Keir Starmer might have a big majority, but he is still going to end up in plenty of fights as he tries to govern. So far, most of the focus has been on the battles brewing on the backbenches of the Commons, such as a rebellion over retaining the two-child benefit limit, or Labour MPs realising that their constituents are only in favour of mass house-building when it doesn’t affect them. But often the biggest scraps are within a government, between cabinet ministers with different priorities. There are plenty of issues likely to trip the new Government up in this way.
Take the new package of workers’ rights that Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has drawn up. It’s not a surprise that a Labour government would want to improve conditions for working people: that’s the founding principle of the party and the clue in its name. But not everyone is going to be a fan of, for instance, the proposals on the “right to switch off”. Some of the reporting on this has been overblown: Rayner is not introducing a bill banning bosses from emailing their staff at 6:30pm on a Friday.
The right for workers to ignore emails outside their working hours and while on holiday will be something the Government will recommend businesses embed into their codes of practices. But dismissing any concern from businesses, particularly smaller ones, is also to ignore the implications of this proposal because it could still form the basis of a claim for unfair dismissal. In a unionised workplace, it could have a major impact. It could also form part of a perception that the UK has an over-regulated labour market and put international firms off coming to this country.
There is also the question of whether, in a tight labour market where workers are already pushing for a better work-life balance and flexibility before accepting a job, Government even needs to get involved in pushing businesses to adopt new policies like this.
Those are the sorts of concerns that Labourites in Government who worry about regulations causing more harm than good will be airing as the details of these new policies are hammered out. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has staked most of her policies on the UK economy starting to grow and there being enough money coming in for the Government to afford to scrap the two-child benefit cap: if she thinks businesses are going to suffer as a result of over-burdensome regulation, she will start blocking policies.
Similarly, Pat McFadden, one of the few ministers in this Government who remembers the last Labour administration, was in the Business department when the New Labour government was trying to deal with EU regulations on workers. Ministers had worried these regulations wouldn’t do much to materially improve workers’ lives while also causing a great deal more administration for businesses.
Another piece of legislation which could have that same paradoxical impact of causing a great deal of fuss and burden while not doing the thing it’s supposed to, is the 2010 Equality Act. This was passed shortly before the last Labour government left office, and part of it was almost immediately cancelled by the incoming coalition government.
As home secretary and equalities minister, Theresa May cancelled the “socio-economic duty” in section one of this Act, saying “it would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked” and that public sector bodies would have spent “more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances”.
Unsurprisingly, 14 years later, the manifesto that took Labour back into government promised that it would enact the socio-economic duty, which requires public bodies to “address the inequalities that arise from differences in socio-economic status” and “ensure breaking down barriers to opportunity and tackling inequality is at the heart of all our government’s work”.
Few could disagree with the aim of that second statement, but it doesn’t automatically mean that the means of achieving it will be the right ones. They may force local authorities and government departments to spend a great deal more time assessing whether a policy has really taken into account people on low incomes or from socially deprived backgrounds, but not result in any measurable improvement to the lives of those people. The Scottish Government has been committed to this kind of activity since 2018, and as yet there has been little evidence that it has made much difference to the people it is supposed to help.
Once again, some of the reporting on the socio-economic duty has been overblown, suggesting middle-class people could be pushed to the bottom of the queue for public services. The real impact will be much more boring, but still burdensome and possibly unnecessary in achieving what Labour wants. That is, if ministers actually agree on it happening. There are plenty of internal Government fights to come before then.