Fire and rehire tactics need to be outlawed and unscrupulous companies bullying our key workers to take lower pay and worse conditions should be called out and held to account.

Andy McDonald MP is right- the Tories side more with bad employers rather than they do with working people.

I’m proud to be part of a team of Labour MPs pressing the UK government to outlaw the abhorrent practice of employers firing their workers and then re-hiring them on worse terms and conditions.

Stephen Kinnock: Fire and rehire has been used against supermarket staff who worked through lockdown to keep our country running, and the practice has now spread into schools, with teachers being threatened with the sack unless they agree to worse terms and conditions. Does the Minister agree that it is completely unacceptable that our key workers, who have sacrificed the most in our national effort against covid, are the very people now being threatened by these bully-boy fire and rehire tactics?

Paul Scully: I have said repeatedly that bully-boy tactics are absolutely unacceptable, but if it is a matter of a choice over protecting jobs in the first place, that is the flexibility that we need to check, based on the evidence, and ACAS has gone a long way to providing that evidence.