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1.24 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Paul Boateng): The House owes my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Pond) a debt of gratitude for enabling us to discuss an important issue. No one could bring to the issue his depth and breadth of knowledge, which is based on a lifetime's experience and work. I think that his work has influenced us all in our approach to the issue.
The Bill is an important one. Although the Government are not able to accept it, it will undoubtedly inform and shape policy development on the issue. We do intend to develop that policy. The Government's business and concern--which we share with my hon. Friend--is that children should not be exploited or endangered at work. All that we do must be designed to achieve that end.
The House should be in the business of ensuring that we protect childhood. A theme that has run through hon. Members' speeches is that nothing is more valuable than childhood--a period in which a child is allowed to grow and develop as an individual and is not circumscribed by the world of work. That is not to say for one moment that work is not valuable or that experience of work is not important to a child as he or she grows up. Nevertheless, the most valuable thing for any child is time--to grow, to play and to do all that children do--without having to worry about an employer. There is precious little time in life without those worries, and we must ensure that it is preserved for children.
This has been a good debate, not least because of the range of experience and opinion that has been shared by hon. Members on both sides of the House. However, it must be said that there is a difference between us and them--between a Labour Government's approach to the issue and the previous Government's legacy. We should not believe for a moment that, in their 18 years in power, they did not have an opportunity to act on the issue--they declined to act. Furthermore, they tried to make a fetish of deregulation.
I hear Conservative Members complain that this is the first party political speech in this debate--but that is my job. I am a Minister, and it is my job to point out where they failed. They did fail. I am glad to see the hon. Member for Guildford (Mr. St. Aubyn) beginning to stir and to give some indication that he will get to his feet. I wanted to say a few words, not too many, about him--although I shall not be as deprecating as my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North (Mr. Gardiner), because, after all, this is a Friday. Nevertheless, there was something of a whiff not so much of sulphur but of methane about the hon. Gentleman, not so much of the pony in the back paddock but of the pony down the pit. Listening to him, one felt that had he been in the House when it discussed the Shaftesbury legislation, he would have opined that that legislation would have worked against the development of self-esteem in the young people concerned. Sitting at the checkout for hours does very little to develop a young persons's self-esteem; nor does being bussed to a pork pie factory, as described by my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac). It is our job, in which we are aided by the Bill and the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham, to make sure that that sort of thing does not happen--under Labour it will not.
Mr. St. Aubyn:
This is not only 13 February but Friday 13 February. It is the Minister's unlucky day, not mine. He has said that he does not intend to support the Bill, which rather undermines his position. Surely he accepts that self-esteem is important, especially for the most disaffected children. It is those children whom he is attacking, not me.
Mr. Boateng:
I said that I would spend only a short time dealing with the hon. Gentleman. It is time that I passed on to the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt) because it was he who suggested--at least, this was his subtext--that if a child was not particularly academic, it was all right for that child to work. That sticks in our gullet, because whether a child is academic or not, there is no reason why he should be subject to exploitation. That child, too, must be protected, and we will protect him.
Mr. Blunt:
As usual, the Minister is creating Aunt Sallys, which appears to be an occupational hazard for members of new Labour. They are programmed to say what they assume everyone thinks, and they then bring their assumptions to the House. If the Minister reads the text of our proceedings, he will see that I, too, object to people being categorised. I said that people should not be stereotyped; nor should our ways of dealing with them.
Mr. Boateng:
We will read the text and reflect on the subtext. We must remember what the Opposition failed to do when they were in government. Let us move on.
I want to concentrate on what we are going to do, because that is what interests the nation. Let us first turn our minds to the European directive, which was adopted as long ago as 22 June 1994. The previous Government did absolutely nothing to deal with the needs and concerns that arose as a result of that directive.
We have acted. Yesterday, my right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for Health and for Scotland signed and laid before the House the regulations that will bring the directive into effect and take forward our agenda. It is an important piece of work because the directive required member states to bring their domestic legislation into line with its minimum requirements within two years of its adoption. The previous Government did not do it; we have, and the regulations have been laid.
The major effect of the regulations will be to bring the existing protections of children into line with the requirements of the directive and, importantly, to provide greater standardisation, as is envisaged in the Bill. That has been the call from all hon. Members during the debate. We recognised that the position was unacceptable and unsatisfactory, and that we needed the standardisation that was lacking.
The regulations will extend the provisions of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933--in Scotland, the Children and Young Persons Act 1937--to include restrictions currently contained in local authority byelaws on children's working hours on Saturdays and during school holidays and on minimum rest breaks. The new regulations will also give children two weeks free from work during school holidays, and local authority byelaws will have to contain a list of jobs that 13-year-olds will be permitted to do. The controls on children's involvement in performances contained in the Children and Young Persons Act 1963, and the Children (Performances) Regulations 1968 will be amended specifically to include children employed in sport and advertising, including modelling, which is a cause for concern.
During school terms, national working time limits will be two hours for weekdays, five hours for Saturdays--eight hours if the child is aged 15 or over--and two hours for Sundays. During school holidays, national working time limits will be five hours for weekdays and Saturdays--eight hours if the child is aged 15 or over--within a weekly limit of 25 hours, or 35 hours if the child is aged 15 or over, and two hours for Sundays. Currently, some of those limits are set by local authority byelaws, but they can differ from authority to authority, and cause confusion. We have ended that confusion.
I want to say a few words about Sundays, which have been mentioned by a number of hon. Members on both sides of the House. We believe that Sunday is a special day for the family and for children to relate to their parents and their siblings. It is a day on which there ought to be a focus on family life. Children should have an opportunity to mix with friends and family and to do their homework. We all know from experience the importance of making sure that children have a space in which to do their homework.
The matter was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley, North (Mr. Cranston), when he stressed the vital nature of ensuring that we do nothing to undermine the important steps that the Government have taken to promote education. That is why we refused to go along with what the previous Government proposed, not least
because it undoubtedly would have had a damaging effect, to which several hon. Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins), for Preston (Audrey Wise) and for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn), have referred, particularly in relation to employment in supermarkets. It could have resulted not only in the substitution of very young workers for teenagers and other workers, but in driving down wages and conditions in that sector.
That was never the intention of the legislation. It bears very much on the point rightly made by hon. Members that, as a nation, we must be only too aware of our need to comply with the highest international standards.
Had we allowed young children to be exploited--that is what it would have amounted to--in supermarkets on a Sunday, toys made by poor young hands in the third world could have been sold by young hands in this country, replicating the exploitation that we want to counter globally. That is the importance of our international commitments.
This country has traditionally given life and force to international treaty obligations and sought to make real the impact of international law. We want to do that for legislation on the employment of children, using International Labour Organisation convention 138 as a breath of fresh air, invigorating our system of protection for children. We take a similar view on the United Nations convention on the protection of the rights of the child. We want to make the best use of international law for our citizens.
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