Trade Union Bill

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Prosser for moving this amendment. After the rest of the Bill, which was like trudging through a freezing Arctic wilderness, this is like relaxing in a warm bath and savouring the moment. The subject of Royal Mail was raised earlier. When I first got to ACAS and tried to book the best rooms in the building for a meeting I was told, “No, you can’t have those rooms. They are set aside for six weeks”. I said, “Why on earth are you setting aside those three best rooms for six weeks?”. I was told, “Well, that’ll be the Royal Mail dispute”. So the job, as I saw it, was to eliminate the recidivists and accentuate good employment relations. I know that ACAS saw that as its job. I should say that I am in receipt of a small pension from ACAS before I go on to praise it.

This amendment sums up what ACAS is about. Without going into detail, because I am going to take only two minutes, it produces high-quality reports on employment relations and how to improve productivity and employee engagement. It has a helpline which took 1 million calls a year when I was the chair—it is probably more now—assisting both employers and employees, while its website was consistently praised by HR managers in every industry. ACAS knows the value of good employment relations and about the important work of trade unions.

My noble friend Lady Prosser mentioned the Involvement and Participation Association, of which I am very proud to be a vice-president. It encourages partnership working and employee/trade union engagement, produces reports and promulgates examples of good practice to encourage others. Finally, as a fellow of the CIPD, which also promotes good employment relations as a route to improving productivity, attendance and staff morale, I say that this amendment acts as a welcome contrast to the rest of the Bill, which is such a lost opportunity, as my noble friend Lord Young said. We could have been discussing how to improve our productivity and provide a skilled workforce. Every study from the organisations that I have mentioned, including the workplace employment relations study that ACAS always supported and helped to finance, proves time and again the importance of positive employment relations. I very much hope that the Minister will take this amendment on board in the spirit in which it is intended.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friends Lady Prosser, Lord Young of Norwood Green and Lord Mendelsohn, who have put their names to this amendment. I spoke at some length at Second Reading and I will not repeat that today, as much of what I wish to say has already been said. However, at Second Reading I talked about not just trade unions but the millions of workers who are as yet not members of a union. A series of analyses indicates that many of them lead unhappy lives at work. They do not make the contribution at work that they would like to, while the benefit of what they could add to companies’ quality and output is not taken into account. I said that we needed to think in a more positive frame of mind about how we can engage people in unions, and those who are as yet not in unions, to better our economic performance and well-being in this country.

At the end of that speech, I pleaded with the Minister to go back and look at the information and consultative council regulations introduced back in 2005 by Tony Blair’s Government. At the end of Second Reading, she had a lot of people to respond to and she did not address that issue—in fairness to her, it was probably because she saw that she needed to speak on other topics. When she responded to me she spoke on something else—check-off, which we were dealing with earlier in the day. But like my colleagues I hope that I can urge her or her Whip, who may be looking at the subject with a fresh pair of eyes, to take this part of the debate away and look carefully at what we have had to say. It is about progress and making a better life for employers and employees.

Following my noble friend Lady Donaghy, I have had a look at some recent documents issued by ACAS. It says:

“Information and consultation are the basic building blocks of every effective organisation. These concepts are as crucial to the relationship between the individual workers and their line manager as they are to”,

any other parties. It continues:

“Whatever the size or type of your organisation people need to talk to each other. They need to … exchange views and ideas … issue and receive instructions … discuss problems … consider developments”.

ACAS goes on to list a range of topics that are worthy of joint consultation between employees and their managers, including organisational performance, management performance and decision-making, employees’ performance and commitment, levels of trust, job satisfaction and work/life balance. The list goes on and on.

In many workplaces, unions are there but such discussions are not taking place in the way that they should. There are even more workplaces around the country where the voiceless have no means whereby they can engage properly with their managers to the overall improvement of the operation of those businesses and companies. That is to the detriment of not only the individuals in and owners of businesses but the company at large. My noble friend Lady Prosser has been extraordinarily agile in finding a way to bring an amendment to a Bill whose primary focus is on what I would see as negatives relating to trade unions. However, this amendment gives the Government a chance to put a positive there, as my colleagues have been pleading, and this time around I hope that we will get a positive response to our points.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I too hope that this session provides a little light relief for the Minister, who has had quite a hard time through various sessions of the Bill. It has been a bit like a series of one-sided OK Corrals. Over lunch, I thought I might ask the Minister whether she has any genes from Stonewall Jackson, that great Confederate general. The other metaphorical point I would make is that he ended up being shot by his own side—accidentally. I hope the Government at least allow the Minister to make the concessions in the Bill which will be her salvation.

Amendment 97A is welcome in providing a wider debate on where we are going and I would like to make a number of points. Employment engagement is very important to improving the country’s competitive position, and to improving services in the public sector. As someone who has been in industry, I certainly feel that we have far too much dependence on adversarial systems and processes—I sense this in our politics as well—when engagement and working together on problems normally provides much better solutions.

I am certainly one of those who welcomes unions and sees their important role in society and industry but, sadly, the reality is that although the unions remain strong in the public sector they have become weak in the private sector. However we may regret that, we have to make the point that although unions are important there has also to be a diversity of systems that can work well. We see that in companies such as Marks & Spencer and John Lewis, and many foreign-owned companies where processes have been developed not necessarily strictly through recognised trade unions. This is very important in the public sector, where we in this country will no longer have a great and dominant manufacturing sector—although we might like to aspire to that—but will be much more dependent on services. That requires the motivation of employees and will be especially important in the public sector; it is certainly important in the private sector. That is why an adversarial system is no longer totally relevant to improving industrial relations.

I welcome the spirit of this amendment, the thinking behind it and the opportunity to have a general debate, however briefly, on this important subject.