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

Baroness Turner of Camden Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Lords Chamber

The Government therefore should think again before Report. They should start to act in a fair-minded way and not be blinded by ill-informed prejudice. I beg to move.

[Baroness Turner of Camden (Lab)]

I rise to support these amendments. This section of the Bill is yet more evidence of the opposition of the Government to the interests and desires of ordinary working people—to their need to organise to represent their legitimate interests at a time when employment rights are constantly under government attack. Now we have this attempted legislation, which is a direct attack on unions and their ability to represent their members and provide a service to them. There is already legislation in place as we have heard, in the 1992 Act, which requires unions to maintain a register of members with a certification officer in charge of implementation. As my noble friend has pointed out, there have been hardly any complaints under that legislation and only one with any substance requiring further examination. The Government have not produced any evidence to support the amending legislation they are now proposing.

Government spokespeople often stress the importance of voluntary organisations, but unions are among the largest voluntary organisations in the country. Although the media, most of which seek to demonise unions, refer only to union bosses, most local and workplace work is done by willing volunteers. Yet unions are the only voluntary organisations to have this kind of internal bureaucracy imposed upon them and at their expense. The CBI, employers’ organisations, organisations representing bankers and the fiscal industries do not have this; only unions are to have this additional expensive official, an allegedly independent person, who is not voted for by them but is imposed upon their internal administration.

What of the privacy of ordinary members? What of their confidentiality? It is clear that the Government are intent on making things much more difficult for a union affiliated to the Labour Party. However, not all of them are. Most are affiliated only after a ballot of those who pay the political levy, which is surely a matter for union members themselves. The TUC has made substantial criticism of the Bill, which it regards as an attack upon democracy. It believes that it would make organising a conference in advance of the general election, even its own congress in 2014, a criminal offence, because it would be in advance of an election.

The campaigning organisation, Liberty, has also opposed this section of the Bill, believing it to be a breach of Article 11 of the European employment rights legislation. The Government, of course, disagree. I regard this section as undemocratic and a further attack on the employment rights of ordinary people. The Government pretend that it is not. However, to weaken the ability of the unions to adequately do the job for which their members belong weakens those members. Strong unions mean better pay and conditions, which is one of the reasons why millionaires do not like them much.

We in this House should not be misled by media misrepresentation of unions and should recognise the contribution that they make to the support and welfare of ordinary working people. This section of the Bill should therefore be opposed. I fully support what my noble friend said in his introduction to this section.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I have been a member of the GMB for 40 years this year and was a member of other unions prior to that. I therefore have an axe to grind—not a pecuniary one—and I share that interest with millions of our fellow citizens and with many who are not in trade unions but who, nevertheless, benefit from the way in which trade unions operate in the market.

My Amendment 118C seeks to delete from the clause the reference to this peculiar new invention of an assessor. The Government have seen fit to invent a whole new profession and office for reasons which, as my noble friend Lord Monks said, are not entirely clear. The role of the assessor is dealt with in more detail in Clause 37, and I will return to make more detailed remarks in that respect. The central point is why the Government think that they need to invent a relatively costly new bureaucratic structure when they already have the powers in the role of the certification officer, who can deal with any complaint received, intervene and censure a union if inadequate documentation is provided. As my noble friend has said, there are already substantial penalties available to certification officers if ever one of the few complaints they receive is upheld. In this section of the 1992 Act, there is also the possibility for individuals to complain, not only to the certification officer but to the courts, about the failure of trade unions to maintain proper records and many other provisions of that Act.

So why is a new structure being proposed? As my noble friend Lord Monks has said, there are problems in maintaining a register of trade unions with names and addresses and accurate records. By and large, most of the population moves every four years, and the impact assessment recognises this. People change their address every four years and tend to move job slightly more frequently than that. In some cases, they change the way in which they pay their union dues, or the name of the company for which they work changes. At any given point, it is difficult to maintain a 100% accurate register, but the Act rightly says,

“so far as is reasonably practicable”.

That is the basis on which the certification officer makes a judgment.

It is not clear in this Bill whether the Government intend to invoke more stringent principles of how to decide whether or not it is an accurate register. If they are, it is not in the Bill. Is the assessor, or whoever advises them, to develop new codes? If so, the House should be told before we proceed. I will return to the role of the assessor, which appears in the next clause.

I also strongly support the aim of the amendment of my noble friends Lord Monks and Lord Stevenson to delete this clause and this whole part of the Bill. We have looked at the impact assessment, which estimates the costs to unions, the Government and employers. For unions, it is assessed at around £400,000. I have had representations from all sorts of unions—my own, the National Union of Teachers, which is not affiliated to this party, and the Royal College of Nursing, to which my noble friend has referred and which is not affiliated either to the TUC or to the party. These indicate clearly that the cost of implementing these provisions and initiating the changes in procedure and rules that is required would be substantially more than that.

Even more interesting is that only £140,000 is allocated to additional costs to the Government, whereas if they were really trying to enforce this, they should give the certification officer significantly more powers. It is arguable that under the present rules the certification officer may need more resources, but that is not what this Bill is about. It is about an entirely new approach to this area. The even more interesting part of the impact assessment is that the benefit at one point is described as nil. That is a pretty telling internal report on a proposal from Ministers: at a cost of £400,000, which I think will be rather larger, plus £100,000 or so to the Government, the benefit is nil.

My noble friend Lord Monks has already cited the Regulatory Policy Committee, which basically says that this is one of the daftest proposals that has ever come before it, and there is no justification for it. Even the Government, who have been scraping around for supporters of this Bill during a rushed consultation period over the holiday month, could not get more than lukewarm support from the CBI, which said that it would not be its first priority. Where are the Government coming from on this? The benefit to restating and providing a bureaucratic infrastructure to enforce the requirement of unions to keep membership records effectively is not justified in anything the Government have so far said about this, either in the impact assessment or in speeches in the House of Commons, which was of course very late in the proceedings.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Monks has made a sophisticated case to the Government for making this whole clause and the invention of the assurer more palatable, or at least more workable. He has had to do so in a very complicated way because of the nature of the proposition. My opposition and that of my noble friend Lord Lea to the clause standing part is a more straightforward proposition: we are basically seeking to delete the clause.

We still have not had a proper explanation of why there should be an assurer. Incidentally, I need to apologise to the Committee and to Hansard: on occasion in the previous debate, I referred to an “assessor” rather than an “assurer”. I also apologise to the Minister. It was almost certainly down to my writing. The term “assurer” has a nice touch about it; it is as though the man from the Pru is coming round to collect your life assurance every now and again. However, it is not quite like that. What qualifications and what legal requirements does the assurer have to have? He or she is going to be employed by the union but approved by the state. This person may well be somebody with auditing qualifications but he or she is not an auditor, an accountant, a lawyer or a scrutineer in the sense of the ballot scrutineer, to which my noble friend referred. The post is an entirely new invention.

I go back to my earlier point. Why do we need this new invention? If the Government’s intention is to tighten things up, why do they not do that? Can we not rationally look at a proposition saying that the certification officer should have more powers or that the requirements on the union should be clearer or more stringent? However, that is not what the Government have proposed. They have simply proposed this intermediary, which is very strange.

I do not know how the general public will take to this. What is the assurer? It sounds to me like a third-rate television series: “The Assurer—Licensed to Check Membership Records”. Even more sinisterly, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it could be the kind of person who meticulously took notes of the proceedings of a committee in the old Soviet Union. He sat in the corner and nobody quite knew who he was, but you knew he was reporting on you, and you knew he was reporting to the Central Committee. Such a role is not of the organisation; it is not of the state; and it is not of a recognised profession; it is a new invention. To do exactly what? I do not think that, in all their interventions so far, or in what they have done with their advisers, the Government have come up with a clear definition of what this person is to do.

For the smaller unions—those with fewer than 10,000 members—the requirements in Clause 36 relate to an audit certificate. That is slightly more understandable. It has to be signed off by senior officers of the union. That is a procedure that many organisations know about. They have to bring in external auditors to check it and, if it is complicated, they have on occasion to ensure that their lawyers have seen it.

However, this new profession is not known to science or to society—or, so far as I am aware, is it known to legislation. If the Minister can point to a precedent I would be grateful, but it is not in any part of society that I am aware of, or in any part that bears any relationship to the context in which trade unions and employers operate.

If I were the Government, I would think that the best thing would be to delete this whole new proposition and instead get around to telling us clearly what this part of the Bill is supposed to do. Then we could have a rational debate. We might still disagree, but at least we would know what we were talking about. The main proposition here is to introduce into a very delicate and sensitive area—the issues of human rights and data protection have already been touched on, and will be again—an entity and a role that is unknown to all the players and unknown to the courts. If the Government were sensible, they would approach this in a cleaner way. They would make a proposition as to how they want unions to change their behaviour and what standards they want them to meet, and we would be able to see whether those were reasonable, rather than putting things in the hands of an entirely new concoction.

I therefore propose that Clause 37 should not stand part of the Bill. I hope that by the time we have completed our consideration of the Bill the Government will either have deleted it entirely or put something much simpler and more straightforward in its place.

[Baroness Turner of Camden (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment moved by my noble friend. One point struck me particularly, from my recollection of my own work as a full-time official in connection with recruiting in areas where there was no trade union membership. I am referring to people who were new to the trade union movement. The lack of confidentiality implied in this part of the Bill would be a deterrent to recruitment. Obviously, if you are trying to recruit people who have never been in a union before and are not organised, the last thing they want is for their details to be made available to anybody. They want to keep things close to themselves until they have recognition. Obviously that is important to them. A number of us have raised the issue of confidentiality, which is threatened unless this provision is either removed entirely or substantially amended.

I do not see why we should have to vote for yet another official—this so-called assurer. Where is he to come from? What sort of background is he to have? What kind of voice will the ordinary members have in relation to this individual? We do not want this new individual. We do not think the role is necessary, and I personally oppose this clause altogether—although the amendments tabled by my noble friends would undermine to some extent the opposition that some of us have on grounds of confidentiality. This is very important to new members, particularly those who have not been in a union before and who need some assurance of confidentiality if they are to remain with the union and support it as it struggles for membership and recognition. I therefore completely support my noble friends in their opposition to this part of the Bill.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, I add my support for the amendment. Orwell has been mentioned, and I have mentioned Kafka—but now I shall give a more homely sort of picture. One of the children says, “Mummy, what does Daddy actually do?” and Mummy replies, “Well, he’s an assurer.” I think that after that Mummy might have a bit of difficulty and wonder whether she had actually answered the question.

Let me apply the provision to electoral rolls. This is one of those phantom tasks on which you could expend the whole resources of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and still not solve the problem. The Minister has said that there is a problem with churning, and people moving house and so on, so we are to have more of the Central Committee investigatory branch investigating and then doing something about it. I do not know what it would be able to do if it is true that the rationale for the action, and the analysis of why there is a problem, is the changing nature of the economy and the churning of people in the trade unions. When would you have won the game? If that is the analysis you can never win the game. To use a different metaphor, you can always move the goalposts.

I hope that the Cross-Benchers in their massed ranks, between now and Christmas or a bit after, will be able to decide whether we are right or whether the Government are right in this way of stating, or inventing, a problem and begging the question to which there is not an answer as there cannot be an answer to the problem as stated.