Trade Union Bill

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

There we are: we have the entire spectrum of the Conservative Party in agreement on this matter. I will not make any comments about Europe, so that we may maintain that position.

As the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, pointed out, we allow charitable deductions, and as Conservatives surely we believe in reducing the power of the state, not increasing it. What business is it of the Government or the state to decide what arrangements are made between free trade union movements and employers?

I have looked in vain to find this great cohort of employers that are against check-off. It seems to me—this is a central point that has been made in the debate—that you do not want to create a situation where there is tension between employers and trade unions, and where you perhaps end up back where we were before the 1980s, with militant people going round the workplace to collect subscriptions and to encourage people to do things which we on this side of the Chamber would not be very enthusiastic about.

I am also very concerned about another thing. We have had a debate on my noble friend Lord Strathclyde’s report on the use of secondary legislation, but here we have, in new Section 116B(3), in Clause 14:

“A Minister of the Crown may by regulations provide, in relation to a body or other person that is not a public authority but has functions of a public nature and is funded wholly or partly from public funds”—

that is quite a wide gang—

“that the body or other person is to be treated as a public authority for the purposes of this section”.

So the Government are taking unto themselves powers to be even broader in respect of something about which, as far as I can see, they have not yet made their case.

I do not want to take up much more of the Committee’s time, but will just give notice to my noble friend that, should this matter come to a Division, I will certainly not be supporting it. I suggest to my noble friend that she looks very carefully at the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, and the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, which seems to me to do everything that the Government could possibly want, if there is a genuine and sincere reason for making this change. It would provide for a proper code of practice, which means that people will be aware of what they are doing.

I suppose I should have declared my interest as a director of a bank, but the point has also been made about people who do not have bank accounts. I dare say we could find noble Lords on this side of the House who have not paid their subscription to the Conservative Party because they forgot to renew it and did not have a direct debit or something of that kind—my noble friend Lord King is indicating alarm at that. It is a very simple system, which is tried and tested and about which there are no complaints.

The costs are absolutely negligible. If it is a cost argument that is driving the Government, employers could charge the cost to the trade union, as the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who I thought made an excellent speech, suggests. But to my mind the costs to the employer are considerably less than those of having people coming round the workplace collecting subscriptions. If anything, what is being proposed will add to the burden of employers, and I thought that as Conservatives we were against adding to the burden of employers and in favour of making life as simple as possible for them.

This looks to me like something that seemed a good idea at the time, which has now got into legislation, perhaps not with the best of motives. It would be wise of the Government to take the good advice which is coming from all sides of the Chamber and drop it.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, it is quite an exceptional pleasure to follow the speeches of two distinguished Members of this House on the Conservative Benches and the intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, which was pithy but very striking, if I may say so. I declare my local government interest and my interest as an unpaid consultant at a firm which, for many years, has acted for trade unions. In that capacity, I am very well aware of the help and support they give to individual members across a huge range of concerns, from employment tribunals to accident cases, and of their support for members in the workplace.

I start by referring to the other check-off—Anton Chekhov—who wrote in one of his stories:

“To advise is not to compel … You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible”.

That seems to me a good description of the world of industrial relations. When it comes to check-off, many councils, including Newcastle, of which I remain a member of course, charge for the service. Newcastle actually makes a profit of around £20,000, which goes into the council’s budget. To put it another way, it could be said that it reduces the cost of facility time, which we touched on in an earlier debate. Many other councils do the same. It would be quite reasonable for the Government to require unions to pay the cost of check-off—Unison has made it very clear that is has absolutely no problem with that—but it should be a matter for individual councils and public bodies, as it is for private sector companies, to decide whether or not to operate a check-off scheme.

Unison reports that it is involved with 9,334 agreements about check-off, 7,242 of them in the public sector, with the rest in the private sector and, I suppose, the voluntary sector. Interestingly, some major companies, such as E.ON and United Utilities to name but two, are perfectly happy to operate such a scheme. The proposals were not in the Tory manifesto, and appeared at the last minute as the Bill was going through in the House of Commons. It would appear that there was no consultation with employers, let alone, of course, the unions themselves. Indeed, the director of human resources at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust—a very major trust—has written:

“Ending trade union deductions through payroll in the public sector came out of the blue”—

I do not think he is making a political reference there. He went on:

“From what I can tell there has been no consultation with employers, no engagement with trade unions, no assessment of what it may mean for employee relations or, more importantly, recent progress in partnership with trade unions … My anxiety—which I know is shared by others—is about the unintended (but in this case entirely foreseeable) consequences. Check-off… is a light touch management activity, but it does give employers a sense of their union density, particularly when dealing with multiple trade unions”—

a point made effectively by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. He continued:

“When balloting does take place, check-off allows employers to undertake the SBET (standard British eyeball test)”,

which I had never heard of before. Quite what it means, I confess I do not know, but I assume that it means that the employer can check on the validity of a ballot in relation to union membership. Mr Royles goes on:

“Should we challenge it? All this will be more difficult if payments are made by direct debit”.

That is a big employer, of a major service, making a very telling point.

The Government suggest that payments be made by direct debit from the employee’s bank, as we have heard. Other noble Lords have said there is really no difficulty in this, and, just as much to the point, most Unison members have expressed a preference for check-off. As long as there is no cost to the employer, why should their wishes not be respected? Many employers in local government have voiced their views, including the north-eastern councils, which have collectively backed check-off. I think the Dorset police and crime commissioner—who I suspect is probably not a Labour member—has done likewise. As we have heard, the Government are reserving the position in relation to the functions of police and crime commissioners.

On Second Reading, I quoted Margaret Thatcher, who famously said that,

“for over 100 years … it has been the belief of the Conservative Party that the law should not only permit, but that it should assist, the trades unions to carry out their legitimate function of protecting their members”.

It could be argued that she rather departed from that view, although the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, disagrees, during her period in office as Prime Minister, when she spoke of “the enemy within”. The latter view, sadly, appears to have shaped the provisions of the Bill. It is time for the Government to treat the unions as partners in the provision of public service, not as enemies, and to treat public sector and council employers as reasonable decision-makers, not subordinates requiring constant interference with, and control of, their role as managers of public services.

There is also the issue of potential legal challenge. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who is not in his place, wrote in the Times recently that the second area where the Bill is vulnerable to legal challenge—he had identified another issue—is Clause 14. He wrote, “It is very difficult to see the justification for such a restriction which has a very damaging effect on the efficacy of trade unions”. There must be the possibility of a legal challenge.

I suspect that there will be a broad consensus in this Committee about many of these provisions, particularly this one. I hope that the Minister will take these views back to the Government and that they will think again. An amendment was moved in the Commons by a Conservative Back-Bencher which would effectively remove the element of compulsion and leave it to employers, providing that the cost was met.

I began my speech by referring to a quotation from Chekhov. I offer three titles of his short stories which might well be applied to this Bill: “Gone Astray”, “Overdoing It” and “A Blunder”.

[Lord Cormack]

It is certainly no cherry orchard, is it, my Lords? I am delighted to support my noble friend Lord Balfe in particular. He made a very telling, powerful and compelling speech, and I agreed with every word. Although I have concentrated my contributions to the debates on this Bill on Clauses 10 and 11, about which I remain acutely concerned—my noble friends on the Front Bench know my intentions if the debate does not move in the right way—I share the views and intentions of my noble friend Lord Balfe when it comes to this clause.

If the Conservative Party stands for anything, it stands for choice. This clause is an unnecessary, meddlesome, bureaucratic abolition of choice, and it is not worthy of the Conservative Party. Although she is engaged in conversation, I hope that my noble friend the Minister can hear what I am saying. She has a very good track record in the field of industrial relations. She cannot, surely, believe that the deprivation of choice is something that she can champion, and I hope that she will not.

It is only about a week since an eminent world leader rebuked an aspiring world leader by telling him, effectively, that those who wish to demonstrate their credentials should build bridges rather than walls. In this clause, we are building an unnecessary wall. It is inimical to the true one-nation Conservative tradition and it is not something that any Conservative can wholeheartedly support. The speech of my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean was intervened on in a very pithy and apposite way by my noble friend Lord Deben, who said that they spanned the whole range of the Conservative Party. I stand somewhere between them on a range of issues, so I think that we pretty well span the range of opinion in the Conservative Party. If my noble friend the Minister thinks that by giving way on this clause she will be conceding to the Opposition, she will not be—she will be marching in the spirit of true one-nation, pro-choice conservatism.

I hope that when we come to Report, we will have from my noble friend a suitable amendment that will encapsulate the essence of the amendments proposed today, in particular the amendment so splendidly spoken to by my noble friend Lord Balfe, and that we will therefore be able to take away from this Bill an aspect of petty vindictiveness and spite that does nobody any favours and is wholly unnecessary. What is the point of this? The answer is that there is no point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a fair point. Having said that, the growth of direct debit in lots of areas has continued. As I have said, I do not think we are ruling out a union accepting cash or alternative payment arrangements. We are trying to make a change of direction here within the public sector.

I was going on to say that we debated Clauses 12 and 13 earlier this week, and I indicated then that I would go away and think about concerns relating to which organisations would be in scope of the facility time regulations, so I will not seek to delay the Committee by trying to answer all the related questions that have been asked today in that area.

I should, however, turn to Amendments 94 and 97, both of which seek to limit the employers within scope of the regulations. Amendment 97 in particular would carve out our largest public sector employer, the NHS, plus local authorities, thus excluding large swathes of the public sector. Obviously, that would not deliver on our commitment to ban check-off. As I said earlier in the debate, we are looking at the impact of the skeleton regulations that we sent to noble Lords earlier this week.

[Lord Beecham]

Will the Minister explain why it is deemed necessary to impose a new arrangement on two parties, a public sector authority and a trade union, that are perfectly agreeable to operating a check-off scheme? Why is it necessary for the Government to intervene in a situation where both sides are satisfied with an arrangement, on the basis that there will be no cost to the employer? If the Government’s provision is good enough for the public sector, why are they not seeking to apply it to the private sector? What is the difference?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

My Lords, the difference is that the cost falls on the public sector.

[Lord Beecham]

But the premise—the burden of the amendments that we are discussing—is there would be no cost to the public sector employer.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

The answer is that I think the impact assessment says there is a cost of £7.2 million. I was seeking to answer the question that had been raised.

Amendment 92 would allow check-off to remain and replace the prohibition with a statutory obligation for ACAS to create a code of practice. As part of that, payment for a check-off service would be recommended as best practice. I return to the points made on earlier amendments: this would not deliver the commitment that we have made to prohibit check-off across the public sector. As it would not be a mandatory requirement, some organisations, as I think we have heard today, might choose not to do it while others might do so, and then one would have an inconsistency of application.

I am, however, grateful to my noble friend Lord Balfe for Amendment 93, which seeks to help us by allowing check-off to be retained wherever the employer is reimbursed. However, even where the service is paid for, I cannot accept that it is appropriate for a public sector employer to be the intermediary of the subscriptions relationship between a union and its members.