Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Debate between David Anderson and Stephen McPartland(11 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Stephen McPartland
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. Local councils around the country have to confront a number of issues with vexatious claims and are currently struggling under the freedom of information rules introduced by the previous Government. It may well be an issue that needs to be looked at further. It is a law of unintended consequences, however, and if there have been only six complaints in the last 10 years, I cannot imagine that there would have been many vexatious claims.
In most small workplace environments, a large proportion of the employees are not union members. If they are, they are often members of a variety of different unions. Most of those employees do not want to cross a picket line and have no intention of doing so. That can be a real emotional struggle for them; I saw that a lot when I was growing up in Liverpool. If a person is being called out on strike by union members in the area but does not want to strike, I think it is perfectly acceptable for such an employee who is not a union member to be expected not to cross the picket line. However, it is perfectly acceptable for them to question whether the ballot was accurate. There is personal and social pressure put on people and it is understandable.
Mr Anderson
The person that the hon. Gentleman is talking about has that right now. There is no point in this Bill, because the provisions are already in place: the individual can already do exactly what the hon. Gentleman says. Legislation was deliberately set up that way by Governments in the 1980s to undermine the ability of unions to take industrial action. It is already law; we do not need this new law.
Stephen McPartland
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful intervention. I grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s and I remember a great deal of industrial action. I survived. My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon said that the purpose of the Bill is to take things back to the 1980s so that that exists as the status quo now. I am not particularly interested in the ideological arguments going back and forth across the Committee. I genuinely believe that the purpose of clause 36 is to help people who feel that they want to make a complaint but cannot. I heard the shadow Minister talk earlier from the Dispatch Box about the possibility of a charge of £1 or £2 being exercised in respect of clause 36. I imagine that most trade unions would hate that because it would probably cost more to administer the charge than it would to send off the certificate.
The basic purpose of clause 36 boils down to transparency; it innocently says that trade unions need to know where their members are. There is a massive reality gap here. We all know from the electoral register, which we deal with every single year in all our walks of life, that the number of people moving in and out of constituencies when they move home is huge.
Mr Anderson
Absolutely none; not one.
We heard earlier from our learned friend the Chairman of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee about the work it was doing to try to build a consensus across the House in addressing the points the people of this country are really worried about. That has been thrown out of the window, however, so that yesterday we discussed attacks on charities and organisations like the Royal British Legion and today we are talking about attacks on the trade union movement.
Stephen McPartland
Is the hon. Gentleman prepared to tell us how many unions have approached him with concerns about the certification officer and this part of the Bill?
Mr Anderson
No trade union has approached me about the certification officer, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) said, the unions campaigned against legislation in the 1990s, but they have now accepted the reality of that legislation. They have put money aside time and again. Staff time is used up and people are employed to make sure the records are kept up to date. There is no reason to do what this part of the Bill is saying should be done, and what this part of the Bill is supposed to be about does not in any sense have anything to do with lobbying or people misusing lobbyists.
As we saw yet again today, the Prime Minister cannot stop himself: he has to attack the trade union movement, because that is part of the narrative—the big, bad trade union bosses who are controlling the Labour party, telling the leader what to do and telling us all what to do, and bankrolling us. That is absolute guff. The people being bankrolled are the Members sitting on the Government Benches, who are bankrolled by people who have no democratic right whatsoever and where there is no transparency about what they are doing. The truth is the agenda is very clear: big business is getting away with murder.
We have heard over the past few days that 1% of lobbyists could be caught by this Bill. What about the other 99% who are getting away with things? That is what the people of this country are worried about.
This is a continuation of a raft of constitutional work that has been done over the past three years: the alternative vote referendum Bill, Lords reform, the packing out of the Lords, the boundary review, the attempts to impose city mayors. They have been introduced for one reason alone: to tip the balance of power in favour of the coalition parties at the 2015 general election. It is a deliberate ploy, and people can see through it and see it for what it is. The Government want to put this Bill in place quickly so that from 8 May next year there will be a year when trade unions and civic society are banned from speaking, because the Government want to try to make people forget the mess they have got this country into and the things they have done such as introducing tuition fees and the bedroom tax, and not responding positively to the Robin Hood tax campaign. They want a vacuum in that year so no one can challenge them. The people of this country will not have that, and I am convinced that if this Bill becomes law there will be a lot of people who are prepared to stand up and break that law.
Public Service Pensions Bill
Debate between David Anderson and Stephen McPartland(11 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Anderson
I agree entirely, as somebody who is facing his 60th birthday—it comes up like an express train. I was a care worker, and I would hate to think that I would still be caring for people at my age, and in the physical shape that I am in at the moment. I would guess that the people I would be caring for might share that view.
The Minister says that there will be negotiations and discussions, but if there is to be a serious discussion, a job evaluation scheme needs to be put in place to see who a worker should be compared with. So far, the people in question are being compared with other civil servants. Should somebody carrying backpacks and armour be compared with somebody working in an office? Of course not. They should be compared with people who are out there doing a similar job for a different organisation. That would lead to exactly the conclusion that John Hutton has now come to. That is why we should support the Lords amendments and the Minister should have the good grace to accept them. They would get him off the hook.
Stephen McPartland
The Lords amendments are great, and I would like to be able to accept them, but I have some concerns about them. Members of all parties are concerned about the emotive nature of the Bill’s effects on a small group of people. I would like to put it on record that I am proud of the public sector. Many members of my family work in it, and they show great commitment to the services in which they work on a day-to-day basis. Some of them risk their lives, and others almost risk their lives teaching very small children—I would much rather address the House than a classroom of 30 primary school children.
The work of Ministry of Defence police and firefighters is incredibly important, and it would be disingenuous of Members to try to identify whether the job of one set of police officers in the Home Office is more dangerous than that of another set in the Ministry of Defence. Some police officers in the Home Office do a great deal of work in difficult circumstances in some of our areas on a Friday and Saturday night, and some have jobs that are predominantly focused around the desk and paperwork. Those jobs are also very important in the attempt to reduce crime and provide police intelligence.
As I said, this is an emotive issue, and the real problem is the knee-jerk reaction that we are seeing on the Floor of the House to the attempt to resolve it. The shadow Minister said honestly that a mistake was made in 2007 that went through by ministerial order. There was no debate in the Chamber on the retirement age of the forces in question being raised from 60 to 65. I understand, as the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) said, that some people of a particular size, weight and age would not be the best at resolving the problems we have in some of our towns and cities.