Employment Bill [HL]

My Lords, I speak to my Amendment No. 34A, an amendment to subsection (b) in Amendment No. 33. It is on the supplementary list for the simple reason that I thought for a long time that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lester, covered sufficiently my concerns about this issue. However, the more I thought about the phrase ““exceptional hardship””, the more that I thought that it was a rather sterner requirement of proof than I would have wished. My amendment does not take anything from the noble Lord’s words, ““exceptional hardship””, but adds the words, ““any financial disadvantage””. The noble Lord, Lord Morris, cited the example of the lorry driver who might lose his licence and, therefore, his livelihood. My examples are from the profession that I know well: teaching. It is little realised that, in the last year for which statistics were published, more than 1,800 teachers were accused of either sexual harassment or physical violence towards children, of which accusations less than 1 per cent were afterwards upheld. That is a huge number of people, whose lives were disrupted terribly. Often their marriages fell apart; they were denied access to their work for long periods while their case ground through the courts; and so on. It is a very serious matter. Now let us imagine the financial hardship of their having to pay for legal representation. As long as they were members of a recognised trades union, as the noble Lord said in his example of the lorry driver, they were entitled to free representation, which was paid for by their union. I remember being told when leaving university that I should join up to the teachers’ union fast. In those days we did not think of sexual harassment, but in case I was accused of hitting a child, the union would represent me and it would cost me nothing. These are important financial benefits, quite apart from health insurance and everything else. I quoted the statistics about teachers because that is the world I know. The financial benefit of free representation with the union’s financial help enabled people to survive. Let us remember that 99 per cent of cases proved to be blatantly unjust and only 1 per cent of cases were upheld. As has been rightly pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, the union would have to look ahead at the point of excluding someone to see whether such exclusion would cause ““exceptional hardship””. I hope that my more modest words, ““any financial disadvantage””, would be clearer. We are all at risk of sympathising too much with the trades union and not enough with the individual because the case to which the European Court judgment gave rise was against people with whom we have very little sympathy. They were not very nice people in their political views, but it can happen to others whose views might be less distasteful. The rights of individuals and those of trades unions, as the later amendments of my noble friend Lord Campbell emphasise, must be got right in this legislation. My modest additional amendment, which would point out the financial disadvantage that loss of union membership could bring, might help us in our debate.