UK Parliament / Open data

Trade Union Bill

Yes, it was a point that I made in my original case—that is why we do not think, as the noble Lord, Lord King, said, that it is just about transparency. We have a feeling that these are two of the same bits, which is why there is great nervousness about this.

In a sense, this is the same issue that my noble friend Lord Sawyer, raised. If you are going to talk about transparency in terms of saying which trade unionist will go off to a safety conference, that gets listed. But I used to work in the health service, and doctors were always going on very nice “continual professional development”, often in ski resorts. If we are going to have transparency, maybe we should look at some of that. Why are we picking on one particular small element for all this transparency, with the list of nine things that have to be covered? It is the employers who will have to do this. Why not perhaps look at the gender pay gap in some of these organisations? That might help and give us the tools to improve the situation of women. Or maybe we should look at diversity statistics and make more of these organisations that are not all covered by that. That sort of transparency should help much more.

Maybe we should look at the compensation paid by some of these organisations, where employers have not been very good. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, would say that not only did he remove those two people but there was quite possibly compensation that went with it that was not declared. So there are other ways. The interesting thing is why on earth we are picking up on just this aspect, if not for what my noble friend Lord Beecham said—that it is the trailer for Clause 13.

What the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, said about fire, rescue and police is really important. But this is a management issue. I started by saying that good management manages this—it does not need an outside Minister at 30 Whitehall, or wherever it is going to be, to be able to set this down. We will come on later to which organisations are covered by this, and I shall not respond to that at the moment. There will be some organisations that the Minister has not even heard of, let alone visited, but she will still have the ability to put a cap on that. This is about management. It is something the Minister should keep well out of and leave to good managers.

It is fairly clear that we will be coming back to this at a later stage, but at this stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

769 c198 

Session

2015-16

Chamber / Committee

House of Lords chamber

Subjects

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