Minister strongly rejects claim from business lobby ‘chaotic’ workers bill will cost jobs – UK politics live

The number of people waiting for hospital treatment in England fell slightly in August, according to the latest figures – even though the number of procedures waiting to be carried out rose slightly.

The headline waiting list figure for NHS England relates to the number of treatments due to be carried out. That was 7.64 million at the end of August, up from 7.62 million the previous month.

But NHS England also gives figures for the number of individuals waiting for treatment, and that fell slightly. It was 6.33 million patients at the end of August, down from 6.39 million the previous month.

As PA Media reports, the waiting list hit a record high in September 2023 with 6.50 million patients and 7.77 million treatments.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, has arrived in Downing Street for talks with Keir Starmer and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, Eleni Courea reports.

Zelenskyy is due to give Starmer details of what he calls his “victory plan” for the war against Russia. He had been due to meet Starmer and other world leaders at a summit in Germany at the weekend, but that was postponed after President Biden said he could not attend because of Hurricane Milton.

Good morning. During the election campaign Labour promised to produce an employment rights bill within its first 100 days in office. The anniversary is on Saturday, and, just in time for the deadline, the bill is being published today. It is hugely important to the trade unions, who provide the institutional backbone to the Labour party, and, as Jessica Elgot reports in her overnight story, millions of workers will gain new rights as a result.

The government claims the scope of the reform is huge – 9 million people will gain new rights against unfair dismissal, more than 1 million low-paid workers on zero hours will have the right to job security on a new contract, an extra 30,000 parents will gain new rights to paternity leave, and 1.5 million will be newly entitled to unpaid parental leave.

Ministers also believe the bill will help at least 1.7 million people into the labour market who are not working because of family commitments – and who would benefit from new policies on flexible working and parental leave.

Here is Jess’s story.

In its news release about the bill, the government says it includes 28 separate employment reforms. Here is our explainer.

Labour has consulted extensively on the proposals, and it has made considerable efforts to accommodate business opinion; the unions have not got everything they were asking for, and there is quite a lot of important, smallprint detail about how proposals will work in practice yet to be finalised. Keir Starmer has spoken a lot about his desire for Labour to be seen as pro-business, not anti-business, and he does not want these plans to scare corporate Britain.

The TUC has described the bill as “a positive new chapter for working people in this country”. In a statement Paul Nowak, its general secretary, said:

Driving up employment standards is good for workers, good for business and good for growth. It will give workers more predictability and control and it will stop good employers from being undercut by the bad.

While there is still detail to be worked through, this bill signals a seismic shift away from the Tories’ low pay, low rights, low productivity economy.

Some of the big business organisations have yet to give their overall verdict on the bill. But the Federation of Small Businesses, which is one of the lobby groups always most hostile to new regulation, has been hyper-critical. Tina McKenzie, its policy chair, said in a statement:

This legislation is rushed job, clumsy, chaotic and poorly planned – dropping 28 new measures onto small business employers all at once leaves them scrambling to make sense of it all. Beyond warm words, it lacks any real pro-growth element and will increase economic inactivity, seriously jeopardising the government’s own 80% employment target.

The FSB response has been picked up by the Daily Mail, which is the only pro-Tory paper to splash on the bill.

Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, was doing a morning interview round this morning. On the Today programme, asked to respond to the FSB criticism, he said:

I would reject that very strongly.

First of all, there’s no surprises here. Everything in this package was in the manifesto.

Second of all, there is a very strong business rationale for these measures in terms of getting more people into work, in terms of making sure there’s a link between job satisfaction and productivity.

It levels the playing field to what a lot of businesses are already doing, actually, to a higher standard than those measures in the bill would bring forward.

It gives more incentives for training. We have listened and worked very closely with specifically the Federation of Small Businesses.

He also said a lot of the criticism reminded him the claims, made by the Conservatives and some business groups, that when the last Labour government introduced the minimum wage, it would lead to mass job losses. When it was put to him that the measures in this bill would deter firms from hiring new workers, Reynolds replied:

I reject that entirely.

And I think, to be honest, a lot of those points remind me of [opposition to] the introduction of the minimum wage, which, again, were not found to be true once it came in.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Morning: Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, is meeting Keir Starmer for talks in Downing Street. Mark Rutte, the new Nato secretary general, is also attending.

After 10.30am: Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, takes questions from MPs on next week’s Commons business.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

12pm: Robert Jenrick, one of the two Tory leadership candidates left in the contest, gives a speech in London.

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