RESTRICTIONS ON THE HOURS OF WORK OF YOUNG PERSONS
11. All members of the working party agreed that it was still necessary to restrict the hours of work of young persons (i.e. persons under 18) in factories. Their reasons were not medical but social; such as the desirability of ensuring adequate leisure during the formative years, for educational, recreational and social pursuits (paragraph 12 of the report). The DEP agrees that in principle this is a desirable objective for all types of employment. This fact by itself may not necessarily justify widening the scope of statutory restrictions. It might for instance be argued that extending the scope of restrictions would increase the obstacles to productivity at a time when the aim is to reduce them. Against this, it could be said that this would have to be seen in proportion against the background of a larger gain to productivity from the removal of restrictions on women's hours of work. The DEP has no evidence that the absence of restrictions over a substantial part of the employment field is leading to serious abuses. The strength of the case for applying restrictions more widely must be affected by the extent to which abuses are known to arise in practice, either generally or in particular types of employment, and the DEP would welcome information about this.
12. There are some areas of employment in which it would be difficult in any event to enforce restrictions. It will be recalled that when in 1949 the Gowers Committee in its report* on Hours of Employment of Juveniles recommended that restrictions on the hours worked by adolescents should be applied as widely and uniformly as possible, it excluded employment in agriculture and forestry, fishing and shipping, private domestic work and outworking. These employments are excluded from the scope of this paper. The DEP notes however that the Board of Trade intends to take powers in its forthcoming legislation to regulate the employment of young persons on any ship registered in the United Kingdom including fishing boats.
13. If statutory restrictions on young persons' hours were extended to types of employment not previously covered by such restrictions, the DEP's view is that they would have to be of the simplest possible kind and confined to the minimum rules needed to achieve the objective. The restrictions at present applied to young persons in factories are cumbersome and would be an excessive imposition in employment where there had been no hours restrictions in the past and where perhaps the case for introducing them was only marginal. simpler the restrictions were, the better they would be grasped by employers and workers alike, the less difficulty there would be in securing compliance and the less need for an exemption procedure for individual firms. But there is also a strong case for revising the rules in factories, as the working party found. In the DEP's view it may be possible to draw up a single and relatively simple scheme of rules which could be applied uniformly, in general, both to young persons in factories and those in other types of employment.
14. Although such a single scheme might fit the great majority of types of employment, there would still be some it would not fit, and special provision would need to be made for these types of employment either in the body of the new legislation or in general exemption regulations. There is already some provision of this kind e.g. in Section 99 of the Factories Act, 1961, relating to specified continuous process industries, and in some regulations.
The case for such special provision would be considered on its merits at the appropriate time, but it would be helpful to have some idea at this stage of the types of
*Reprinted 1962, Cmd. 7664.
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