These new employment laws are coming at precisely the wrong time.
This matters specifically for the moral mission Healey claims he is on: getting young people off welfare and into work. There are 981,000 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training.
And what about innovation?
Innovative tech companies such as Meta and Amazon have reversed their Covid-19-era work-from-home policies, and in 2021 Microsoft led a large study of 61,000 employees that found working from home was killing their innovation.
How can the Chancellor support innovation at the same time as passing legislation that innovators specifically state is harmful to innovation?
What Labour seems to struggle with is that innovation doesn’t emerge from the Cabinet prescribing how a company should operate.
It comes from the companies being free to pursue their missions, without clipboard-wielding bureaucrats getting in the way.
The reality is that since Covid-19, work-from-home policies have varied between companies and sectors.
For some companies it works well; for others, it doesn’t. But the question is who is best placed to decide.
It’s hard to work out exactly what problem this new law is trying to solve.
And while the Chancellor has been admirably specific about a “growth” plan, he seems to treat the policy to achieve it as if it’s something protected by the Official Secrets Act.
My advice to him is this: if he’s struggling for funds to finance growth at the Budget, there is one route that costs the Treasury nothing.
Reduce the hassle factor for those who are solving all of your stated priorities. And whatever your Cabinet colleagues say, do the opposite. Make it easier to hire people, easier to manage them and bin this daft and harmful policy.