The Employment Rights Directorate (ERD) sits in the Competition, Markets and Regulatory Reform Group at the heart of the Department for Business and Trade.
Employment Rights is a top priority for the new Government who have set out an ambitious, wide ranging and long-term reform plan for workers’ rights in their manifesto, The Plan to Make Work Pay. ERD is at the very centre of delivering that programme by a mixture of legislative – including the Employment Rights Bill currently in parliament - and non-legislative measures.
To accommodate this new priority the Directorate has expanded significantly, and retains a working culture that we are exceptionally proud of. We pride ourselves on the high quality and significant quantity of work that we deliver but we are clear that it is our working culture that enables us to deliver that. The Directorate is inclusive, friendly, collaborative, supportive and embraces genuinely flexible working.
The Security of Work branch in ERD is a newly formed and growing Deputy Director led team, primarily responsible for developing and implementing a significant package of policy and associated legislation set out in the Plan to Make Work Pay. These include:
* Banning exploitative zero-hour contracts;
* Making protection from unfair dismissal a day one employment right;
* Tackling bogus self-employment; and
* Guarding against some employers exploiting the complexity of the UK’s existing employment status framework to deny people their legal rights.
As a result, the work of the team cuts across sectors and encompasses those on low hour contracts, agency workers and the gig economy as well as freelancers and self-employed contractors.
These are high profile and challenging roles with a significant level of ministerial interest, both within DBT and across government. There is also significant interest from a broad range of senior external stakeholders. Most importantly, the work has a significant, tangible, real-world impact on the lives of working people.
The policy areas are complex and technical, requiring close working with legal and analytical colleagues and range from very early policy development and scoping work through to the details of legislation.
The team currently consists of c. 20 policy officials across a range of grades and is spread across four DBT sites. We are a friendly, supportive and flexible team with a wide range of backgrounds and experience from both within and outside the Civil Service and actively support a range of working patterns to balance personal and work lives.
We are recruiting for two talented policy professionals as part of the expansion of the team. The exact remit and deliverables for each role will be finalised depending on the skills, interests and experience of the individuals appointed alongside ongoing decisions around exact priorities and workstreams but broadly:
1. Zero-hour contracts
The Government is committed to ending one-sided flexibility, by introducing a right to a guaranteed hours contract, and a right to reasonable notice of shifts, with proportionate compensation for shifts cancelled or curtailed at short notice for workers. This role is likely to include developing legislation to ensure these measures can apply to agency workers.
The successful individual will oversee the development of the policy and delivery of primary and secondary legislation, as well as ministerial briefings, stakeholder engagement, parliamentary questions, and correspondence. This role would suit an individual who can engage with both technical legislative detail, as well as seeing the bigger picture. The successful individual will be comfortable operating at pace, be able to prioritise effectively and tolerate ambiguity, and work in collaboration with a wide range of people.
2. Employment status
This role will initially combine both strategy and policy thinking to consider broad questions around how the existing three-tier employment status framework is applied by businesses and options for tackling areas where it is open to abuse or manipulation. This will require working across government to develop policy, and significant engagement and consultation with external stakeholders. We expect the focus of the role to subsequently turn to policy delivery. This would suit you if you are confident working at the early stage of the policy development cycle, have the skills to quickly understand a legally complex policy area with significant ambiguity and enjoy the challenge of balancing competing issues and views to find a way forward.
Both roles will include management of a small team of 1-2 people.
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