HC Deb 15 June 1977 vol 933 cc388-91

3.32 p.m.

Mr. Greville Janner (Leicester, West)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to increase the holiday entitlement of employees and otherwise to amend the law relating to holidays. The Bill has three separate objects. The first is to provide for a minimum four-week holiday entitlement. The second is to ensure that employees who are dismissed during the course of a year have a pro rata entitlement so that they get a proportion of their holiday pay. Many at present get none. The third is to ban the sort of incredible behaviour such as that exhibited by the Leicestershire County Council in insisting that State schools remain open during the industrial holiday fortnight, thereby forcing parents either to keep children away from school during that fortnight or not to take their children with them when they go on their annual holidays.

It is a surprise to most people to learn that there is no legal right in this country in most cases to any holiday other than the eight statutory days. Only where such a right is secured by contract or where employees are covered by wages council regulations or agricultural wages council regulations are they entitled to certain minimum periods. In all other cases, rights depend totally upon agreement. Although in most cases where unions represent employees agreements have been arrived at which are fair and reasonable, in many cases, even for union members, there is no such agreement in existence. Although the Council of European Communities recommended on 22nd July 1975 that four calendar weeks should be the minimum standard for annual paid holidays by the end of 1978, we have no minimum standard whatsoever.

There have been previous efforts in this House to obtain such minimum rights, and I pay special tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Small Heath (Mr. Howell), the present Minister responsible for sport, who introduced the Employment (Holiday Extension and Early Retirement) Bill, which, alas, did not reach the statute book.

I ask, at the start of this annual holiday period for our entire nation, that we should recognise that there are many thousands of workers who will get no money unless they are at work, who take their holidays entirely at their own expense, who very often have entered into employment believing that they were entitled to normal holidays and in fact find that they have none, and who are entitled to rest as well as to work. We in this House have recognised the right to work. We fought for it. There is also a right not to work and to have reasonable holidays with our families.

Secondly, where an employee is dismissed within 26 weeks of the start of his employment, normally he is unprotected against unfair dismissal, and his rights to holiday entitlement depend entirely upon his contract. Probably the majority of contracts of employment, other than those negotiated by large unions, provide that an employee must work for a full year before he acquires his first holiday entitlement. This is wrong and unfair. An employee who has worked so as to earn a holiday entitlement should acquire a pro rata or proportional entitlement for the period that he has worked. An employer may dismiss a person after 24 or 25 weeks and not only remove the employee's rights under the Employment Protection Act in most respects—and certainly the right to unfair dismissal remedies—but also the right to accumulated holiday pay. That, too, is wrong.

In these two respects, I pay tribute to the efforts of a number of unions. I have in mind especially the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers whose Leicester District Secretary, Bridget Paton, has told me that unless a company is federated to the Employers' Association or recognises the Collective Trade Union National Agreement, they are not required by law to pay other than statutory days of holiday pay. Although there is provision in the Contracts of Employment Act 1972 that employees should be given written particulars of their terms of service, there are hundreds of thousands of employees who either have none or who do not read them or understand them, or who do not realise that their holiday rights are mutilated and miserable. As Bridget Paton says, there are many small employers who try to evade their duties in respect of contracts of employment, and that in smaller unorganised firms people go along and take a job thinking that they are entitled to holiday pay as a matter of course and, when they do not get it, they just leave. Finally, in certain areas all Over the country there are traditional holiday weeks or fortnights, or wakes weeks or industrial holidays. By tradition, schools in those areas stay closed so that, for the period concerned, employees are able to take their children away on holiday with them. It is surely a basic, sensible and reasonable request to employers not merely that they should close at that time but that they should apply pressure on educational authorities to ensure that the schools in those areas are closed.

By tradition, schools have always closed for the wakes week or the industrial holiday fortnight in every area that I have known. In Leicestershire, since time immemorial, people have taken their children away for the first two weeks of July. Now, with that traditional county Tory lack of understanding of the needs of the cities, the county education authority has decreed that schools in Leicestershire and, in particular, in the city of Leicester must remain open for the first week of the industrial fortnight.

Mr. Terry Walker (Kingswood)

Stupid.

Mr. Janner

It is not only stupid, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kings-wood (Mr. Walker) says. It is callous, It is also very bad administration. It forces parents into a disastrous choice. Either they teach their children that school does not matter very much— "Never mind; miss a week and come on holiday with us"—or they give up one of the two weeks of the holiday that they are entitled to enjoy with their children. Either way, it is the kind of decision that we have come to accept is likely to be made by a Tory-dominated county education authority which has not a scrap of under standing of the needs of city schools.

This Bill would require schools to be closed during the traditional fortnight's industrial holiday to enable parents to take their children away with them. This would ban the sort of behaviour that is making a mockery of the Leicestershire Education Authority and that shows why education should be brought back within the purview of district councils.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Greville Janner, Mr. Tom Bradley, Mr. Dennis Canavan, Mr. Robin F. Cook, Mr. Bruce Grocott, Mr. Doug Hoyle, Mr. James Lamond, Mr. Austin Mitchell, Mr. Nigel Spearing, Mr. Leslie Spriggs, Mr. Edwin Wainwright, and Mr. Ian Wrigglesworth.