Draft Trade Union (Deduction of Union Subscriptions from Wages in the Public Sector) Regulations 2023

Simon Clarke Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2024 General Committees

[Dame Nia Griffith]

Indeed I am. As the hon. Member will know, reflecting the will of the people of Wales, the Trade Union (Wales) Act 2017 disapplied devolved Welsh public sector employers from the provisions of the Trade Union Act 2016. Non-devolved bodies that operate in Wales are subject to the jurisdiction of the 2016 Act, however, so there is certainly an impact on people in Wales. There should have been full and proper consultation with the devolved Governments.

I hope the Minister will address this in his concluding remarks, but will he look again at what happens if the charges that the employer wishes to impose upon a trade union for providing check-off are considered unreasonable by the trade union? Will he look at working with trade unions and employers to agree some form of mechanism to resolve a disagreement?

In the draft impact assessment, the estimates for the scale of the use of check-off range from the 10-year-old TaxPayers’ Alliance figure of 90% of the workforce to the more recent Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy figure of 65% of the workforce. The TaxPayers’ Alliance says that some 22% are already paid for by trade unions, whereas the Local Government Association says that 67% are already paid for. One would think that the Government could, without relying on external organisations, produce an accurate figure for how many employees are served by check-off and whether the costs are recovered from the trade unions. They certainly expect trade unions to have accurate information on whether their members are up to date with their subscriptions when they ballot for industrial action.

The current cost of check-off, which is estimated to be some £1.5 million, pales into insignificance when compared with the latest figures we have of nearly £10 billion wasted on personal protective equipment. Only last Thursday, the Department of Health and Social Care published its annual accounts, and figures showed that some £9.9 billion of the £13.6 billion-worth of PPE that the Department bought between 2020 and 2022 was unusable, and its value is now less than the Government paid for it. Rather than scrabbling to claw back a few pence from their employees, the Government should be making much more effort to chase down those who ripped off the British taxpayer by millions and billions, but they have done nothing to recoup that money. That is why Labour is committed to creating a powerful covid corruption commissioner to help recoup billions of pounds that has been lost to waste, fraud and flawed contracts.

[Sir Simon Clarke (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Con)]

I was not intending to intervene in this debate, Mr Paisley, mindful of your stricture at the outset, but we appear to have drifted into a wider consideration of the Government’s response to covid. I was the Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the time, and I gently point out that we did instigate a number of controls to try to make sure that wherever wrongdoing relating to the procurement of PPE had been perpetrated against the taxpayer, it would be followed up. That is something that the Department continues to do.

I further observe—I will conclude my remarks in a moment, Mr Paisley—that it was the Labour party that was urging us at the time to disregard ever more processes and to do ever more to procure at pace, to a point when the shadow Chancellor was urging us to go to historical re-enactment companies to procure PPE. I do think that in chiding the Minister and seeking to make a point, the hon. Lady—

[The Chair]

Order. We are not getting into the settling of scores. I encourage the shadow Minister to stick to the scope of the statutory instrument. Otherwise, we could be here for a very long time.