Employment Bill [Lords]

I do not want to put myself in the position of judges in such cases, but, if my hon. Friend will bear with me, I shall touch on one of those examples in a moment. The changes that we have made make it clear that trade unions are not expected to hold perfect information about their members whom they intend to ballot. The information supplied in the notices"““must be as accurate as is reasonably practicable in the light of the information in the possession of the union at the time””." The presumption is not, therefore, that the union must access information available to others. To comply with the law, it will not need information held by the employer that it will not necessarily possess. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) asked about some of the cases quoted, one of which concerned a recent dispute involving bus drivers—I, too, have received representations about that. I am always cautious when commenting on particular cases, because I do not pretend to know all the facts, but my understanding of that case is that the issue in dispute—pardon the pun—was the timeliness of the information, rather than the accuracy of the ballot result.