Employment Rights Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 16th June 2025 Lords Chamber

The uncollected rubbish of Birmingham must be a ghastly historical aberration. However, this legislation, if it is unamended, threatens to turn the bins of Birmingham into an augury of the future and create a new norm. The nation deserves better. I beg to move.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment so eloquently moved by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral. There is not much more to add, but I will try. I also put my name to the amendment.

I thought we had gone past the stage where we look back at history and do not learn its lessons on protecting the franchise and the ballot in sensitive elections. There are no more sensitive elections than workplace elections, on which people’s very livelihood, careers, family and income depend.

I take your Lordships’ Committee back to February 1834. Colleagues on the other side of the Chamber will be aware that in 1833 agricultural workers in the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset quite rightly formed a union to fight wage cuts. The following year they were arrested, arraigned, found guilty and transported not because they had administered oaths, which was the official reason for their incarceration, but because they assembled as a group. The point is that they did not have a secret ballot. They had an open meeting to form the union and a strategy for fighting those wage cuts, and they were betrayed by two union members. If you talk to Unite the Union and GMB, there is nothing new under the sun.

That said, the point was they did not have a secret ballot. One reason that the unions have evolved in a positive way over many years—hitherto, until we reached this Bill—is that we have had that workplace democracy, unlike in the bad old days of the 1970s and before, where people were pressured to join a union in the closed shop and sometimes pressured to support industrial action which was uncalled for and damaging both to their own jobs and to the business generally, as we saw, for instance, in 1984 with the miners’ strike. Amendments 247 and 248 tabled by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral are very sensible. I would say: be careful what you wish for, because there is another historical example, although noble Lords on the other side may resile from it. The Jim Crow laws in the southern part of the United States existed for many years post-reconstruction in 1865. That they marginalised, traduced and undermined the right of black people, of African Americans, to vote was, in effect, because they did not have a secret ballot and had to register, and there were many legal impediments to them voting.

We respect the integrity of the secret ballot. We would not dream of asking local councillors, parish councillors, borough councillors, county councillors and certainly not Members of Parliament to seek election on the basis that their electorate would be corralled into voting a certain way and there would not be a secret ballot. That is as it should be and as it has been for modern times, and it is correct. Why are we now going back to a potential era of bullying, harassment and attacking people who may not support the union line? Give people a chance to think, reflect and choose the right way for not just themselves and their families but their union by means of a secret ballot. For those reasons I strongly support my noble friend’s amendment, and I hope the Minister will give it due regard.

[Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, I oppose this group of amendments. I have to say that it is with deep regret, because my assessment of them is that they are trying to stir up a spectre of trade union intimidation, which reminds me strongly of the initiative going back in history—not quite as far as the noble Lord, Lord Jackson—to 2014, when the Government commissioned Bruce Carr QC, as he was then, to conduct an investigation of intimidation in workplaces. As it transpired, Mr Carr declined all opportunities to make any recommendations whatever on the basis of the evidence that he received. For the TUC’s part—and I was at the helm at the time—we described it as a party-political stunt and said that, frankly, the then Conservative Party in government should have repaid the taxpayer for the significant cost of conducting that investigation that led to zero—I repeat, zero—recommendations for changes in the law. In fact, Mr Carr went on just a year or two later to oppose the then Conservative Government’s Trade Union Bill as “a threat” to industrial relations and to civil liberties.

That brings me to safe and secure e-balloting. It seems to me that anybody who was a true democrat would be looking to increase opportunities for participation in safe, secure, secret and electronic balloting. Any boost to democracy should be welcome. I have to say that it is disappointing that those who oppose the right for trade unionists to cast their vote safely, securely and secretly by electronic ballot apparently believe that there is no threat of intimidation in respect of political parties. Therefore, it is fine for political parties to use modern methods of balloting; it is not fine for trade unionists. I would ask what view that gives us of the perception of trade unions from the Benches opposite, when, on the contrary, we should be proud of trade unions. We should tackle the causes and not just the symptoms of industrial action. We should be proud of constructive industrial relations in this country, which are vital for productivity and growth.