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12.11 pm
Mr. Barry Gardiner (Brent, North): What may we expect of hon. Members, unless it be that they should take care of those who are without power? Children in Britain are without direct access to power. For that reason, the obligation on us today is all the more onerous to have a care for them. I could hardly contain myself when I heard the hon. Member for Hogwash--the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt)--saying that our role in this Chamber is not to set standards. If we are not to set standards, who is?
Often in these debates, we hear hon. Members congratulated on their good fortune in having come so high in the ballot for a private Member's Bill. Interestingly, today no one has congratulated my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Pond) on his good fortune; instead, we have all congratulated him on his good sense in using this opportunity to give voice to the needs of our nation's children so that we protect them against both injury and exploitation.
The Bill does not ignore the great benefit that children can derive from engaging in the world of work. The sense of responsibility, the independence and the mature co-operation in a commercial context, which work can bring to children, are of real value.
My eldest child, Jess, is a singer and has performed, from the age of 11, at the Almeida opera and on Radio 3. I am proud of the rigorous hours of training and rehearsals that he has worked. The experience of working with
professional musicians, conductors and recording technicians is one which he will never forget. Above all, he will retain the sense of being treated as a fellow professional--not a child, but an artist of equal importance in a successful production. However, such benefits must not be purchased at the expense of childhood itself. It is vital that a child's school should always be aware of and support any child's employment, as the Bill would stipulate.
When it was discovered, not a few months ago, that the footballs used in our national game were made by child labour on the Indian subcontinent, it rightly became a matter of national news and of public outrage. How remarkable therefore that, during all that time, little uproar was raised in defence of our own children and about the conditions in which they have been employed. Yet we know that almost 1.5 million children in Britain are employed illegally, and that one third of them have been involved in an accident at work. We have allowed an almost casual disregard of child employment to prevail in Britain, dismissing such employment as merely paper rounds and babysitting. It is not.
I pay tribute to the Low Pay Unit for its research, which has highlighted more than merely the bald official statistics on injuries and deaths of children in the workplace from contact with machinery, falls from a height and other causes. It is shocking enough that even one child in Britain should die in legal employment, but the unit's research has uncovered the appalling scale of illegal employment of children under 13 and outwith the hours of 7 am to 7 pm.
Those of us with children know to our cost how early mornings and late nights can be singularly corrosive of family life. Children are less patient with their parents in such circumstances. Much more important, tired children learn less in school. Critically, children are more exposed to all the potential health and safety risks in their workplace when they are tired.
Mr. St. Aubyn:
Given that all hon. Members oppose the illegal employment of those under 13 and putting children at risk in the workplace, and that those matters are already dealt with in existing legislation on health and safety and on employment of children, how will the Bill help to address those issues?
Mr. Gardiner:
I shall deal later in my speech with the very important matters not only of regulation but of enforcement of regulation, which have been mentioned by many hon. Members.
I particularly welcome clause 4(4), which stipulates:
Part II of the Bill seeks to provide an enforcement system through the issuing of permits involving the local education authority, parents, schools and the local police. It is here that what weaknesses there are in the Bill are most manifest. Clauses 12, 13 and 16 rightly provide that the child's school must be notified and consulted at all stages on the issuing of permits and their amendment.
It would be helpful to include in clause 15 a continuing requirement not only on the employer to update the local authority record on 1 January and 1 July each year, but on schools to reassess their own agreement to the employment continuing.
Clearly, many schools, on first being approached by parents for their agreement, may say that they would be prepared to allow a child to undertake some employment, but they will want to see how the work affects the child's performance at school. Unless an automatic obligation is placed on schools to renew their consent, it may be that, as the child's achievement declines, it is forgotten that the child is in employment outside of school life; the two factors may not be correlated.
Having been a councillor in local government for many years, I am acutely aware of the ever-increasing work load placed on local authorities by the House. As has been said, it is not simply a matter of making regulations; those regulations have to be enforced. The resource implications of such enforcement are, sadly, clear to anyone involved in local government.
Local government budgets are strained in meeting their present statutory obligation to protect children. New legislation will inevitably add to that burden, but that does not mean that new legislation that attempts to codify the existing regulations is not right and necessary.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle- under-Lyme (Mrs. Golding) set out only too clearly the difficulty involved in providing the necessary resources that could give us confidence that we might see any real enforcement of the Bill's provisions. The split of Government responsibility for children between different Departments--the Department of Health, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, and the Department for Education and Employment--is detrimental to the resolution of the problem. I certainly echo and support my hon. Friend's call for the Government to consider appointing a Minister for children.
Employers do exploit children. Few would doubt that the reason why most employers take on children is that children are cheap, but they are also compliant. They can be got to work at times and in conditions that an adult might resist. They are also less likely to protest about harassment by their employer--and such harassment of children clearly exists. That is why any employment must be assessed and permitted for children only if it can be clearly shown that such employment is a net benefit to the individual child. It is the child who must be our primary consideration and, broadly speaking, the system of permits set out in the Bill seeks to ensure that.
Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes):
I welcome the Bill, and I applaud my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Pond) for the excellent and hard work that he put into the Bill and during his years working at the Low Pay Unit. He has brought a wealth of experience to today's debate and his Bill has given us the opportunity to discuss an extremely important issue.
Like my hon. Friends the Members for Preston (Audrey Wise) and for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn), I do not think that all work is bad for children. When I was a teenager, I would have been horrified had I not been allowed my wee Saturday job in a well-known high street chemist. It gave me the opportunity to earn a bit of money to spend on the things that I wanted. As a teenage girl, I bought mainly clothes and make-up, but it was all about growing up, becoming independent and choosing to buy the things that I wanted. I did not want Mum's smelly old Vosene, for example. I wanted to buy the shampoos that I was reading about in the girls' magazines.
We cannot condemn all employment for children, but the debate is not about that. It is about the abuses of the system, and I am concerned about them. Some children work extremely long hours. When I was a teenager, my employer did not break the regulations; teenagers were paid exactly the same rates as other members of staff. However, I was lucky. At the time, some of my friends were working for a pittance, as teenagers still do today. In addition, some work in dangerous conditions. We must do all we can to protect children in those circumstances.
Like other Members, I am concerned about the impact of employment on schoolwork. When I was a teenager, I did not find that my job impacted on my performance at school, but my propensity for staying up until 2am watching trash horror films on television did.
I have discussed the issue with education welfare officers of North East Lincolnshire council, which is responsible for the towns of Grimsby and Cleethorpes. They are most concerned about abuses of the system--not just about children who might be tired at school, but about non-attendance because of work. One recent example involved a 14-year-old girl who was absent from school. An education welfare officer visited her home and found that she was being picked up in a van and driven south to a factory in Lincolnshire to pack pork pies. Her shift was from 2 o'clock to 10 o'clock, so she simply was not at school. We must stop such abuses.
In Lincolnshire, there is a tradition of gangs of children working in factories. They are hired by a ganger, who collects them and drives them to the factory. The ganger, not the factory, pays the children. The factory may be unaware that it is employing someone of 14 and may assume that he or she is 16. It is a shady form of contract work. The practice is also prevalent in the agricultural sector. At harvesting time, gangs of children are driven to work. Certainly the regulations are often breached in respect of the hours that the children work.
The education welfare officers are concerned about the agriculture sector because abuses do not occur only in the summer holidays. Sometimes it happens in term time, resulting in non-attendance at school. One of the worst examples that the officers came across recently was an eight-year-old selling flowers in the centre of Grimsby. I am sure that we all condemn such exploitation.
A couple of loopholes concern me. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will address them. In the food processing industry in Grimsby, 16-year-olds who have just been given a national insurance number dupe employers by saying that they have left school, when they should still be there. The processing firms have responded when education welfare officers have raised the issue with them.
The European Union directives have been mentioned. As I understand them, they will give less protection to children who work in some respects, such as start and finish time. We should be more protective of our children.
"No person shall employ a child to do any work which, on account of the nature of the tasks involved or the particular conditions under which they are performed, is likely to be harmful to his safety, health or development; or to his attendance at school, his participation in vocational training or guidance programmes . . . or to his ability to benefit from the instruction so received."
It seems that that is one of the central focuses of the Bill.
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