Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

Monday 10th December 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, thousands of construction workers have been secretly blacklisted and denied jobs on building projects such as the London Olympics. Individuals branded as troublemakers for being members of a trade union or for raising concerns in the workplace over important issues such as health and safety had their names passed to more than 40 construction firms. In his evidence to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee last month Mr Ian Kerr, who ran the consulting association responsible for gathering the names of thousands of workers, told the committee that he went to radical bookshops and political meetings to gather information, saying:

“I would have had a file on the Socialist Workers Party. I had a file on the National Front. Any organisation that seemed to be jumping up and down about construction, it was my role to keep tabs”.

The committee heard that trade union activity, health and safety concerns or standing up for colleagues was enough to blacklist a worker, leading to work drying up. My colleague, the shadow Business Secretary, Chuka Umunna, has also raised concerns over whether blacklisting is going on for Crossrail, the new £16 billion rail network.

The construction blacklisting scandal exposed in 2009 highlighted a gap in protection for job applicants. At present, if a prospective employer accesses a blacklist or becomes aware of a job applicant’s whistleblowing history and decides not to give them a job on that basis, the applicant would have no course of action. The 2010 blacklisting regulations deal only with lists of individuals who have been involved in trade union activities. The Equality Act provides protection at the point of recruitment and we think it is vital that the right message is sent to employers that discriminating against whistleblowers at this point is unacceptable.

The amendment calls for the Public Interest Disclosure Act to be brought into line with the Equality Act 2010 and to make clear that individuals who blow the whistle will continue to have protection under the law against blacklisting by future employers on grounds that they have raised legitimate concerns over wrongdoing at previous employers. I beg to move.

[Baroness Donaghy]

My Lords, I was the author of a report on construction fatalities a couple of years ago and I spent a lot of time with both employers and employees on that issue. During the course of my report it became known that a company was keeping records of its former employees—it was in all the papers—and the trade unions concerned asked me to include something about that in my report. Although I was very sympathetic and met a number of the people involved who had been blacklisted and had not worked for years in the construction industry, I did not feel that I could put that in the report because I had to be clear what caused fatalities in the construction industry—that was my brief. You could extrapolate and say that if you prevent people reporting genuine health and safety dangers it will cause risk in the industry and is likely to cause fatalities. However, as I prepared the report in a pragmatic way and had to have absolute proof—we commissioned research on this—I did not feel that I could make any recommendations in that respect.

I met a number of what I regard as good construction employers, some of whom were embarrassed to be on the list of people who paid this company. I asked them about it and they said it was an administrative error and they did not realise that they were still paying. You have to sometimes accept in good faith what people are saying. In the past 15 years they have achieved a much better record on health and safety and it is no coincidence that health and safety was often talked about in the run-up to the Olympics. I pay tribute to the Labour Government and the continuing work of the coalition Government in making sure that there was not a single fatality on the Olympic site. It was a fantastic achievement. The good employers say that it is not only an issue of reputation: if you are hard-nosed about it and you have a fatality on site, the site will be closed for the whole day. So it is not in their interests to have an unsafe building.

I have met employers who do not have quite that view. They claim that they have a right to pay someone to find out about troublemakers and poor workers. When I put it to them that this list had been proved to be completely inaccurate—it had even got the names wrong in some cases—they would shrug their shoulders and say that it was just bad luck.

I spent a whole Saturday with a group of workers who had been blacklisted from the construction industry. To say that the effect on them was traumatic is putting it very mildly. Most of them were now working on a self-employed basis with small companies, some of them for 20 to 25 years. They had never worked for a large company. The ones who were trade union activists were probably realistic about why it had happened; they were fighting for their fellow workers and were regarded as trouble-makers, which was why they had been blacklisted. Others had no idea. They did not know why their names had been put on the list and could not understand it.

This is a very murky world and I accept that it is incredibly difficult to prove whether these lists exist. They are like will-o’-the-wisps; they move around. One company will close but they will make jolly sure that another company opens up somewhere else. It is incredibly difficult to prove. The worker himself finds it very difficult to prove. All I can say is that the impact on individuals and their families is profound. I wish that I could have done something in making recommendations in that report but it would have been dishonest of me. If there is any way that we can make life better for some of these workers who do not know why they are not being employed, I hope very much that we can do so. I support the amendment in that spirit.