Trade Union Bill

Lord Callanan Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, I have listened with great interest to the many heartfelt contributions, and indeed history lessons, from many people on both sides of this debate. Many on the Labour Benches—I suppose predictably, as my noble friend Lord Mawhinney pointed out—have their outrage meters turned up all the way to 11. An uninformed observer might conclude that the Government are somehow abolishing trade unions entirely or making strike action illegal, but of course neither is true.

We no longer live in the 1970s, an era of industrial strife, when the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union was voted to be the most powerful person in the country, ahead even of the Prime Minister of the day, or indeed the 1980s, my formative time in politics. I was a young councillor in the north-east of England at the time of the miners’ strike. While in my opinion virtually all the ordinary miners had legitimate intentions, the leadership of the NUM made no secret of the fact that their aim was to bring down the elected Government of the day. We now know, of course, that they even took money from our foreign enemies to help them in that task.

Thankfully, times have now moved on. We no longer live in an “us and them” working environment, with bosses on the one side and workers on the other. Most people are not in trade unions. Most people now work in small businesses or are self-employed. It is surely time that the trade unions moved on, as the rest of society has done.

I am grateful for the briefing on this subject from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, an excellent organisation that does great work. In 2014, a total of 788,000 days were lost in strike action. Only 72,000 of those days were in the private sector but 715,000 were in the public sector—10 times as many, even though more people work in the private sector. This is overwhelmingly a public sector problem. Why is that? Is it because pay, terms and conditions and health and safety are worse in the public sector? Of course not—if anything, the reverse is true. It is, of course, because public services are by nature a monopoly provision. People have no choice in using those services, so the public sector trade unions know that they can inflict real damage on the public, who cannot go elsewhere to obtain them.

Many noble Lords have referred to the Tube strikes, where several hundred well-paid militant trade unionists with pretty good terms and conditions are making life a misery for millions of commuters, and all to try to prevent Transport for London introducing an improvement in service: a night Tube. However, there is, in my view, an even worse side to this. Transport for London, I discover, employs 35 full-time-equivalent members of staff working purely on trade union business. So taxpaying Londoners are subsidising the very union organisers who are working their hardest to stop them going about their lawful business and, indeed, even getting to work.

These people are a small part of the so-called trade union pilgrims, made famous a few years ago by the nurse in a Tooting hospital who was paid £40,000 a year to do no nursing at all but to spend her time seemingly organising demonstrations against Conservative politicians. She was obviously kept very busy by her trade union activities, but not so busy that she did not have enough time to run a part-time health consultancy as well. The Metropolitan Police has 57 full-time-equivalent pilgrims; the Land Registry has 19; the Scottish fire brigade, incredibly, has 78. In 2012-13, there were almost 3,000 of them, although, thankfully, the Minister tells us that the numbers have reduced since then. If the Government are searching for cuts in public expenditure, there are tens of millions of pounds to be saved there.

On the subject of wasting public money, we also received a briefing from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a body that the Government seem to be funding to lobby against themselves. According to the EHRC, ending this so-called facility time or imposing balloting thresholds is not, as most of us might believe, a simple matter of political disagreement that this Parliament is perfectly able to decide. Apparently, it could be a breach of those workers’ human rights. I have no idea whether that information is accurate or not but, if it is, it provides further evidence for why our other manifesto commitment to reform human rights laws should, in my view, be speedily implemented alongside this legislation.

I fully support the Bill, but my slight concern is the issue of the opt-in system for political levies, which are supplied, ultimately, in many cases, to the Labour Party. I take the view that for political funding changes it is best not to depart from the principle that they should really be agreed on a cross-party basis. Besides, from my party’s point of view, surely we should be in favour of giving Jeremy Corbyn as much access to as many resources as possible to promote his views as widely as possible.