Compensation Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The scandal of what happened with miners’ compensation is that union members got the service for free but non-members, of whatever category, did not. UDM members, for example, got the service expressly for free. The people who had rights of redress got it for free, but the rest had to pay. The joining fee, under different guises, became the contribution that the UDM attempts to justify. By clarifying the question of membership, the Minister will make her life, the life of her Secretary of State, and the lives of their successors significantly easier. It is not true that there is a big problem with unions and union members in relation to the handling of industrial injury and industrial disease matters. There are not even small problems in relation to how other unions are handling it. We have to deal with this scandal and with another scandal—currently theoretical but potentially actual—that is important in this context. Will the Minister clarify whether a regulator is to be appointed immediately? That would help us easily to define what falls inside self-regulation and what falls outside it. If that does not happen, the Minister will have a series of continuous problems. We start, however, with the draft code. I am not sure who worded it, but paragraph 3(1) is interesting. It states:"““The involvement of any subsidiary companies in handling a member’s claims (whether owned wholly or partly by the Trade Union) should be disclosed.””" What use is that? I have here a sheet of paper from a subsidiary company called Vendside that is wholly owned by a trade union—the UDM. In other words, as drafted, the code would legitimise the practices of the UDM and Vendside, because it is disclosed that the member will be going through Vendside and paying their fee to it. Disclosure is an issue, but it is not the key issue. The key issue is whether the money should be deducted. Paragraph 3.2 says:"““The information given by a Trade Union to a member about arrangements with third parties should be as comprehensive and clear as possible, but need not involve the disclosure of commercially sensitive information.””" That creates a catch-all whereby all relationships with solicitors, even beyond scandalous organisations such as the UDM and Vendside, can be hidden away. Why should not the member know what is going on? The catch-all of commercially sensitive information creates an enormous loophole in the draft code. Let me give one example to show how bad it could get—that of the UDM. A third party that was never disclosed to the members as commercially sensitive, one might say, was a firm called Indiclaim. Money belonging to a swathe of UDM claims victims—non-members who have gone through the UDM—has gone from the solicitor to a firm called Indiclaim, but the victims knew nothing about it. The money was paid by the solicitor, but they might want to question what the marketing and vetting fee was. They might wonder about this firm, Indiclaim, which was vetting their claim. If they were to probe deeper they would find that it is owned by one of the employers—the manager of Vendside. If they had happened to stumble on various minutes meetings involving the UDM, Beresfords—the precursor to Indiclaim—and a company called Walker and Co., they would see a swathe of financial arrangements between the solicitor and UDM Vendside of which they were unaware, with money going in six separate ways. Again, that could be described as commercially sensitive information. That loophole needs to be removed.