Trade Union Bill

My Lords, it is getting late in the evening and I do not know whether we will get anywhere near the debate on check-off, but there are some similarities and some dissimilarities from this sort of question in a later clause. The Minister sent us a very courteous letter today about listing the bodies which will definitely be classed as within the public-sector umbrella on check-off. We have two timescales in which to give more thought to this; one is the longer-term timescale, naturally, between now and Report. Between now and Thursday, the go-ahead for some standardisation of which body is in which category in the public sector raises the question of terminology. The point has been made already, but I would like to put it slightly differently —that this is a game not of definitions but of looking at the Government’s criteria for their own judgment of which bodies they want to fall within scope.