Lord Oates
Main Page: Lord Oates (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Balfe
May I add to the general misery of the Minister? This clause really is far too sweeping. Whatever Bill it appears in, to my mind it extends the power of Ministers against the parliamentary officials by a far wider margin than can possibly be justified. The clause contains the words:
“If a Minister of the Crown considers it appropriate to do so”.
You can consider all sorts of things “appropriate” and then produce an SI that cannot be voted down in this House. It gives far too much power.
We already gave, in the previous clause, quite extensive powers of publication—probably more than many people would say were necessary, but there are certainly wide powers. The meaning of the clause is now, “If the Minister doesn’t like the information they’ve got, they can then proceed in detail to intervene in any public body”. That is just not good and acceptable public administration. I am not speaking now about localism or anything: it is not the way you should run a public administration.
The way the clause develops gives the Minister carte blanche to do virtually anything. They can ensure that,
“in each period specified by the regulations, the percentage of the working time of any relevant union official”—
they can say, “Let’s have a list of your union officials”; which ones are relevant?—
“of an employer that is taken as paid facility time does not exceed a percentage”.
Is the decision made in Whitehall? The noble Lord has already made the point about Newcastle and the parks department. This intervention is way beyond what is appropriate, acceptable or sensible. If you try to implement the regulations, you will immediately find that there are all sorts of extenuating circumstances. Given the need for publication, public bodies will not just sit down and roll over when the Government come along and say that elected or appointed officials in the health service or in local government cannot run a single unit of staff. This really goes far further than is sensible. I seriously urge the Minister to talk to her friends about withdrawing this unnecessary and, frankly, provocative clause.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I fully agree with every word that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said. On reading Clause 13, I became worried about the Conservative Party—probably for the first time in my life—and about what has happened to the people in the Conservative Party, certainly since we were in coalition with them. I remember that they then believed that regulations were in general anathema and they decried state interest. Indeed, they believed in that to such an extent that at an early point in the coalition I remember that Conservative special advisers insisted that we removed a regulation relating to a requirement for children’s nightwear to be fire resistant, so appalled were they by the burden of state regulation that that put upon manufacturers. What has happened to that stance and to the belief in localism and pushing power from Whitehall down to towns, cities, schools and hospitals? With every clause in the Bill that we discuss, we see regulation upon regulation and overburdensome bureaucracy upon bureaucracy.
This clause is most extraordinary. The Government’s arrogance is breath-taking—a Government who, as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, pointed out, would assume to themselves the power to determine these matters in relation to the parks department in Newcastle and to local authorities up and down the land. It is extraordinary that a Minister of the Crown can, according to new subsection (2)(b), make regulations,
“containing any provision that the Minister considers appropriate for one or both of the following purposes”.
This includes determining that,
“the working time of any relevant union official of an employer that is taken as paid facility time does not exceed a percentage that is so specified”.
It is simply extraordinary that any Government should suggest doing such a thing.
In our previous discussion on Clause 12, the Minister said that the intention of gathering all this information on facility time was not at all in order to use the reserve powers in Clause 13 to cap and restrict it. I have no reason to doubt the Minister’s sincerity but I am afraid that the political architects of this Bill in the Treasury—because that is where they are—have no such reticence. That is exactly why this clause is in the Bill, because the whole purpose of the Bill is to stamp down on trade unions and the opposition Labour Party. That is what it is all about. We know that from our time in the coalition because they tried to push this on us at least two or three times at that point.
This sort of clause should be the dream of every bureaucrat and state centralist and the nightmare of every Conservative and democrat. I hope that the Minister and the Government will think again.
Lord MacKenzie of Culkein (Lab)
My Lords, given the lateness of the hour, I will not say all the things I was going to. Most of them have already been said, perhaps more expertly than I could. I want to speak about the health service, and about Amendment 90A. I know a little bit about the health service. I started life as a nurse, involved in my local branch. I eventually became a senior official and general secretary of a health service union. Many years ago, in a new district general hospital, where we formed a branch of over 300 members—largely nurses—we were first regarded by management as some sort of devil incarnate. That mood changed very quickly when they realised that they needed staff support to get a transition from the old healthcare into the brand new DGH. Very quickly, long before it became fashionable, one of our branch officials was given facility time. It was not me: I was a theatre nurse and it was not suitable for me to have that time, but I did plenty when I was off duty.
Given my experience over the years, it is difficult to see where the Government are now going with Clause 13. There is no evidence whatever to back up the contention that the taxpayer is lying awake at night worrying about Staff Nurse Smith from Unison or the RCN or Dietician Jones from the British Dietetic Association having some facility time. Sometimes I think that things have not moved on very far. Recently, a nurse told me that she spoke to a manager about her concerns with an issue bordering on bullying. That manager was quite clear. He said, “I do not like clypes”. Clypes is not a word in my vocabulary, but I gather it is Lowland Scots vernacular for a teller of tales, a sneak or an informer. Clearly, one manager north of the border has not had the post Mid Staffordshire situation imprinted on his mind. That is why we still need unions and why we need people to undertake union duties: to represent a nurse who is now afraid of repercussions and who will, in all probability, not dare to speak out unsupported again. That is why we need sensible facility time.
The reality is that, in the health service, we all support high-quality patient care, but we need that to be cost effective. We need to find ways to increase productivity and, at the same time, improve outcomes. That is a lot of horses to ride at the same time. Most human resources people working in healthcare would acknowledge that if they are to take staff with them on the road ahead, whatever the future holds for the service, the staff have to be willing and engaged. All the health service unions invest a lot of money in training union stewards and representatives. We invest in quality training in health and safety skills, which is extremely important in the multiple practice environments of hospitals. As we heard a number of times today, we invest in training learning representatives. All of that helps to have a more confident staff.
Does the Minister—or the Government—really think that nurses and other staff representatives to whom we have given high-quality training are sitting around planning strikes and mayhem? Of course the Minister does not believe that. So will she acknowledge what really happens: that staff sides in NHS trusts try very hard to have sensible working relationships with management? One only has to look at the series of reports from the Social Partnership Forum to see what good work goes on. I can commend to her those from Guy’s and St Thomas’, University Hospital Birmingham NHS Trust and many others, not least those many dealing with the outcomes of the Francis report into Mid Staffordshire. Why do the Government want to damage that? Why do they need to take powers to limit trade union facility time? Is it really going to be a position—as has been suggested—where a Minister looks at figures supplied by a health trust or another employer, about which he or she has no detailed knowledge, and instructs that authority to cap facility time to some fraction of its pay bill? If so, we are going to make life much more difficult for the health service than it needs to be. Research has shown that, far from the costs alleged in the impact assessment, there are actual savings to be made by having union representatives in the workplace.
Lord Oates
Pursuant to that point, can the Minister tell us, specifically with regard to local authorities, why she believes that it is for the Government in Whitehall to interfere in the decisions made by democratically elected local authorities? As the noble Lord, Lord King, pointed out, if we have transparency, that will presumably bring pressure to bear. It is for local authorities, which are, in my experience, much more responsive than central government, to react to it. On what basis would this extraordinary power be used against a local authority?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I agree with the noble Lord that the changes we propose promote transparency and that the power of transparency should lead to good decisions, be it at national or local organisational level. That is common ground. We believe that a back-up power, even if it is never used—I remember debating this very issue in respect of other Bills before the House with those on the Benches opposite—is necessary in this area. It is a power of last resort. It applies to local authorities, where there may be an example of the sort that my noble friend Lord King talked about, in the same way as in other areas.
The situation is similar in the NHS, and I was so glad to hear about the NHS from the noble Lord, Lord MacKenzie of Culkein. It is a public sector employer, so obviously the taxpayer funds facility time. It is the largest employer group in the public sector in the UK. I gather that it is now number five in the world: it has sunk beneath the US and the Chinese military, Walmart and McDonald’s. Obviously, it is a very large and important organisation. Like the Royal College of Nursing, we recognise the value of facility time in the NHS and do not for a moment suggest that it is simply a drain on the public purse. We do not seek to ban it, but where inefficiencies are revealed in part of the NHS, for example, the reserve power should be there in the same way as for a school or a local council.