Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not want to repeat points which have already been made by other noble Lords, but two points do bear underlining. First, the consultation period has already been mentioned, but I am not sure that noble Lords know its exact dates. It opened on 17 July this year and closed on 16 August. I would like to ask any fair-minded person whether they thought that to be a sufficiently long period for consultation, and whether that was the right time of year to have such a serious constitutional consultation. My second point, which has already been made but bears repeating, is that the Regulatory Policy Committee stated that:

“The impact assessment lacks a sound evidence base and is insufficiently robust to justify RPC validation of the estimated costs to civil society organisations (trade unions)”.

That is a damming indictment of the process that this Government have adopted. Even if the proposals were valid and fair, and even if we understood their motivation, I would say that the process is not just flawed but a public disgrace.

Let us look again at the impact assessment. I should emphasise that I am not criticising the civil servants who drafted it. They are magicians; they have conjured up some window dressing for this crackpot idea, which puts them on a par with Tommy Cooper. I blame the crackpot idea. The impact assessment states:

“Anecdotal evidence from a few employers provided as part of informal consultation with stakeholders suggests that some employers would benefit from being provided greater assurance that membership lists are accurate”.

“A few employers”; “suggests”; “some would benefit”: how in the name of bureaucracy are some employers going to benefit from a certificate? That is all that they are going to get. In the next paragraph the impact assessment states:

“Given the complexity of maintaining up-to-date registers there is a danger that trade union members, employers and the general public will not be confident that unions are complying with their duty to maintain an accurate and up-to-date register”.

Who says that there is a danger? Here is another quote:

“We have received views from some employers that there is a perception”—

this is going further and further back—

“that trade union membership details may be inaccurate”.

Yet the impact assessment then goes on to state:

“But we have no direct evidence that unions are not complying with the existing statutory duty to maintain their list of members”.

Let me repeat that. This impact assessment—which the Government expect us to take seriously, even though it was not actually published at the same time as the Bill—acknowledges that there is no evidence that unions are not complying with the existing statutory duty to maintain their list of members. This is a shocking example of a complete failure to produce evidence to justify this dubious policy.

The finances are also way out of line. We are told that independent assurers will be appointed from professional bodies such as solicitors, auditors and scrutineers. The cost to the trade unions for these assurers is estimated by the impact assessment to vary between £5,000 and £15,000. I have never met an auditor yet who would get out of bed for those sorts of figures. I could go on. The intellectual base and the rationale for this proposal are absent, but the petty prejudice of this Government is only too obvious.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend asked at the beginning of her speech whether the Committee thought that a 30-day period—no more than that—was adequate for consultation. It is quite clear that the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, which has reported on consultation matters, thought that such a period is inadequate and that a six-week period ought to be regarded as a working minimum. As my noble friend pointed out, the period in question partly covered a holiday period as well. That is just one flaw in this process, which is another example of this Government’s propensity to cobble together wholly unrelated issues into a single Bill.

I said at Second Reading on the anti-social behaviour Bill that it was not so much a curate’s egg as a curate’s omelette, combining as it did a variety of different substances. I said on that occasion that there were unsavoury ingredients; I have to say in connection with this part of the Bill that these are certainly unsavoury ingredients. It is strange, is it not, that this is a Government who have taken so long to begin to do anything about the massive scandals in the banking industry, the regulation of letting agents—my noble friend Lady Hayter has been pursuing that for some years—the energy companies or payday lenders, none of which are effectively regulated but are all matters of huge public concern? Yet they do not get legislation, let alone legislation in the form in which it emerges in this Bill.

The Explanatory Notes give some justification for Part 1, the part of the Bill that was contained in the coalition agreement. I think it was also in the Conservative manifesto. It was certainly the Prime Minister’s intention to deal with the “next scandal” which he, perhaps rightly, identified as political lobbying. Three years on we get a Bill which deals with that, after a fashion, but with these additional elements thrown in—and in a quite unjustified and unexplained way.

The Explanatory Notes do not touch on the rationale for these proposals. Just as the anti-social behaviour Bill includes such matters as dangerous dogs, firearms, court fees and policing, all dragged together in a Bill which is supposed to be dealing with anti-social behaviour, in this Bill we get proposals, out of nowhere, affecting trade unions in a way that is not imposed on any other sector. It is not imposed on professional bodies or, in anything like this form, on the world of charities. It is purely a question of singling out trade unions. As others of my noble friends have said, perhaps these proposals were intended to convey the misguided view that these are all political organisations pledged to support the Labour Party, which is palpably not the case. It is an unfortunate example of recidivism on at least the Conservative part of this coalition Government that they should hark back to that kind of divisive and inaccurate view of the trade union movement, which is much broader than they would like people to think.

There is no justification for Part 3. We have yet to hear from the Government why at the last minute they have chosen to add this dubious ingredient to the legislative omelette to which I have referred. It will be interesting to hear what explanation the Minister can give over and above the flimsy grounds that have been referred to by my noble friends already, particularly my noble friend Lady Donaghy, and the handful of responses that conditionally seem to raise concerns that have not been adequately explored or explained. This is an unworthy addition to a Bill that should have dealt with the much more serious problem of the impact on our parliamentary democracy of lobbying, which the Prime Minister identified all that time ago. This is hugely important.

When it comes to compiling information, perhaps the Government should give more attention to ensuring that we have a fully complete electoral register underpinning that parliamentary democracy, while expressing their concerns in this very party-political way about the membership of trade unions organisations, which are already significantly regulated. I hope that this debate will persuade the Government to have second thoughts. I am not over-optimistic, but they really ought to have second thoughts about pushing forward a measure that is irrelevant, in this part anyway, to the needs of our country, to the role of the trade unions and to industrial relations.

It also imposes a significant financial burden on the sector. In local government, we have something called the new burdens theory, under which, if new responsibilities are laid on local authorities, the Government are supposed to make financial allowance for them. There is no indication whatever that they will do so here. Yet this is a Government who, in their legal aid provisions, scramble round to find areas for cutting back on access to justice for minimal savings. They are prepared to inflict on organisations representing millions of people costs in excess of those that they are seeking to achieve by legislative measures in that area. It is a disgrace and the Government should think again.

[Baroness Drake (Lab)]

I support my noble friends Lord Monks and Lord Stevenson. Trade unions are a very important part of civil society. In their contribution to it they have many proud achievements: the equal treatment of part-time workers; the financial assistance scheme for pensioners whose companies go bust; and the national minimum wage, to mention just a few. These concepts were challenged at the time, but are now accepted as an integral part of a civilised and advanced society.

A free and independent collective voice for ordinary working people is also an essential ingredient for a secure democracy, whether we look back to the 20th century or to what is happening in some emerging economies. Oh, for some of the mature, stable, free, independent voices to address some of the issues that have occurred in those civil societies! In spite of that, at the moment we have a narrative that quite crudely says, “Unions bad, employers good”.

We are seeing in this Bill an opportunity to give extensive powers to part of the state to access trade union membership records, allowing third parties, whoever they may be, to make complaints. These powers are being granted in the absence of coherent reasons for the Government to make this necessary, or of a problem that they are seeking to remedy. We are struggling to understand that. This is a sizeable attack on an important, voluntary set of organisations in their contribution to civil society, and they are being subjected to potential onerous conditions.

Much mention has been made of strike ballots. I confess to having conducted quite a few in my previous existence. As my noble friend Lord Whitty commented, they are about bargaining units and who are the union members within those units. The employer wants to know exactly who is involved in the strike and which employees will be absent. Employers can readily seek injunctions if they are unhappy with the information that unions provide. I know to my cost—I have experienced those injunctions and have had to stand there and explain in detail. I do not bite ankles, but I still found myself facing an injunction.