Blacklisting

Cathy Jamieson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

Let me just proceed a little more.

I should like to move on from that point and to ask, out of genuine curiosity, about the way in which this issue has surfaced in the form of an Opposition day debate. The Prime Minister was totally right to point out as a matter of fact that these things had happened before 2010, and I do not quite understand why that has caused such offence. Many of the issues that have been raised here relate to the conduct and behaviour of the Information Commissioner. As the hon. Member for Streatham and his colleagues know, those in the Information Commissioner’s Office are not Government officials responsible to Ministers; they are responsible to the House. The Information Commissioner is a different kind of animal from a Government Department. Many of the allegations relate to the courts, and to civil and criminal practice, for which we cannot take responsibility.

[Cathy Jamieson (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I very much hope that that is the case and thank my hon. Friend for his intervention.

The shadow Secretary of State talked about how different Governments had tried to act on this but found it difficult. I completely understand that, having gone through the history of blacklisting as best I could with the information provided to me. In 2003, as he detailed, the former Labour Government consulted on introducing regulations against blacklisting but announced that they would not bring any into force because the evidence suggested that blacklisting had been eradicated in the 1990s. Six years later, in 2009, they announced that they had plans to implement regulations to outlaw the blacklisting of trade unionists. I was quite surprised to find that Labour chose not to make compensation or penalties retrospective. If the weight of evidence that would be required was not available back in 2009 when the shadow Secretary of State’s party was making those choices and decisions, why is it so relevant to secure it now? As the Secretary of State said, and as the shadow Secretary of State will know, retrospective action has lots of unforeseen consequences and is therefore rarely taken by any Government of any political ilk.

In 2008, when the Information Commissioner’s Office closed down the blacklisting of construction workers by the Consulting Association, it did its job in a reasonable way, if slightly slowly, as the hon. Member for Streatham said. It went about trying to establish a fast-track service and a helpline to assist those who suspected that they had been on the list, but many significant entries on that list were incomplete and very dated. I therefore suspect that the gathering of the information slowed down the ICO’s investigation.

The law does now protect employees from blacklisting. When I read through the history in the articles I had assembled, I thought—this has not been mentioned by anyone else—that the problem is not so much the existence of a blacklist but people knowing of its existence and having to worry about whether their employment chances are affected by its being in effect. The pure knowledge of the existence of the list has a huge detrimental effect on people.

[Cathy Jamieson]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should look into the suggestion that there has been a separate blacklist of people who have been involved in environmental activism? As he rightly says, the fact that people are aware that a blacklist exists means that they will also want to know how to get information about whether their names have been included and how it has affected them.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I would hope that the current legislation would help to eliminate those issues and tidy them up. I could make a few political points, but I am trying to reflect the feeling of the debate so far. Employees in the UK are already protected against blacklisting by the Employment Relations Act 1999 (Blacklists) Regulations 2010. The regulations allow them to bring a case to a civil court or employment tribunal, as detailed by the Secretary of State, if they suspect that they have been denied employment, suffered detriment or been unfairly dismissed as a result of an illegal blacklist.

The Information Commissioner’s Office is working to help people who are concerned that they have been affected in such a way and is, supposedly,

“committed to investigating any intelligence databases being operated in breach of the Data Protection Act 1998.”

The ICO continues to help people who are suspected of being on a list and is doing more, supposedly, proactively to contact others who do not know that their names are on a list in the first place.

We have to wonder whether the ICO has the capability to do the job that we are asking it to do, or the job that it has been doing, in its given time frame. It has so many names with only basic entries—some with no addresses and others without much detail at all—and finding and contacting them will take a huge amount of time. I am not arguing for more resources for the ICO; I am just making the point that this is a fairly big job on a fairly lax database, and that needs to be investigated.

I think I heard the Secretary of State say that there is no evidence that the practice of blacklisting trade union members is a widespread problem. I am comfortable, to a certain point, with the questions he asked of the Opposition, because the tiny bit of the motion that says that the practice “may be” happening now opens a new kettle of fish. It should not be going on now, because it is illegal under the 1999 Act.

The ICO undertook an investigation in 2008-09 and the Labour Government subsequently introduced blacklisting regulations. Given that the Scottish Affairs Committee has been given seemingly new evidence by those involved at the time, will the Secretary of State confirm whether there are grounds to go over the ICO’s original investigation?

I have tried to be non-partisan up to a point. I have some interesting experiences of trade unions. I used to run a business that operated with the help or hindrance of the Transport and General Workers Union. I ran the business during the last closed shop. It was not a great experience and it did not endear me to unions. However, I have a close relative who is a teacher and who was accused of doing something ridiculous. His teaching union—yes, one of those teaching unions that we on the Conservative Benches do not particularly like—was magnificent in the way in which it protected, helped and supported him. It provided a superb service.

I am not as wary of unions as some of the others on the Conservative Benches and I perhaps have more knowledge of them. I am, however, wary of the way this debate came to take place. The hon. Member for Streatham should be very wary of the potential for allegations to be made with regard to union paymasters and so on. [Interruption.] That is absolutely the case. We need only look at the Register of Members’ Financial Interests to see that there might be a link between debates on the Floor of the House and where they came from.