The political agenda this week is going to be dominated by the hour or so that George Osborne spends on his feet setting out the budget early this afternoon. However, if you happen to be reading this on Wednesday at about 4pm, I will be on my feet leading a parliamentary debate about zero-hours contracts. These two events are not unconnected. Zero-hours contracts are a symptom of an economic recovery that simply is not delivering for so many people.
Along with two other Merseyside Labour colleagues – George Howarth and Luciana Berger – last summer I launched a survey to find out more about the use of these contracts. Put simply, the data was not being collected officially to provide an accurate picture of what was going on locally. We then wrote a report laying out the stories we found where people were not able to properly budget or plan for their future because of a lack of reliable hours at work.
We found that this was especially a problem in the social care sector, where it has been estimated about 300,000 people work on a zero-hours basis. This makes for all kinds of problems in terms of reliability for the person receiving care, potentially reducing quality and continuity of care, and uncertainty for the care worker. But the spread of zero-hours contracts is far from limited to the care sector – they are also increasingly prevalent in sectors such as hospitality and retail.
Now the chancellor will get up today and claim that Britain is experiencing an economic upturn – and, indeed, belated growth is very welcome. But we need to seriously question whether this is the recovery that my constituents deserve if people are trapped in contracts that leave them without enough work to pay the ever-increasing bills. Alongside the rise of zero-hours contracts, the recovery has also seen the growth of under-employment, with almost 1.5 million people who want to work full time being forced to take part-time employment. Prices are up, but wages are down, and full-time, permanent jobs are scarce. For far too many people, there is no recovery.
Last week the ONS said it had to radically increase the number of people it estimated are on zero hours, up from 250,000 to nearly 600,000. Because of this huge change to the way the statistics authority is counting this phenomenon, we cannot know for certain whether this represents as dramatic an upward trend as it appears. But we do now know for certain that these contracts represent a huge part of the employment market – and that for too many people they lead to exploitation and low pay. It is right, therefore, that Ed Miliband has pledged Labour in government to stamping out the excesses of zero-hour contracts, including clauses in contracts that stop people seeking other work when they are not needed by one employer. Zero-hours contracts work for a few, but for too many they are a choice of last resort or even desperation.
This is the question that will be at the core of my debate this afternoon – if this is a recovery where hundreds of thousands of people are forced into taking up contracts that guarantee nothing in terms of work or remuneration, what sort of a recovery is it?
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Alison McGovern MP is shadow international development minister, a vice-chair of Progress, and member of parliament for Wirral South. She tweets @alison_mcgovern
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