Labour’s plan amounts to a skivers’ charter

NEWS of a policy initiative by the Labour Party is never calculated to be good for my blood pressure but the latest one proposing to give workers the ‘right to switch off’ sent it off the scale.

My company runs 14 hotels and resorts scattered around five countries in multiple time zones, and so the idea that I and my staff could confine our interactions to a rigid set of working hours is absurd.

As someone who prides himself on being a good employer, I am not going to bother anyone unnecessarily, but if a situation requires input from a person out of the office then it is perfectly reasonable to contact them outside normal hours.

And I practise what I preach. I make myself available to my colleagues 24/7.

Sir Keir Starmer recently had the temerity to attack the Tory record on economic growth. But Labour’s proposal to ban bosses from contacting employees during their evenings, weekends and holidays, is precisely the sort of measure that will cripple businesses by reducing their productivity and making them less competitive.

One of the reasons I am a Brexiteer is because I detested the way the EU was strangling commerce in red tape.

But Sir Keir’s wish to enshrine in law a rule pioneered by the French, those lovers of the nanny state, would only make doing business harder, something the Gallic subsidiary of British pest-control firm Rentokil has learned to its cost.

In 2018, one of its workers was awarded €60,000 (£52,725) after the company was found to have failed to respect ‘le droit de la déconnexion’ (the right to disconnect).

Together with Labour’s proposal to make working from home a legal right, the right to switch off amounts to a skivers’ charter.

After all, it’s delusional to believe people at home work as diligently as those who turn up to the office. And what about those who can’t work from home, such as plumbers, drivers and my hotel chefs?

As politicians, Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner know only too well that the demands of the news cycle require them to make themselves freely available. Politicians can’t work 9 to 5, why should they expect the rest of us to?