My Lords, the Bill takes us back to the insulting doctrine that trade unions are the enemy within. When I first saw it, I was rather shocked—but then I thought that it must be some sort of spoof written by the provisional wing of the Committee on Public Safety. The first point which I ask the Minister to comment on is that it is very asymmetrical so far as trade unions and employers are concerned. How can he say that all these requirements should be placed on trade unions, at vast cost, without parallel requirements being placed on employers?
In the published material that one finds, with difficulty, in the Printed Paper Office as the Part 3 financial assessment, we have a fascinating set of paragraphs on pages 3 and 4. It is headed:
“Evidence Base … Problem under consideration”,
and it is worth reading. It says:
“An increase in an individual union’s membership diversity and membership turnover is a key reason why managing a large database of members is complex. It means that the information held in the unions’ registers will decay rapidly. In addition, the information held on the registers will decay for other reasons: changes of addresses; and deaths, divorces, and marriages … All of these changes may undermine the accuracy of union registers, unless adequate and relatively frequent management procedures are in place to resolve inaccuracies and maintain the register. Some of the reasons for inaccurate data are explored in more detail below”.
We get fantasy piled upon fantasy as we come to that more detailed explanation, which goes into gross and net flows by work status, the high degree of churn in the UK labour market, and the flow estimates of the size of movements between the three main labour market statuses of employment, unemployment and economic activity. So it goes on.
Then the material comes to the “Rationale for intervention”. I wonder how all these people came to be so readily brainwashed, but I have to read it. It says:
“Given the complexity of maintaining up-to-date registers there is a danger that trade union members, employers and the general public will not be confident that unions are complying with their duty to maintain an accurate and up-to-date register. And, as trade union activity has the potential to affect the daily lives of members and non-members, the general public should be confident that voting papers and other communications are reaching union members so that they have the opportunity to participate, even if they choose not to exercise it”.
It then goes on to the division between unions with more than 10,000 members and those below that figure.
As my noble friend Lord Monks pointed out, it says that,
“the Certification Officer will … be given powers enabling him to both act on his own authority to appoint inspectors and require documents to be produced to help investigations. The powers will provide a mechanism by which the general public and employers can ensure that trade unions are complying with their duty to maintain an accurate and up-to-date register”.
After all that, we come to the policy objective. I will read out one more passage. It says:
“The policy objective is to give greater assurance that unions comply with the existing duty to maintain a register of members’ names and addresses. However, we wish to do this in a way which
minimises the burden on the union in providing this assurance and is not prescriptive … the intended effect of the policy is to ensure that members, the general public and employers are confident”,
et cetera. My reaction is, “You must be kidding”—but then it dawned on me what was going on here. There are two groups of civil servants being instructed by the Secretary of State to provide a case for this. One set of civil servants, job team A, is asked to write one set of arguments. In the next paragraph, job team B is asked to demonstrate the absurdity of the arguments presented by job team A.
Having cracked the code on this, I realised that it is all very logical—right down to the detail of why the sum involved is an extra burden on the trade unions of £420,000. That has been arrived at by using the salaries of trade union officials from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, which says that the basic hourly median pay for officers of non-governmental organisations —that obviously implies voluntary organisations—who are the closest match to a trade union official, is £12.03 an hour. The basis of all this is that union officials doing all this stuff are paid that, on average, but I suppose that the people who have to provide all this stuff in Whitehall have telephones and might ring up any trade union to find out more directly.
I return to the main theme that many of my colleagues have brought out: why are we picking on the trade unions and making them keep their lists up to date for transparency, which we simply do not do for shareholders’ lists, boards of directors or banks? We are now insisting that we have to do even more for the most openly democratic and transparent organisations of any size in the country—the trade unions.
I will use a different word from that used by my noble friend Lord Whitty: I say that this is just party-political vindictiveness. I am very sad to hear that, because over many years of my working life we have had very good working relations with Conservative Governments, such as those of Mr Macmillan and Mr Heath. We had acceptance from them as social partners, and they would not have dreamt of this nonsense. I hope that in Committee we will have time to move away from the idea that a Secretary of State can say to Whitehall, “This is what we want to do; find reasons for it”. They have failed in that, because there are no good reasons—it is absurdity.
As my noble friend Lady Donaghy said, you do not need a lobby if you are chairman of a company in the energy field, whether it is a nuclear power station or anything else; you are probably president of the CBI and talk to the Prime Minister every day of the week anyway. To take another, more practical example: KPMG’s employees are scattered around Whitehall. Does it need a lobby? Of course not.
This is a quite extraordinary development, but I have reached the 10-minute limit so I will leave the issue there. As far as I can see, though, there has to be much deeper consideration by the Government. As things stand, my view is that the Bill should simply be withdrawn as an outrage to democracy. When I go to do work for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in Congo or Mozambique, these are some of the practices that we state that you do not do—and we should not do them here.
7.43 pm