Trade Union Bill

Nick Boles Excerpts

Monday 14th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Skills (Nick Boles)]

This debate has not exactly been notable for its cross-party harmony. Speeches from the Labour Benches have at times sounded like an extended message from their sponsors.

I will start by acknowledging some important common ground between hon. Members in different parties. We all value the work of trade unions. My hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) talked powerfully about the role shop stewards can play, and have played in his own life, in helping to protect people from bullying in the workplace. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) quoted Pope Francis and I agree with every word that Pope Francis said. We applaud unions for helping people from ethnic minorities, such as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s father, to overcome prejudice in the workplace and unlock their potential. We admire them for the decades of campaigning that led to the passage of the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the introduction of the national minimum wage. As Skills Minister, I would like to thank them for the work they do through Unionlearn to help thousands of working people to improve their skills. I agree with the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) that that is a great example of partnership between unions, Government and working people. I want to work with unions to ensure that as many union members as possible benefit from our investment in 3 million new apprenticeships over the next five years.

Every 30 years or so, however, public institutions need to be modernised, to become more transparent, more accountable and more responsive. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) made the very important point that the biggest threat facing unions is not from the Bill or anything that this House might pass, but from a loss of public trust. It is modernisation that will help them regain it.

The Bill will give union members more information about what unions are doing with their money. It will ensure that diverting a union member’s hard-earned cash to a political cause is done only with their explicit assent. I agree with the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth). I cannot think of a better cause than HOPE not hate and I have no doubt that union members will willingly opt in to political funds that make HOPE not hate one of their main causes. The Bill will also ask unions to form a direct relationship with individual members as customers of their services by ending the practice of check-off.

The core purpose of the Bill, however, is bigger than that. The purpose is to strike a fairer balance between the rights of unions and their responsibilities towards the rest of society, especially other working people. It asks union leaders to weigh the costs and benefits of calling a strike ballot carefully and to make sure they win the arguments for action convincingly. It ensures that in future unions will only be able to disrupt other people’s lives if their cause has broad support. In British society, we all depend on public services in our daily lives. Parents rely on schools to be open. They cannot put their children into another one if their school is closed by a strike. Patients rely on hospitals to be open. They cannot go elsewhere for the appointment they have waited for anxiously. People rely on trains and buses to get them to work on time. They cannot use another train or bus company if their local service has been shut down by a strike. As the Mayor of London, my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) pointed out, most of the people travelling on public transport are paid much less and work much longer hours than those people driving it.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Oliver Dowden) argued so powerfully, it is only reasonable to reassure his constituents, my constituents and those of every hon. Member that a strike that forces them to take a day off or to pay for expensive childcare, that makes them late for work or that makes them miss a long-awaited check-up was the result of a recent vote by a decent proportion of union members and not a vote taken several years ago in which only a small minority supported strike action. I have an example of that: the National Union of Teachers strike in 2014 that closed 1,500 schools and colleges was on a two-year-old ballot in which turnout was 27%. That was recent, it caused huge disruption and it was not democratic.

I would now like to answer some of the points made during the debate. The shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), who I welcome to her place, suggested that the Bill gives the Government powers to add new sectors to the ballot provisions by secondary legislation. That is not the case. There is a power to restrict within the existing sectors those groups of employees to whom the threshold should apply and we have consulted on which groups of employers within those six sectors it should apply to, but there is no power to expand it further.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) raised some concerns about the picketing code, and those concerns were reflected in other speeches, too. I am a little puzzled by those concerns because the clauses in the Bill on picketing were taken directly, word for word, from the code on picketing, a statutory code that has existed since 1992, which the previous Labour Government made no attempt to amend and which no union has ever written to me to ask me to amend. The code talks about registering a supervisor and about picket supervisors wearing armbands or other identifiers. I am happy to discuss the detail of that code, but there is nothing in the Bill that was not already known.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) raised the question of e-balloting, and he is right that there is no in-principle objection to the idea of voting online. The objection is practical. In January 2015, the Open Rights Group—I think that it believes in open rights—gave evidence to your Commission on Digital Democracy, Mr Speaker, in which it said:

“Voting is a uniquely difficult question for computer science: the system must verify your eligibility to vote; know whether you have already voted; and allow for audits and recounts. Yet it must always preserve your anonymity and privacy. Currently, there are no practical solutions to this highly complex problem and existing systems are unacceptably flawed.”

If the Opposition can find a practical solution, I look forward to hearing it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (William Wragg) made an important point, with which I entirely agree. In asking public sector bodies to measure the amount of money spent on facility time, we must distinguish between union duties, on which it is entirely proper for union members and union representatives to work, and union activities, in which case it might not be so proper for them to be paid while doing them.

Our debates in this place focus on the issues in the Order Paper but on some days they also reveal the deepest shifts in the political landscape. In the speeches from the Opposition, we have heard the last rites being read for Labour as a party of the modern world. This once great movement has become a left-wing sect in thrall to union leaders who have become ever more extreme while their membership declines. It falls to us as Conservatives to stand up for working people in every part of this great nation. It is this Conservative Government who are investing in apprenticeships, creating millions of jobs and ensuring that work always pays. It is this Conservative Government who are giving pay rises to millions of working people by introducing the national living wage. This Trade Union Bill will modernise trade unions to the benefit of everyone in society.

Question put, That the Bill be now read a Second time.