Qatar: Migrant Workers

Lord Monks Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Monks]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what recent assessment they have made of the situation of migrant workers in Qatar.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we welcome the serious manner in which the Qatari Government are responding to concerns about the treatment of migrant workers. We fully support Qatar’s intention to reform the current labour law. We encourage the Government of Qatar to put forward a timetable for passing and then implementing the proposed legislation. We stand ready to support these efforts where we can.

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, the House should be aware that 964 migrant workers from India, Bangladesh and Nepal were killed on Qatari building sites in 2012 and 2013. There are many other countries with unrecorded deaths. This is all part of the run-up to the 2022 World Cup. Many migrant workers work under a system called kafala, a medieval bonded labour scheme. Will the Government exert maximum pressure on Qatar to enforce a ban on kafala and proper safety standards on the construction sites? If necessary, will they call for Qatar to lose the right to host the World Cup in 2022? Additionally, will the Government disqualify contractors guilty of poor health and safety practices from tendering for jobs in the UK?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the 2022 World Cup is a matter for FIFA. Since I know that there have been considerable allegations in Qatar that the British press are campaigning for the 2022 World Cup to be transferred to the UK, let me make it clear that we entirely accept that it was agreed the 2022 World Cup would take place outside Europe. We have no intention of applying for that particular competition. We might well be interested in a later competition and wish to campaign actively for that.

On the question of pressure on Qatar, we welcome the moves it is making, but I quote the United Nations Human Rights Council report on the situation in Qatar, discussed the other month:

“The Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants welcomed the positive legislative developments in Qatar that had made it illegal for sponsors to confiscate passports. However, he noted the need for effective enforcement of that law”.

We are seeing useful developments in the rhetoric and legislative framework. The question of enforcement is a serious one.

Deregulation Bill

Lord Monks Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, will comment on a small number of proposals in this Deregulation Bill and touch on two issues that are not in the Bill but are relevant to it. The first issue is the concern expressed by some other noble Lords who have contributed to the debate—Clause 1, which aims to limit the general duty on the self-employed to comply with the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. Only those who are definitely picked out would be covered by the Act in future if the Bill goes through.

As the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Rooker, have made clear, this is a pretty big change to the existing provisions and is a genuflection to those who consistently sneer at the health and safety culture, which may have its ludicrous moments from time to time but generally has served this country well. If you look at international league tables on, say, skills, health and safety, industrial relations or productivity, the one that Britain comes top in now is good health and safety. On the others we are languishing in a lower position than is comfortable. Therefore, this is an area of excellence and I pay tribute to all those who have done a good job in making it like that. It seems to me now that to give the self-employed the impression that they are going to be outside the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act is a big error. A process of prescription would no doubt be controversial, rather costly and protracted. Different sectors will argue like mad about whether they should be in the scope of the Act. I think that more red tape rather than less is being introduced.

I am not alone in thinking that this prescribing will be onerous, so the effect of Clause 1 will, I think, be to remove most of the self-employed from the general duty under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act. I know other figures have been given but it is going to be quite a process arguing whether you are in or out. It will be confusing to the average self-employed worker who is thinking, “Am I covered, am I not covered?” and will be referred no doubt to a lawyer and to the subsections in a particular piece of legislation. I recognise that this was recommended by the majority of the Löfstedt review of health and safety regulation, but the subsequent consultation by the Health and Safety Executive has shown many to be against it, arguing that confusion and possibly increased risk will result.

The present system covers everybody. At least it is straightforward; it works. The message is, “Don’t take risks with other people’s health and safety—or, indeed, your own”. Under the Bill, will that change? Will the impression be different? It could well be, and many will not bother to take it quite so seriously as they did in the past. Worse, people who control a workplace with many self-employed people—often bogus self-employed; they are doing the same jobs as employees—will tend to think that they have no duty of care and guess that they are exempt from the law. The most dangerous industries, such as agriculture and construction, have a high proportion of the self-employed. The confusion from this clause in those sectors could cause complacency and poor practice. The Government have today published a consultation on health and safety, proposing that construction becomes a prescribed industry, but the exact borders of that are not clear. I understand that already a lot of questions are being raised about it.

On self-employment in general, the fatality rate per 100,000 is already twice that of employees. Self-employment is rising quickly in this country: 9%—330,000—since 2008, while 40% of the new jobs that have been created since 2010 are self-employed. Going freelance has been very much the fashion, or maybe the only option, for many. The increase has been marked in all sorts of occupations that you do not associate with self-employment or freelance working: admin, secretarial work, sales and customer service and, perhaps more traditionally, personal service occupations. It would be naive to think that all these people were budding entrepreneurs. Many of them are the bogus self-employed, relieving an employer of his obligations under PAYE, national insurance, pensions and employment law, with many of the workers concerned thinking that they are going to get a tax advantage out of being self-employed. This measure could be a further incentive to go self-employed, or to be forced to give up employee status. It is wrong and it could be dangerous. It is encouraging to see Members of the House on all sides raising questions about this. I hope that the Government will consider these representations seriously.

There is a complete change with my next concern. Clauses 10 and 12 on private hire cars and taxis were touched on by my noble friend Lord Stevenson. The purpose is to reduce the effects of the current rules that apply to taxis and private hire. I will not go into detail, but there will be more unlicensed and less controlled private hire and taxi drivers flooding the streets than before if this goes through. The risk, particularly to women travelling in cabs and taxis at night, is being highlighted by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, the Local Government Association, Unite, the GMB and RMT, the main unions concerned with workers in this area. I ask the Government to take this threat, particularly to women, very seriously indeed.

The role of the local authority licensing body becomes much more difficult under these provisions. In a sense, one risk of deregulation is that you merely move the pinch point somewhere else. Licensing these people, and being responsible to a degree for what goes wrong in this area, will become a new industry if we are not careful. It would be a real problem.

I mentioned that I wanted to talk about a couple of things that are not in the Bill. I can do that very briefly. I was looking for the deregulation of trade unions. After all, as Members of the House will know, we are awash with scrutineers and assurers. The lobbying Bill added £500,000 to the costs of the average large trade union just recently. We are swamped with regulation. The fact that a strike is scheduled for later this week seems to have prompted the Conservative Benches to suggest all kinds of new regulations in relation to strikes, as if a law every two years on trade unions, when the Conservatives were in power, was not enough. I think that it would have been a very good idea to apply the Deregulation Bill to trade unions, but that does not seem to have crowded on to, at least, the Conservative Party’s agenda. I want to encourage them, in a genuine spirit of helpfulness, to go down that road. I do not even have to be consulted too much about it, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, suggested, if a new clause comes in.

On the second area, I am pleased to see that the Bill does not propose to make further changes to the Sunday trading rules. A big lobby has been pressing for provisions in the Bill and I am pleased to say that the Government, so far, have not accepted them. Long may that continue.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Lord Monks Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I join the chorus of critics of this blunderbuss of a Bill. It is quite a big chorus, who expect to be heard with their many concerns and, although it is a very diverse one, stretching across many organisations whose views have been reported by other speakers, there is a remarkable degree of harmony in its view of this Bill.

Critics of Parts 1 and 2 abound, but I shall speak mainly about Part 3. I remind all noble Lords about what the three committees in the other place have thought about the process adopted so far. They have been extremely and uncharacteristically critical—and united across all parties in their criticisms of the way the Government appear to be making it up as they go along at different stages on different issues. In those circumstances, there is a heavy responsibility on the House of Lords, and I hope that we will accept it. I hope that we will do our duty as a revising Chamber that seeks to express its wisdom on the way that legislation is made. On this Bill, more than on many others, we have a duty to do so.

As I mentioned, others have dwelt on the weaknesses of Parts 1 and 2. I will not repeat their points because I shall move on to Part 3, the trade union bit of the Bill. I think it was Joseph Heller who wrote in Catch 22 that:

“Just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”.

In the trade union ranks, we feel that somebody is certainly after us. That sums up the mood of many people in the movement. We are to be enveloped in new and expensive red tape, and we are being singled out for a kind of special treatment that no one else is being singled out for. Is there some supporting evidence of what we have done wrong in this area? Do we have some flaw that needs public intervention? Is there any evidence that our membership records are dodgy?

Unions will be required to employ a new, independent assurer—that is a new word for me in this circumstance—and those with more than 10,000 members will have to submit a membership audit certificate prepared by the assurer. In addition, the certification officer will be able to make copies of membership records. Let us remember that: a public official will be able to make copies of union membership records. That is a feature of societies that are a lot more repressive than ours. It is an intervention in the internal affairs of a union. I think that what is developing in this country will alarm people in the International Labour Organisation. It is not a small point, it is a big one.

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord King, is not in his place at the moment, because he knows well the range of existing requirements that unions have to meet in terms of their administration. They must make an annual return to the certification officer and they must have an independent scrutineer on secret ballots, which we very much accept. Anyone can complain about maladministration in the union. It is not easy to keep union records in areas like construction, retail, hotels and catering, which have rapid staff turnover.

What is the situation? Between 2000 and 2004, the certification officer received six complaints. Five of them were thrown out and in the sixth case, the declaration that was sought was not issued. Since 2004 no complaints have been made to the certification officer. Where is the evidence to justify a major legislative intrusion into union administration? There is no evidence for it. People talk about the need for transparency, but transparency for whom? Who wants this information and who is going to get it? As the basis for a new law, it really is ridiculous.

We have these existing obligations and we want to make sure that the way in which we carry them out is for the benefit of union members and is exemplary in terms of our administration. We do not want to open a door so that our records may become available to those who blacklist union activists. We have seen recent evidence of that in the construction industry. Once individual membership records are distributed more widely, where will they end up? If transparency is such a brilliant idea in this area, why do we do not do it for political parties? That would be quite interesting to a lot of people. Why not put them in the glare of the sun? We would then know for sure what the true membership figures are. Surely we have not reached the stage where we have to legislate to remedy an assumed problem for which there is absolutely no evidence. This is red tape gone mad.

The cost to the unions of the assurer and all the rest of it has been estimated, according to the Government’s own figures, at a minimum of around £460,000 a year, while the Government will be required to fork out another £130,000 to £150,000. I will just say this: going down this route is a waste of union members’ money and a waste of taxpayers’ money. If the Government have evidence, they should bring it forward. If they have not, I suggest that they should at least pause and think again about this provision.

Are there darker motives behind these provisions that are not being revealed? Is it a way of opening up union membership records so that employers can check industrial action ballots? I would be grateful if the Minister would comment on that tonight. Is it simply to put a tribal spanner in the union works so that we have something else to wrestle with and waste our money on, rather than tackling the kind of agenda referred to by my noble friend Lady Donaghy: the living wage, job security and all the other things that we will want to talk about in the run-up to any general election? This is a bad part of a not very impressive Bill and I hope that the House as a whole recognises that Part 3 is a waste of time, a waste of effort and a waste of money. Those are good reasons for a pause.