My Lords, I share experience of the print industry with the noble Lord, Lord King, although mine is slightly more recent than his, I think. I know the benefit of union facilities. I also accept that both management and unions should question those facilities from time to time to ensure that they are efficient and the money is well spent. It also has to be said—here I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Hayward—that if we just look at this from a slightly anti-union perspective, we will not take into account the fact that, often, more union facilities are needed when the management is poor. I do not know the detail, but I suspect that in the modern successful car plants we now operate in this country, they will have union facilities but not to the degree that they needed in the 1960s and 1970s when they had all their problems. They will now have much more professional management and, indeed, much more professional union representatives.
Union facilities are also a factor in change. When you are undertaking a lot of change, you need more facilities, such as when you have redundancies because skills and so on are changing. I remember in the print industry taking union delegations abroad to try and negotiate manning agreements on the basis of what our competitors were doing on machinery. Noble Lords may remember that. It took a lot of time and cost to do that, but that was because we were conducting major changes.
I also find it extraordinary that a Conservative Government can advocate another layer of bureaucracy to achieve this so-called change, but that is what they are doing. The impact assessment says it is going to cost £2.4 million to have the information collected regularly. The initial cost of getting that information together will be over £2 million and then there will be another £2 million going on. The Government also say that they expect there will be £100 million of savings. I accept that is not insignificant, and that it is important to have those changes, but I question, when we are trying to find £35 billion of cost savings in the public sector, with all the change that that requires, whether this is the priority. I suspect we are we just going up a blind alley here, and it is wrong.
6.45 pm
The strategy is also wrong. I do not know how the health service manages. I am amazed when I listen to debates in this House on the health service, because more regulations and requirements are always being put on people who should be concentrating on care. I do not know how people actually carry out their roles in the health service under all this regulation. We have to question whether we actually want all the ongoing bureaucracy involved in collecting all this information on these facilities every year. If the Government really think that there is a lot of money wasted on union facilities, why not have a one-off review and expose it? The Government could achieve the change they want and the cost savings, but probably without the ongoing regulation and information-gathering that this proposal is going to require for ever more and for no clear purpose.
We also have the example of the Cabinet Office producing all these changes to facilities. Why do we have to legislate to get change in the public sector? Why can we not just have managers do it? Why do the Government not initiate these sorts of reviews, so that they can get these savings? Why does there have to be an ongoing burden of regulation to get change? It is madness, and the Conservatives should question themselves about this further bureaucracy they are imposing on the public sector. In time, what will happen of course is that when they want to blame all this bureaucracy on somebody, they will come up and impose the cap. That is what will happen and that is why we are very worried about that clause.
As has been said in this debate, this one-sided approach is worrying. It is wrong as a concept because you could get this by having, as I say, a one-off review. It does not need the regulation and of course it is very one-sided: it is basically saying that excessive facilities are the fault of the trade unions, when actually anybody who has worked in industry knows that this should be about partnership, and that unions and management have an interest in using them most effectively.