Lord Leigh of Hurley is a Tory back bench Peer, Senior Treasurer of the Conservative Party and Senior Partner of Cavendish Corporate Finance LLP
There have been many reasons expounded for Sir Kier Starmers downfall.
Personally I think that Kemi Badenoch’s relentless exposure of his failings and in particular of his appointment of Peter Mandelson was key.
However, others have said that the prime reason for secure Starmer’s demise is that he wasn’t capable of communicating what he regarded as his achievements and accordingly didn’t receive any credit for them.
For example, Kezia Dugdale cited the Employment Rights Act as one of his great successes. She claimed that he hadn’t been vocal enough about its benefit for many workers.
As some may recall a number of us in the House of Lords fought tooth and nail on the Employment Rights Bill particularly the enormous increase in power it gave to the Unions.
But business was particularly worried about the change in employee rights.
There was a very interesting private comment to me from Labour insiders that this Act was forced upon them by the Unions and that much of its implementation was dependent upon subsequent regulations.
The inside track from Number 10 was that these regulations would not be put in to force for some time, pushing everything back as far as possible because they recognised the damage it would do to business.
This reliance on delegated subsequent regulation attracted attention because many of the most important policy questions have been left to Ministers, rather than settled by Parliament in the Act itself. Examples include:
- how guaranteed-hours calculations will work;
- what constitutes reasonable notice of shifts;
- compensation formulas;
- probation arrangements under day-one unfair dismissal; and
- enforcement procedures.
Perhaps the reason Starmer never boasted about the Act was that he didn’t want to rush this in to legislation, or maybe always intended much of it to go into the long grass.
The worry is will this change under Burnham?
The feeling is that his camp very much welcomed this Act and are even keener to ingratiate themselves to the Unions.
They will probably have to as this is likely to be their only source of funding – we haven’t seen any major Labour donor support Burnham.
This will mean even greater pressure on businesses in the near future and all our worst fears about this Act coming sooner rather than later.
Lord Leigh of Hurley is a Tory back bench Peer, Senior Treasurer of the Conservative Party and Senior Partner of Cavendish Corporate Finance LLP
There have been many reasons expounded for Sir Kier Starmers downfall.
Personally I think that Kemi Badenoch’s relentless exposure of his failings and in particular of his appointment of Peter Mandelson was key.
However, others have said that the prime reason for secure Starmer’s demise is that he wasn’t capable of communicating what he regarded as his achievements and accordingly didn’t receive any credit for them.
For example, Kezia Dugdale cited the Employment Rights Act as one of his great successes. She claimed that he hadn’t been vocal enough about its benefit for many workers.
As some may recall a number of us in the House of Lords fought tooth and nail on the Employment Rights Bill particularly the enormous increase in power it gave to the Unions.
But business was particularly worried about the change in employee rights.
There was a very interesting private comment to me from Labour insiders that this Act was forced upon them by the Unions and that much of its implementation was dependent upon subsequent regulations.
The inside track from Number 10 was that these regulations would not be put in to force for some time, pushing everything back as far as possible because they recognised the damage it would do to business.
This reliance on delegated subsequent regulation attracted attention because many of the most important policy questions have been left to Ministers, rather than settled by Parliament in the Act itself. Examples include:
Perhaps the reason Starmer never boasted about the Act was that he didn’t want to rush this in to legislation, or maybe always intended much of it to go into the long grass.
The worry is will this change under Burnham?
The feeling is that his camp very much welcomed this Act and are even keener to ingratiate themselves to the Unions.
They will probably have to as this is likely to be their only source of funding – we haven’t seen any major Labour donor support Burnham.
This will mean even greater pressure on businesses in the near future and all our worst fears about this Act coming sooner rather than later.