Business on trial: Cops, courts and there’s no clarity

The Fair Work Agency, which will oversee new rights going to the Lords this week, would be granted powers of arrest on a par with the police – but ministers haven’t made its aims clear.

The government is handing extraordinary powers to an unelected body, without offering even the most basic clarity on what it’s meant to achieve.

Under sweeping amendments heading to the House of Lords this week, the newly created Fair Work Agency is set to be armed with police-style authority: the right to arrest, raid homes, seize documents and digital equipment, and force individuals to attend interviews.

These powers are vast and invasive, and the framework guiding their use remains undefined.

The Employment Rights Bill, as amended, gives this new body the tools of a criminal justice agency, yet offers no transparent mission or operating manual.

The agency’s goals are opaque, its oversight mechanisms unclear, and its commitment to supporting good employers entirely missing from the conversation.

Business leaders across the country are right to be deeply concerned.

The right to enter homes—not just business premises—based on suspicion that employment documents or equipment might be inside, represents a serious overextension of state power. Obtaining a warrant should never be a blank cheque for enforcement bodies, especially when applied to businesses that may have fallen foul of administrative rules rather than serious labour abuses.

Even more troubling is the agency’s ability to launch tribunal proceedings on behalf of workers who haven’t asked for legal action. This level of state intervention, bypassing individual consent, creates a dangerous precedent—removing agency from the very people the law claims to protect.

These proposals do not strike a fair balance. They tilt the entire system toward state suspicion and punishment, rather than partnership and improvement.

That’s not regulation, it is coercion, and it risks turning every employer into a suspect, regardless of intent or record.

Small and medium-sized enterprises—the very firms driving employment and growth—will bear the brunt. These are the companies already contending with rising costs, tax complexity, and regulatory overload. They employ locally, invest in skills, and often operate on tight margins.

Instead of support or clarity, they’re being met with threats of raids and arrests.

The government is taking an adversarial stance toward business at precisely the moment it should be working in lockstep with it. Enforcement is important—but it must be targeted, justified, and proportionate. Right now, that’s not guaranteed.

The lack of specificity around the Fair Work Agency’s remit is a major failing. Is the priority stamping out wage theft and exploitation? Ensuring gender pay gap transparency? Policing sick pay and holidays?

The bill lumps all these issues together under one vague mandate, with an enforcement model that treats every infraction, no matter how minor, as grounds for sweeping action.

That’s not effective labour market governance. It’s a climate of uncertainty and fear.

Good employers—who make up the overwhelming majority—deserve better than to be treated with suspicion. They deserve an enforcement body that prioritizes collaboration and education over punitive action. That balance isn’t in the current legislation.

Employment lawyers and industry groups have already sounded the alarm. These powers are excessive, and the thresholds for their use remain worryingly undefined. Without urgent changes, the agency risks going from untested to untrusted before it even begins its work.

Parliament must act quickly. The Lords should demand clear answers on the Fair Work Agency’s operational focus, enforcement priorities, and accountability to employers and the public.

There must be strict legal definitions around when and how home entry, arrest, and seizure powers can be used. There must be public reporting requirements and proper scrutiny.

And above all, there must be an explicit commitment to working with good employers as allies, not treating them as a problem to be rooted out.

Britain’s business community wants to see fair rules in the workplace. But fairness cuts both ways. Enforcement must be intelligent, restrained, and directed toward genuine wrongdoing—not turned into a dragnet for technical errors or non-compliance with yet-to-be-understood rules.

If Labour is serious about economic growth, it needs to recognise that business isn’t the enemy of progress, it’s the engine of it.

Empowering a quasi-police force without a mandate does nothing to improve workplace conditions and everything to damage the relationship between employers and the state.