Its initial objectives are to improve standards in recruitment, with a special focus on new technology platforms, to better protect workers and jobseekers, and help tackle labour abuses and improve UK labour market regulation.

Other objectives include reducing barriers to work, helping more people get into work and into new forms of work and, the group said, “to make UK hiring the fastest globally, improving people’s choices and chances of getting employment”.

The APPG will meet in Parliament across the next 12 months to develop briefings and action plans to achieve its objectives, which will be shared with UK government. Chairing the APPG is Labour MP for Hull Emma Hardy. 

The APPG secretariat is Hook, Hampshire-based Wychwood Consulting, supported by the Better Hiring Institute (BHI). Among Wychwood’s consulting specialities is identity management schemes. The BHI is a social enterprise part of the Modern Work Foundation, a Community Interest Company that also runs UK flexible worker advice platform JobsAware (www.jobsaware.co.uk). Keith Rosser, director of Reed Screening, is one of BHI’s advisory board members. 

“This is critically important work to revolutionise UK hiring and working to best maximise available talent, harness innovation, enable the transition into our future of work and ensure that our new world of work is prosperous for all,” said a BHI statement about the APPG. “The strategic question the APPG will seek to address is how can the UK create the world’s most attractive/prosperous labour market?”

The APPG chair said: “Modernising employment and hiring is essential to maximising good job opportunities for all, to make best use of the available talent in the UK, and to promote the regions of the UK as destinations for workers to work flexibly and remotely. This is essential to unlocking the full potential of the UK and of places such as Hull that can be transformed as innovative work locations for our new age of working.”

The BHI has played a key role in advising government and industry on the current digital right to work and digital identity schemes designed to make hiring faster and more secure. The BHI works with more than 6,000 employers and recently launched sector-specific hiring best practice guidance.

Rosser, chair of the BHI, said: “We have a huge opportunity to revolutionise hiring here in the UK to maximise the benefits of fast and remote hiring, whilst at the same time improving the UK labour market to make it highly attractive to all, being both pro-growth and pro-worker in our new digital age of work.”
 
The website for the new APPG on Modernising Employment can be found here.

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