Public Service Pensions and Judicial Offices Bill [Lords]

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

As I said on Second Reading and in Committee, the SNP supports the intention behind this Bill and we will support it on Third Reading. The intention is to clear up a mess of the Government’s making. I also repeat that, as I said in Committee, I do not have any doubts at all about the sincerity of the Ministers who have led for the Government at various stages of the Bill. I am convinced that they want to get it right and to finish up with an Act that is as fair to everyone as it is possible to be. However, my concern with the Bill currently before us is that even after the Government’s amendments are added in, sizeable numbers of current or former public sector employees will lose out. Given where we have been forced to start from and the scale of the mess that the Government made of this previously, I am not sure that it would ever be possible to produce a Bill that would be fair to absolutely everyone, but the Bill as it stands can still be improved. To that end, we will support such amendments as Opposition Front Benchers want to press to a vote, particularly new clauses 8 and 9.

One of the issues I raised on Second Reading has certainly come to pass: the extraordinary number of amendments the Government had had to table to their own legislation during its passage through the House of Lords. We now know that including the 61 amendments they tabled in Committee and the 28 further amendments tabled today, by the time the Bill gets its Third Reading later on the Government will have had to amend their own legislation no fewer than 212 times. In fact, Members who attended the Bill Committee will have seen the spectacle of the Government tying themselves in knots trying to remove two entire clauses from the Bill and replace them with two entirely new clauses. It was only the speedy intervention of the Clerks and the Chair that prevented the Government from presenting us with a Bill that had all four clauses included despite the fact that some of them were completely contradictory to the others. Eventually the Government had to whip their own Members to vote down two clauses that the Minister had already moved, presumably by mistake.

That incident served only to highlight what many of us on the Opposition Benches have been saying from the beginning—that the Government still cannot reassure us that they are genuinely fully in control of this Bill. I worry that they are very quickly running out of last chances to put it right. There is still a danger that the Bill that receives its Third Reading later today will have flaws and weaknesses that neither the Government nor anybody else have spotted yet. Most of today’s Government amendments are part of the process of picking up flaws or ambiguities in the original Bill, and we will not oppose them. We have some concerns about new clause 7, which provides for a lessening of parliamentary scrutiny in some cases. The Minister has not yet convinced me that that is an appropriate thing to do. I hope that when he winds up he will explain why new clause 7 is appropriate and why, in some cases, parliamentary scrutiny should be diluted in any way.

As I indicated earlier, we will support new clauses 8 and 9 in the name of the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq). New clause 8 would provide a means of compensating scheme members who, through no fault of their own, stand to lose out as a result of the Bill. The Bill rights a wrong for a very large number of people in public pension schemes but goes in the opposite direction for some, and we should not forget about them. The new clause does not commit the Government, or indeed the scheme employers, to any additional expenditure, but it would require the Chancellor of the Exchequer at least to recognise that this is an issue and to look at whether there are realistic and reasonable ways of resolving it.

New clause 9 would require the Government to review how the Bill operates in the real world—as opposed to the assessment, as with any Bill, before discussions on it began—with regard to equalities. Given how many substantial changes the Government have already had to make to the Bill, it is prudent to accept that, once it comes into force, it might have consequences that the Government have not foreseen, which the new clause would attempt to protect against.

New clause 1, in the name of the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), is a different matter altogether, and the SNP is minded to oppose it. We have heard some of the arguments in favour of it—they are similar to comments made on Second Reading—which simply do not wash. I will not get into an argument now about the BDS movement. If the Government genuinely think that that organisation is a threat to peace and stability in the middle east or elsewhere, they could bring forward legislation to address it—they have had over two years of this Parliament to do so, and they still have time—but this is not the Bill for that.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman share my concerns that the new clause tabled by the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) risks barring ethical investment decisions across the board—for example, in relation to Saudi Arabia? Given that future Governments might decide to support regimes that abuse trade unionists, for example—as we have seen in Colombia in recent years, or in Chile in the past—the new clause would be not only anti-democratic but would risk ethical investment decisions and human rights policies around the world.

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. If the new clause was intended purely to limit the activities of the BDS movement as a precursor to possible further restrictions later on, a very different new clause would have been tabled, and it might have been possible to word it in a way that we would not have significant problems with, but this new clause is far too wide. It could give the Secretary of State—any Secretary of State—the power to prevent any public pension fund from considering any kind of ethical, sustainability or other factors simply because they decide that they are contrary to UK foreign or defence policy.