Blacklisting

Debate between Chuka Umunna and Ellie Reeves

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Chuka Umunna]

I wholeheartedly agree. My hon. Friend talks about litigation, and in July 2014 Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Costain, Kier, Laing O’Rourke, Sir Robert McAlpine, Skanska UK and VINCI plc, which were all involved in blacklisting and in funding the Consulting Association, established a compensation scheme for individual workers affected by blacklisting and made an apology of sorts for what happened. However, their scheme was established unilaterally without agreement on the terms with the trade unions representing workers. Other firms that were part of the hall of shame involved with the association such as the Amec Group, Amey, BAM Construction, Morgan Sindall and Taylor Woodrow did not sign up to the scheme.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

As my hon. Friend knows, this is an important issue to me as I represented blacklisted members of the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians in the High Court. Does he agree that no firm involved in historical blacklisting should be given a public contract until it demonstrates regret for its actions by supporting a public inquiry, offering retraining to victims and demonstrating that its recruitment processes are transparent and fair?

[Chuka Umunna]

I completely agree, and I commend my hon. Friend and the huge team of people who have worked on all the litigation we have seen in the High Court brought by a number of unions including UCATT— now part of Unite—which I am proud to say is headquartered in my constituency, and the GMB. Those unions deserve huge credit for the efforts they put into uncovering exactly what went on and then getting redress, working with my hon. Friend and others in the courts. Those cases have been settled in the past two years and millions have been paid, but the fact remains that not one director of the firms who funded the Consulting Association has ever been properly brought to book, fined or subjected to any individual court sanction for the misery they visited on construction workers over the decades. No one has been brought to book properly for that.

In fact, we are behaving as if all has been forgiven. Tears were apparently shed last month over the fact that we will not hear Big Ben’s bongs for several years. We should be far more concerned about the fact that Sir Robert McAlpine, a firm implicated in all of this, appears to have bagged a multi-million pound contract for the work that is to be carried out on Big Ben tower to fix those bongs.

Let us be clear about the role that the company Sir Robert McAlpine played. Cullum McAlpine, a director of Sir Robert McAlpine, was chairman of the Consulting Association when it was formed in 1993. Later, David Cochrane, the head of HR at that firm, succeeded him as chair of the association. During a hearing of the Scottish Affairs Committee’s inquiry into all of this in 2012, the late Ian Kerr, who died that year, admitted that his £5,000 fine for breaches of the Data Protection Act was met by Sir Robert McAlpine

“on the basis that I had put myself at the front and took the flak, if you like, for it all, so that they wouldn’t be drawn into all of this. They would remain hidden.”

How, in the light of that, can we parliamentarians sit here and say to the victims—many of whom are watching the debate in the Public Gallery—“It is an outrage”, while we stand by as Sir Robert McAlpine is awarded the contract to do the work on the parliamentary estate? There must be consequences when those who bid for public contracts are found to be involved in such practices. Will the Minister explain why on earth, given its disgraceful role in blacklisting, we are giving Sir Robert McAlpine the contract to fix the bongs of Big Ben, which so many parliamentarians have shed tears over?

I took up the blacklisting issue originally as a constituency issue, having been alerted to the scandal by my good friends at Unite; I took an even stronger interest when I was shadow Business Secretary, and I instigated the first full debate on the topic on the Floor of the House in 2013. As I have said, I instigated another debate on it earlier this year, because we must have a proper public inquiry into blacklisting, and the victims are continually denied it.