Here’s a sentence you don’t see very often, but hats off to the Regulatory Policy Committee for its excoriating review last week of the thinking behind the new Employment Rights Bill.
The RPC is a body set up by the Labour government in 2009 as part of its Better Regulation Framework to ensure that the potential impacts of UK legislation are properly considered before it is enacted. Its report on the Employment Rights Bill is a masterclass in measured understatement, but the underlying message is very clear – large parts of the Bill are currently without demonstrated objective justification or consideration of their possible consequences for employers and the wider economy. To be clear, the RPC is not saying that those provisions are necessarily inappropriate, merely that there is somewhere between little and no evidence either that change is required in those respects or that the path taken by the Bill is the best of the available options if it is. The supporting impact assessments for eight out of 23 measures in the Bill and as a whole are expressly and repeatedly described by the RPC as rushed and “not fit for purpose”, with a number further described as either weak or very weak.
None of this will come as a surprise to anyone except Angela Rayner, since the subjugation of many of the measures in the Bill to political expediency and dogma has been obvious from the start. Anyone else whose baby had received such an immediate, comprehensive and laughably predictable...
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