Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill [HL]

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 1st March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, in this debate. I trust that what I say is fully within the guidelines laid down by my noble friend Lord Cameron when, as the then Prime Minister, he appointed me here and said, “See what you can do to help the trade unions—just make sure it does not cost us any money”. I think the Bill helps the trade unions and I am not sure it costs the Treasury any money—so it is within those guidelines.

First, I should make some personal declarations. As the register will record, I am the honorary president of BALPA, the pilots union, and very proud to be. I have also spent most of my life as a member of AUEW, TASS and its successors, which now puts me in the same union as the noble Lord, Lord Woodley. When I began my trade union career at the age of 16, it was in the Civil Service Clerical Association, which is now the PCS. On this day, when it launches its ballot for industrial action, it gives me great pleasure to endorse what the PCS general secretary, Fran Heathcote, said: fire and rehire is nothing short of bullying and is a nasty ploy used by unscrupulous employers to drive down pay, terms and conditions. It is worth placing that on the record. It was with that union that I held my first union position, when I became the acting chairman at 17. Because the communists of the Labour Party could not agree who should be the vice-chairman, it ended up as me, and then the chairman very inconveniently fell ill. At the age of 17, my bedtime reading was Citrine. I will not move today that the previous question be put, but that was one of my favourites in the Citrine handbook.

Let me move on. This Bill effectively tightens the rules around fire and rehire, but it really is an absolutely disgraceful practice for workers such as those I just quoted in the PCS ballot, many of whom have had their terms and conditions for 20 or 30 years—this is not something they got in a recent industrial action. This is not the way you build good industrial relations. Now, the CIPD recently did a survey and could not work out how many employers had used fire and rehire. It decided in the end that it was about 3% who had done so by dismissing and rehiring workers. That sounds a very small number, does it not? But it is over 40,000 employers. That is a big number, so we need to remember that, while this is not the biggest problem in Britain, it is certainly a big problem, particularly if you happen to be one of the workers involved.

I have spent my entire life in bits of the trade union movement; 25 years of it was spent in the European Parliament. One of the differences between that Parliament and our Parliament is that with the people in that Parliament who sit on this side of the House—the Christian Democrats, which was where I was for at least some of the time I was there—there is a trade union organisation within the party, led by a German Christian Democrat trade unionist. We used to have regular meetings, and our job was to harmonise the relations between capital and labour—not to stir them up but to make them work better, in the interests of society and industry. That is best done by co-operating with each other.

The trouble I sense with the present Government, I am afraid, is that the default position seems to be disinterest bordering on hostility. That is not a sensible way forward in industrial relations. All the people who go to work every day—I often use this example in my union—do not come from privileged backgrounds. Most pilots have worked their way up; they have been to technical school, found places in universities, become graduates and then engaged in very expensive training to do this hugely skilled job. The reason BALPA’s strapline was “Every flight a safe flight” was because the pilot is responsible for possibly 300 passengers and £150 million-worth of equipment. There was not a single fatal passenger plane crash in the world last year, but that exists because of work between the two sides of industry—and that should be our standard.

The standard we should be working to—I am afraid I have a lot of unfortunate heroes in my life—is that put forward by the late Ted Heath. He genuinely believed —although he got it a bit wrong on occasions—that the two sides of industry had to work together. They do have to work together; that is how we get a prosperous economy.

Apart from my history lectures, one of the things I talk about from time to time is the Conservative Party and its tremendous ability to reinvent itself. It has been doing so ever since it stood up for James II in 1688; noble Lords will recall that that does not appear in the manifesto anymore. But the fact of the matter is that, if we are going to move forward, the new Conservative Party has got to take a leaf out of the Ted Heath book and the European progressive trade union book, and has to learn that the future prosperity of Britain rests on both sides of industry working together for the common good. Working people need a decent wage and the employers need a decent dividend, but what they should not be doing is preying at each other’s throats all the time. That is not the way to build a successful country and a successful economy. I am pleased to support the Bill.