Downing Street Says » Private Members Bill

» Friday, February 22, 2008

Private Members Bill – Agency Workers

Asked for the Government’s position on the Private Members Bill, the PMS replied that Pat McFadden had been on the radio this morning regarding this subject. The Government’s position was that we recognised that there was an issue in relation to agency workers and we wanted to take action in order to address some of the concerns that had been raised. However, as Pat Mc Fadden had said this morning, we did not think that this bill was necessarily the right way of addressing the issue. This was why we were separately planning to set up a commission, which would be modelled on the Low Pay Commission, which had been originally set up to deal with issues relating to the minimum wage. John Cridland of CBI had said this morning that they were willing to discuss this and participate in this commission, as were the unions. As such, we felt that we could find a way forward; there seemed to be general agreement, in principal, that action needed to be taken, but we needed to find a practical solution.

Asked if that meant that there might be an amended bill, the PMS replied that he was not necessarily saying that; the Government’s preferred way of dealing with this was through the commission that it was planning to set up.

Asked when the commission might start work and if there was a time scale in terms of when it would finish its work, the PMS said that he did not have that level of information to hand and that we were not yet at that point. It was best to check with BERR for further guidance in terms of time scales.

Asked if George Bain was likely to head the commission, the PMS replied that there had been some suggestion that it may be George Bain; he was someone who had a huge amount of experience in this area but we were not in a position to confirm anything at this point.

Asked if this was now an entirely UK matter, the PMS replied that there was not a consensus in Europe on this matter; we thought that this was an issue that could be dealt with through UK legislation and we were setting up this commission in order to look at the issues.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.