European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Foulkes of Cumnock and Lord Lea of Crondall

Monday 23rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I have the highest respect for my noble friend but I am afraid that on this one he is wrong. In international trade, employers will claim we are at a competitive disadvantage if we do not do things together. This is what Europe is about. That is what Delors pointed out in Bournemouth in 1988.

If we were to say to an employer in Holland, Italy or Spain, “You can lead the race to the bottom”, all the employers, one by one, would scream that they had to go in that direction. I will be calling for a European identity card the way I am going, but if we had a floor for all European workers in all these areas, the comparison with the minimum wage—although we do not have a European minimum wage—would be valid in that all workers and employers would be protected. If noble Lords will allow me to conceptualise, we will have a European ring-fence—let us not start getting into the argument about competition with China or Japan; it is a good argument but quite different from the one we are considering at the moment. This is for the parties in the referendum debate to discuss, and they are valid points to discuss.

Another factor that will determine how Brexit would work would be, no doubt, the majority in the country and the state of agitation on how best to progress matters on the Back Benches of the Conservative Party—and indeed, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and everybody else in the House of Commons. To get to the nub of the point for this debate, and maybe to add some value to what I am about to say, we have a difficulty which would have been avoided if we had followed what we called in an earlier debate the OBR-type of authorship because all these amendments look to HMG to produce these studies. How will Ministers avoid the charge of cherry picking, as and when they deal with what are, with good will all round—and there will not be an oversupply of that—difficult analytical distinctions between things that we know and things that are going to be debated?

In conclusion, I will try to answer my own question.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

You are the only one who understands it.

Trade Unions

Debate between Lord Foulkes of Cumnock and Lord Lea of Crondall

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

My Lords, I first declare an interest as a member of the GMB union, although I must confess that I am now, very appropriately, in the “retired workers” category. I very much look forward to the debate, but particularly to the contributions of the two maiden speakers, the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, and the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, whom I know from the other place and whom I know will make excellent contributions. However, I also look forward to the contributions from the many former trade union leaders—I was going to say “trade union barons”, but perhaps that is not the right phrase to use here—who know so much more about this matter than I do. We are in for a very well informed debate.

Labour’s contribution to the debate on the Trade Union Bill in the other place has of necessity been somewhat defensive, because that Bill represents such a fundamental and, frankly, malign attack on trade unions. However, on behalf of Labour, I sought this debate today so that we can be much more positive and praise the work of the trade unions over the years and the contributions they have made and continue to make to our democracy and economy, as well as to protecting the well-being of the workers they represent.

Trade unions, from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1387—not many Members will remember too much about that—

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

I remember that.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

—although my noble friend Lord Lea does; through to the industrial age, when, I am proud to say, the weavers in Ayrshire led the way, workers got together to challenge the injustices and abuse they faced. The state was controlled by an unrepresentative minority of wealthy people—in fact, a minority of wealthy men—

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Foulkes of Cumnock and Lord Lea of Crondall

Monday 20th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am happy to move my amendment when the House and the Government are in such a contented mood. I thank all those who have stayed.

This is, I believe, the third time I have proposed this amendment, or at least some version of it, to the House. As the Minister knows, last year my Labour colleagues and I moved an amendment to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill which would have created a separate legal offence for assaulting any worker in the performance of his duties. Sadly, although many, including a number of those on the Benches opposite, were sympathetic to the amendment’s aim of encouraging prosecutions, acting as a deterrent and doing justice to the physical and emotional suffering of the thousands of workers assaulted each year, your Lordships did not give that amendment your approval.

One concern raised at the time was that the amendment was so wide in scope that it would cover so many workers as to render it ineffective. That is why I proposed at the Committee stage of this Bill in July the amendment before your Lordships, drafted with the invaluable help of the union USDAW. I thank all at USDAW for their great help on this issue. The amendment focuses specifically on those workers who are required to enforce, as part of their employment, compliance with the Licensing Act 2003. It creates a separate either way offence for assaulting a shop or bar worker who is selling alcohol, and in doing so, takes account of comments made by the Solicitor-General in the other place which claimed that, if we were truly serious about higher penalties, such an offence should be either way and not summary as was originally intended.

There are three problems in the way in which we currently deal with assaults on workers serving alcohol which this amendment attempts to address. First, it attempts to remedy the fact that at present the vital and dangerous public function performed by workers who serve alcohol is insufficiently acknowledged by the criminal justice system. Men and women who serve alcohol are required by the Licensing Act 2003 to enforce that law, in terms of its consumption and supply. They must refuse to serve those who they believe to be under age, and those who are already intoxicated. They are working in febrile environments and are responsible, like police officers, for enforcing the law. If they refuse to do so, they themselves can face legal action or lose their licences. It is therefore unacceptable that these men and women receive no effective protection from the legal system for that additional service and the physical danger that it puts them in.

That brings me to my second point. Men and women serving alcohol have, like all workers, the benefit of a clause in the sentencing guidelines—as the Minister pointed out in Committee—which makes the assault of a worker providing a public service one aggravating factor, but it is one of 19 aggravating factors, which is seldom acknowledged. This fails to acknowledge that those who serve alcohol place themselves in greater danger, and make a more vital contribution to public order and to public health, than most others in other professions. According to the Health and Safety Executive, alcohol was the trigger to threatened or actual violence in 38% of cases.

Thirdly, the current regime has inadvertently produced a system which disincentivises prosecution and ends up being too lenient. At the moment, if a worker who sells alcohol is assaulted, the crime will usually fall into the category of common assault. The problem is that common assault carries relatively lenient punishments, meaning that in many cases the Crown Prosecution Service decides not to bother prosecuting. That has certainly been the experience of the unions like USDAW and other organisations in the industry like National Pubwatch, the Wine and Spirit Trade Association and others. Lenient sentencing and lack of sentencing not only fails the victims of such crimes by depriving them of justice but also results in many incidents going unreported as people’s faith in the criminal justice system becomes less and less secure. USDAW found that 17% of workers attacked at work, or threatened with physical violence, did not report—they did not bother to report—the offence because they did not think that any action would be taken.

My amendment addresses these issues. It provides greater protection to this group of workers by doing three things. First, and most importantly, it recognises at long last the dangerous environment these men and women must work in, as well as the strenuous and vital public function they carry out in enforcing the law. It does so by creating a separate, specific offence for assaulting someone who sells alcohol, one that carries a harsher penalty of either up to six months in prison and a fine of up to £500 for those charged summarily, or up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine for those who are convicted or indicted at the Crown Court, for more serious offences.

Secondly, in creating that separate offence, it would act as a deterrent to such crimes. Between 2012 and 2013, reported incidences of violence at work increased—there were 649,000 overall, including assaults on bar and shop workers serving alcohol. At a time when we see that these crimes show no sign of abating and their frequency remains alarmingly high, we must recognise the service of this group of workers. Harsher penalties will act as a deterrent.

This brings me to the third major reason to support this amendment. It will encourage more prosecutions, as a separate legal offence is easier to determine than common assault. You can prove it more easily, and because it carries stiffer penalties, that will give the CPS greater incentive to prosecute.

I heard example after example recently at a presentation by USDAW. I know that Members of the House will know of other examples. I will not go into them in detail as time does not permit, but I assure the House that there were some horrific incidents causing great harm, which I know the noble Lords, Lord Lea and Lord Kennedy, and others who attended the presentation, will testify to. I am arguing in favour of the amendment before your Lordships today so that many thousands of other workers do not have to go through what those about whom we heard in that presentation have already suffered.

In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks—have I got the pronunciation right? I have the same problem in reverse—expressed his genuine sympathy with the amendment’s aims before arguing that it was not “at the moment” the right way to combat such crimes, citing a lack of evidence and the availability of other actions to deal with it. He also agreed to meet me and other colleagues, and he was true to his word. The general secretary of USDAW, my noble friend Lord Kennedy and I met him and we had a sympathetic response. He asked for more evidence and was interested in trying to deal with the issue, but, unfortunately, he was not willing to support this amendment, at least at this stage, until we had come forward with more evidence to persuade him.

I hope, nevertheless, that the Minister will today recognise the seriousness of this matter. If he does not accept the amendment—I hope that he will and I shall certainly test the opinion of the House if he does not—I hope that he will at least put forward some alternatives to take account of an increasingly serious problem. We should not let down these people who serve the public and make sure that the law is upheld. They deserve the kind of support that we can give them by supporting this amendment.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps I may add one point which the union raised and which I think is the reason why the Government are having undue difficulty. It is an inconsistency which relates to semantics. These people are serving the public—they are in public houses after all. If you are a public servant, you seem to be protected in a way that these workers are not, yet they are in more direct, physical contact with the public—with many injuries sustained. I ask the Minister—I know that the matter has been brought to his attention in private conversations—how it is that these workers have less protection under a lesser criminal offence than applies to violence done to workers in the public sector who have an interface with the public. These workers are effectively in a private space, not in a public space, and the law works differently for them.

Global Economy

Debate between Lord Foulkes of Cumnock and Lord Lea of Crondall

Thursday 11th August 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, perhaps I may make two comments and ask two questions. First, it has already been remarked on that the Faustian pact between China and the United States over the past 10 years has been an ultimate, if not the principal, reason for slow world growth. Secondly, although the Minister dismisses so perfunctorily what my noble friend Lord Eatwell said, I suggest that he reads Hansard tomorrow, because my noble friend made a very carefully considered analysis of the world and European situation. I suspect that in terms of economic analysis my noble friend would probably get a higher mark than the Minister on the current situation.

Six months ago, I and many of us were on record as saying that all this would lead to a double dip. It is a quite different scenario from the Thatcher period when there was a reasonably good international position. The prediction of the IFS and others was that if you are going to cut £200 million-worth of output through the crash, the deficit would actually rise from 3.5 per cent in 2008 to something like 11 per cent now. That was without adding to it through austerity measures. We are talking as if austerity measures apply to all circumstances.

My first question is: will the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, consider inviting Chancellor Merkel over here to give her a personal tour of Britain to show her how a modern economy can best succeed—an economy where manufacturing all around works at the rate of Siemens and BMW?

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

This is irony.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I had better spell it out as sometimes it does not get across.

That tour could demonstrate that the higher economic growth rate in Britain than in Germany could help solve the German problem. I have a second question arising from that. My noble friends will not be aware of this but I asked a Written Question about the relative position of German multinationals and Britain’s multinationals and the proportion of value added in Germany and Britain, the home country. It is pretty obvious from the FT Global 500 employment figures that Germany, which has only about half the number of multinationals as Britain, is miles more successful. Employment in Germany—that is the value added as a proportion of the German economy—is far, far higher than in British multinationals.

My question, which I shall repeat, asked the Government to give me the statistics. I had the most perfunctory reply in one sentence from the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, that the Government are not interested in such statistics and that it was not their job to collect them. The Department for Business knows what the figures are, and the relative value added of our multinationals in Britain and the relative value added of multinationals in Germany. Will the Minister today say that he will look at the matter more carefully and give me, the House and the Library a less perfunctory answer?