in relation to the reference period. We think that 26 weeks would be a much fairer reflection.
Q10 Justin Madders: What is to stop your members employing people during seasonal peaks on fixed-term contracts?
Tom Ironside: We have undertaken some survey work. It was undertaken by a market research agency, and that looked at people’s reasons for coming to work in retail. Two-thirds of people who work part-time in the industry told us that it was the flexibility of their roles that drew them to the industry. It was their opportunity to take additional hours during set periods that attracted them to work in the industry, whether that is because they are students or they have childcare or other external responsibilities. If you move to a model where you have a set of fixed-term seasonal workers, you are taking opportunity away from other people.
Q11 Justin Madders: Could I just come back to you, Mr Sheen, on this Christmas peak? You said that this tends to be in November and December. Is that right?
David Sheen: It depends on where you are in the country and whether it starts with Halloween, for example, at the end of October, and whether you manage to pick up trade in January. It could be anything.
Q12 Justin Madders: That is probably less than 12 weeks, though, given the calendar dates you have just provided us with.
David Sheen: It would typically be slightly less than 12 weeks, but you would have 10 very busy weeks and two not so busy weeks, which will determine what your average is looking like.
Q13 Justin Madders: Again, if you have a period when you can anticipate what the demand is going to be, you could, of course, put people on a fixed-term contract, could you not?
David Sheen: Yes, and Government said that that is a reasonable thing to do, as long as it meets certain conditions that are set out in the legislation. They have said that fixed-term contracts are permissible where reasonable. There is quite a lot of debate to be had around what “reasonable” is. Within the consultation, there is a question around exceptional need, which, again, comes back to the detail.
Q14 Justin Madders: Do you know roughly what proportion of new hires in hospitality are taken on in November and December time?
David Sheen: I do not know off the top of my head, but that is something we can find out for you.
Q15 Justin Madders: That would be your baseline for any 12-week reference period, so if this is going to be an issue for the sector, you would assume that there was a significant number of new hires during that period.
David Sheen: A significant number of temporary workers would be taken on then, but also at the start of June.
Q16 Justin Madders: Again, the use of the word “temporary” implies that you can put them on a fixed-term or temporary contract, so in terms of the argument about the 12-week reference period, there is a solution there if employers want to take it, is there not?
David Sheen: There could be. It depends on how you read the consultation on that point.
Q17 Justin Madders: We have had some briefings from Unite, which has given a number of examples of where it has entered into agreements with employers in the hospitality sector, and quite a lot in Scotland. I am not quite sure if that is coincidence or just where they have been organised, but it has reached agreements with a number of employers about removing zero-hours contracts. That shows that, if there is engagement with relevant trade unions, you can usually find a way collectively to benefit everyone.
David Sheen: There are certainly benefits to working together. There are a lot of hospitality businesses that have already taken out zero-hours contracts within their business, because that is what they felt, but have also kept the option for people to stay on them if they so wish.
Q18 Chair: Joanne Thomas, can I get your view on the correct reference period that the Government should conclude?
Joanne Thomas: We feel, exactly like Justin Madders has just said, that 12 weeks is more than enough of an opportunity. Bear in mind that employers invariably know exactly what is on the horizon every single year. They cannot plan their business otherwise, so to say that this 12-week period is unreasonable is not the case. There is an opportunity there to have something that gives the employer flexibility, but also does not get to the point where this legislation is so weak that it is ineffective. That 12-week period really does give us an opportunity to smooth out the reference period of what that would need to look like.
In addition to what has been said, you could also employ somebody on a temporary contract for seasonal periods of time. That is still in existence. That would supplement and complement this piece of legislation to give even further flexibility to the employer.
Sampson Low: We support the 12-week reference period as being suitable for lots of the areas we work and organise casual work in, such as social care, with the rhythms and patterns of employment there.
Q19 Alison Griffiths: I was particularly interested in what both David and Tom were saying, but am interested to hear your perspectives also. Just keeping to this 12-week reference point, I am the MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, so there are theme parks and amusement parks. Harbour Park is one of my biggest employers. The one point that you made, Joanne, is that you can predict what is coming. Given the British weather, you cannot.
The question that I have is particularly for Tom and David, but others might have views they want to put in. What feedback have you had from amusement parks and outside leisure facilities about this 12-week period? I can guarantee you that Harbour Park is already saying to me that it is operating on wafer-thin margins. All of its costs have gone up in the last two years. You do not need me to rehearse the reasons for that. Putting this additional inflexibility of 12 weeks removes the opportunity for people who want ad hoc work, but, more than anything, what it could do is destroy the very jobs that you are trying to protect because they will be unprofitable and go out of business. I am really keen to hear what wider evidence you have had from similar businesses.
David Sheen: We have a lot of theme park attractions within our membership. We have an affiliate that has those with its membership. There is a lot of concern. Again, I cannot give you any specific numbers, but there is real concern that this does start to really affect the ability to recruit and to upscale for the season. It applies as much for attractions as it does for broader hospitality.
Tom Ironside: I do not have much to add other than to say that we know there are significant categories of workers, students and those with family responsibilities who value that opportunity to have flexibility to work more hours during set periods but do not want to take it on an ongoing basis. We are trying to get to a place where we have something that is workable within the requirements of those people as well as the wider operating requirements of our businesses.
Chair: Thank you. Let us now get into some of the low-hours versus zero-hours debate with Leigh Ingham.
Q20 Leigh Ingham: There is a debate around zero-hours versus low-hours contracts. I would be interested to know where you think the consultation should land on this. Are there workarounds that should be put in place or are there things we need to be guarding against? If I start with the trade bodies first, I will then come to unions if that is okay.
Tom Ironside: We think that the definition of low hours should be set at eight hours. That is where we think it should be. We think that that would give the right basis to exclude anyone with a baseline of security and predictability. That is our view of how you pitch that. If you define low hours beyond eight hours, you start to take in such significant numbers of employees that it starts to unpick that model of flexibility, which, first, is valued by lots of the people who work in retail, and, secondly, helps to make the model viable. That is really where we are coming from. As you move up above eight hours, it becomes more and more difficult to do that without having knock-on effects.
David Sheen: Ours is a similar position. The consultation is still open and we are still working through it with members. Broadly, anecdotally, we are landing at around eight hours as the preferred point, for exactly the same reasons as retail.
Sampson Low: If we go back, the original starting point was that what the legislation and the regulations are trying to address is the point around the artificially low-hours contract. Of course, if you have a contract for eight hours and you do regularly eight hours a week, the worker can see that they are getting regular patterns of work well above what is formally set out in the contract. When they go for a mortgage or a car loan, or everything else, the contract says eight hours, and yet they have a pattern that they can see every day, and every week over time, which shows a lot longer and more regular hours available, with peaks and troughs, and maybe seasonal variations and other things as well, but it is breaching that gap.
Where you draw that line is that one-sided flexibility, and all of us want to end that. That is what we want to get right and why we would be looking for a far more generous definition of low hours. Joanne might be able to say a bit more.
Joanne Thomas: Sampson, I completely agree with what you just said there, but the focus on this matter is on what the threshold should be and whether that is something that we could come to a consensus on. We absolutely cannot if it is going to exclude groups of workers and make them financially worse off, suffering huge detriments. Let us not forget that this is having a disproportionate impact on women and disabled people, which might also generate claims in the likes of employment tribunals, and nobody wants that.
This is about making sure that the threshold is set fairly, and the only way that it can be set fairly is if it allows everybody—and this a key point that I am about to make—who wants one to have a contract that reflects the hours that they work. Not everybody wants one, so if they do not, they are not going to be forced to have a contract with more than the hours they worked, but they should at least have the opportunity to access one, to access that better standard of living, and to be able to operate their life with some element of fairness, which they currently cannot.
This is impacting millions of workers. This is an opportunity to really bring about that fairness that I spoke about, but the key point is around making sure that the threshold is right, and not necessarily having a debate in this next hour on what is low hours versus zero hours. It is about getting that threshold right.
Q21 Leigh Ingham: Could I just follow up quickly with you, Joanne? I represent Stafford, which has a really high number of people employed in the logistics sector—sending out goods to shops and things like that—which I know, historically, has had a really high proportion of zero-hours contracts. At one point, it was almost standard across the sector. Just speaking specifically to my constituents, we have 12% who work in that sector. From your perspective, what would you like to see changed around that space in terms of distribution centres and things like that?
Joanne Thomas: If you were to show me one person who liked a zero-hours contract, I could show you 1,000 who did not, because they cannot live their life on that. That does not mean you will not get odd people—and it is absolutely the minority of people—who want to live their life in that fashion. What I am talking about and what we are representing here is bringing about the fairness and the opportunity to get access to that contract that is fair. I will never, in a million years, be an advocate of zero-hours contracts, but what I will say with the low-hours contracts is it does act as somewhat of a trap, because, if you are at the whim of the employer that wants to or is able to flex your contract whenever they want, up and down, you cannot get access to another job.
This keeps a lot of people in poverty. I am not exaggerating. Some of our members have said that they have had to glue their children’s shoes together because they cannot afford to buy new ones. That is a fact that a member told me recently. I have had other members who have said they eat their tea on an evening; they tell their children that they ate it earlier than them because they do not want to admit that they cannot afford to eat. That is invariably because they just cannot get access to a decent standard of living. It is a really horrendous situation to be in, but you are in work. We have a lot of employers that have food banks in the backs of their shops, for example, because they know that their staff cannot afford to eat properly. That is quite a common occurrence these days.
The answer really is not just about talking about a standard of what you pay people. It is about giving them access to a contract that reflects the hours that they are working, so they can get financial stability and be able to plan around that.
Like I say, somewhat repeating myself, unless we get the threshold right, we are still going to have these employment practices. It will be an incentive to employers, if the threshold is not available for full-time, to really not provide and to have this unintended consequence, like I said before, of making people worse off. It will incentivise that type of behaviour. The whole point of the Employment Rights Act is to improve the standard of living for workers and to improve their situation, not make it worse.
Q22 Chair: Presumably, if one was to pick an hour on the Government’s barometer of between eight hours and 20 hours, you do create risks around people beginning to game that.
Joanne Thomas: It will absolutely enable the system to be gamed. There are no two ways about it.
Q23 Chair: You are in no doubt about that.
Joanne Thomas: I am in no doubt whatsoever.
Q24 Antonia Bance: That was the question that I was going to ask Tom and David. You have spoken, David, about eight hours being your preferred threshold. What modelling have you done? Do you have any sense of how many workers are currently on eight hours? Do you have any sense of how many workers will be on nine hours? That feels like it may suddenly become a very common pattern, if the threshold were to be set at eight hours, in order to deny a whole group of workers the rights from which, according to the intention of the legislation, they would benefit. I would appreciate your thoughts.
David Sheen: As I said in my last answer, we are still working this through. We have not established an answer. We have not done that modelling. Clearly, there is a risk that nine hours becomes the norm, which is why the conversation started about low-hours contracts. People were going to move from zero to three, so we fully understand why Government are trying to prevent that. We think that eight hours, roughly, is where you are hitting that point, subject to the modelling, where you are protecting a lot of our workers.
Q25 Antonia Bance: A third of zero-hours contract workers work in your sector, and you have not modelled what is likely to happen with the different thresholds.
David Sheen: I have a slightly different number. It is maybe 20% in the data that we have.
Q26 Antonia Bance: I will take Unite’s data.
David Sheen: I will not get into an argument. It is Unite versus ONS, but it is something that we are looking at. We saw the consultation four weeks ago. We are looking at what happens. We have seen more and more businesses move away from zero, but I appreciate that they have not gone to 20 or whatever.
Q27 Sarah Edwards: Just picking up this discussion around how to respond to the consultation at the moment and where some of those levels may sit and how we define them, there are workplaces that will use agency workers. Traditionally, and speaking as a former union organiser, some workplaces decided that they would almost exclusively be agency worker employment. That has led to this entire discussion about the insecurity of work because some people will have the regularity of work to indicate that they should be on a more permanent contract with defined hours. Joanne, perhaps I could ask you first to give your views on whether at any point you may treat the direct or the agency worker any differently for the purposes of what the Government are trying to ascertain or not.
Joanne Thomas: I will be much quicker in this answer because the answer for me is no. Agency workers must be protected. If they are not, you are just creating another loophole. Like I say, there is enough evidence there to allow the employer to have the flexibility that they desire.
Q28 Sarah Edwards: Sampson, what about your view? Is there any point at which you can see that there may need to be a slightly different reference period? Is there any other thing that we have spoken about in this session for which there could be an argument that they need to be treated differently?
Sampson Low: No. I would back up what Joanne said about agency workers. In health and social care, there has been a growth of in-house banks, often with very confusing employment status, and in-house agencies doing extra hours. It is a very confused employment status. We definitely want to rule out those loopholes as well. Those workers should be treated equally.
What it has driven out in a large number of sectors, particularly social care, is overtime rates. They exist on paper, but no employer in social care will pay overtime. They will ask workers to go on to a second or third contract, sometimes agency or zero hours, to try to deal with extra hours.
The bank system is definitely already a loophole. Again, as Joanne said, there will be some—maybe retired workers—who will be willing to come back for occasional shifts or people who have caring responsibilities. There will be a very small number who will not want to take up the offer of guaranteed hours. In-house banks or external agencies have grown massively in health and social care over the last 20 to 30 years. We want that loophole to be closed.
Q29 Sarah Edwards: One of the ratios that we, and I am sure many other unions, would accept in an employer argument might be that 10% of your workforce could be agency to allow for that ebb and flow of business operations. Would you argue that there needed to be a more defined limit put into statute that can say, “You should not be employing a higher level of agency”, particularly where you can prove that there is no real need to do that? Is that something that you would support? Have there been discussions around that?
Sampson Low: In education and health and social care, there are some recognised agencies for short-notice cancellations when staff are sick. When you have a social care or health establishment with a minimum staffing level, you have to hit legal compliance. There can be in-house extra staff who come in. There are needs for short-term employment opportunities to hit the legal minimums of compliance and safe spaces for patients and clients in health and social care. It is the absolute minimum. The agency situation, as I said, has been massively expanded and exploited.
Q30 Sarah Edwards: Tom, what about from your perspective? I am sure that there will be times where you may be using them. Do you have a different view? Have you put forward some different views currently, or are the industry working on them for the consultation?
Tom Ironside: Retail generally makes limited use of agency workers, particularly in customer-facing roles. As currently conceived, the measures being proposed would mean that guaranteed hours and shift-change measures would also apply to agency workers.
Our HR community finds it very hard to understand how, as end hirers, they would be able to oversee and administrate that in a way which enabled them to take on those responsibilities. There is something there that has to be unpicked between those running the agencies themselves and the employers. That could lead to all sorts of complexities, which might be difficult both for employers and employees. Thinking that through properly, so that we do not get ourselves into something that looks good on paper but is not workable, seems to be a good thing.
Q31 Sarah Edwards: David, how about your sector? How do you approach this issue around agency workers and the changing view of this consultation on whether they should be included or excluded from certain provisions?
David Sheen: I would echo that frontline team members do not tend to be agency, except for a particular event. If you are scaling up for a festival or Wimbledon, which is on at the moment, you are clearly not going to be able to keep below 10% or 20%, whatever it is, for that sort of event because it is a one-off for that two-week period. There does need to be continued flexibility in how agency workers are employed.
We also share concerns about the unintended consequences here and what it means for the provision of workers. Again, without being repetitive, I would echo Tom’s view that it really needs to be thought through.
Q32 Antonia Bance: Do you think any exemptions to the Act’s requirements should be allowed, Joanne?
Joanne Thomas: No, I do not. There are enough provisions in place to protect all of the concerns that the employers have made reference to. If you were to itemise a fraction of it, they will still be using in agency workers, albeit on low thresholds; there will be fixed-term contracts; there will be the temporary contracts; and there is a 12-week reference period. I am not sure how many more provisions an employer would need to be able to give a worker this simple right.
In addition, if you do not mind me adding on, with the increase of AI and automation, we are seeing HR in particular using a lot of AI and tools with algorithms that enable them to game the system much more easily than they could even five years ago. That really does give me a concern that it will be so easy to exploit any of these loopholes. It needs to be tight; it needs to be robust; and it needs to deliver what the manifesto intention was.
Q33 Antonia Bance: If I may, Chair, people quite frequently reference the rise of NEET young people—people who are not in employment, education or training. They talk about zero-hours contracts as a stepping stone into sustainable employment. Do you think that there should be an exemption for young people, Joanne?
Joanne Thomas: No, I do not. It is just another form of discrimination, quite frankly. We have to look at why people, no matter how old they are, are not going into the world of work. Part of it is because it is not attractive enough. It is very one-sided. People cannot have access to a decent life just by getting a job anymore. That is apparent. I hear that on a regular basis.
We need to have employment that gives access to that. That should be the case, but it is not because there is far too much flexibility on the employer’s side. It is nowhere near balanced. Even with this legislation it will not be balanced. You would expect me to say that, but this is a stepping stone to start and address some of these societal problems by ensuring that the world of work is attractive enough to step into, fair and much more balanced.
Q34 Antonia Bance: I wanted to ask about the access requirements that are also in the Employment Rights Act. Sampson, I will start with you, but I will also go to Joanne and the employer representatives in just a moment. What barriers are there to unions’ ability to reach workers, especially in sectors such as social care? What challenges are presented by different sizes of business?
Sampson Low: Yes, we are pleased that the Government are listening on adult social care. In England, Skills for Care estimates that there are between 19,000 and 20,000 employers, two-thirds of which have less than 20 employees. If the 21 threshold, which was consulted on, is going to stick, 12,500 social care employers could be left outside and those workers would be unable to speak to trade unions in a far easier way. It is an incredibly tough and isolated sector. You then have domiciliary care workers, who visit clients in their own home. It is very hard to pin them down with regular workplaces.
It is absolutely crucial that we get the access question right in sectors such as social care and schools with lots of small establishments. Workers are reporting a lot of problems. The MPs here, from your postbags, will probably have heard from migrant social care workers on three-year visas having problems with fees for uniforms, fees to middlemen for visas, deductions from wages that they do not understand, ineligible pay slips, and a whole raft of problems. They have a real problem getting access to decent, independent and impartial advice, which a union could offer in a workplace, face to face or online.
Joanne Thomas: Yes, we are very lucky and fortunate in USDAW. Over 90% of our agreements are consensual. We have really good agreements that help us to have good industrial relations across the private sector.
There are a lot of businesses that fear trade unions. Some of them are very anti-trade union and do not want anybody talking to their workers about their rights. The starting point should be to show employers that this is a really good piece of legislation, which will enable trade unions to get access to workplaces not just to talk to workers about their rights but to foster really good industry relations practices within their workplaces. We have been contacted by some of the smaller employers that have grown at a rapid pace to come in and work with them to help them adopt good working practices.
Access and the provisions around that are an extension of what that should look like, similar to what you would see in a social partnership approach. Again, it has to be right. It has to reflect what was intended by the manifesto commitment.
Q35 Antonia Bance: A free democracy needs free trade unions. What is the problem with trade unions coming into retail businesses, Tom?
Tom Ironside: There is no problem with trade unions coming into retail businesses. Quite a number of our largest members have recognition agreements and very positive relationships. We work closely with USDAW across a whole range of issues.
All our requests in this area are about making it practical and making it work effectively. There has been concern about how practical it will be to guarantee weekly access. However, there are digital forms of access that are possible. Working through some of what is in there could get us to a place where some of these things could be resolved.
There are aspects of the code of practice that are vague. They are vague in terms of the language and requirements. If you are trying to work from either side of this, you need to have a clear understanding of what is intended, particularly if there are financial penalties attached to the requirements. We are looking at some of the language in there and trying to work out whether it really gives you a basis to take that approach. There is no issue in relation to trade unions from a retail industry point of view.
Q36 Antonia Bance: Hospitality is less unionised, David. Is there a problem in hospitality with giving unions access to workers?
David Sheen: No. As you say, we are significantly less unionised. Perhaps for historical reasons, the SME community tends to have a lower level of union uptake.
Again, most of our concerns are much more about practicalities around times of access and how that impacts on trading. If you are a busy pub and it is 1 o’clock on a Sunday, you will be hitting Sunday roast. A lot of that has been consulted on. We have made points. The trade unions have made their points. Some of that has been listened to.
We still have a lot of concerns. On digital, conversely, that answers your workplace question, but there are some issues around how that will work in practice. Again, we are hoping that the code of practice can get to a place where that does become more practical and solvable and addresses some of the issues.
Q37 John Cooper: There are some concerns about the implementation. David and Tom, you seem quite keen on the idea, but what about the practicalities of this? We are talking here in particular about SMEs and small companies, which will not have big HR departments and will have very thin margins. Can you tell us a bit more what the concerns are? Tom, maybe you could start. What are the issues that need to be worked out?
Tom Ironside: We do not have many very small members. The issue of the 21 threshold is not a particularly key one for us. There was some movement on some of the timelines associated with the right of access measures, which were positive. There are some timelines that, in our view, remain too short. Five working days between finalising access agreement and the first instance of access taking place would be challenging. Similarly, two working days’ notice for subsequent visits is also too short. There are areas where we would like to have more flexibility.
As you look at digital access, we need to think it through in terms of making sure that we were doing the right thing from a GDPR perspective and a cyber-security perspective, particularly given the recent experience of retailers that have experienced attacks and similar. There is detail that needs to be worked through. I return to where I came in. There is a reservation from the industry about the idea of making weekly access workable. We would like something that was less frequent than that.
Q38 John Cooper: David, is it the case that there are a few issues to work out, but nothing major?
David Sheen: Some of the issues are quite substantive in terms of how it works. We still have some concerns about the process for requesting access to workplaces. In a multi-site business, who do you contact? Where does the clock start? If you hand in a request to an assistant manager who does not know what it is, does that get escalated in time? Is it worked through? Have you trained everyone to understand what a request for access is? It is probably not insurmountable, but, given that these can be relatively new members of teams, there is a lot for everyone to process.
The main thing is that this whole package of measures is huge. There is a lot to train people on. There is a lot to get people up to speed on. Some of those issues are substantive.
Q39 John Cooper: Picking up on that, the Adam Smith Institute puts the cost of working this out and spending time on this at something like £600 million. That is a lot of money coming out of businesses, which are working on thin margins. At a time when the Government say their aim is growth, that surely is counterintuitive. Tom, is that £600 million figure something you recognise, something your members are worried about?
Tom Ironside: Any additional cost is an area of concern for members. Cost has not been the primary driver of the conversations that we have been having with members. They have been driven by wanting to get to something that is workable, long-lasting and allows the retail model to continue and thrive. It is more coming from that perspective, notwithstanding the fact that there clearly are costs and clearly a rising cost of employment currently.
Q40 John Cooper: Against the backdrop of a time when employing people is getting more expensive, this is another cost that your members are going to have to absorb.
David Sheen: Absolutely, yes. Hospitality is a big employer. It is our biggest chunk of turnover. Getting the labour market offer right for hospitality is important. We have seen some fairly eye-watering quotes from tech providers for providing solutions for some of this. There are going to be some really big costs, whether it is tech, the whole education piece, training, writing up procedures or your HR director being taken out to sort these things out. These are genuine concerns that are coming through.
Q41 John Cooper: They might not have an HR director. A lot of companies will not have that. The people who are trying to run the business are going to have to take time out to implement all of this.
David Sheen: Indeed, yes. This is a point this Committee raised in its report in March. There are so many unknowns. It is vast. There are still so many unknowns in a lot of areas. That is less about access because we are getting closer, but it is keeping people up at night because they do not know how they are going to resolve these issues.
John Cooper: Businesses are really worried that there is that uncertainty.
David Sheen: Yes.
Chair: Let us move on to the question of enforcement that Mr Cooper flags there.
Q42 Justin Madders: The Central Arbitration Committee will be the arbiter of the new rules. There are different views about how effective that is going to be. Is it going to be properly resourced? Perhaps I could just ask the panel to respond to that. Ms Thomas, do you want to go first?
Joanne Thomas: The system will require to make applications to the CAC, which will make the determinations. Quite frankly, it is unnecessary. When I hear Mr Sheen talking about worry and stress, the answer is to work with trade unions.
Like I said before, I can evidence that we do not rely on the likes of the CAC, but, if we do and we end up having an adversarial relationship, it will take a huge amount of resource from trade unions and businesses, unnecessarily so, when this is about having grown-up conversations about giving trade unions access to workers to bring about fairness, equality and all the things that should be pretty high on a business’s agenda in any event.
Q43 Justin Madders: That is a fair point. A lot of employers will engage practically, but there are always those who are belligerent and hostile to recognition. One that this Committee is aware of is Amazon. Figures from the United States Department of Labor showed that it spent $26 million in 2025 on anti-union consultants. That approach could be replicated in the UK. The highest-level fine is £500,000. You have to go through the process three times before you get to that. Does that cut it, if you have an employer that is really determined not to engage?
Joanne Thomas: No, absolutely not. The fines at the beginning were meant to replicate GDPR fines, which would be in proportion. If you do not get the levels of fines correct, particularly for the likes of Amazon, this legislation will mean it is cheaper for them to go against the legislation because it will be a lower cost than what they are paying on union-busting consultants. That should be a big concern.
Q44 Justin Madders: Are there any other comments from any of the panel members on that particular point about enforcement?
Tom Ironside: The main experience that I would bring to this is our experience of national minimum wage enforcement, where there have been technical or accidental infringements. We see that in successive years. Quite often it is because there is either an absence of clear guidance or indeed any guidance in relation to the issue in question.
What I would hope that we can avoid with this is a situation where you have a code of practice that is not clear enough and you get enforcement of financial penalties off the back of that. I am just talking about the apparatus here. I am not talking about the nature of where the rules are drawn. You need to be able to define that clearly enough for people to have the right triggers and to take the right action.
Justin Madders: One would hope that in this situation you have a trade union on the other side of the negotiating table that you can engage with. In minimum wage enforcement, it is usually HMRC coming in retrospectively. Hopefully, that is not going to be an experience that is replicated.
Q45 Chair: Let me wrap it up there. I have one final question to you, Joanne. The consultation closes end of August. We do not know how long it is going to take for the Department to wrap it up and turn it into legislation, but it is going to be under a new Prime Minister. What is your message to the new Prime Minister who will ultimately take a decision on this package?
Joanne Thomas: It has to be in line with the manifesto commitments—that message has to be crystal clear—and how it was intended, which is to ensure that trade unions have access to workers via their workplaces.
Chair: That is very clear. Thank you very much indeed. That is going to help us frame our response to the consultation. We are very grateful to you for your evidence this afternoon. That concludes this panel.