The Employment Rights Act has been hailed as the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation. But while it marks a break from Tory reforms, it represents a reversion to a New Labour model that prioritises individual rights over collective power.
Much has been made of the government’s approach to labour law. Many in the Labour Party and across the wider union movement consider the legal interventions in this area to be among the most radical elements of the administration’s domestic agenda, suggesting an approach that will restore dignity and justice to people at work. The Employment Rights Act has been described by the Prime Minister as ‘the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation’.1 Assuming a generation equates to roughly a quarter century, or, put another way, the fourteen years of Tory government that preceded Starmer’s 2024 victory and the limited labour law enacted by New Labour between 2000 and 2010, then this statement is technically correct.
However, while the Act amounts to a significant package, at least when set against the limited positive labour law interventions this century, we might also question how genuinely transformative the government’s employment rights agenda is. Does it signal a radical departure from the approach adopted by New Labour? Is it a major turning point in the history of UK labour regulation? Will it transform the economic power of the British working class? What then are we to make of the Starmer government’s approach to the regulation of work? History offers a useful lens through which to assess recent government interventions.
British Labour Law
Throughout much of the twentieth century the British state was content to limit the legal regulation of employment relationships. This approach, often labelled voluntarism, reflecting a belief in limited state interference in labour relations, became the hallmark of British labour law and shaped British labour regulation from 1906 until 1979.
Historically, UK unions have enjoyed exceptional protections, but these have taken the form of immunity from prosecution rather than legal rights. The Taff Vale judgement of 1901 imperilled the right to strike, thus the viability of a union movement historically built around collective immunity from prosecution. In the early twentieth century, union support for the emerging Labour Party arose directly from the need to overturn this judgement through parliamentary means and re-establish the voluntarist approach. This was successfully achieved in 1906 with the Trades Disputes Act. In contrast to countries that industrialised later, Britain’s party of labour was not built to sponsor workers’ industrial power through positive legal rights to organise, or to enforce workplace protections, but rather to keep the law out of employment relations.
Henceforth, the freedom to strike and organise was protected from civil damages. Unions were once more collectively shielded from liability for breaches of the employment contract by a legal framework which privileged negative immunities over individual and collective rights.
This system of British labour law proved to be remarkably resilient. By the 1950s, however, strains were emerging within the voluntarist approach. Low unemployment and labour shortages led to more strikes and ‘cost push’ inflationary pressures across the economy. Having once been characterised as the ‘workshop of the world’, Britain was now, critics contended, the ‘sick man of Europe’, suffering from the ‘British Disease’ of poor productivity growth and comparative economic decline. These declinist narratives linked growing concerns about productivity to systems of domestic labour regulation.2
This argument—that voluntarism inhibited growth as it cultivated a system of uncoordinated free collective bargaining, which led to wage drift, unofficial strike action, and restricted work practices—was embraced by the right in pamphlets such as A Giant’s Strength, authored by conservative lawyers in 1958.3 This right-wing challenge was accompanied by a discernible labour movement response from the so called ‘Oxford School’ of industrial relations practitioners.
The Oxford School
Nearly sixty years ago the journal New Society first identified a new ‘Oxford School’ of industrial relations. Based around Nuffield College, Oxford, it contained five key academic figures: Hugh Clegg, Allan Flanders, Alan Fox, Bill McCarthy, and Arthur Marsh.4 For decades this group influenced the development of government—especially Labour government— thinking on economic and industrial strategy, pay policy, employment law, trade union reform, economic democracy, and much more. The Oxford School sought to build institutions to moderate unequal power relations at work, to civilise capitalism, and to lock the working class into the mechanisms of the economy.5 In 1964, the incoming Harold Wilson-led Labour government drew on their diagnosis to consolidate British corporatism and integrate the organised working class into a national project to boost competitiveness and anchor post-war social democracy – an early version of what today is often labelled economic stakeholding.6
The clearest exposition of the Oxford School’s thinking was found in the final report of the 1968 Donovan Royal Commission, a direct response to mounting evidence of comparative industrial decline and productivity shortfalls.7 Donovan sought to resolve earnings drift and unofficial strikes through innovative factory agreements to boost productivity and formalise labour relations. The report reaffirmed the voluntarist tradition, sought to extend collective bargaining, and remove barriers to union recognition.
The report was part of a wider corporatist strategy to reverse economic decline that was briefly reflected in a desire to challenge the Treasury and captured in the short-lived (pre-sterling crisis) National Plan of 1965. And it informed the corporatist architecture of the National Enterprise Board (NEB), the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), ACAS, and the National Board for Prices and Incomes.
The Donovan Report was largely welcomed by the unions. But by then the Wilson government was moving away from the spirit of voluntarism. With their 1969 White Paper In Place of Strife, the government looked to tighten the regulation of labour, constrain unofficial strike action, and limit shop steward power. The Heath government attempted a similar policy response with the 1971 Industrial Relations Act, which was also defeated and subsequently abandoned. However, the subsequent Labour Government of 1974-9 re-embraced the voluntarist tradition and sought to enact the Donovan programme through five statutes: The Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1974 and its 1976 amendment, the 1975 Employment Protection Act, as well as the Sex Discrimination and Race Relations Acts.
Thatcherism
Following the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the 1979 election, successive Conservative governments sought to confront organised labour and deregulate the labour market. The institutional architecture of post-war corporatism—the NEB, MSC and NEDC—was either dismantled altogether or significantly curtailed. A supply-side revolution began, the Fair Wages Resolution was abolished, and younger workers were removed from wage council coverage.
The 1980 Employment Act, or ‘Prior Act’, extended the tortious liability of the unions over industrial action. Voluntarism was under attack. The next Employment Act, the 1982 ‘Tebbit Act’, further restricted the definition of legitimate industrial action and union protections. It also enabled the selective dismissal of strikers and restricted the closed shop.
The voluntarist gateway, the preference for negative immunities rather than individual and collective rights secured with the Trades Disputes Act, was stripped back to allow for the sequestration of union funds. Unions were banned at GCHQ. Acceptable industrial action was narrowed to exclude secondary and overtly political strikes. Pickets were limited, and union disciplinary action in support of strikes was banned, alongside official union support for illegal strikes. All strike action henceforth had to follow a tightly regulated balloting procedure. The legacy of ‘Saltley Gate’, where a mass picket of a fuel storage depot secured victory for the NUM during the Miners’ Strike of 1972, was avenged when the Thatcher government defeated the unions after a fifty-one-week strike throughout 1984 and 1985. Meanwhile, 20 per cent of manufacturing output and two million jobs were lost between 1979-81.8
The proportion of employees in unions collapsed from 56 per cent to 31 per cent, and the proportion of employees protected by collective agreements fell from around 55 per cent to 25 per cent.9 Britain became more unequal. Postwar trends that had seen income inequalities incrementally fall were suddenly reversed. In the battle between capital and labour, labour lost.
New Labour
Writing in the Murdoch-owned Times in March 1997, Tony Blair promised that ‘the changes we do propose would [still] leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the Western world.’10 This statement appeared to commit any incoming Labour administration to maintaining the essential parts of the Thatcherite revolution. Yet despite the rhetoric, different approaches to labour relations still managed to co-exist within the Blair government. We can identify four.
The first was represented by the Industrial Pluralists, the spiritual descendants of the post-war ‘Oxford School’, who were keen to reassert corporatism, promote stakeholding, and nurture collective bargaining. Key figures included TUC General Secretary John Monks, employment law minister Iain McCartney, and Labour’s spokesman in the Lords, Bill McCarthy, one of the original school.
They achieved some early notable successes with the government’s ‘Fairness at Work’ agenda and subsequent White Paper of the same name – an agenda that was consolidated into the 1999 Employment Relations Act. This group’s influence was particularly noticeable in the introduction of the tripartite Low Pay Commission, established on a non-statutory basis in July 1997, and placed on a legal footing with the passage of the 1998 National Minimum Wage Act. Key figures from the Donovan era chaired and helped run the commission.
Despite initial successes that included protections for whistle-blowers, reductions in unfair dismissal qualifying periods, statutory recognition laws, rights to be accompanied in disciplinary and grievance procedures, and the Union Modernisation Fund, the influence of this tradition gradually diminished over the course of Labour’s first term. While policy makers influenced by the industrial pluralism of the Oxford School approach reformed strike ballots and introduced protections against dismissal, discrimination, and blacklisting on grounds of union membership during lawful industrial action, their influence effectively disappeared after 2001. A review of the effectiveness of new union recognition procedures was promised but little came of it.11
The second approach belonged to the Globalisation Realists, a faction dominant within the Treasury. Its key proponents, including the Chancellor Gordon Brown and his close advisors, took declining real wages across the West as given, stressed the benign effects of globalisation and heightened international competition, and consequentially questioned the party’s traditional approach to labour market regulation. Global realities, they argued, meant such market regulation could price people out of work and inhibit domestic growth.
The realists argued that Labour’s traditional aim of maximising working-class welfare would henceforth be best achieved not by extending collective bargaining but primarily through new welfare transfers and tax credits. Their focus was on remedial cash transfers to alleviate the declining living standards of the working class, especially its young families and older pensioners. This strategy worked alongside the refinancing of public service safety nets, was informed by hubristic assumptions of a long term ‘end to boom and bust’, and was financed by the shared proceeds of growth brokered through a compact with a lightly regulated financial sector. Such thinking translated into ongoing hostility to labour regulation, such as in behind-the-scenes battles to dilute the proposals of the Low Pay Commission.
A third approach belonged to those we can label European Proceduralists, characterised by an emphasis on individual employment rights and the active embrace of an emerging international framework to regulate labour. This agenda is often associated with elements of the liberal left, alongside powerful cohorts of Labour-supporting lawyers. Such an approach involved inevitable tensions with the voluntarist traditions of the British labour movement, historically cautious of the state’s role in regulating labour. In contrast, the more continental approach of the European Proceduralists tended to emphasise state neutrality and individual rights, rather than antagonistic industrial relations.
With Jacques Delors’ visit to the 1988 TUC Congress the British labour movement more actively embraced an emerging European ‘social model’. This signalled a turn toward individual and collective rights rather than traditional immunities. Under New Labour the influence of this approach was revealed in the government’s support for the European Social Chapter, initiatives in 1998 and 2007 to regulate working time, and in rights to information and consultation.
This approach’s influence extended into the development of many of New Labour’s ‘family friendly’ individual employment rights, including flexible working protections for guardians of young or disabled children and those with caring responsibilities. It also covered rights to paid and unpaid maternity leave and paid statutory paternity leave. This approach subsumed labour relations within the wider orbit of European law, in effect sub-contracting the domestic political contest over labour regulation to transnational judicial oversight.12 The Labour government was surrendering voluntarism and embracing more legalistic international approaches to labour regulation.
The fourth and final approach, much favoured by Blair himself and key New Labour allies such as Peter Mandelson and Steve Byers, was influenced by so-called Knowledge Economists such as Charlie Leadbeater.13 This group identified a revolution in economic relations coinciding with New Labour’s arrival in power, which freed the new government from the imperatives of both labour regulation and party history. The growth in knowledge work meant an end to the ‘old’ economy, ‘old’ labour, and the case for regulation. Physical toil, it was assumed, was becoming technologically obsolete. The slogan ‘education, education, education’ captured a new, tech-savvy, meritocratic rethink, best expressed in the 1998 White Paper, Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy.
Overall, for different ideological reasons, key figures in the Treasury and Downing Street, often with support from the DTI, tactically aligned to reject traditional twentieth-century labour movement approaches to regulate employment relations. Before the global financial crisis, when it was assumed that growth was locked in, the case against traditional approaches to labour regulation was considered self-evident: they belonged to the past, at odds with modern economic imperatives and a new ‘third way’ social democracy.
Yet even before the financial crisis, trouble hid in plain sight. Tax credits allowed employers a free ride and wages and productivity were flatlining long before 2008.14 A labour market increasingly built around cheap, unorganised labour undermined technological innovation and productivity growth. These realities were economically exposed by the financial crisis, and politically exposed in working class desertion from the party – a spectacle that played out in four Tory victories and in Brexit.
Under New Labour, union density continued to decline, from 31 per cent cent of all employees in 1997 to 27 per cent in 2009. In the private sector, it fell from 20 per cent to 15 per cent. Alongside this, despite some initial interest, New Labour had rejected economic stakeholding even before it came to power. The 1998 Company Law Review and 2001 White Paper led to the tepid 2006 Companies Act, which retained the underlying supremacy of shareholder interests. Duties to represent non-shareholder interests had been dropped in 2005.
The Starmer Approach in Opposition
Since 2008 we have witnessed an unprecedented fall in UK productivity, alongside poor wage growth and significant price rises, which have cumulatively produced a profound deterioration in living standards. Modern liberal democracy has ushered in oligarchy, crushing inequalities, and generational rupture. Social mobility is rewinding. These harsh realities found expression in Brexit, political alienation, institutional mistrust, and the rise of Reform.
Gradually, what nineteenth-century political economists referred to as ‘the labour problem’ has re-emerged. Theresa May tentatively sought to rethink labour relations with the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices, which reported in July 2017. When campaigning to be party leader in July 2016, she called for worker representation on company boards, an early embrace of industrial democracy that came to nothing. Then the Covid pandemic curbed the market for labour, and a Tory government had to step in to regulate who worked, where, and under what conditions. Corporatism reappeared as the TUC helped shape the most significant labour market intervention in living memory: a state furlough programme covering some eleven million workers.
During the Corbyn years Labour strategy on employment law toughened significantly compared to the New Labour period. The 2019 Labour Manifesto appeared to suggest a return to pre-1979 immunities by pledging to repeal ‘anti-trade union legislation’, a shift that Keir Starmer indicated he would maintain. In the summer of 2021 Labour launched the ‘New Deal for Working People’ campaign. At that year’s TUC Congress Starmer said his government would enforce full rights and protections for all workers from their first day in a job.15 In her speech before opening that year’s Party Conference, Angela Rayner promised that the ‘driving mission’ of the next Labour government would be ‘to end poverty wages and insecure work that blights lives and holds back our economy’.16 She unveiled a new Green Paper on Employment Rights that signalled the revival of a more traditional post-war approach to labour regulation, overseen by a Labour leader who self-identified with Harold Wilson rather than figures from the New Labour era.
The original New Deal for Working People pledged to eradicate in-work poverty and replace Universal Credit, to use procurement to ensure union recognition, and to install collective bargaining and fair wage clauses in public contracts. It committed to Fair Pay Agreements and sectoral bargaining across huge swathes of the economy, a radical initiative to extend collectively agreed conditions into unorganised sectors. It pledged to create, in law, a single status of ‘worker’, and to give all workers day-one rights. The package included a ban on zero-hours contracts, increased statutory sick pay, a ban on fire-and-rehire practices, new rights over flexible working, more family-friendly rights, and to introduce ‘a right to switch off’ technologically. It committed to ‘repeal anti-union legislation’, a deliberately ambiguous phrase that suggested the return of some pre-1979 immunities. It promised to increase workplace access; simplify the union recognition procedure, including lowering the thresholds for industrial action; to reform balloting, including the introduction of workplace ballots; and to align domestic strike laws with the International Labour Organization. It planned to reboot the HSE, reform the employment tribunal system, and provide a single enforcement body to protect workers. It also committed to strengthen the Equality Act. Overall, it promised a significant overhaul of employment law through a mix of individual and collective rights and stronger immunities. Despite some notable shifts, especially around Fair Pay Agreements, the general shape of the package remained relatively intact until the election.
The Starmer Approach in Government
Did this agenda survive in office? In terms of combatting low pay, the government has generally built on the New Labour approach with its support for the Low Pay Commission and its acceptance of incremental rate increases. The minimum wage now stands at £12.21 an hour. It has also introduced double-digit increases in the minimum wage for younger people.
In terms of labour law, the centrepiece of the government’s approach has been the Employment Right Bill, published on October 10th, 2024. 150 pages plus schedules, containing some twenty-eight employment measures, the bill appeared, on initial inspection, to be a substantial package of reform, although much of the detail was left to secondary legislation and extensive consultation involving a substantial transition period. Protection against unfair dismissal was initially to become a day-one right, although it would be available to employees only. A qualifying period was subsequently accepted in the House of Lords. The controversial practice of ‘fire and rehire’, of dismissing staff to impose worse terms, is to be abolished, with a few exceptions. The Bill also requires employers to take all reasonable steps to prevent harassment under the Equality Act. It will end ‘exploitative’ zero-hours contracts, with exemptions around genuine temporary work. It offers a limited expansion of rights to flexible working—again, only to employees—although only a right to request it. The bill does, however, ensure all workers are entitled to statutory sick pay, as well as parental and paternity leave as day-one rights, and it boosts maternity protection. On the question of the inspection and enforcement of employment standards, the government, as promised, will establish a new Fair Work Agency to bring together the work of the three separate bodies it inherited.
The new legislation targets recent Tory attacks on union activities, particularly the Trade Union Act 2016, over industrial action ballot thresholds, and the role of the certification officer in terms of the operation of strikes and the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act. It also provides new rights for trade union access to workplaces and adapts the recognition procedures of the New Labour era, including balloting thresholds.
Alongside the Employment Rights Act, through a statutory code of practice, the government is also introducing the right to switch off, extending pay gap reporting, and providing a full review of parental leave and carers’ leave. It is also rethinking TUPE regulations, which concern employee rights when a business transfers to new ownership.
Taking into account the limited action on employee rights taken by New Labour after 2000, and fourteen years of Tory government, this packageis the most significant advance in employment rights for a generation. However, is this package a significant departure from the approach adopted in the New Labour era? Overall, it is difficult to conclude that it is. It is doubtful that it will correct the long-term decline in union membership. The package has tilted significantly away from earlier commitments to strengthen unions and spread collective bargaining. This approach now emphasises individual rights, many of which remain ambiguous, rather than collective rights and strengthened immunities. As such the package is a significant reorientation away from the original New Deal for Working People.
The central planks of the original New Deal for Working People, in particular single status, widened immunities, and Fair Wage Agreements, are either absent or have emerged in barely recognisable form. Despite commitments to repeal ‘all anti-union legislation’, the basic architecture of the Thatcher settlement remains untouched. The ILO commitment regarding domestic strike law has gone. So too the workplace balloting commitment. Critically, the extension of negotiated terms and conditions into unorganised sectors through Fair Pay Agreements—the most significant feature of the original New Deal—has been eroded to social care staff and those in school support in England, leaving millions uncovered. Consequently, the route to extend union density into unorganised sectors and spread collective bargaining is primarily through New Labour’s recognition procedure, now amended with limited openings to increase workplace access through ACAS and threshold changes. Again, this is welcome, but will it boost union membership and address long-term decline? Basically, the extension of collective bargaining offered by the Fair Pay Agreements has been significantly curtailed in favour of a recognition procedure that has delivered little. While this shift was announced while Labour was still in opposition, and might well offer critical help to the staff involved in the key sectors of health and education, it remains unclear how it will advance collective bargaining, or be extended to other sectors.
The cornerstone of the individual rights package, the commitment to introduce a single status of ‘worker’ to extend the coverage of employment rights, has been weakened and is now subject to extensive consultation. The backdrop to this consultation—widespread criticism of market over-regulation (especially acute following the national insurance charges levied in Labour’s first budget)— alongside plummeting poll numbers and declining political capital for the government, suggest that it is unlikely single status will be achieved. Without this revised status the government has introduced a series of individual rights very much in line with those established under New Labour, while leaving the definition of ‘worker’ ambiguous.
The key building blocks of the original New Deal—strengthened immunities, Fair Pay Agreements, and single status—were significant departures from the New Labour approach that signalled a return to other post-war Labour traditions of employment regulation. However, subsequent changes and omissions now suggest that government strategy effectively amounts to a restoration of the New Labour approach. Will such a restoration help address the material basis of working-class political resentment over recent decades?
The continuities with the New Labour era can also be seen in various contributions to the labour law debate across the party. The influence of the Industrial Pluralists remains, detectable in the contribution of figures such as Angela Rayner, ex-Minister Justin Madders, and backbench MPs such as Andy McDonald, the architect of the original New Deal. But just as in New Labour’s first term, their influence appears to be in decline. Meanwhile, if rumours are correct regarding concerns over labour market reform and competitiveness, the Globalisation Realists still appear to drive Treasury thinking on employment regulation.17 The Prime Minister himself stands in the tradition of the European Proceduralists, seeking to navigate the complexities of domestic labour law reform through the further development of individual rights in a post-Brexit era, rather than rebuild the institutional power and agency of organised labour. Finally, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s embrace of the Knowledge Economists has extended into a wider personal and political obsession with AI, incubated within his own policy institute and embraced by a new generation of ministers with similar reservations around labour regulation.
Overall, how might we assess the legislation and government approach to employment law? First, it has produced a welcome clear-out of much recent Tory legislation. Second, it has helped consolidate a series of individual rights introduced under New Labour, especially family-friendly initiatives, partly driven by the need to consolidate retained EU law in the post-Brexit era. Third, it has also extended individual rights, for instance in terms of statutory sick pay, and sought to address new labour market challenges, for instance over zero-hours contracts, and a right to switch off. Fourth, it has addressed some technical concerns around the operation of the 1999 statutory recognition procedure especially in terms of workplace access, while continuing to build consensus around the National Minimum Wage. Finally, it is providing a substantial overhaul to the enforcement regime. While it amounts to a substantial body of work, in critical areas it departs substantially from the original New Deal.
One final point concerns omissions. There is little about the extension of collective bargaining, nor the extension of good work. And there is nothing on stakeholding. Industrial democracy linked to industrial policy, such as an embrace of works councils or worker directors, is not part of the government’s agenda. There is nothing on company law reform, or anything that questions the supremacy of shareholder interests and directors’ duties, nor the economic democracy of worker ownership funds, one of the true policy highlights of the Corbyn era. There is no sign of a new Department of Labour, an idea regularly debated since the demise of the old Department of Employment, to signal the centrality of labour issues within government. There is very little on automation and the future of work, for instance the introduction of a tripartite commission on work futures at the centre of government.
Such omissions suggest the need for a Second New Deal for Working People. One that might resolve the unfinished business around single status and the extension of Fair Pay Agreements, embrace economic stakeholding and the structure of the firm, and convene an urgent national conversation on the future of work.
If, as seems likely, the Employment Rights Act is the high-water mark for labour law reform in this government, then an overall assessment of post-war employment regulation is clear cut. The historic turning point was, and unfortunately remains, the 1979 election. History is unlikely to assign the 2024 election the political significance many once hoped, unless over the next few years the labour movement can unite around a Second New Deal for Working People.
Jon Cruddas was the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham until 2024.
Notes
- Department of Business and Trade, ‘Biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation comes one step closer’, www.gov.uk, 15 September 2025.
- See, for example, K. Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society, Andre Deutsch, 1979.
- A Giant’s Strength: Some Thoughts on the Constitutional and Legal Position of Trade Unions in England, London: Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Society, 1958.
- Jeremy Bugler, ‘The New Oxford Group’, New Society, 15 February 1968, pp221-2.
- See for instance, H. Clegg, Pluralism and Industrial Relations’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol 13 No 3, 1975, pp309-16; A. Flanders, Management and Unions, Faber and Faber, 1970.
- A second generation of the ‘Oxford School’ included George Bain and Willy Brown key figures in New Labour’s Low Pay Commission.
- Report of British Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employer Associations 1965-1968, HMSO, June 1968, Cmnd. 3623.
- P. Nolan, ‘The Productivity Miracle’, in F. Green (ed), The Restructuring of the UK Economy, Harvester, 1989.
- IPPR, ‘Power to the People: How Stronger Unions Can Deliver Economic Justice’, 10 June 2018.
- Tony Blair, ‘We Won’t go Back to the 1970s’, The Times, 31 March 1997, 20.
- Although in 2004 minor technical alterations were introduced to prevent ‘union busting’, protect strikers, adapt the right to be accompanied, adapt balloting procedures, and halt far right entryism were introduced.
- Although the growing limitations of this approach were over time exposed as this European social model was increasingly challenged, such as in the Court of Justice in the famous Viking and Laval cases.
- C. Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air: The New Economy, Penguin, 2000.
- See J. Cruddas, The Dignity of Labour, Polity, 2021, pp75-78.
- TUC, Keir Starmer’s Speech to TUC Congress 2021, www.tuc.org.uk , 14 September 2021.
- ‘Labour sets out plans for Fair Pay Agreements to deliver New Deal for Working People’, Orpington Labour Party, www.orpingtonlabour.org.uk, 25 September 2021.
- ‘Treasury raises fears over costs of workers’ rights bill’, The Times, 1 March, 2025.