No, I want to be very brief.
We are being offered a marginal increase in shareholder rights when what we need is an increase in worker rights and worker representation, particularly representation. Workers are the ones with the interests of the company
at heart and they want to see the company maintained, viable and healthy. Workers, as well as shareholders, should be represented on the remuneration committee, on the audit committee, which should have a central role, and on works councils, such as those that they have in Germany. I would move rapidly towards the Mitbestimmung system of co-determination and partnership that they have in Germany. The Bill does not do that, which is a failure. It offers a simplified structure for competition issues when what we need is a British version of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and a business commission to enforce effective corporate governance of British companies and to impose tougher rules on mergers and foreign takeovers.
As Alex Brummer shows in his latest book, we have very few national champions left in this country and a higher proportion of our big firms have been taken over by foreign firms than in any other country. That means that they are dancing to a tune dictated from Zurich, Hamburg, Delaware or wherever else rather than to a British tune when making their investment decisions. We need to check and control foreign takeovers on that stage.
Let me make a brief mention of what the Bill does; it has to be brief, because it does not do all that much. First, the simplification of the tribunal process is okay and acceptable, provided that ACAS gets the extra staffing and money that it will need to take over the conciliation process before industrial tribunal. Secondly, we need a one-track approach, rather than having to go first to ACAS and then to the tribunal. The approach should be integrated down one track.
We need better protection and provision for whistleblowers. In many cases, that is the only way we will find out what is going on inside companies such as A4e—we heard all the revelations about what that company had been doing because they do not have an adequate audit structure or control structure. That means that fraud can be perpetrated at the lower levels, whereas the top management is not concerned and does not want to know what is going on. We need proper control structures and some system of strengthening and protecting whistleblowers to encourage them to come forward and reveal what kind of business practices are going on. If the Bill does not provide that, it will fail. Those are important provisions that must be implemented.