Trade Union Bill

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2016 Lords Chamber

I fear that, once again, we have a piece of bad legislation—badly written and not thought through—that will be subject to a series of statutory instruments that will seek to clarify matters but will just be an open cheque for the lawyers, who will be fighting over this. It removes the spirit of good industrial relations and puts things firmly in the hands of lawyers. I beg to move.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, it is a very serious issue when you diminish somebody’s right to withdraw their labour. Therefore, it must be very exceptional. Normally it would be good industrial-relations practice, when you are doing this, to offer those employees some protection in return. There is nothing on the agenda today that suggests that, or even that the Government are thinking about it.

There are a number of unintended consequences to all these measures as well. I shall mention two. I always think of the syndrome of the winding-engine men in the coal industry—a key group who used to control who went down and came up in the mine. If you start having thresholds, you will encourage small, strategic groups who will organise to go on strike and can cause massive disruption. I always think that the winding-engine men could be the signal. It could be other groups. That is an unintended consequence.

There is another consequence of this sort of thing, which I thought about in the last debate. Do you remember what the New York governor said about politicians?

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose”.

This is what we are doing with industrial relations. We are actually encouraging trade unionists to spend all their time getting the votes over the thresholds so that they can put pressure on their employers. It underestimates the difficulty and the time that trade unionists actually give to trying to minimise disruption. That is what trade union leaders do—they know these disputes are unpopular. That is why there is a trend for one-day disputes rather than longer ones. They are trying to manage this in very difficult circumstances. If you encourage them to have to spend their time campaigning to get the votes over the threshold, they will not be able to control those emotions or get the people back to work.

This is precisely what has happened in the junior hospital doctors dispute. How do you get people back when 76% of them have voted, and 99% are in favour? I said this several weeks ago, and we are no nearer a settlement. This is the sort of unintended consequence that we have.

That is why in Amendment 18 we are saying that the Ministers’ powers must be very restricted here. They cannot just come along as soon as there is a dispute in some area and add that to a list. This will form the worst sort of legislation, and it will have the worst consequences. I do not know where the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, is tonight, but I thought we were going to have amendments in the next group telling us how we are going to widen these groups, so virtually any group in the public sector can be included. I imagine he has been told to go home, unless he is going to come back from the dead and propose these motions tonight. That is precisely the sort of thing we are worried about in this legislation.

This is just the first step. This is the agenda. This is the agenda of this Government: a partisan agenda which will be disruptive of industrial relations in this country and will have completely the opposite consequences to those they are trying to reassure the public they are going to provide for them.

[Lord Balfe]

My Lords, I will ask the Minister a question. I believe we are going to have tremendous difficulties defining,

“education of those aged under 17”.

Not only do you have differences in who the teachers are teaching, but also head teachers can preside over schools of different age spans. Will the Minister give some careful thought, between now and our next looking at the Bill, to how the clause can be better defined? I do not think that it works as it is.