Blacklisting

Michael Meacher Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

That is an allegation and, as I said a few moments ago, if there is serious substance to it and a good basis for investigation, it should first have gone to the Police Complaints Authority and to the body that looks at the security services. There is a process. It might be tedious to go through it, but that is what we have to do. If those avenues have been exhausted, perhaps we can take it to the next stage, but I have no evidence that they have even been tried.

The next question was whether we should now be investigating construction companies working on public contracts. That is the issue for today. As I have said many times, I am open to new evidence if it is available, because it is very clear that any company working on a public contract must comply with the law. Of course companies should not break data protection law, trade union law or the blacklist regulations.

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State keeps returning to the point that there needs to be evidence of blacklisting after 2010. How does he respond to the statement made only last week by Balfour Beatty that it used blacklisting when taking on workers for the construction of the Olympic venues?

[Vince Cable]

I am coming to the Balfour Beatty point, which I think related to events four or five years ago; I am happy to be corrected, but that is my understanding. Let me say what I think happened in that case. We knew that Balfour Beatty wrote to the Olympic Delivery Authority admitting that one company in its group made checks on 12 potential employees prior to February 2009. That was in response to a letter from the ODA, one of a number sent to high-profile contractors. The firm insists that all 12 people were given jobs and that there was no wider or further use of pre-employment checks. The ODA has taken a very clear and unambiguous stand condemning blacklisting in the operation of the Olympics. There is no question but that the practice was taking place well back during the last Government.

I have already responded to allegations of collusion by the police and security services. There is then the question of remedies; people have clearly been damaged, and evidence has been advanced. Let us review the redress. Those excluded from employment can seek redress in the county courts or the Court of Session in Scotland and other rights under the regulations can be enforced in employment tribunals.

I repeat the point I made in response to an intervention: the last Government took the view that legislation should not apply retrospectively and prior to 2010. I suspect that a lot of the frustration and anger of people who have been hurt by what happened relates to the decision not to apply the measures retrospectively.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

I have great respect for the Secretary of State, but I found his speech today very disappointing. He kept demanding recent evidence, but recent evidence is available if only one looks for it. Such evidence relates not only to Crossrail but to some Ministry of Defence sites and to the Olympic venue, other than in respect of Balfour Beatty. The real point is this: it is disingenuous to ask for evidence in an industry where there is a tight curtain of secrecy. If we really want the evidence, we actually have to look for it. The only way of getting this evidence is by setting up an inquiry, either a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills inquiry or a judicial inquiry, and put the relevant companies on oath to tell the truth. That is what the House is demanding of the Government today.

Blacklisting, as many hon. Members have said, is arguably the worst human rights abuse against workers in the UK since the war. It is worse than imprisonment in that it is usually imposed on the victim without his being given any opportunity to defend himself and it lasts for an indefinite period—often decades.

There are several issues surrounding the raid on the Consulting Association’s Droitwich offices in 2009, on which this whole debate hangs. Since it was widely suspected that blacklisting continued after the Economic League was wound up in 1993, why did it take 16 years for the authorities to act? Why was Ian Kerr, the retired special branch officer running the Consulting Association, given only a paltry £5,000 fine despite running an illegal database over 15 years that wrecked the lives of thousands of workers? Above all, why did the companies that sustained his business, and in some cases supplied the data, get off scot-free. Why did the ICO fail to take the full and necessary action that it could and should have taken?

Under the Data Protection Act 1998, the ICO may only issue an enforcement notice, which effectively says, “Stop doing that, and only if you don’t will it be a criminal offence.” In that case, why were enforcement notices issued against only 14 of the 44 companies involved? Not only is that a small part of the total, but the list does not include some of the heaviest users—McAlpine and Skanska—for reasons that have not been revealed, despite each of those companies making some 12,000 to 13,000 inquiries in a single year. That all suggests a distinct reluctance, to put it mildly, on the part of the authorities to deal with this huge and pervasive malpractice, involving at least 3,200 workers and probably many more, with the vigour and determination it clearly demands.

The implications go further still. First, as was stated earlier, representatives from the ICO stated at the employment tribunal hearing that some of the information held by the covert Consulting Association

“could only have been supplied by the police or security services.”

If that is confirmed, it reveals a conspiracy between the police, MI5 and many of the biggest building companies in the UK that is comparable to the phone hacking scandal.

I wrote to the Home Office last year to demand a public inquiry and a full investigation to get to the bottom of the scandal, but the Minister replied, with apparently unconscious irony, that the matter should merely be referred to the police. There were shades of what happened in 2009, when the phone hacking scandal was referred to the police and perfunctorily dismissed.

Secondly, David Clancy, the investigations manager at the ICO, told the Scottish Affairs Committee that the construction worker database accounted for, as he said, between “5% and 10%” of the material seen during the 2009 raid on the Consulting Association offices. On 24 October, I wrote and asked that the other 90% to 95% of the material should be located and its contents fully investigated. I was told in a reply on 30 October:

“There was other material in the Consulting Association’s office, but we did not need to search this to secure the evidence we were looking for, and we did not do so”.

Why not, since it was obviously likely that other material held on the site would be equally unlawful? Anyway, how did the ICO officers identify what material related to the building industry without checking all the other material to find out whether it related to construction?

Lastly, there is the question of the adequacy of the existing legal framework. It is currently a criminal offence to compile and maintain a blacklist but not to supply information to a blacklister, to solicit information from the controller of a blacklist or to use one. It is also unlawful to be excluded or dismissed from employment because of trade union membership, but there is no right not to be blacklisted unless that leads to adverse employment consequences. These are two yawning gaps in the law, and as a result of this debate the Government must take steps to fill both those gaps if this awful malpractice is finally to be stopped.