[Silhouette]

I fed back that this would be a barrier to hiring quality staff

When I worked as an employee, that kind of clause was one of my "gut feel" tests for whether I wanted to work somewhere. Even proposing it was a warning sign about the company culture, though because of the kind of situation you described I tended to give the benefit of the doubt if it was readily removed. I have never signed an employment contract that actually had this kind of heavyweight clause in it, and always had something that was explicitly more restrictive.

I think management and particularly lawyers sometimes ignore the possibility that terms they propose to a generally intelligent and detail-oriented workforce are going to have consequences. Maybe it's just standard legal CYA manoeuvres and wouldn't stand up anyway or would be the default in law even if the clause weren't there explicitly, but the potential employee doesn't necessarily know that. The contract is probably the first detailed, formal document that person ever sees from a prospective employer, and it can betray a great deal about an employee-hostile culture and create toxic bad feeling before they've even started, which is absurd if the employer and employee were otherwise a good enough fit to have reached that stage!