Trade Union Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

The answer, which I suppose relates mainly to Clause 12, is that we want to ensure that the time that union representatives collectively spend on union duties and activities during working hours, at taxpayers’ expense, is justifiable and accountable and represents value for money. Clause 12 enables Ministers to make regulations requiring specified public sector employers to publish information relating to facility time for those representatives.

Equally, if the reserve powers in Clause 13 were ever required, they should logically apply to all types of facility time, whatever legislation the rights are granted under and whatever category they fall into in the public sector. In a sense, no area is more immune to attracting inefficient or unaccountable spend than any other type of facility time. Where facility time is found to be at an acceptable level and adds value to the organisation, we expect it to continue, as I have already said. The way that I see it is that the benefits of transparency and accountability do not vary according to the type of work undertaken by, or designation of, a union representative engaged on facility time.

[Lord Deben]

Where one found a public service in which the amount of time spent on health and safety was manifestly below what would normally be expected, would not the fact that you had these figures enable people to complain about that, pointing out that this would be dangerous and that the situation ought to be improved?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

My noble friend makes a very fair point. Transparency will show where money is being spent, and sometimes too little is spent as well as too much.

Enterprise Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben (Con)]

Could the Minister help me on this, too? I have had exactly the same experience. I think that people around the country always find the figures very difficult to believe, because if you happen not to be in the section that is provided with broadband, you do not believe that anyone else is getting it. You form your opinion from your own experience. I wonder whether there is a possibility of helping those who are still waiting for broadband or, as in my case, are told that they have broadband but it does not actually work, which I think is what happens in much of Suffolk. I wonder whether there is a better way of helping us to feel that there might come a day in which we could operate our businesses more effectively from home than we can at the moment.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I very much agree with noble Lords that it is important for consumers and businesses to have transparent information on how mobile and broadband coverage is improving. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Deben has joined the discussion. He is right: the truth is that perception in this area is lacking reality. It was a slow start, there is more to do and there are lots of individual problems with broadband, but the Government’s plans are now beginning to yield impressive dividends.

We are of course committed to ensuring that the benefits of improved broadband and mobile services are felt right across the nation. That is why we made a universal service commitment to provide minimum service levels of at least 2 megabytes per second by the end of 2015. Basic broadband is already available to virtually 100% of UK premises, and by the end of this year only about 1% of premises will receive less than 2 megabytes per second.

To deal with the remaining 1%, which in a sense is where we are, all premises will have access to at least 2 megabytes per second through the option of satellite broadband connections. They will have the capability of delivering superfast broadband for those who want it. Noble Lords may not know that the satellite scheme is currently being trialled in West Yorkshire and Suffolk, close to my noble friend’s home, and a national scheme is due to go live in December. We are very pleased with the results so far.

We remain on track to provide 90% superfast broadband coverage by early 2016, and we are aiming for 95% of UK premises—the number in the amendment —to have access to superfast speeds by December 2017.

As I think I told the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, superfast is already available to over 83% of homes and businesses in the UK. Importantly, that is up from 45% in 2010. So that was a good effort by the coalition Government. That is the highest coverage among the top five European economies.

Recognising problems in rural and remote areas, the Government have made available up to £8 million to support pilot projects to extend superfast broadband beyond 95% of UK premises, using satellite and wireless, as I said, and will publish further lessons from those pilots later this year.

Improving mobile connectivity is also a priority. Around 94% of the UK’s land mass has coverage from at least one mobile network operator and 69% has coverage from all four. But we want to go further. To this end, a landmark agreement was reached with all four operators in December to ensure that 90% of the UK’s landmass will have voice and text coverage from each MNO by 2017. What this also means is that 97.7% of the UK will have a signal from at least one mobile operator.

These are relentless and concrete measures that the Government have taken to improve coverage. We are striving every day to make improvements so that everyone can benefit from the digital economy. I share the frustrations of everybody at the time that this has taken, but we are committed to ensuring that we have the infrastructure we need for this fourth utility.

The noble Lord proposed a requirement to report on progress being made in improving broadband and mobile coverage. This is already widely available from lots of different sources. I can make the list available to noble Lords so that they know what is being done. I am not convinced that the information gap is there; what I think is there is the need to continue getting this fourth utility fully across the UK. I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw this amendment.

Enterprise Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will take this point seriously. First, the figure which has been produced by the noble Lord is remarkable. Even if you were to halve it, it would still be remarkable, so I am very interested in that. I want to tell the Committee about my own experience of the construction industry, in which I had a company for some time, but no longer. The comment made by the noble Lord, who is now no longer in his place, that it is not a litigious industry seems to be totally contrary to the truth. It is probably the most litigious of industries. Indeed in many cases, certainly in the past, that is how decisions were made: you made contracts where you knew you were going to go to court at the end of it. That is how you made your decisions. I am afraid that it is a very unhappy history. Anyone who has read the Egan report or indeed the one before his would see just how this business has not changed to the degree that we all hoped it would.

The point I want to draw to the attention of my noble friend is that many companies in other areas manage to have very few bad debts and few bills. Every month, the board of the company of which I am the chairman gets a report on bad debts. I am happy to say that it is a very short report and they do not carry on through to the next month. That is because the company is well run and chases these things up. I do not think that there is a company of any kind in the construction industry which could possibly say that, because it is not the nature of the industry. Once people get into the habit of thinking that this is the way they can behave, that is the way they behave. It becomes a kind of chain: because you do not get your money, you do not pay the money to the other person. They do not get their money and it goes on in that way.

We have to break into that chain. I had not come across this idea until I read the amendment. It seems to me quite an original idea. However, I hope my noble friend will recognise that this is at the heart of the problem. We are talking here about an amount of money that is sufficiently large to make a huge difference if it were redistributed rather quickly. If this situation occurred in any other major industry, there would be cries of outrage, although it does not apply anywhere else that I can think of. My business interests are spread over quite a lot of different companies and I do not think I have ever known the kind of reaction that one has in the construction industry. Therefore, I hope very much that my noble friend will take this seriously. It may not be the answer but it may give her a clue how to provide another answer.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I thank noble Lords for this amendment and, indeed, for the whole series of amendments on the Small Business Commissioner, which have enabled us to have a very good debate. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Deben joined the debate and note his comments on construction, which we can consider in the context of the review that we have just agreed to. However, as he says, more generally, in other sectors some companies are much better payers. What we want to do is to change the culture so that this is the norm rather than the exception, if it is the exception. I do not know the exact facts but the overall numbers are a cause of concern, as we have said on a number of occasions.

The amendment before us, which is not really concerned with construction, would require companies to report outstanding liabilities relating to overdue payment, including interest payments on the unpaid invoices. It would require any failure to disclose this information to be reported to the commissioner.

During Report of the small business Bill in the Lords, I brought forward amendments, as noble Lords may recall, to specify in the Bill how the reporting power could be used in relation to payment performance and interest owed and paid in respect of late payment. Over the summer, my officials have been working with stakeholders on the regulations. We have established a working group to draft non-statutory guidance to ensure that companies are clear on their reporting obligations, and that the information reported is robust and comparable.

From next year we will require companies to report online every six months against a comprehensive set of metrics. That includes the proportion of invoices paid beyond agreed terms and the proportion of invoices paid within 30 days, between 31 and 60 days, and beyond 60 days. That is a lot of information for the top 14,000 companies. It will not be in the annual accounts as we want the information to be provided quickly. The information will, however, be rigorously monitored and will be timely and accessible—more so than putting something into the annual accounts.

The new prompt payment reporting requirement will enable us to bring increased transparency on payment practices and performance. We can legislate by regulation for the Small Business Commissioner to monitor that information, which I think is one of the things that the noble Lord emphasised in his presentation of the amendment. The commissioner may also highlight good and poor performers as part of his or her efforts to drive a fundamental change in behaviour. This will help exert the necessary pressure—a point we keep returning to—on companies to make sure that their suppliers are paid on time and fairly compensated when that is not done.

I am confident that the measures imposed on the Small Business Commissioner will lead to significant change in the UK’s payment culture. I note that the noble Lord said he would want to return to issues to stiffen powers on Report. I would only say in conclusion that I would very much regret seeing an adversarial element developing in this proposal. We do not want more costs, more lawyers and more delay. I think that we have a shared objective of trying to make the Small Business Commissioner a success, but in the mean time I ask the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.