Trade Union Political Funds and Political Party Funding

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde (Lab)]

My Lords, I was a member of the Select Committee; it was a privilege to be so. I have read all the debates that took place in the Chamber, including the exchange between the noble Lord, Lord King, and my noble friend Lord Monks on 10 February at col. 2325 and related.

The Motion we were asked to go away and look at I believe was passed with such an overwhelming majority of 94 because there was a feeling in the House that Clauses 10 and 11, which is all I am dealing with, were unfair and in many respects disproportionate. If noble Lords check this long path on party funding, they will see that whatever committee was set up on this—the Committee on Standards in Public Life has looked into it, as have several others—they all honed in on ensuring that there was fairness and balance in what was put forward on party funding and that it was not disproportionate. Indeed, the evidence that we had from Ministers in the other place, from both Tory and Labour Governments, shows that they had demonstrated restraint on dealing with the issue. That was the background and environment within which we conducted our work.

I hope that noble Lords will accept that the report covers a wide range of evidence brought by witnesses, both in person and in writing. When we got into our work, we quickly established that we were talking on average, about 9p a week, or £4.80 a year. That is averaged out over individual union members; the highest amount paid was, I think, 28p a week. Were these clauses proportionate for what we were told was a high-principle issue of opting in?

We tried to look at the evidence coolly, without emotion, and the Committee worked very well together. That is evidenced in the fact that all the proposals for the way forward at pages 134 and 135 are unanimous recommendations to the House. I hope that this is judged to be of assistance to the Government, and the Minister in particular, in finding a way forward when we come back to this next week.

The issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord King, about the unions not keeping their word that they gave him when he was Secretary of State, is challenged very strongly by the TUC in the evidence it gave us. We have a copy of the agreement that was reached. When the Minister, Mr Boles, came before us, he made it clear that his office and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills looked on the web at union membership forms. No membership form is mentioned anywhere in the agreement. Of course, that set us, as individual members—perhaps not all of us—going on the web and seeing where the evidence was and what unions were doing about telling their members that they could opt out. It is in every rule book. A union will not get clearance from the Certification Officer if it is not in the rule book that the members must have it made clear that they can opt out. Indeed, the Certification Officer was completely puzzled when he came before us as to what the problem was, because he had had, I think, two complaints over quite a number of years.

Let me look at the disproportionality, both financially and in what unions were being asked to do. The impact assessment has been challenged very severely. Some of us did our own figures. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, in particular, was very good at coming up with statistical information and giving it to the committee. One could argue that it would cost the political funds practically the whole of the fund in one year to carry out what the Government were asking the unions to do. It was completely disproportionate, as is mentioned in the report.

We were asked to look at the impact on party funding. No one who came before the Committee said that it would not have an impact. The Minister himself said it would depend on the unions and how they dealt with this, but then did not really show us the way. Paragraph 134 of the report establishes clearly that there will be an impact on the funding of Her Majesty’s Opposition, the Labour Party.

There has been reference to the Tory party manifesto, which we quote in the report. In paragraph 131 it promises,

“to ensure trade unions use a transparent opt-in process for union subscriptions”;

it does not say “political fund contributions”. The manifesto goes on:

“In the next Parliament, we will legislate to ensure trade unions use a transparent opt-in process for subscriptions to political parties”.

The contributions do not go to the political parties; they go into the union political fund, half of which, on average, in affiliated unions, goes to the Labour Party. Let us be clear that of 163 trade unions, 25 have political funds and only 15 affiliate to the Labour Party. So we are again looking at disproportionality.

I close by saying that reference has been made to our chairman. He was experienced in the chair and I have to say that he set the tone and the environment from the beginning. I feel that we worked together as a committee in a very constructive way. We were backed up, as we always are in this House, by absolutely superb secretariat support. The secretary to the committee and the clerk worked on a hugely demanding timetable and delivered: I register my thanks to them. This was a report done in a hurry, but we tried to cover everything. Its intention, which I hope it achieved, was to assist this House in going forward and ensuring that the Trade Union Bill, when it is finished, will be fair and not disproportionate.