Employment Bill [Lords]

This is an important area of legislation and, as the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) said, there has been a huge amount of legislation on these matters. I want to follow on from where the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) left off. There are five areas of importance in the Bill, and we had some debate on all of them on Report. Those who were privileged to serve on the Committee were able to explore them in more detail but, as is always the case, that involved only a minority of Members. Over the years, many of us have taken an interest in many of the matters that have been touched on in the Bill. Some of the outcomes of the deliberations in the House of Lords, and in the Commons so far, have been good, but I have to share the frustration that the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills has just expressed, and which I ventilated when I raised a point of order earlier, that there has been no opportunity to explore some of the matters in the Bill or to test whether they are as valid as they could have been. I want to concentrate on two of those areas. The first area, which covers the first seven clauses of the Bill, deals with dispute resolution. I have had a meeting with the Minister on this matter, for which I was grateful. He knows that I have taken an interest in this, and I have also raised the matter in Adjournment debates in the House. I am concerned that the Bill, as it stands, still does not deal with one of the areas in which the worker often feels that he or she does not get a fair shout. Changes to the dispute resolution procedure are proposed in clauses 1 to 6. Variations have been made over the years—these proposals undo the changes we made four years ago—as to how much should be optional, how much should be procedural, and the extent to which complying with the procedure should make a dismissal unlawful. However, there is still no automatic right to a dispute resolution procedure for someone who is dismissed summarily. There are many people up and down the land, in small and large firms, who, as a result of this legislation, will still be able to go to work and find themselves dismissed with no right to any dispute resolution procedure in the workplace. They can take their case to an industrial tribunal but, in four fifths of the cases that get to a tribunal, the employee does not succeed. Furthermore, in many cases, the tribunals and the higher courts will say that such cases fall within the band of a reasonable decision taken by the employer. Many workers do not feel that they are getting a fair deal yet. It is disappointing that, when the Government looked at the statutory dispute resolution procedures and introduced the changes in clauses 1, 2 and 3, they did not consider going back to the beginning of the procedure and providing for access to the statutory dispute resolution procedures from the beginning of the process. Clause 3 allows the awards that can be granted to be varied and provides for a financial penalty. Bluntly, however, a financial penalty is not much use if, at the end of the day, the person loses their job. If someone is dismissed, the chance of getting back to work is very small, certainly reduced, and the person might be out of work for a long time. Clause 5 provides for conciliation before the bringing of proceedings, but it is clear that we have moved from having a set of obligatory procedures to an optional procedure—from ““shall act”” to"““may endeavour to promote a settlement””." Conciliation officers do a good job. ACAS, based in my constituency, does a good job; it has been lauded on both sides of the House, and everyone is glad that it is there. It takes many disputes away from the headlines and improves many people's lives. It would be preferable, however, if the Government recognised that significant injustices are not yet dealt with. Today's deliberations and the fact that Parliament has been able to debate less than half of what it wanted to debate will mean, as the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said, that we will have to return to these matters—and soon. Only part of the opportunity has been taken; sadly, part of it has been significantly missed. I end where the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills started: unless we change our procedures so that Parliament, not the Government, determines the business, we will never be able to do our constituents the proper service that they expect us to do. Parliament, not the Government, should decide Parliament's business; we need to change that in order to get the balance right. Question put and agreed to. Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed, with amendments.