Enquiry into flexible labour market

The Trade and Industry Committee has announced that it will conduct an enquiry into UK Employment Regulation.

During the course of its enquiry the Committee will consider issues including:

• the contribution labour market flexibility makes to the UK economy;
  
• whether the current degree of flexibility is appropriate or desirable, and, if not, what measures the Government should take.

The Committee would welcome written evidence on these or any other related issues by 18 June 2004. Details of any oral evidence will be announced shortly after that date.

The Committee has requested that, written evidence should take the form of a memorandum with numbered paragraphs and should be submitted, as a MS Word document, by e-mail to tradeindcom@parliament.uk with a single hard copy sent to the Clerk at Trade and Industry Committee, Committee Office, House of Commons, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA.

Alternatively, if you wish to comment here, I will collate the responses and make a submission.

Response

One member of the UKTECH has already responded to the call and sent in this example of his experience.

Dear Sirs,

Witness Evidence:

We are a small consultancy that supplies IT expertise to major corporates. In addition to this we write the software for xxxxxxxx. This system is the one used by almost all xxxxx's in the UK.

We do not own this system. It is copyright and marketed by CompanyX Limited.

The UK market for this tool is now saturated and a considerable portion of CompanyX Limited's new software sales are now overseas generating valuable export income for the UK. In many senses this is a world leading product.

But because the market for this software is highly vertical i.e. "can only be sold to xxxxx" the income flow it generates is slow and steady rather than spectacular. It is an extremely viable and successful all British product nonetheless as CompanyX have responded to their market with the appropriate caution and growth curve, gathering their resources carefully as they increase momentum.

However, there was a cloud on the horizon: The version of the software that CompanyX had been selling had started to show its age (about 5 years old - which in software terms is very old indeed) and competitors were moving to compete with them and capture the hearts and minds of overseas xxxxxxx's. CompanyX Limited were then faced with hiring a software engineer of sufficient calibre, track record and trust to engineer an entire saleable product for them from scratch using the latest software techniques. To take such an expensive person on board would have brought considerable risks - not least the question of what to do with such a resource when they were not programming new software.

Inevitably they would have ended in a position where their most valuable IT resource was thrown at high risk new projects the company was not ready to follow through on the sales and marketing front or run of the mill internal work - simply because the person was there 9 to 5 each day and something would have to be done with them to recoup the spend on their wages.