Lord Balfe
Main Page: Lord Balfe (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I start with a declaration of interest that does not usually come from this side of the Chamber. This month I celebrate my 50th continuous year of membership of the TUC-affiliated trade union movement. I am the president of the British Dietetic Association, which is a TUC-affiliated union, and I am an adviser to BALPA, which still has blessed memories of the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, and more recent memories, of course, of my friend the noble Lord, Lord Monks. So I speak with some sort of background.
I was struck by the level of consensus that I detected in the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn. The role of this Chamber is to revise, and there are certain areas of the Bill that could well be revised without us departing from the manifesto commitment of the party on this side of the House. I noted that the noble Lord made reference to the 1980s and compared it to today; what he did not say, of course, was that the last Labour Government kept in place all the legislation that was passed by their predecessor, by my noble friend Lord King and other Conservative Secretaries of State. I would predict that the central part of this Bill, on thresholds in public sector services, will not be repealed when the Labour Party, as it eventually will in a democracy, comes back to power. They will probably stay, because the point has been made—my noble friend Lord King made it—that there is a distinction between the industrial workforce and the public sector.
There is no doubt in my mind that a number of public sector strikes have been deeply unpopular. I have a briefing from the Mayor of London—I do not know whether the Opposition have had it—which says that, of the 26 disputes in London which have led to Tube strike action since 2008, 19 would have been prevented under this new legislation in relation to workers in essential services. That is quite a high figure, but of course it also presents an organisational challenge. There is a tendency, which people sometimes slip into, to think that trade unions are somehow led by people who are not followed by their workers. One has only to look at the strike that is going to take place tomorrow to see that you get quite high turn-outs for industrial action in ballots. One sometimes must reflect, as the noble Lord, Lord Monks, mentioned, that in a dispute there may be two sides to a story and that both sides need to sit down and talk to each other. That is the whole purpose of ACAS.
I would also say to the trade unions that they need to get out of their sectarian silo. I am sorry to keep on referring to the noble Lord, Lord Monks, but he has been the secretary-general of the European TUC. He will know that, outside this country, it is very unusual for the entire trade union movement to be dedicated to the support of just one party. That is not good for the trade union movement, particularly when we know that one-third of its members actually vote for the Conservative Party. Of course, a good number of the others do not vote at all and a handful, I am sorry to say, vote for the Liberal party. I think both sides of the Chamber can agree that that is not what either of us would like, but it is none the less the case.
I say to the trade union movement: reach out. You could have a Conservative Government for some years yet. Good relations and the interests of the members of the trade union movement are not served by the blanket refusal that you get on the part of some unions—I single out Unite particularly—although not all of them, to engage in any sensible dialogue with the governing party. That is not sensible. It is not good news for the members of that union.
Lord Monks
Does the noble Lord accept that the publication of the Bill makes that kind of dialogue even more unlikely?
Lord Balfe
I say to the noble Lord that the publication of the Bill probably arises in part from the fact that there is no strong trade union voice on this side of the House. There is no one around to say at the higher policy levels of the Conservative Party, “Hold on a minute, there is another side to this story”. I was about to say that unions such as BALPA, the BDA—the union that I am president of—Prospect and others have reached out and begun a dialogue, and I hope that that will continue.
We are, I hope, going to join together and look for some concessions from the Minister. I do not propose to go through them in detail because they will come up in Committee. With regard to facility time, the Conservatives’ manifesto actually said that they would legislate to,
“tighten the rules around taxpayer-funded paid ‘facility time’”.
You can tighten rules and still preserve a local interest and the right of local democracy to determine what happens. It is, frankly, not a localism agenda if you start telling district councils, such as the one my wife served on in Suffolk, how to regulate the 25% of the week that one person spends on facility time—generally doing things for the local authority, actually. We need to look at this with a broad brush. We want transparency on facility time, but we do not want day-to-day control. We cannot exercise it. We cannot say what matters in Forest Heath District Council in Suffolk or any individual authority. We can say, “You must publish—you must be in the daylight”, but we cannot lay down the rules.
Similarly, if e-balloting is okay for selecting the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, the ruling body of the Royal Statistical Society, of which I am a fellow, and the board of directors of a venture capital trust that I am investing in, I do not see that we can rule it out. Certainly, if we look at making it subject to some control or sanction by the certification officer, there must be a way forward. We cannot just write it off.
The third thing I want to mention is the financial aspect. If it were left to me, I would ban all financing of political parties beyond a very low amount, probably £5,000 per head. I would not have any hedge funds donating to parties. I would make parties fight for votes. But I say this: is it healthy for democracy to work in this direction? I just put that question. Is it a good thing that we should patently attack one of the three unsatisfactory wings of funding? I leave that question up in the air because, if it were left to me and if I were the Labour Party, I would not turn the clock back. When I came into power, I would immediately ban donations to political parties above a quite low level and say that everybody above that level could not donate. It would not be that they had to say how much; I would say, “You cannot donate. You cannot buy democracy”. But until that day comes, let us be careful to look at what we are doing and think about our responsibilities to democracy, which go further than our responsibilities to one or other side of the House.
Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)
My Lords, I first congratulate my noble friends on their maiden speeches, which showed great promise of some superb contributions to come.
Unfortunately, the Minister is not in her place. I listened carefully to her contribution, which was short—I suppose we should be grateful for that in some ways—but I was not convinced that she was convinced about many aspects of this Bill. I find that surprising. I spend some of my time working constructively with her, in a semi-industrial relations way, on apprenticeships, and I did not see the same conviction in her presentation today.
I have spent most of my working life involved in industrial relations, as I said in the 19 November debate that has already been quoted today, and which was introduced by my noble friend Lord Foulkes. As I said then, I owe most of my education—for better or worse, as one can judge on this contribution—to the trade union movement.
I, as general secretary, and my noble friend Lady Drake negotiated our way through some very difficult challenges, including large-scale redundancies, without strike action. Why? Because we had a constructive engagement that involved the positive approach to industrial relations, which, I would submit, most of the trade union movement in this country participates in. I sometimes reflect that it is unfortunate that the history of the trade union movement is often focused on the great strikes, which tends to take away the emphasis on all the work and activity that takes place without strike action. We have heard mentioned many times, so I need not repeat it, all the work that takes place on education and defending workers’ basic rights.
Is this Bill really going to make a constructive, positive contribution to improving industrial relations? For the life of me, I cannot see where in the Bill such a contribution is made. It is not as though we do not need it. We do face some real challenges. If the Bill was doing something about the real challenges of improving productivity and creating a more skilled workforce, I would be willing to look at it much more favourably. But there is nothing in this Bill.
There is a real problem with workforce industrial relations, as has been acknowledged by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and with management training. A significant number of management personnel still do not have any training at all, and a significant number of employers still do not provide reasonable training or take on apprenticeships. Those are the real challenges that we face, and they are not going to be addressed by this Bill.
I will not focus on the points that have been made exceedingly well by my noble friends Lord Mendelsohn and Lord Monks, because they made a better job of doing so than I would. I was interested in the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake—unfortunately, he is not in his place—who could not be described as “one of those trade unionists, so he would say that, wouldn’t he?”. You could say lots of things about him, but you cannot characterise him in that manner. He identified the issue. We have heard it said time and again in this debate: where is the call for the many wonderful features—that is my attempt at irony—of this Bill?
I was also fascinated by the attempt by the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, to establish his trade union credentials, which I do not doubt. I was just concerned about the bit where he talked about the Conservative association of trade unionists. I regard that phrase as an oxymoron—a contradictory cliché, for those who are not sure. I struggle to remember the campaigns that were led by the Conservative association of trade unionists. Maybe I missed them. Maybe it was leading the minimum wage campaign or the fight for equal pay; if so, I clearly missed it. No doubt the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, is about to tell me of the great campaigns. I knew he would rise eventually.
Lord Balfe
I remind the noble Lord that 30% of trade unionists vote for the Conservative Party but they are not widely represented in the leadership because the leadership replicates itself. The fact that the Conservatives are not often approached by the unions actually weakens the unions’ case.
Lord Young of Norwood Green
I thank the noble Lord. I have always been aware of the fact that a significant number of my members voted for the Conservative Party, despite my attempts to persuade them otherwise. We did not use the video, thank goodness—if we had they might have been convinced of something, although I do not know what.
Although I have tried to lighten my approach to this debate, it is a serious Bill that, as many people have rightly said, is partisan in many ways, whether intentionally or otherwise. The Minister must address that point. A number of people have asked whether the Government can really justify undermining check-off arrangements when there is no call for that. This Government are making a serious mistake and losing an opportunity, as I have said, to address the real challenges and problems that we face.
When the Minister reads my scintillating contribution in Hansard, I hope she will take into account the key points that I have made, and that others have made throughout this debate. This Bill does nothing to improve industrial relations and does not address the real challenges that we face in this country.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I hope I will not go too far down memory lane, but I would like to make a point of contrast between what we are discussing here and what we have often discussed in the trade union movement, which is about taking a more constructive position on the new world economy. Some months ago, some of us carried out an exercise with the TUC and UK members of European works councils with trade union and employer members. Frances O’Grady, Chuka Umunna and my noble friend Lord Monks were there, along with representatives of big companies, employers and workers, discussing investment, skills et cetera. It occurred to me during the course of the afternoon, listening to the various contributions, to ask how what we have been trying to do in that sense squares with the positions of the ideological fundamentalists of Conservative Central Office at present. How do those two things square? They do not.
I will give another example. We have growing inequality, which, as you can see around the OECD, correlates with less collective bargaining. Growing inequality is the opposite of what we want, so do we need more collective bargaining? Yes or no? The answer is yes, but does the Minister think the answer is yes? If we have this correlation between growing inequality and less collective bargaining, it would not be a bad idea to think it has something to do with organising and having this constructive relationship.
I suspect that the reason these things do not add up together is that there is some type of schizophrenia inside the Conservative Party—the same schizophrenia that I think we have with the “pull up the drawbridge” position on the European question. How can we remove this sort of misunderstanding, which I think is part of our mutual problem? Some speakers opposite have tried to imply that it is we and the trade unions who have walked away from social partnership, social dialogue or whatever you like to call it, but there is no evidence for that at all. It is the Conservative Party which has recently backed itself into a silo—today’s fashionable word.
Let me just remind the House of one little bit of history. In 1998 we arranged, for the first time ever, a meeting at the TUC with the leaders of the Conservative Party. William Hague led the team, and George Osborne was there. A number of colleagues who are here this evening were on the trade union side—my noble friends Lord Morris, Lady Donaghy, Lady Drake and Lord Monks, as I recall. Although it was partly subliminal, the message was a very important one: we were saying that we accept your legitimacy, as the Conservative Party, as part of the body politic in this country and that you should acknowledge ours. I am not quite sure that we are now seen as legitimate. We are perhaps in a better state than we were 100 years ago in our relationship—it has been a long journey since the Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists—but where are we now? Does the Conservative Party really want to go down the track of trying to delegitimise us by setting up a caricature of trade unionism? The caricature has us as An Enemy of the People—I am referring there to a play by Ibsen, in case anyone thought I was quoting Mao Tse-Tung.
How does that fit with all the rhetoric about the need to work together to increase our world market share? Answer: it does not. Some Members seem to want to conjure up an idea that we are so lacking in intelligence that we do not understand that public services are part of our living standards, and that people do not realise that when there is a strike in the public sector.
Lord Balfe
I point out to the noble Lord that the general secretary of the TUC, Frances O’Grady, has been within the past year to a group meeting of the Conservative Peers—I do not know whether she has addressed the Labour Peers—and we are still awaiting an invitation for our Prime Minister to address the Trades Union Congress. Perhaps that could be facilitated; perhaps the general secretary of the TUC could be invited to the Labour group of Peers.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I do not think that the Bill has helped to facilitate it; that is all I can say.
The issue is that we are now not being seen as part of the great happy family, which was the idea, but delegitimised, which is my thesis. I am trying to get someone to point out whether that is true or not with some evidence. The Bill seems, with one provision after another—beginning with my noble friend Lord Monks, everybody has gone through the list—to be intended to reduce the number of members, the size of any political fund and so on. That is the effect. If that is not intended, someone has not done their arithmetic properly in designing the Bill. I should be interested to hear whether the Minister thinks that I have got that wrong, and why.
Organising is inherently more difficult at present than when we had lots of big workplaces and there was a higher trade union density. That is true across the OECD. Where we are at the moment was summed up in a Financial Times editorial: the Government are crossing the road to pick a fight with the trade unions. Why? One reason might be political advantage—perish the thought. If the idea is not to cut the legs off the trade unions or the financing of the Labour Party, the Government have a very funny way of going about it.
On the point about check-off, the Government seem to think that because some private sector companies are working to government contracts, they can somehow reach into the private sector and tell them how to organise check-off. This has certainly been mentioned to us as what is happening at Sellafield and Dounreay. Even before the Bill has passed, the Civil Service has written to companies saying that this is how they have to go, and they have to step into line as if they were in the public sector. I would like that to be looked into, if it has not, because we are told that that is what is happening.
The reason I find that rather strange is that, having been a member for some years of the central arbitration committee judging recognition claims, I know that if you get recognition, you have a collective agreement—in Sellafield or wherever it is—and it is a natural part of the agreement that you do check-off. Unless the Government have some ideological reason in mind for doing it, I do not think they should interfere with or intervene in voluntary arrangements that suit both parties.
I shall say a couple of sentence about party funding. A joint approach on this is an idea whose time has come. There are naturally the usual caveats, but we know that there is something weird about the attempt to go back to 1927, after the General Strike. Contracting in was repealed by Attlee in 1945 and was not revisited by Churchill or Thatcher. I therefore have some sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is trying to do, but there are cherry-picking problems in this. I do not think it is possible to assume that an individual and a union with 1 million members are the same thing. It is clear that there are trade-offs, but the time has come to investigate because there is mutual interest at present, which there has not been until now, to do something along that line.