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National Insurance Contributions Bill

My Lords, I echo my noble friend Lady Kramer’s view of the importance of job sharing. I, too, could introduce a small reminiscence. I have had job-sharing personal executive assistants working for me, and I know that the arrangement can work extremely well. It gives people who, for example, have children, more opportunities to work. I have seen this in action and I and the Government encourage it. The difficulty in this Bill is that they will be working in the technical framework of tax and national insurance legislation. One feature of the NICs and tax framework is that there is no distinction in the HMRC construct between full-time and part-time work. Therefore, we decided that the way to accommodate this was through the relatively high limit on the total number of employees. Putting together a construct for this piece of national insurance legislation that distinguished between full-time and part-time staff would be enormously challenging. This was recognised in the public evidence session by the Federation of Small Businesses, which concluded that it would add complexity for the employers who were affected. There is nothing here that discourages part-time employees, and the 10 employee limit should fully accommodate the likely demand, except in the very marginal case of the few thousand firms—perhaps 2 per cent—that would be restricted by the limit. Again, I ask noble Lords to withdraw the amendment.