Trade Union Bill

Lord McKenzie of Luton Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I have seen the impact assessment, but I do not think that it is particularly specific about how much is spent. Once the regulations are published we will know how much is spent across the piece. It is a taxpayer subsidy. It may be justified; we do not know. There are some egregious examples of abuse of the facility, which I referred to in my speech at the start of the scrutiny of this legislation, which are well known and have been well publicised.

We spent the previous couple of hours talking about the campaigns that trade unions run and the tens of millions of pounds they spend campaigning against Israel or whatever. That is perfectly proper and it is their right to do that, but they cannot argue on the one hand that it is in their members’ interests to spend lots of money campaigning on these various issues, but on the other that they need a taxpayer subsidy to represent their members in the workspace because they do not have enough money left in their coffers to pay for this facility themselves.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)]

My Lords, how would the noble Lord characterise the cost of health and safety reps and the work that they do to ensure the workplace is safe and that the employer’s legal obligation is supported by their efforts?

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[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, rather than looking at the types of organisations that are covered, this amendment looks at the role of safety and learning reps. My noble friends Lord McKenzie of Luton and Lady Donaghy have put their names to it.

The role of safety and learning reps is probably unparalleled. Having worked a lot with trade unionists from other countries, I know one of the things that they have learned from us is how it has improved the workplace. The work these reps do benefits the whole organisation enormously. Our fear is that it will be at risk if these representatives are denied the time to undertake this work and to do it at a high standard.

There are some workplaces where safety representatives are particularly important, where there is heavy machinery is one, but also in hospitals where there are drugs, surgical equipment, radioactive equipment and very pointy needles often with nasty things on them, so safety is clearly particularly important. I shall take just one example which could affect any one of us. It is when firefighters come to our homes to put out fires. Safety is key to their lives, but it impacts on our property and often our lives. The Fire Brigades Union is a proud and active trade union, but it is also the professional voice of firefighters and has a key role in improving health and safety. It trains highly qualified serious accident investigators who work with fire authorities to investigate incidents where firefighters have been injured or killed in order to identify problems and implement improvements. Our fear is that any restriction on facility time for health and safety reps—that could be without even Clause 13, just that they are concerned about what it looks like on paper—could come at a very high price, particularly in safety-crucial industries, such as fire and rescue. Cuts in any such time could stop FBU reps investigating incidents thoroughly and consequently retraining or redesigning protocols.

The amendments in this group would exclude safety and learning reps from these provisions. Both contribute to the success of the relevant businesses as well as to the wider economy. I beg to move.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

I shall speak to Amendments 87A, 89A and 89B, which are in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Donaghy, and in support of Amendments 79 and 80A to which we have added our names. Our focus in this contribution is health and safety and particularly the role of safety reps. I should make it clear that focusing just on that does not mean that we resile from the broader issues of representation and facility time which have been argued so effectively by my noble friends.

I came at this issue and learned about health and safety not through long active work in the trade union movement, like a lot of my noble friends, but as Minister for Health and Safety in the DWP under the tutelage, for a period, of my noble friend Lord Hain, who is not in his place. I understood from that the importance of partnership working, the role of the HSE and, in particular, the role of safety reps and the contribution they can make.

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[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

Does the noble Lord accept that there are plenty of ways to promote good health and safety practice without forcing safety reps through the processes in the Bill, with the risks that run from the subsequent clause, under which they could be restricted?

[Lord Deben]

There are plenty of good ways, but I have to say to the noble Lord, having said that I agree with so much of what he has to say, that in the world of the internet, when everyone expects to be able to know everything, it is an odd argument to say that we should not know how much time is spent on this. I just think that that is not of 2016; it is the kind of argument people used 20 years ago. Today we need to know. We need to use those figures in order to point out that this borough spends very little time on health and safety while that borough spends much more, and it is about time that I as a taxpayer in a particular borough could say, “I don’t think my council is behaving properly”. If I do not have the figures then I cannot make that point.

I quite agree with the noble Lord about the consequences if this were used to push down the unions, but I have no evidence whatever that this Government, or any previous Conservative Government, have done that on health and safety. All I am saying is that I know of no evidence of that. I can imagine that in some areas suspicions might arise, and indeed I might find myself equally suspicious, but on this particular measure I do not think that is a fair assertion.

Still, it gives me an opportunity to say to the Minister something that I think needs to be said more often. Just because certain popular newspapers find ridiculous things that health and safety has insisted upon, and just because it is true that many local organisations fail to do the things that they used to because some unnecessary intervention by health and safety has suggested that it might be dangerous—children might fall over or something untoward might happen—that does not mean to say that we should not continually press for better health and safety in our workplaces. I particularly want to make the point about health and safety as far as hearing is concerned; we still have far too many people who retire to an old age of deafness because the health and safety provision has not been satisfactory.

In supporting my noble friend’s view about this amendment I would like to hear from her a very robust defence of the need for health and safety, the role of trade unions in ensuring that, and a determination to use the knowledge which we get from the Bill to ensure that those public sector bodies which do not treat this seriously enough can now be pinpointed because we shall know that they are not giving the time off which they should for the trade unions to play the part that they ought to play on health and safety.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

My Lords, these amendments all seek to limit the information published under our transparency regulations by excluding certain types of trade union representative. I start by agreeing with the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayter and Lady Donaghy, about what health and safety and union learning representatives do for their organisations. The debate that we had about the dangers in the NHS, about heavy equipment and about many other areas showed how important health and safety is. Of course, there are duties on employers as well. If you sit on a public body or on a company board, you take these matters very seriously in this country, and that is a good thing. As my noble friend Lord Deben said, we have a strong record, although we always need to keep working at it. He gave examples of where trade union reps are very helpful in enforcing the detail of health and safety, which is so important. As the noble Lord, Lord Monks, said, we have taken our fine traditions in this area to Europe, and that has been important as well.

I also commend the work that the TUC and Unionlearn do right across the public and private sectors in working with adults who lack basic skills in numeracy and literacy, including peer support from union learning representatives.

Those sentiments do not jar with what we are proposing. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, an employer must allow union representatives as much paid time off work as is necessary or reasonable to perform their statutory functions and duties, and we are not proposing to change this rule. We simply want to ensure—

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

If there is no proposal to change the rule, why not take union reps out of Clause 13, even if there is a wish to leave them in Clause 12 on information gathering?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

The answer, which I suppose relates mainly to Clause 12, is that we want to ensure that the time that union representatives collectively spend on union duties and activities during working hours, at taxpayers’ expense, is justifiable and accountable and represents value for money. Clause 12 enables Ministers to make regulations requiring specified public sector employers to publish information relating to facility time for those representatives.

Equally, if the reserve powers in Clause 13 were ever required, they should logically apply to all types of facility time, whatever legislation the rights are granted under and whatever category they fall into in the public sector. In a sense, no area is more immune to attracting inefficient or unaccountable spend than any other type of facility time. Where facility time is found to be at an acceptable level and adds value to the organisation, we expect it to continue, as I have already said. The way that I see it is that the benefits of transparency and accountability do not vary according to the type of work undertaken by, or designation of, a union representative engaged on facility time.