Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Any doubts about my view of the new clause have been reinforced by the reminder that this is Thatcherite legislation. In fact, some of what it does goes beyond Thatcherism. We all recognise that operating a prison is exceptional and that it is not like running a factory. There have to be differences in how the trade unions can operate because we cannot allow prisons to be left unstaffed. Prisons have dangerous and violent people within them as well as people with all sorts of mental health problems. There are also many vulnerable people, particularly in some of the young offender institutions. We expect prison officers to keep those people secure, keep them safe and ensure that they are fed, receive appropriate medication and so on. If we are to achieve that as efficiently as possible, we need good industrial relations within prisons, as the Secretary of State has acknowledged. We need the Prison Officers Association and other unions in the prison system to feel that they can act as trade unions, which is part of having good industrial relations. Recent history, however, has been exactly the opposite, as prisons have had very poor industrial relations. That is one of the reasons why Ed Sweeney's report was undertaken and why both the Government and the POA signed up to it. That report, however, was published only on Monday this week. I realise that my right hon. Friend said that drafts have been seen, but the report was published only on Monday, as I say, and at exactly the same time that he made his statement announcing the amendments to this Bill. The Sweeney report was set up in the context of poor industrial relations and the need to secure a new voluntary arrangement to replace JIRPA—the joint industrial relations procedural agreement—from which the POA had given notice that it was withdrawing. We can argue about how good JIRPA was and how well it worked. The fact is, though, that it did not work; otherwise, there would not have been any withdrawal from it. The Sweeney report points to some of the issues that the POA raised about JIRPA and how far it allowed the union to raise relevant industrial relations issues as opposed to allowing management to rule them out. Irrespective of arguments about JIRPA, everyone accepts that we need a new and better agreement. My right hon. Friend says that he does not want to use the powers in the new clauses, but—because of the timing as much as anything else—the POA now undoubtedly sees the new clauses as having been designed to hold a gun to their head in negotiations that have not begun. I know that that is not my right hon. Friend's view, but having spoken to its representatives yesterday afternoon I can assure him that it is the POA's view, and I think that that will make it much more difficult for us to reach the sort of agreement that we want to reach.