Equality Bill

The worst thing that can happen is that we enact this legislation without making it effective and then rely on too many informal arrangements that allow the untrained barrack room lawyers to become involved, which in turn places a burden not only on the other members of the work force, but on the company or the agency employing the members of staff. That is why we must put all this on a professional and statutory footing. The recognition of equality reps should, thus, not be a contentious matter. As I said before, this has been done in other areas of employment legislation, and I hope that the Government will accept this new clause. Secondly, I wish to dwell for a short while on new clause 25, relating to the minimum wage for seafarers, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Gwyn Prosser); I hope that he will permit me to do so. He will speak more eloquently than I, but I wish to discuss this matter because it has become a personal crusade for a number of Members over the years. It is eight years since I first raised it in the House and I was hoping that today would be the day when we would resolve it once and for all. I chair the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers parliamentary group, of which my hon. Friend is a member, as is my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Ms Clark)—she, too, has taken up this issue. I wish to pay tribute to the RMT, which has valiantly pursued this campaign over the years. I shall name the officers involved because I want them to receive recognition for standing up for some of the most vulnerable workers in our work force. Thus I pay tribute to the RMT general secretary, Bob Crow, and to Steve Yandell, Steve Todd, James Croy and Malcolm Dunning, all of whom have worked alongside hon. Members from all parts of the House to try to get this matter resolved, and have given advice to the Government on how that should be done. This process started as a result of an exposé of the low rates of pay of certain workers on British-flagged ships. A number of years ago we emphasised those rates of pay, particularly those of Filipino workers, but I must say to hon. Members that this still goes on; it has not gone away. The rates of pay for Filipino able seamen on P&O ferries between Liverpool and Dublin—we are not talking about seafarers who are crossing the world, but about seafarers operating on ferries close to us. A Filipino on the Norbay receives £313 a month and a Filipino on the Norbank receives £328 a month. Given that the UK minimum wage is about £1,000, those are poverty wages for people working less than 200 miles away from here, on a UK-flagged ship. Nearly eight years ago we made proposals in negotiation in which we sought to ensure that at least those people would be paid the minimum wage. We took the matter to the Deregulation and Regulatory Reform Committee—I was allowed to speak, even though I was not a member—and we were given the assurance that they would be paid a minimum wage within British waters. We came back to this House and celebrated a success, only to be told by the Government that this would apply not to "territorial waters", but to "internal waters": that means a boat that is moored, because the term has extremely limited coverage. I used to tell jokes about the Norfolk broads, where I sail, but this is no longer a jocular matter; it is a serious matter because it has gone on for so long. We then went back into negotiations with the Government to discuss how we could overcome this situation. We were told that the reason why the Government could not move beyond that position was because of various international laws, so we took our own legal advice. We supplied the Government with that advice—on two occasions they were supplied with separate forms of advice—in which it had been confirmed to us that it is extremely doubtful whether their hand is restricted in this way by international laws of the sea. Our latest advice, from Mr. Jonathan Chambers of Quadrant Chambers, clearly states:""In my view, the proposed amendment"—" the proposal we made previously—"—"probably does not interfere with the right of innocent passage protected under section 3 of UNCLOS"." As of yesterday, the Government remain of the view that their legal opinion says that we cannot implement the minimum wage in our territorial waters because of this "interference" with "innocent passage". Even if we cannot resolve this today—if the Government cannot accept the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover—I must say to them that there must be a way through this. So far they have not been willing or able to share their legal opinion with us. Can we at least share the legal opinions upon which the Government are basing their decision? Perhaps we should hold a seminar—I make this offer—where we get the lawyers together with Ministers and Members of Parliament who are interested in this subject to try to resolve it. I am sure that nobody in this House would want to support a situation whereby people are paid this minimal level of income, on which it is basically impossible to survive. This is poverty pay within the UK jurisdiction. My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran has tabled new clause 33 on pay audits, which I wholeheartedly support, and I shall leave it to her to discuss it. As for the difference between the numbers, we simply felt that the numbers would reflect the Government's own attitude on other employment legislation, so we chose 21. Even if we could get the Government to agree to the proposal today, large numbers or workers would still not be included in the overall scheme.