Employment Bill [HL]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate and I am obliged to the Minister for his detailed introduction. I should declare my interest: for many years, I was assistant general secretary of one of the founding unions of the Unite union. Much of the Bill I support; I believe it to be well intentioned. However, I have a number of queries. As we know, a large part is concerned with dispute resolution. The first part repeals the statutory dispute resolution procedures introduced in the 2002 Act, which I welcome at least to some degree. I always felt that these procedures had an inhibiting effect on employees wishing to take their disputes to a tribunal. I can well recall when tribunals were first established to deal with individual workplace disputes. That was in the wake of the Donovan commission and its report. The tribunals were intended to be easy of access for individual employees and fairly informal, where an individual would be able to present his or her own case. Union officials represented members before such tribunals. As a young official, I often undertook this work. However, as time went on, such tribunals and the law became much more complex and lawyers were more frequently employed by both sides. But ease of access to tribunals remains an important matter. It may be that the repeal of the procedures stipulated by the 2002 Act will assist this. It is of course true that conciliation can play a useful role in reaching a satisfactory settlement without people having to go to a tribunal. Of course, adequate disputes procedures at workplace level are also important, as is the right to union representation in such procedures. Instead of the statutory procedures introduced in the 2002 Act, there is to be a code of practice, which I believe ACAS is working on with a view to its being ready when the Bill becomes law. But this produces a rather odd situation, in which we are debating the disappearance of one set of procedures without knowing what is intended to replace them. I do not find that very satisfactory. Perhaps we need to explore it further in Committee. Perhaps there is a case for waiting until we know what ACAS intends. In the mean time, I still believe that easy access to tribunals is important, and not just for individuals. I have long felt that there should be some means of dealing with class actions. I remember feeling this particularly in equal pay cases. In trying to get the law applied, we had to find individual members and take cases in their names when we were really trying to secure rights for whole groups of members. In particular, there was a case for speech therapists, known as the Enderby case, with which I was very deeply involved. It took 11 years to resolve because there were constant attempts by the then Government to appeal at various stages. I am glad to say that a successful career followed for the speech therapist who was prepared to be our test case; she is now Dr Enderby at Sheffield University. However, a class action would have been much fairer and much less traumatic for the people involved. In the case of individual dismissals, it is crucial that the individual has access to a system guaranteeing fairness. The loss of a job for many people is a deeply traumatic experience, which threatens not just financial difficulty but a loss of self-confidence and self-esteem, even sometimes threatening family life and marriage. Great bitterness may be involved and the individual will not be satisfied without his or her day in court. Incidentally, since the Bill apparently envisages a greater role for ACAS, we must be assured that ACAS will be provided with the resources to deal with these additional responsibilities. The Bill also introduces welcome measures to ensure enforcement of the minimum wage and to increase the penalties and fines paid by rogue employers who do not pay the minimum wage. But do we have enough inspectors to ensure that enforcement actually happens? From what the Minister has said this afternoon, I understand that there have been 15,000 investigations and that there may well be more, but do we have enough people to carry out the inspections and thus ensure that people get what they are entitled to? Clause 7 also increases the compensation that must be paid to individuals who bring successful claims for unlawful deductions from wages. In future, tribunals will be able to order an employer to recompense a worker for financial loss experienced as the result of the employer’s actions, but would this include interest? I am glad to see that the Bill set outs measures in Clause 14 to increase the penalties for agencies that commit offences under the Employment Agencies Act 1973, but what about agency workers themselves? Many immigrant workers secure their employment through agencies and they are often grossly exploited. The opportunity has been missed, in my opinion, to ensure that such workers—there are many of them; at least 1.25 million—are provided with equal employment rights. We are told that the Bill covers most workers, but with a sizeable proportion of the workforce omitted that is clearly not accurate. I hope that we will deal with this further in Committee, but in the mean time one of my erstwhile colleagues in the other place is introducing a Private Member’s Bill to try to address this omission by the Government. One way or another, the Government are going to have to deal with the whole issue of rights for immigrant workers, for agency workers and for people working on so-called contract—what at one time we called the ““lump”” when it applied to the construction industry. Finally, I should like to deal with the important point of the right of unions to expel or exclude members on the grounds of membership of a political party. I understand why this has been introduced; it is an attempt to cope with the decision in ASLEF v UK. There has clearly been much consultation, but I wonder about the solution chosen. A union should have the total right to exclude those who disobey its rules. It is possible to indulge in activity of a racist character, conduct which is to the disadvantage of other union members, without actually being a member of a party. What is important is the activity itself. This could be further examined in Committee and may perhaps result in an attempt to amend the Long Title. In the mean time, much of the Bill I welcome; I look forward to further discussion in Committee.