My Lords, I will make a couple of brief points. There is an irony in this debate, because most of the time in opposition we are asking for things to be in the Bill, and it is the Government who say, “Oh no, there is a very good reason why it should not be in the Bill, it can come in a regulation”—or, dare I say it, in a code of practice. So I am aware of that dilemma. The first thing that I want to say after that is that I do not think that anybody here is going to say that violence and intimidation are acceptable, whether on a picket line or elsewhere in pursuit of a certain point of view. But I will say that up to now the code of practice has been adequate. I do not agree with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, that just because a few people might disregard it, the tail should be allowed to wag the dog and that somehow or other things need to be tightened up because there is a very small minority determined in some cases to cause that confrontation and take on the establishment.
My final point might seem trivial, but I do not think that it has been raised since my noble friend Lady Gould of Potternewton raised it at Second Reading.
It is about the feminisation of the workforce. To a large extent, the trade union movement has not caught up with that as much as I would have liked, but we are now talking about a workforce, particularly in the public services, the majority of whom are women and people from ethnic minorities. As often as not, when you see pictures of pickets in the newspapers, the vast majority of them are women. I think that they have a slightly different understanding of employment relations; they might feel passionately about a particular dispute, but I would like to see one instance where women on a picket line have caused these difficulties. So I urge a bit of caution and that in any attempt to tighten up or change the code of practice into a law we should have regard to the fact that the industrial relations scene is very different from how it was 35 years or so ago, which some noble Lords were talking about.