Employment Rights Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I place on record my thanks to the four maiden speakers and to the three former TUC general secretaries who have joined us for this debate, not to mention the last speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Prentis, whose union was always very helpful to me when I was David Cameron’s envoy to the TU movement.

I declare an interest: I am the president of BALPA, the pilots’ union, which is a TUC-affiliated union. I do not think I would be giving many secrets away if I said that the majority of our members probably vote Conservative at most elections.

Most people do not join trade unions for political reasons; they join because they want to be looked after and to have someone to consult if times get rough. The other thing is that most of them join because you get a good discount on your car insurance and a free legal advice service. My subs to AUEW-TASS, which is now part of Unite, were covered completely by the amount of money I got off my car insurance.

Just to rub it home a little bit, the legal service was excellent. My children went to a private school. We once got into a bit of trouble with the bursar, who was trying to pull a fast one. I rang the union legal service, and a very helpful solicitor drafted me a letter. I said, “I dare say you’re not used to helping your members challenge private schools”. I always remember his reply. He said, “Sir, we are not here to judge the members; we’re here to help them”. Those two facts about unions are a great comfort to many ordinary people who have to work for their living.

I have known quite a lot of Prime Ministers. The only Conservative one that I thought was on the right track was Ted Heath. If things had turned out differently, this party might well have a somewhat different relationship. I got to know Ted quite well after he retired because he used to enjoy coming to Brussels. They are so obsessive there about political balance and I was about the only Labour Party member willing to sit next to him at dinner, so we had lots of very interesting conversations.

I welcome this Bill—I am probably the only one on this side who does—because I think it clears up a lot of anomalies that need clearing up. I served 25 years in the European Parliament and I saw European trade unionism, based on the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, where you respect the rights of workers. It is as simple as that. But I do think that, if we are going to move forward, those in the TU movement will have to change. They have to get Conservatives into the annual congress; they have to make them come and explain what they are up to, not have them as the hate figure on the wall. The TU movement itself has to look at how it deals with the one-third of its members who vote for the Conservative Party. That is as much of a challenge as our challenge to pass this law and make things better for the workers.

Employment Rights Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, I admit that I am a little perplexed by Amendment 1, particularly in the light of the latest TUC-commissioned poll that was published last night. Not only is the Bill popular with the public, including a majority of Conservative and Reform voters, but, when they are faced with robust arguments against its key provisions, the Bill becomes even more popular with voters.

I am not sure that your Lordships or the public need this amendment to know that the Bill is about fairness, security and the right to an independent voice at work. The public are already well aware and, frankly, appalled that, under the previous Government, low pay and insecurity became mainstream in British working life. They want change.

Underlying this amendment—this might be my suspicious mind—is the worry that it is really about undermining the role of independent trade unions in representing workers’ interests. The ILO uses the term “workers’ organisations” for a reason. International law upholds the right to collective bargaining and freedom of association. Independent trade unions are workers’ best chance of getting their rights enforced and built on for better pay, safer workplaces, training opportunities and family-friendly hours, and they provide a democratic voice at work.

Without repeating the arguments from Second Reading, I encourage your Lordships to look at the evidence about just how far Britain has fallen behind other countries in employment protection, and how giving ordinary working people a stronger collective voice can help deliver more responsible businesses and a healthier and more equal society.

I encourage the noble Lord, Lord Fox, to cast his mind back to Labour’s introduction of a national minimum wage. He may remember that the Conservative Party and the business lobby said that a national minimum wage would cause mass unemployment and that businesses would collapse. In reality, the national minimum wage is now widely respected as one of Britain’s most successful policies. It has made a difference to millions of working lives in the teeth of opposition from the business lobby at the time. It is worth remembering that.

I end by saying that it is time to get on with and get behind the Bill, so that Britain takes the high road to improving business productivity by treating workers fairly, as human beings and not just commodities.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to address a quorate meeting of the TUC General Council. I should declare an interest at the beginning: I am the honorary president of BALPA, the British Airline Pilots Association, a union that covers all the people who fly you on holiday and back again. Its motto or strapline for many years was

“every flight a safe flight”.

It regarded its job as to deal not only with the members but with safety. In dealing with the companies that we dealt with and still deal with, aircraft safety and looking after passengers was as much at the front of our mission as anything to do with pay and conditions. Of course, we were interested in them—we were a trade union, after all—but we were a responsible trade union. I stand on this side of the House pretty convinced that probably a majority of the members of BALPA support this party. Let me remind the House why.

Most people do not join a trade union for any political purpose. They often join, as I did at the age of 16, because it is there. Nowadays, most trade unions, particularly the better ones, have a free legal advice service and will get you a discount on your car insurance. I have told this story once before, I think, but at a point when we had a silly dispute between my family and the bursar of our local private school, I rang up the union solicitor and he drafted me a letter to send to the bursar very quickly. I apologised and said, “I am sorry. I dare say this is not what you are normally here for”. I will always remember his reply. He said, “Mr Balfe”, for I was that in those days, “we are not here to judge our membership. We are here to help them”. At the basis of virtually every trade union official and action is the desire to help the membership. Nobody I know regards going on strike as anything other than a defeat, because it means the members do not get paid, you often lose pension entitlement, and you lose your wages. You know, people go to work to get their work done, to get a reasonable wage.

I always had a lot of time for a person who is almost unmentionable in modern politics, Edward Heath, because I thought that he came nearer to understanding the TU movement than probably any leader of the Conservative Party and maybe any leader overall. Indeed, I remember when I was a much younger trade union person in the 1960s asking a group of Conservatives who they thought was the best Secretary of State for Labour there had ever been. The result was unanimous: Sir Walter Monckton, Conservative Minister under Churchill, was reckoned to be the one who listened to them the most. You always have to have a runner-up in these things just in case one falls down, and that was Iain Macleod.