New director of enforcement role among labour market reform plans

Nick Elvin

The Government is planning to introduce new measures aimed at improving the enforcement of employment rights to prevent non-compliance and the exploitation of vulnerable workers.

Following a recent consultation period by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and the Home Office, the Government now proposes to:

1. Create the role of Director of Labour Market Enforcement to “set the strategic priorities for labour market enforcement bodies”;

2. Allow data sharing between the director, the Intelligence Hub, labour market enforcement bodies and other bodies;

3. Create a new labour market undertaking and enforcement order regime to allow the Government to deal with repeat labour market offenders and rogue businesses;

4. Reform the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to become the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, with stronger powers to deal with labour exploitation across the economy.

Commenting on the Government’s official response to the “Tackling exploitation in the labour market” consultation, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation’s (REC) director of policy, Tom Hadley welcomed the new Director of Labour Market Enforcement role but warned against unnecessary licensing expansion.

He said: “The effective enforcement of all regulations is absolutely crucial to protect the interests of compliant businesses as well as individual workers, so we welcome the creation of the role of a Director of Labour Market Enforcement.

“The key issue concerning the new director role will be to ensure effective co-ordination and resourcing of existing inspectorates rather than starting again from scratch and it appears the Government has heeded the call to provide adequate resources.”

On the issue of licensing Hadley added: “Creating an unnecessary and undue bureaucratic burden for the whole recruitment industry, which helped 630,000 people find new permanent jobs last year and places over one million people into temporary assignments every single day, would be a serious mistake.

“The Government’s proposed risk-based approach to reforming the remit and licensing regime of the new Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority is good to see and we strongly support the expansion of intelligence gathering and enforcement activity to focus on eliminating forced labour and trafficking wherever evidence of such activity exists, not limited by sector. However, instead of pressing ahead with any formal expansion of licensing we believe the Government needs to undertake further work. It is not at all clear that it is the licensing process itself that drives out criminal activity, as is evident from the number of GLA licence revocations and enforcement action taken against existing licence holders.”