Trade Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Prosser and Lord Stoneham of Droxford

Tuesday 19th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister will have noticed the slight but significant change of wording in this amendment. Despite my cogent and—I thought—very persuasive argument when I moved my amendment in Committee, I clearly failed to move the Government Front Bench. The Government’s argument was that currently there are a variety of ways in which employers can and do engage with the workforce. Quite so—there is no disagreement between us on that. The noble Earl, Lord Courtown, said:

“It is not right that we restrict how employee engagement can happen”.—[Official Report, 25/2/16; col. 462.]

Nothing in my previous amendment nor in this amendment would or could restrict ways in which employee engagement can take place. Indeed, the thinking behind the amendment is to encourage involvement, participation and voice, and for a thousand flowers to bloom. The amendment asks that employers are encouraged,

“to have due regard to … mechanisms”—

in other words, to establish systems which suit themselves and the workforce.

Back in 2009, David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, director of the Involvement and Participation Association, in which I declare an interest as a member of the board, produced a report for the then Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills entitled Engaging for Success. A number of subsequent events took place. In March 2011, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, gave his backing to the newly established independent employee engagement task force during its launch at No. 10 Downing Street. In November 2012, 43 CEOs, from a wide range of organisations, signed a letter inviting UK businesses to embed employee engagement in the ways in which they work and quantified the loss to the UK from low levels of employee engagement.

Later that month, 300 practitioners gathered in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. In May 2013 the job design and engagement White Paper was published and in May 2014 the well-being and engagement White Paper was published. By August 2015 more than 600,000 visits had been made to the EFS website—around 27,000 a month—and 1.4 million hits had been made on the EFS pages. There has been lots of interest and lots of activity. Then just last month a White Paper on further evidence was published showing, via new sector case studies, the links between employee engagement and business performance.

When I spoke in Committee I mentioned the report produced by the IPA entitled Involvement and Productivity—The Missing Piece of the Puzzle?. I remind your Lordships’ House that the report examined the evidence from large surveys, behavioural experiments, academic studies and employers themselves and went on to show that, when employees have a voice in the decision-making process over their jobs and the wider organisation, productivity is higher.

We have a lot of government activity and support, right up to the level of Prime Minister. We have a large, wide-ranging and supportive group of employers involved and a report demonstrating the link between employee engagement and improved productivity. What’s not to like? The amendment calls on the Government to reiterate their support and to give this initiative—which they are on record as being supportive of—a formal boost.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, when I spoke in Committee I made reference to the Minister behaving like Stonewall Jackson. I was concerned in making that analogy because I pointed out to the Committee that he was eventually shot by his own side. I was mightily relieved today that, when all the cannons were turned on the Minister, the Government made a number of sensible suggestions in the interests of her welfare.

As we come to this debate, we can relax a little and look at how industrial relations affect industry and employment in this country. I hope that we can spend a moment away from the adversarial side of industrial relations and look at the more positive aspects. It is not that I do not respect the need for collective bargaining but I see the benefits of employee participation and working with trade unions as important elements of our democracy. It is sad that in industry generally we have often relied far too much on overseas companies and foreign management to bring in new techniques for our managers and employees and benefit from. There are some notable examples, particularly John Lewis and Marks & Spencer, but I have to say that in these days when customer service, quality and value-added products and services are so important all these aspects of employment require direct employee engagement.

I am reminded of my own experience in the 1970s in a WEA class of shop stewards from the Morris Cowley plant who I had to teach the economics of the car industry. It was not an easy task at that time, particularly as they were cynically suspicious of me and I was warning them of the coming threat to them and their jobs from Japan, which had reached America and was about to become very dominant in Europe. The Morris Marina was the car those employees made at the time and I remember using the words of Gerald Ratner to describe their product.

At that point, there was uproar in the class. The people who made the rear door panels and the electrics and those who worked in the paint shop came to an amazing defence of their product. I was quite astonished. They took real pride in their product and in what they did in that plant, despite its huge complexities and difficulties at that time. Throughout the rest of my career, I have always thought what an opportunity was missed by British management in the British motor industry at that time by failing to engage with its staff. It was only when we had the foreign management of Nissan, Jaguar Land Rover, Toyota and Honda that we started to make real progress in those sectors.