Lord Balfe
Main Page: Lord Balfe (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord King of Bridgwater
Perhaps the doctors got a round of applause because the patients were so pleased to see that they had come back.
Lord Balfe (Con)
It is good occasionally to get up on this side of the House and remember why I am on the Conservative Benches and not on the opposition Benches. This is a clear manifesto commitment. You can throw statistics around for how many people voted for the Government and how many people did this or that. They are different systems. It is clearly written in the manifesto that:
“Industrial action in these essential services would require the support of at least 40 per cent of all those entitled to take part in strike ballots - as well as a majority of those who actually turn out to vote.”
I am impressed with the arithmetic of the noble Lord, Lord Dykes. I am a little puzzled if the number of people coming into his office for a manifesto varied between eight and 10, giving an average of six—he obviously went to a different school to where I learnt my averages. These are different elections. I have no objection to proportional representation. I was a member of the Labour campaign for electoral reform for the better part of 20 years. I voted for the alternative vote system in the referendum because I believe that democracy is strengthened if it is more firmly based than it is at the moment. I am always impressed by the fact that, whenever the Labour Party is in opposition and look as if it is not going to win, it sets up commissions under the noble Lord, Lord Plant, or Robin Cook to look at electoral reform. Then somehow when it gets into government electoral reform gets lost.
This is a separate issue. What majority the Government have is irrelevant to the fact that the Government have a mandate under our constitutional system and a clear entitlement by virtue of the manifesto to introduce this legislation.
Lord Dykes
Does the noble Lord agree that the aspiration for sensible governance of any country is for the number of seats in Parliament to equate proportionally to the percentage of votes from the electorate? The closer we get to that, the more we get a natural balance of the genuine result. The only such systems in Europe, of which the noble Lord has great knowledge, are the Irish with the single transferable vote system and Germany with the additional member system. Why does he not support that?
Lord Balfe
I think we are straying a little, but I am happy to talk to the noble Lord afterwards about different electoral systems.
Many strikes are unpopular, and sometimes the trade union movement does itself no good. I would imagine that everyone on the opposition Benches is uncomfortable at RMT chief Steve Hedley’s comment:
“I think all the Tories are an absolute disgrace, they should be taken out and shot to be quite frank with you.”
Obviously, no one is going to support statements like that, but they are made and reported with pictures of a union leader with a Kalashnikov in the Evening Standard, and this impacts on people.
I quoted earlier what I call the moderate unions—the 16 unions that issued the brief on the Bill. It does not mention strike ballots once. Over four pages it brings out a good number of other points, including on electronic balloting, check-off, agency workers and the Certification Officer. There is not a single word on ballot thresholds. I suggest that the Government have a clear mandate for this. According to the Mayor of London’s brief, which may or may not be accurate, over half the strikes called by RMT would not be possible under this law. That could well be the makings of a rather popular law.
I counsel noble Lords opposite—including the noble Lord, Lord Wallace—to have a look at the sayings of Mr Mark Serwotka, the head of the Public and Commercial Services Union, who said that this Bill provides an organisational challenge. I draw his attention, too, to the words of a trade union general secretary, who is a friend of mine, who said to me, “Richard, I would never take them out on strike if I only had half the people behind me”. If you are going to have a strike, you need to have a good, solid basis of representation and a good, solid majority behind you. I think that the Government in this instance have a very clear mandate for this change, and I doubt that Labour will repeal it when the party—as it inevitably will—comes into office.
Lord Sawyer (Lab)
As a Member who has led many strikes, I have some experience of what it takes to make one successful. Indeed, to persuade any group of trade union members to take strike action, a trade union leader has to have an outstandingly good case. Throughout my career, and many years as a trade union leader, there were no restrictions or numbers on ballots, but I always had to be clear that, although I might go to a work situation where a small number of members were expressing a point of view, which today might be taken as a ballot, the vast majority of trade union members were behind what the union wanted to do. Trade unions cannot call industrial action without the support of their members. We never needed ballots to tell us that we had support in the past, and we do not need them to tell us now. I understand that times have moved on, and political parties and the wider electorate want some measure about the level of support, but I would not like anybody to be under the impression that trade union leaders can just call members out on strike willy-nilly. That is not the case; it needs a lot of thought and consideration and wide support.
Although this debate is only in its early stages, I am already starting to feel anxious that it is not a Trade Union Bill debate but a kind of RMT debate. It focuses on the actions of one particular union. I remember the late, great Mr Bob Crow was often vilified in the press for being an unpopular trade union leader, but that was not the case after he died, when the management of the business came out in numbers to say what a great trade union leader he had been.
Lord Balfe
Can I point out to the noble Lord that people always say nice things about you when you are dead? If they start saying them about you while you are still alive, that is the time to get really worried.
Lord Sawyer
That is not a matter that can be proved. Clearly, those of us who know about employer relations in the industry knew that Bob Crow was a widely respected, sensible and realistic trade union negotiator. The problem was that he was very tough—he drove a tough bargain on behalf of his members. Let us not forget, when we debate manifesto commitments and ballot thresholds, that the balance of power at the workplace, setting aside London and the RMT, is massively loaded in favour of the employer. Trade unions throughout their history have needed to work very hard and make big sacrifices to prosecute their case and get any benefits from taking industrial action. That is the kind of point that the noble Lord, Lord Monks, made—it is about getting some kind of balance. I understand the manifesto commitment and I understand where the Government are coming from, but it is balance that we are looking for in this debate. It is a question of what seems to be fair and reasonable, and the two clauses, both the 50% and 40%, seem a bridge too far.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I have not seen the poll so I shall go and discover what the situation is. We have given this a fair wind and I think it is time that I withdraw my amendment. However, I wish to mark that this raises some very large problems about government to do with fairness, how government tries to represent all the citizens of this country, as it does, and the balance of legislation. I think that the Government would be extremely unwise not to bear that in mind in the happy first six months after their victory.
Lord Balfe
The noble Lord is a very good example of a sinner who repents. I have happy memories of him standing at the Dispatch Box defending our Government for many years.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
My Lords, it is a very serious issue when you diminish somebody’s right to withdraw their labour. Therefore, it must be very exceptional. Normally it would be good industrial-relations practice, when you are doing this, to offer those employees some protection in return. There is nothing on the agenda today that suggests that, or even that the Government are thinking about it.
There are a number of unintended consequences to all these measures as well. I shall mention two. I always think of the syndrome of the winding-engine men in the coal industry—a key group who used to control who went down and came up in the mine. If you start having thresholds, you will encourage small, strategic groups who will organise to go on strike and can cause massive disruption. I always think that the winding-engine men could be the signal. It could be other groups. That is an unintended consequence.
There is another consequence of this sort of thing, which I thought about in the last debate. Do you remember what the New York governor said about politicians?
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose”.
This is what we are doing with industrial relations. We are actually encouraging trade unionists to spend all their time getting the votes over the thresholds so that they can put pressure on their employers. It underestimates the difficulty and the time that trade unionists actually give to trying to minimise disruption. That is what trade union leaders do—they know these disputes are unpopular. That is why there is a trend for one-day disputes rather than longer ones. They are trying to manage this in very difficult circumstances. If you encourage them to have to spend their time campaigning to get the votes over the threshold, they will not be able to control those emotions or get the people back to work.
This is precisely what has happened in the junior hospital doctors dispute. How do you get people back when 76% of them have voted, and 99% are in favour? I said this several weeks ago, and we are no nearer a settlement. This is the sort of unintended consequence that we have.
That is why in Amendment 18 we are saying that the Ministers’ powers must be very restricted here. They cannot just come along as soon as there is a dispute in some area and add that to a list. This will form the worst sort of legislation, and it will have the worst consequences. I do not know where the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, is tonight, but I thought we were going to have amendments in the next group telling us how we are going to widen these groups, so virtually any group in the public sector can be included. I imagine he has been told to go home, unless he is going to come back from the dead and propose these motions tonight. That is precisely the sort of thing we are worried about in this legislation.
This is just the first step. This is the agenda. This is the agenda of this Government: a partisan agenda which will be disruptive of industrial relations in this country and will have completely the opposite consequences to those they are trying to reassure the public they are going to provide for them.
Lord Balfe
My Lords, I will ask the Minister a question. I believe we are going to have tremendous difficulties defining,
“education of those aged under 17”.
Not only do you have differences in who the teachers are teaching, but also head teachers can preside over schools of different age spans. Will the Minister give some careful thought, between now and our next looking at the Bill, to how the clause can be better defined? I do not think that it works as it is.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My Lords, as I have already explained, strike action in services that people rely on every day can trigger a significant amount of disruption. It is particularly unfair when strike action goes ahead without strong support from union members. For example, in 2011 NHS workers were balloted by UNISON for strike action—the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is not in his place, but this was not a London-focused matter—and, according to reports, only 11% of 250,000 members supported strike action. This is disproportionate to the 1 million patients that the wonderful NHS assists in England every 24 hours, who would have been affected by the action taken.
That is why we introduced a further threshold in Clause 3 to apply to important public services in, as I have said, the fire, health, education, transport, border security and nuclear decommissioning sectors. The Bill limits the threshold in this way because we recognise the particularly serious impact that strike action can have in these areas. The objective of the threshold is not to ban strikes altogether, but to ensure that strike action in important public services can take place only if it obtains a strong democratic mandate.
On Amendment 3 and the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Collins, the Bill has been drafted to take account of the fact that most workers will have a range of roles and responsibilities, which may vary across the year or sometimes even in a single day. For example, London Underground control room staff may spend only part of their time monitoring the network and co-ordinating the response to critical incidents, and the remainder on other responsibilities. They may not engage solely in “important public services”. However, their absence in the event of strike action could severely disrupt the service, as they are critical to ensuring that it runs safely and securely. The existence of the threshold would be ineffective if they were excluded on the basis that they do not spend 100% of their time in the control room, as there are few roles in the modern workplace that engage in only a single activity. To my mind, that would make no sense.
On Amendments 5, 10, 12 and 13, we have used the term “important public services” to describe the services that will be subject to the 40% threshold. The term is intended to capture those services where strike action could have the most significant impact on the wider public. That is why the Bill limits the application of the threshold to six sectors. We consulted over the summer, as was said. In the analysis of the 200 responses, we reviewed the available evidence on the impact of strike action across different public services. We listened to people’s concerns. We were troubled by concerns that the threshold could be applied broadly, despite the Government’s clear intention that it should be limited to those services where the impact of strike action is most significant on the public. We listened and responded. We set out our findings in the skeleton regulations, which were referred to. I shall explain this with one or two examples.
The pressing social need that we are addressing in the health sector is the risk to life, or of injury to the public, in the event of industrial action. We have therefore focused the threshold on only publicly funded emergency, urgent and critical care. This is where reduced service levels can have the most immediate impact on the lives and safety of patients and the public. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, asked about orthopaedics and midwives. If they are normally engaged in the provision of emergency, urgent or critical healthcare services—which sounds like midwives in hospitals—then they will be included in the threshold.
In the fire sector, our aim was, again, to protect the public against the risk to life or of injury. In the light of this, we have focused on firefighting services, including co-ordination of the emergency response, because these are all critical to ensuring that fires are dealt with promptly and effectively in order to protect the public.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, shall we hear from my noble friend Lord Balfe?
Lord Balfe
I shall be brief. I begin where the noble Lord, Lord Hain, ended, which is with the leaked letter. The points put by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, were extremely well made. There are clearly a whole number of issues within the Bill. If we are to believe the leaked letter, which I probably do, and as we are not going to vote tonight, I hope that the Minister will look very carefully at all these amendments with a view to coming back and assuring the House that, if we asked to sustain our opposition to them, she has firm advice from the Attorney-General that that will stand up in court. I am not afraid of our occasionally going to the Supreme Court to clarify matters—I think it is probably necessary in a devolution settlement—but we should be on firm ground. If we do go to the Supreme Court, we should have a recommendation from the Attorney-General that he is quite satisfied that legally we are in the right in what we do.
When it comes to things such as deductions of contributions at source, about which at another opportunity I shall make some very clear points, if devolution means anything, surely it does not mean that we are going to ask Cardiff hospital, for example, to stop deducting the subscriptions of their union members if that is done at no cost to public funds and is seen as beneficial to industrial relations in Wales. What does devolution mean if simple things like that cannot happen? Maybe they cannot happen but, if that is the case, I hope that the Minister will be prepared to publish and share with us the views of our Attorney-General as to why this is a sound clause.
Lord Balfe
“Ballots: electronic votingBallots: electronic voting
(1) The 1992 Act is amended as follows.
(2) In section 230(2) (conduct of ballot), after “must” insert “either be registered to vote by way of an electronic ballot, or”.
(3) At the end of section 230(2A)(b) insert “, or
(c) it will be convenient for him to vote by way of an electronic ballot while on the ship or while at a place where the ship is.”(4) In subsection 230(2B)(a) for “and” substitute “or”.
(5) In subsection 230(2B)(a), after “is,” insert “or be registered to vote while on the ship, or while at a place where the ship is, by way of an electronic ballot,”.
(6) After section 230 insert—
“230A Ballots: electronic voting
(1) A trade union may use electronic voting for the purpose of a ballot under section 226 of this Act, subject to the agreement of the Certification Officer.
(2) The electronic voting system must be—
(a) designed by an organisation which is independent from the trade union, and (b) approved by the Electoral Commission.””
Lord Balfe
I am a bit lost, as I thought that we had gone past that section. Anyway, the amendment is not moved.