Lord Collins of Highbury
Main Page: Lord Collins of Highbury (Labour - Life peer)Trade Union Bill
Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts
Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)
My Lords, I shall not detain the Committee for too long, but I want to talk about Clause 3 standing part of the Bill. It illustrates the problem of combining a 50% turnout requirement with a 40% of eligible votes being in favour. Can the Minister confirm whether the figure of 40% was in the Conservative manifesto?
We have had all kinds of figures bandied around; we have had 35%, 20% and 25% as suggested rates, but none of these works. We have had the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, talking about 499 out of a workforce of 1,000 voting for action but unable to make it legitimate because one person did not vote in favour. And if you had just a 50% turnout, 80% would have to vote in favour for industrial action. It is important to have strong support for action if you are going to inconvenience the public, but I do not believe that this is the way, so my party does not believe that Clause 3 should stand part of the Bill.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, the fact that there is a manifesto commitment to both 50% and 40% does not release the Government from the responsibility to explain why and to explain the consequences of their action. The manifesto also says:
“We will protect you from disruptive … action”.
If the strikes do pass the test and there is disruptive action, what are the Government going to propose next? A lot of people in this Chamber believe that this is the first step and not the only step; there may be more to come in order to stop disruptive action.
The purpose of our amendments in this group is to highlight and probe the arbitrary nature of the proposed statutory thresholds for industrial action ballots. The potential impact of these will be to make it very difficult for working people to organise collectively in defence of their jobs, livelihoods and working conditions. As my noble friend Lord Sawyer says, the balance is not overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the workers in most parts of the country in most industries. Unions will find it increasingly difficult to organise lawful industrial action, especially in larger workplaces and those with more dispersed workforces.
The recently published impact assessment estimates that the 50% threshold will reduce the number of work stoppages due to industrial action by 37% each year. The Government have also published initial estimates suggesting that the 40% threshold in important public services—we will obviously come on to the debate in the next group about what those important public services are—would lead to an additional eight percentage points reduction in working days lost to industrial action.
It is also unclear why the Government have determined 40% as a threshold. I know it is in the manifesto; I am not querying that. But nowhere in the impact assessment do the Government look at other percentages as a possibility. They have instead stuck to this figure of 40% as the magic number that will mean that industrial powers are sufficiently curbed, meeting their manifesto commitment to,
“protect you from disruptive … action”.
Can the Minister explain and give us the rational argument as to why the figure is 40%?
I want to spend a bit of time tonight talking about what, in the main, unionised workplaces are like. Unionised workplaces tend to be safer. They are more likely to have enhanced family-friendly policies and to invest in skills and training than non-unionised workplaces. And as the Minister knows extremely well, there are unionised places that are well positioned to innovate and respond to changing economic conditions—she has been part of one of the most successful partnership agreements in the country. They work and they deliver because they are focused on ensuring the success of the enterprise, as the noble Lord, Lord King, said. That is what good unions do.
These thresholds will not assist in that process. Modern trade union workplaces do not occur by magic. Ensuring an equal bargaining power between unions and employers is not easily achieved. The ability of unions to organise lawful industrial action provides essential support for effective negotiations. They are part of a rational process to ensure that both sides understand the consequences of their action. People do not go to strike to destroy the enterprise; it is often to protect it, their jobs and their futures.
The majority of ballots do not lead to action. Balloting members ensures that employers take the views of the workplace seriously and engage in genuine negotiations. It is part of the process of reaching agreement. That is what union organisation is about. This week is heartunions week, celebrating the valuable work unions do to improve pay and working conditions. It is in the interests of employers and employees for disputes to be resolved quickly and amicably.
I fear the Government’s proposals mean that disputes are more likely to become protracted. Unions will take more time in the run-up to ballots to ensure the necessary turnout, diverting time and effort away from finding an amicable settlement. Employers may decide to wait and see whether a union can make the strike threshold before making a revised offer. These thresholds are not working towards decent industrial relations. They also increase the potential for legal challenges, which will escalate tensions between employers and the workforce, again making it difficult to resolve a dispute amicably.
The Government’s case is that the 50% turnout threshold, along with the 40% threshold in important public services, are needed to protect the public from disruption. The noble Lord, Lord King, made that case. In order to be effective, industrial action must cause disruption. However, from the current evidence, it is clear that unions are treating industrial action as a matter of last resort.
The evidence is clear: the statistics published by the ONS confirm that the number of days lost to industrial action per year has fallen dramatically. Since 2010, on average 640,000 days have been lost to industrial action each year compared with 7,213,000 days lost per year in the 1980s. In 2014, there were only 155 stoppages as a result of industrial action, with 55% of the stoppages—85 of them—taking place in the private sector and 45% in the public sector. We hear talk of this being a problem for the public sector; the evidence does not back that up. In an economy with more than 30 million people in employment, that is an extremely low level of industrial action. Most industrial action is short lived. In 2014, 64% of all stoppages lasted only one or two days.
Why do people strike? In 2014, 89% of working days lost were due to disputes about pay and pensions. As I said, in the vast majority of cases where unions ballot for industrial action, disputes are settled without the need for strike. In 2014, there were 550 ballots supporting strike action but only 151 stoppages. I fear that this threshold and this intention to curb industrial action are going to exacerbate the situation and will lead to longer negotiations without the push towards a settlement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
My Lords, the ability of union members to strike is an important part of our industrial relations system. As the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, rightly reminded us, today we are also debating the clause stand part. Let me start by explaining that the objective of Clause 3 is to require strike action in important public services, if it has to take place, to secure a stronger democratic mandate. We must consider the interests of the wider public, as well as those of non-striking workers and employers, alongside the rights of union members. It is a sensible and proportionate reform and, as has been said, the thresholds we are talking about are in our manifesto. The impact of strike action is most severe when it takes place in the important public services that people and businesses rely upon every day, particularly services that are effectively monopolies, leaving people with no alternatives if strikes take place. This is particularly unfair when strike action goes ahead without strong support by a unionised workforce. This is a very different situation from my own positive experience—
Lord Collins of Highbury
The Minister used the term “monopolies”. Is that true of London bus drivers? Do they have a monopoly? There are alternatives in London. There are also alternatives between buses in London; there is not necessarily just one route. So why London bus drivers?
Lord Collins of Highbury
My Lords, this debate is on what certain “important public services” mean in terms of not just the 50% turnout but the 40% of those entitled to vote. Important public services are defined as the fire service, transport services, education for children under the age of 17, border security, and the decommissioning and management of radioactive waste. The Bill does not specify within these services who will be covered by the 40% threshold. But as the Minister has just said in response to the other grouping, the Government recently responded to their consultation on balloting thresholds and important public services.
In that response, and the accompanying skeleton regulations, more details are provided on the types of jobs and functions that the Government propose should be covered by this 40% threshold. In the fire service it includes firefighters, firefighter mangers, control centre staff and managers who co-ordinate the response; and in health it includes doctors, nurses and staff employed in ambulance services, A&E, intensive care and high-dependency units. The threshold will also apply to publicly funded services provided by private hospitals. In education it includes teachers in publicly funded schools that teach pupils between the ages of five and 16, and head teachers and academy principals in state-funded education teaching children between the ages of five and 16. In transport it includes, as I mentioned before, staff employed in bus services in London, including drivers and emergency and control staff, and staff employed in passenger rail services, the metro, the Underground and trams, including train drivers, conductors and guards, safety staff, maintenance staff, and signal and engineering staff. In civil air transport it includes those who work in civil air traffic control, including licensed civil air traffic controllers, airport security, port security and border security, including staff employed to implement entry and exit checks. The Government have said that they are still reviewing which functions within the nuclear decommissioning sector should be covered by the 40% threshold. It is unclear when this decision will be made and I hope that the Minister can inform the House exactly when that will be.
I am, of course, pleased that the Minister has put her name to Amendment 6, which removes from the scope of the 40% threshold individuals employed in ancillary activities that support important public services. This means that hundreds of thousands of private sector service workers will no longer be covered by the threshold. Of course we welcome that. However, it does not address the imprecise nature of the proposals. Before they go to a ballot, unions will not know whether the 40% threshold will apply. That will create uncertainty in industrial relations.
Amendment 3 is a probing amendment, intended to seek clarity from the Government about the broad category of “important public services”. We suggest inserting “solely” into new subsection (2B), so that the 40% threshold would apply only to those who are,
“normally engaged solely in … the provision of important public services, or”,
ancillary services. As the provision stands, it is unclear whether individuals who spend only part of their time providing so-called “important public services” are covered by the 40% vote requirement.
Take education, for example. Education unions planning to ballot staff in a school with a sixth form will find it difficult to assess whether staff who teach both pupils under 17 and those in years 12 and 13 are normally engaged in providing important public services. This will be particularly problematic where teachers’ work schedules vary during the academic year. They might do one thing in one term and something else in another. How will unions be able to work out how the 40% will apply? Similarly, it is not clear whether the 40% threshold will apply to a ballot involving lecturers in further education colleges who teach classes in which some of the pupils may be 16.
The skeleton regulations say that the threshold will apply to,
“care services provided by a hospital for illnesses, conditions or injuries which require immediate attention in order to prevent serious injury, serious illness or loss of life”.
It is far from clear whether this will cover¸ for example, medical staff working in orthopaedic wards, radiographers, anaesthetists or surgeons. It is clear that the Government have not thought this measure through closely. It demonstrates a poor understanding not just of the way trade unions operate but of public sector working patterns.
The proposals are inconsistent and incoherent, and vary considerably across sectors. For example, virtually all staff working in the transport sector will be covered by the 40% threshold, whereas in other sectors its scope will be far narrower. I find it difficult to see how the Government can justify restricting the right to strike for staff working in ticket offices at railway stations and on the Underground, for example, when TfL has just decided to close ticket offices because they are not considered to be essential services. That creates incoherent policy application.
The threshold will apply to bus drivers—but only in London. On the previous group of amendments the Minister suggested that that was because, outside London—well, actually I did not quite get her argument. Were there more buses there? From what I hear on the radio, rural areas will be depleted of any bus service. The “strike” affecting bus services in rural areas is being conducted not by the workers, who would love to keep their jobs in those services, but as a consequence of government cuts, which will deny communities the right to a bus service. An essential bus service is being denied by the actions of this Government, elected on 36% of the poll. It is that incoherent, inconsistent policy objective that we object to most.
Lord Collins of Highbury
Yet the argument is made that ticket offices are not needed any more; they are closing them and Transport for London is going to propose that a number of stations will not be staffed. I hope that the Government will tell Transport for London that it is damaging people’s confidence in a public service and therefore it must keep the ticket offices there.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I think we all feel that the plight and the needs of the disabled and elderly are important, but I was trying to explain the logic on this occasion. The fact that people in ticket offices are helping disabled and vulnerable people is actually a big positive.
There was some discussion about why London buses but not rural buses are included. During the recent strike of 2015, TfL achieved a partial service, but this resulted in 7.5 million fewer journeys. Workers on low incomes rely disproportionately on the bus service in London; around 40% of people using buses are on concessionary fares and some 50% of bus passengers have an annual household income below £20,000. In contrast, there is limited evidence of the impact of strike action on local bus services outside London and on the sorts of users who rely on these services.
Finally, in the Border Force we are addressing the significant risks to public safety in the event of disruption to border controls. We have focused on services in respect of the entry and exit of people and goods, as these are central to the carrying out of checks and to preventing illicit commodities, such as unlicensed drugs and munitions, entering the country.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, asked about progress on nuclear decommissioning and when our findings will be announced. The sector, as he knows, is a complex, heavy-industry sector with interdependencies between the workforces within and between sites. The Government are working to better understand these interdependencies and the implications of forthcoming business changes, and to support workforce reform plans, before bringing forward regulations to apply the threshold in this sector. Any regulations will be subject to the affirmative procedure.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My noble friend has kindly made the point that I was about to make about the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. Perhaps I should say finally that we do not want confusion and conflation of the two terms. In any event, the supervisory bodies of the ILO fulfil an informal advisory role and their decisions are not legally binding on the UK.
I turn to Amendment 18, which proposes that the Government will have only one chance to make subordinate legislation on the services to be covered by the 40% threshold, which I think is what the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, explained. In our skeleton regulations we specified important public services, as I have said, according to the available evidence but we acknowledged that the significance of public services could change in the future. Today’s important services are not the same as those of 50 years ago and they will again be different in 50 years’ time, when the next transformational change—the successor to the internet—has arrived. Moreover, it would not be right for services to remain specified in secondary legislation if reduced service levels and staff absence become less disruptive to the public. Equally, it would not be right if the Government could not capture further public services within the limits set by the Bill, if further evidence was obtained on the impact of strike action in those areas.
My noble friend Lord Leigh does not seem to be here but, to give a curtain raiser, I was not intending to accept the amendment that we were about to discuss next. I hope that is not unparliamentary, but we did discuss this at Second Reading and that amendment, Amendment 4, expands things in a way that is not the Government’s intention.
Finally, Amendment 6 is a good example of the kind of agreement between the Opposition and the Government—in fact, all sides—which is often possible in this House. We initially included ancillary workers because staff who are not on the front line but play a supportive role could be critical to the delivery of important public services. There is a case here, but we have accepted, on reflection, that it would add unwelcome complexity for unions and others involved. We can all agree that the word “ancillary” is open to a number of different interpretations. Having agreed this amendment, the Committee can be assured that only workers who deliver an important public service would be included within the threshold. The regulations would specify, as now proposed, exactly who will be covered. Unions would not have to consider whether there were any additional ancillary workers on top of this. I commend Amendment 6 and hope that the Committee will be able to agree it.
Lord Collins of Highbury
I thank the Minister for her response. For the avoidance of doubt, I reassure the noble Lord, Lord King, that I was not, for one moment, suggesting additional categories, but the debate, and the Minister’s response, have illustrated that this legislation is incoherent and inconsistent. Our purpose in Committee today was to highlight that and we will return to these issues later on. In the mean time, I beg to withdraw Amendment 3.