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Pensions Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall respond briefly to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, who has performed a service to the Committee in raising this issue. My immediate reaction, not least as a former small employer in the agricultural business employing casual labour and the kinds of people who she rightly described from her Norfolk experience, is that we need to think about how this burden should fall on employers if we are to do it. I shall come in a moment to the other side of the argument, but the Minister will have to tell us how this can be done. He will also need to reassure us that, even if perhaps it should not, it will not in practice act as a disincentive to employers employing these people. That is partly on the administrative side, as well as being the effect with regard to cost uplift. I am not for a moment suggesting that the right thing is for people to go into the irregular economy or that in some way we should find some kind of special deal for them because that is not what the noble Baroness is saying. However, we need to have at least some assurance that it is not going to create problems for employers, that it is manageable and that it will not have malign economic effects. On the other hand, the noble Baroness is very much on to a point of substance. We have mentioned the word ““problem””; I appreciate that that was not the context of what she said, but we should not regard part-time employment as a problem. It is a problem only if, when people would choose to be working for longer hours, it does not escalate into being able to do so, or they have not got the right bag of skills or their remuneration package is too low. We should welcome part-time employment with open arms, along with the flexibility that it brings. That is important and positive, which is why I hope that the Minister can come up with a solution. I have one more thing to say, which is not meant to be threatening to him or anyone else. My knowledge of employment law has somewhat faded over the years and I am not too good on the equal treatment directive, but, looking at this from the perspective of human rights law, which I know a little more about from recent experience, and equality, if we do not come up with a system that provides the same functional opportunity for people who are working the same number of hours but for a number of employers as compared with those who are working for one employer, we are at some risk of being accused of discrimination. The Minister has to find a workable answer to this.