Employment Bill [HL]

moved, as an amendment to Amendment No. 3, Amendment No. 4: 4: Clause 18, line 2, leave out ““or having been”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 5, 6 and 7. I thank the Minister for writing to me on 22 May about Clause 18, on which he has just spoken. Sadly, I received the letter only when I arrived in the Lords this morning, because, for once, the excellent delivery systems of this House did not manage to forward it to my home in the country. I am grateful for the Minister’s explanation in that letter of what the Government were up to. I would have responded to him last week and said that I was in effect satisfied with what the Government were proposing. I would then have given him the assurance that, although I wanted still to table these amendments, I did not intend to divide the House on them. I can now give him that assurance. As the Minister said, the Government have in a spirit of compromise gone a considerable distance in trying to come up with a deal that might satisfy us, the Liberal Democrat Benches, the noble Lord, Lord Morris and others who have expressed concern about the clause both in Committee and on Report. The Government have tried to find a compromise that is nearer to, as the Minister put it, Option B than to the original Option A which the Government seemed to favour in their consultation process. For that reason, we will accept it, although we would like to have gone a little further, which is why we have put down the amendments. They are similar to those which we tabled on Report. We might even have discussed something similar in Committee. The amendments highlight our concern, first, that only membership of registered political parties is considered excludable. There are many political organisations and pressure groups, membership of which should continue to be exempt. Secondly, we strongly object to former membership being held against a trade union member. That smacks of retrospective punishment, even if the resignation from an objectionable political party had been recent. Such a resignation would show that membership of the trade union was more important to the person concerned than membership of the political party. Who would decide whether a member’s resignation was fair? That was our concern. I appreciate that the Government have gone a considerable distance since we discussed the matter on Report, for which I am grateful. For that reason, I shall certainly not press our amendments. I look forward to the House accepting the Government’s amendment. I beg to move.