Baroness Donaghy
Main Page: Baroness Donaghy (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, I intervene briefly to support, in general terms, what the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, has said. As noble Lords know, I am concerned about this Bill, particularly these two clauses. I also regret that we are having this debate at all this afternoon. We have, by a fairly substantial majority, of which I was not a part, decided that a Select Committee of your Lordships’ House should look into the issues that are brought to the fore by Clauses 10 and 11. That committee, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, is obliged to report to your Lordships’ House by Monday of next week. No latitude is given, even though, sadly, for reasons of his health, the noble Lord, Lord Richard, has had to be replaced as a member of the committee by the noble Lord, Lord Hart of Chilton. However, I understand that that is not in any sense impeding the progress or speed of the committee.
We will know next week what the committee of your Lordships’ House, on which there are distinguished representatives from all parts of the House, will recommend, so it seems to me that we are having this debate in a bit of a vacuum. When my noble friend responds, I should like her to tell us how the Government will manage the timetable for the remainder of the Bill after publication of that report. I hope she will be able to give a complete, unequivocal assurance that the report will be debated before we move on to Report stage. That seems to me absolutely essential. If she can give that assurance, we should not waste a lot of time today because we can then debate what the Select Committee of your Lordships’ House has recommended and the Government can respond, having reflected on that. I hope we will then be able to move forward.
As I have said, there are many things in the Bill that are not provocative or extreme. There are, however, things that give it the appearance of being a little mean and niggardly and they mostly—not entirely—centre on political funding and the deprivation of one particular party of a source of funding which we may regret but have to accept is there. That party should not be placed at a disadvantage vis-à-vis other parties, and I hope we can get over that.
So I appeal to the Minister to give us an indication of how the Government intend to handle the Bill after publication of the Select Committee’s report. I very much hope there will be a proper opportunity to consider and debate it before we move on to what I hope will be a fairly expeditious Report stage.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for making those points about having this debate in a vacuum. I support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Collins. I appreciate that the discussion on the role of the Certification Officer will take place on day four of Committee, but in case my silence was taken as meaning that the issue was not sufficiently important, I felt that I should place on the record that Clause 11 will provide the Certification Officer with new powers to investigate how unions’ political funds are used and where the money goes.
As part of their annual return, unions will be required to report to the CO on how all expenditure from their political funds has been used, who it has been paid to and for what purpose. This is not even-handed, as the Government claim. It might apply to employers’ associations in theory. However, none of the 94 employers’ associations listed by the Certification Officer currently has a political fund—not one. Instead, companies choose to make political donations individually or via other channels. These measures will create significant new administrative burdens for unions, as my noble friend Lord Collins said. They will need to collate detailed information on political expenditure at branch and regional level, and the Government will be able to monitor how unions spend their resources and will invite significant public scrutiny of how unions choose to use their political funds.
In itself, this might not be of significance to anyone outside the trade union movement—if it was the only thing in this area relating to the subject. However, if you combine it with the ability of anyone outside the trade union to launch a complaint, it starts to look like an attack on trade unions. The Government may not be concerned about strangling trade unions with all the extra red tape under the guise of consistency of information, which is what I think the Minister is concerned about with these amendments, but they should consider very carefully how this will change the nature of the function of the Certification Officer. It will become a much more political position and because this function will be essentially one-sided, it will lead to accusations of political bias.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford
My Lords, I agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and the noble Lord, Lord Collins, have said.
I thought that the Conservatives were in favour of reducing regulation and bureaucracy and simplifying the way we go about things. That seems to be with the complete exception of the trade unions—I wonder why. It is not realistic or proportionate to require all items of expenditure in excess of £2,000 to be reported to the Certification Officer. How is he going to cope with this? It is mammoth and unnecessary bureaucracy, whereas if you were really intent on having greater scrutiny, you would have a review of the categories of expenditure and you would look to see that there was greater transparency. But to require every invoice over £2,000 in a total expenditure of more than £20 million—the bureaucracy just beggars belief. We know that the Government failed to consult the Certification Officer on the implications of this—that has come out in the work of the Select Committee. They seem to be blindly going ahead without any comprehension of the workload and the way in which the trade unions will be bogged down in the bureaucracy of fulfilling all these requirements.
For those reasons, the Government must question whether it really is necessary to put this bureaucracy on the unions. Is the figure of £2,000 realistic? In the other place, the Minister sort of said that this figure of £2,000 was comparable to that for company donations to political parties that have to be declared. The type of expenditure we are talking about here is not just donations, but all trade union expenditure. That will vary, as speakers have already said, from sending people to political conferences, to paying for stands as part of campaigns and hiring vehicles—or whatever it is—but it is all very detailed expenditure. Is the Certification Officer meant to go through all these invoices and check that they have been done properly?
We have seen the great difficulty the Conservative Party already has with its invoices, and now it seems it will impose this on the trade unions. We should not forget that the Electoral Commission is already looking at all political donations in excess, depending on the recipient, of £1,500—£7,500 for the national parties—so all the information is there. Have there been discussions with the Electoral Commission and has it been consulted on the twin track of bureaucracy the Government are now imposing on trade unions—through the submissions they already make to the Electoral Commission and the excessive ones they are now going to have to give to the Certification Officer? Have they also found out from the Certification Officer what dealing with all this extra work is going to do to his staffing and expenditure requirements?
Lord Balfe
My Lords, part of the problem here is that the Government have a bit of history to live down on this. As the noble Lord, Lord King, said, this clause is about the publication requirement—it is not about the detail, which comes in Clause 13—but I can understand why people are a bit suspicious.
When I started doing trade union work for the Conservative Party back in 2008, a huge number of Questions were being put to the then Labour Government about facility time. At one time, I asked the honourable Member in the House of Commons whether he had calculated how much cost he was generating in finding out about the cost of facility time. But if you look back to the records of 2008 to 2010, you will find 400 or 500 Written Questions asking various things about the facility time. I am not surprised that the trade union movement got a bit suspicious about what was going on. It is similarly unhappy about this.
I do not think that anyone would justify the examples given by my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. Those were unacceptable. But the question is: whose job is it to sort out the unacceptable? My view is that if there is sufficient publication of what is happening, it is then up to the bodies concerned to sort it out. After all, facility time is something that comes from the employers locally to the unions. Clearly, there have been examples where the employers—not the unions—have bought off trouble by giving facility time that might not be justified. It is not all on one side. As has been mentioned many times, the fact is that facility time—which equals local representation rather than someone from the hierarchy of the union—is often far more effective in sorting out disputes.
It is also extremely useful for smaller unions. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, mentioned a couple of the smaller unions, which, in the interests of fairness to all sides, have also written to me, so I will not repeat what she said. I will use the example of the union of which I am president, the British Dietetic Association. It has 10,000 members, very thinly spread around the country, the vast majority of them in the National Health Service. Because it is a union of 10,000 members—which also, incidentally, acts as a professional organisation —it does not have many staff. It relies to a very large extent on its local representatives gaining local knowledge to help sort out the generally minor problems that come up at a local level.
One difficulty that some people have, in my party particularly, is that they imagine that unions spend all their time on class warfare. In fact, in my experience—and I was for a time a lay union official—they spend most of their time dealing with and sorting out extraordinarily mundane difficulties in the interface between the troubled worker and the troubled institution. I am afraid I find it very difficult to attach the words “taxpayer subsidy” to the time that is given. Local authorities, as employers, are required by law to have facility agreements and to involve trade unions in a quite wide range of processes and activities involving staff. It is a legal requirement. Whether they are in the public or private sector, they have to involve union officials in certain areas, such as redundancy, disciplinary procedures and grievance procedures. If it is a legal requirement, it cannot be a taxpayer subsidy.
I have a letter here from the Conservative leader of North Yorkshire County Council. He says:
“North Yorkshire County Council has some 22,000 staff including 5600 teachers and in the current climate there is a cost benefit analysis to be considered in relation to whether facilitating trade union input at work is a good thing or not. Our experience at a local level is positive … Since 2010 there have been over 200 service restructures, affecting over a third of the workforce in some way with a proportion of our staff going through potential redundancy processes … To date all changes have been delivered in the timescales set … We have worked closely with Unison as the locally recognised union to deliver the savings”.
This is the Conservative leader of a county council, a very responsible official looking after a lot of people. He ends his letter by saying that,
“the local unions have been a real asset in delivering the changes needed and I hope this will continue for the foreseeable future”.
I have never met Councillor Carl Les, leader of North Yorkshire County Council, but I venture that he probably knows how to handle his local facility time better than someone working off a spreadsheet in an office which is probably some way away from there.
By all means let us have transparency. That is a good thing. But let us not use transparency as a weapon to try to force out the best of what we have had. A British Dietetic Association lay official said to me recently, “The atmosphere at the moment is a bit difficult. I’m not sure I want to put my head over the parapet”. If a feeling gathers that we do not want to put our heads over the parapet, industrial relations will suffer. They will get worse, not better, because situations that would have been solved by the input of someone who knew what was going on locally will be referred upwards to full-time union officials who probably will not have the time to do the job properly anyway; industrial relations will deteriorate and the employers will lose out.
I was very impressed by the words of my noble friend Lord Hayward, who clearly has a lot of experience in this field. I counsel the Minister to let us have transparency, by all means, but let us not use transparency as a way of yet again making life difficult in an area of industrial relations which, overall, actually benefits from the ability of unions and management to negotiate sensible levels of facility time to help employees and employers deliver their targets.
Baroness Donaghy
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, for putting some balance into the debate. I have a lot of respect for his experience. He called for honesty. I could say a few words about my experience when I was chair of ACAS of certain behaviours on both sides of industry but I do not think it would be a good idea or take the debate forward, but I would be very happy to have private discussions with him at some stage so that we could swap examples. I am also very grateful to my noble friend Lord Harris, who reminded me what it was like to be a lay union representative, which I was for 33 very long years, for both NALGO and UNISON. I was not a full-time official; we prided ourselves on dealing with our problems without needing a full-time officer.
This issue of transparency needs to be looked at in the context of the Trade Union Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, touched on this just now. This is not just about transparency being a good thing, so that everybody who undertakes a fishing expedition can find out wicked things about what certain individual trade unionists are up to; the context is that the Bill appears to be a general attack on the trade union movement. The context is the clause that is coming up next, which talks about cutting, curtailing and capping facility time. One of the things that I worry about is that facility time should be seen in the light of a cost-benefit analysis. Nothing has been said by the Front Bench on the government side about the positive work that is done by union officials and the savings that are made by union health and safety representatives and union learning reps, through saving time dealing with grievances, redundancies and reorganisations.
There were times during my trade union lay career when I was accused of being a management stooge because I was delivering an unwelcome message to the members about what was practical; there were times in ACAS when I was accused of being a management stooge because I was not in a position to agree with everything that the union said; and there were times when I was accused of being a union stooge because of my background and because I did not always entirely accept what the management argument said. It is extremely important that we keep on reminding ourselves, in the context of the Bill, that things of this kind are not just about saying, “Oh let’s get some information; it’ll be a jolly good idea”. It is more like a scene from an Arnold Schwarzenegger film with him standing there, fully armed, and saying, “We are not going to do you any harm, just give us the information”.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford
My Lords, I share experience of the print industry with the noble Lord, Lord King, although mine is slightly more recent than his, I think. I know the benefit of union facilities. I also accept that both management and unions should question those facilities from time to time to ensure that they are efficient and the money is well spent. It also has to be said—here I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Hayward—that if we just look at this from a slightly anti-union perspective, we will not take into account the fact that, often, more union facilities are needed when the management is poor. I do not know the detail, but I suspect that in the modern successful car plants we now operate in this country, they will have union facilities but not to the degree that they needed them in the 1960s and 1970s when they had all their problems. They will now have much more professional management and, indeed, much more professional union representatives.
Union facilities are also a factor in change. When you are undertaking a lot of change, you need more facilities, such as when you have redundancies because skills and so on are changing. I remember in the print industry taking union delegations abroad to try to negotiate manning agreements on the basis of what our competitors were doing on machinery. Noble Lords may remember that. It took a lot of time and cost to do that, but that was because we were conducting major changes.
I also find it extraordinary that a Conservative Government can advocate another layer of bureaucracy to achieve this so-called change, but that is what they are doing. The impact assessment says it is going to cost £2.4 million to have the information collected regularly. The initial cost of getting that information together will be over £2 million and then there will be another £2 million going on. The Government also say that they expect there will be £100 million of savings. I accept that is not insignificant and that it is important to have those changes, but I question, when we are trying to find £35 billion of cost savings in the public sector, with all the change that that requires, whether this is the priority. I suspect we are just going up a blind alley here, and it is wrong.
Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)
My Lords, these amendments aim to remove from this clause elements of facility time that are used on health and safety. I suppose that our attitude to this just depends on how we view the status of health and safety activities. I wonder whether the Government are saying that health and safety should be part of the same category as everything else that trade union representatives do. It is of great credit to employers and trade unions that the health and safety record of this country’s workplaces has improved so much over the last 20 years, as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said. Let us also not go back to those dark old days he describes, when employees could be regarded as some kind of an expendable commodity. They are costly to recruit and train, they have fewer days of sickness absence if other health and welfare issues are attended to, and they work harder for an employer when they are properly regarded and looked after.
We understand that no element of facility time should have carte blanche to take up as long as anyone wishes. There has to be a balance. Nevertheless, we do not want to go back to restrictions leading to short cuts and more risks. Therefore, to echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, if we could have some kind of a robust explanation from the Minister as to why specifically health and safety is included in this clause, I think everyone in the Committee would rest easy.
Baroness Donaghy
My Lords, I should be clear that I do not support the Government’s intention—I still think it is their intention—to reduce facility time in the public services in principle. It is a matter for employer and employee to agree between them. Even the claims of cost saving in the Civil Service which were made in the last debate made no attempt to produce a cost-benefit analysis, which includes the undoubted benefits of facility time to the employer. The attempt to aggregate all facility time, including that of health and safety representatives and union learning reps, is cynical. The Government will decide what are “unacceptable inefficiencies” in the system and what is,
“poor value for money for the taxpayer”.
One wonders how objective that will be. It is to be hoped that the benefits, including staff satisfaction, improved health and safety and learning, will also be taken into account.
It is clear, as has already been said, that those employers with the best health and safety record welcome and support union safety representatives. Workplaces with union safety representatives have half the serious injury rate compared to those without. They also have lower rates of occupational illness and disease. The 100,000 health and safety representatives also save the economy millions of pounds and help to develop a positive safety culture in organisations and the reporting of injuries, and risk-awareness.
I will give two examples of health and safety partnership between employers and UNISON, my former union. In 2015, over 1,000 employees took part in a high-quality dementia awareness training in conjunction with the Open University in a range of workplaces. More partnership work is planned with the Open University around mental health awareness and autism awareness. While days lost through strike action amounted to 0.8 million, those lost through injuries or illnesses caused by work were 29.2 million—more than half because of “stress, depression or anxiety”, according to the CIPD. I am not trying to claim that health and safety representatives in most of the public services face the same physical hazards as, say, the construction industry. However, promoting well-being at work leads to huge savings for the employer. No attempt has been made by the Government to assess the benefits of this work.
A recent report by the CIPD, Growing the Health and Well-Being Agenda, reveals that the average cost of sickness absence alone is £554 per employee per year. This is the tip of the iceberg, as it does not cover the “indirect costs” of ill health,
“such as lost productivity, impaired customer service and lower employee morale”.
If you compare that cost of £554 per employee with the estimated cost of the apprenticeship levy and the national living wage at approximately £483 per person it illustrates the importance of well-being strategies and the link with day-to-day management.
I turn to union learning reps, because I have an amendment in the same group. It is important to place on record the important work undertaken by union learning representatives and their involvement in lifelong learning. A recent report by Exeter University also documented the significant added value which employers and individuals derive from projects provided by the Union Learning Fund. The report found that each £1 invested from the fund generates a total economic return of £9.15. The authors of the research estimate that £5.75 of that return goes to individuals in the form of improved prospects of employment and higher wages and £3.40 to employers, resulting from the greater productivity of a better skilled workforce—less output lost as a result of working time taken off to engage in learning.
I will give an example of other partnership deals, first, with Stoke Mandeville Hospital and local learning agreements with Sodexo and Carillion. One member, Louise, said of her own experience:
I left school at the age of 14 with no qualifications as I never sat my GCSE – I was a very rebellious teenager! … I took an NVQ2 admin course at college … I started working for the council in July 2009 … and was fortunate to work with UNISON ULRs [union learning reps], who encouraged me to do my level two adult literacy and numeracy in 2010” … I became lead ULR in January 2014 and began the digital champion project with the help of branch, ULF and UnionLearn funding, which is still going strong … By November 2015, I was already looking for my next learning mountain to conquer and I start an Institute of Leadership and Management leadership and management qualification this month”.
Louise went on to say that it was the investment of time by the union learning reps at the beginning which helped her life improve, and of course I pay tribute to her own commitment and dedication to lifelong learning. The investment of time in lifelong learning pays enormous dividends for our society, and nothing should be done to inhibit the work of union learning reps, which a cap on facility time will almost certainly do.
Lord Monks (Lab)
My Lords, I want to underline one point: British health and safety standards are the bedrock of European health and safety standards. The Single European Act—a great achievement of the Conservative Government at the time—allowed standards for health and safety to be set across Europe. I know that noble Lords opposite are delighted that the working time directive falls under this heading, and a lot of other things fall under it too. It demonstrated that if we had good health and safety regulations and other countries were brought into line with our standards, that would be in the interests of Britain. We raised standards across the European Union. There are not too many areas in the labour market where we have done that—in many areas we have tried to reduce them—but in health and safety we are top of the league.
Therefore, I hope that anything that the Government do in this area will continue the traditions of previous Conservative Governments, distinguished representatives of whom are sitting on the Benches opposite, and maintain high health and safety standards. We cut them at our peril.