In July, the Government launched a formal, 12-week consultation on a proposal to establish a new Single Enforcement Body for employment rights. You might even have submitted a response (the consultation closed yesterday). And you probably concluded that it is just some dastardly Tory plan to slash the resources of the existing enforcement bodies. But how well do you know your (ancient) history?

Between 2000 and 2013, while working as employment policy officer at Citizens Advice, I researched and wrote a deadly boring series of policy reports arguing for a consolidation of the three main labour market enforcement bodies – the HMRC minimum wage enforcement team, the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate (EASI), and the Gangmaster Licensing Authority (GLA) – into a single Fair Employment Agency fit for the 21st century, with the legal powers and resources to “root out the rogues” without imposing unnecessary regulatory burden on the great majority of compliant employers.

In the reports – and in any number of shorter articles, submissions to parliamentary committees, campaign leaflets, and conference presentations – I noted that, all too often, vulnerable workers are too fearful of further victimisation or dismissal to issue an employment tribunal claim, the principal means of enforcing most statutory workplace rights. And, as a result, rogue employers can profit from exploitation with near impunity. In 2005, for example, I noted that:

I suggested replacing this fragmented enforcement architecture with a “more joined-up system of advice, guidance and practical business support for small, low-profitability employers, and a more pro-active approach to compliance and, where necessary, enforcement” through a single enforcement body – or Fair Employment Agency.

From the outset, my proposal was firmly opposed by the Great Protector of workers’ rights, the TUC. Enforcing workers’ rights is a job for trade unions, not government, I was told. And union membership was now growing so rapidly that all workers would be unionised by the 26th century. Well, all workers in whatever remained of the public sector in the 26th century, anyway.

However, as few if any of the tens of thousands of vulnerable, exploited workers seeking employment-related advice from what were then known as Citizens Advice Bureaux would live to cheer the arrival of the TUC’s cavalry, I plodded on. Occasionally, I would win over a key public policy actor – the then Equal Opportunities Commission, the Institute for Public Policy Research, the trade union Unison – only to watch them get nobbled by the more influential (and much better resourced) brothers and sisters at the TUC.

Then, in early 2006, the Labour government became interested, announcing – in a DTI policy document, Protecting vulnerable workers, supporting good employers – that “we need to ensure that vulnerable workers are not mistreated but get the rights they are entitled to.” Policy officials at the DTI (or was it BERR by then?) made encouraging noises. And in 2007 I was invited to join a Vulnerable Worker Enforcement Forum, chaired by the employment relations minister. This included senior officials from the enforcement bodies, as well as officials from each of their sponsoring departments, and my friends and admirers at the TUC were there to ensure nothing significant ensued.

Sure enough, when the Forum concluded in August 2008, having decided to do little more than create a single telephone gateway to the various enforcement bodies – the Pay & Work Rights Helpline, since abandoned and rolled-up into the Acas Helpline – the then minister, Pat McFadden MP, told me that, while he agreed a single enforcement body/Fair Employment Agency was “a great idea”, he couldn’t be arsed with all the inter-departmental wrangling that would be involved in setting one up. (To be fair to Pat, what he actually said was “Gordon Brown won’t let me [because the TUC have told him not to], and I can’t spend another two years arguing with him.”)

Fast forward to 2011, when (I’m told) the Coalition’s first employment relations minister, Liberal Democrat MP Ed Davey, used to wave a crumpled copy of my last report for Citizens Advice on the issue at officials and demand to know “what we are doing about this”. ‘Not a lot’ seems to have been the answer, and in July 2012 a ministerial review of “the existing workplace rights compliance and enforcement arrangements, to establish the scope for streamlining them and making them more effective” quietly concluded that a single agency “would not provide significant benefits to workers.”

Noting that “the Government’s existing workplace rights compliance and enforcement arrangements are not those that someone starting now, with a blank sheet of paper, would devise”, and that “denial of paid holiday (or owed holiday pay) affects many more workers than denial of each of the rights that are covered by [the existing] enforcement bodies”, that 2011 report of mine waved by Ed Davey – Give us a break!, which was endorsed by the Child Poverty Action Group, the Fawcett Society, Gingerbread, Homeworkers Worldwide, the Law Centres Federation, Legal Action Group, Maternity Action, Oxfam, and Working Families – concluded that:

And, despite the negative outcome of the 2012 ministerial review, the idea clearly stuck around in someone’s head, because in October 2014, at the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow, then business secretary Vince Cable MP announced that his party’s manifesto for the 2015 general election would promise a new Workers’ Rights Agency, to “revamp efforts to enforce employment law and tackle the exploitation of workers” by combining the remits of “the minimum wage enforcement section of HMRC, the working time directive section at the Health & Safety Executive, the BIS Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, and the GLA.” According to Cable, this “joined-up enforcement approach” would “ensure the minority of unscrupulous employers who break the law do not get away with undercutting other employers who play by the rules.” So, there would be significant benefits to workers after all.

In the event, Cable’s Workers’ Rights Agency didn’t make it into his party’s mahoosive, 160-page manifesto, though when asked about this his then junior minister, Jo Swinson, tweeted “the idea’s still there.” By which Ms Swinson appears to have meant ‘the idea’s now been stolen by the Tories.’ For, while the Tory election manifesto was as silent on the idea as those of the Liberal Democrats and Ed Miliband’s pathetically timid Labour, within a few weeks of his Nick Clegg-free return to Downing Street, in May 2015, David Cameron announced the creation of “a new enforcement agency that cracks down on the worst cases of exploitation.”

Evidently, not everyone in Cameron’s new government had got the memo, because all that came of this announcement was the creation – under Part 1 of the Immigration Act 2015 of all things – of “a new statutory Director of Labour Market Enforcement, responsible for providing a central hub of intelligence and facilitating the flexible allocation of resources” between “enforcement of the national minimum wage by HMRC, the regulation of employment agencies by [EASI] and the licensing of legitimate labour providers by the GLA.” And, in January 2017, Professor Sir David Metcalf, formerly chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, was named as the first holder of the post, charged with drawing up “an annual strategy targeting sectors and regions which are vulnerable to unscrupulous employment practices”.

Sir David published his first annual strategy in May 2018. This noted that