Angela Rayner is exercising her ‘right to switch off’ Britain’s growth

It was reported over the weekend that the government has dropped ‘the right to switch off’ from its Employment Rights Bill. Such a right, it has been widely asserted, had appeared in Labour’s manifesto for last year’s general election, promising that employees would be granted a legal right to ignore their boss’s emails outside their contracted working hours. However, it was left out of the bill as originally published last autumn, and neither has it been introduced as an amendment.

But it seems that we were not really paying attention. It is true that Angela Rayner, in an interview with the Financial Times in May, made the suggestion that the ‘right to switch off’ would be included in the upcoming manifesto. The ‘right to switch off’ also appeared in a pre-manifesto document called Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering a New Deal for Working People, which was published the week that the election was called.