I am delighted that this Committee sitting has allowed the Chair of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee a little walk down memory lane with regard to his organisation of ballots in the mid-’80s. He is right that there is no compelling evidence. Of the hundreds and hundreds of e-mails I have received from constituents about the Bill, not one has mentioned part 3, because the public are concerned with lobbying, which is what this Bill was supposed to address.
As I was saying, only 10 complaints had gone to a decision since 1987. As my hon. Friends have suggested in their interventions, we must wonder whether the certification officer needs any of these powers, given the level of activity there is on membership lists. Indeed, the certification officer has less work to do in this particular area than the Leader of the House has in counting support for the Bill. People will be asking themselves whether the powers are unnecessary and disproportionate, and the answer is clearly yes.
Let us reflect again on what the Leader of the House said on Second Reading :
“All we are doing is asking unions to provide an annual assurance that they are doing everything that they can to ensure that they know who their members are and how to contact them.”—[Official Report, 3 September 2013; Vol. 567, c. 185.]
That is almost a one-paragraph description of the current legislation that trade unions abide by, including the Data Protection Act and their responsibilities to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The current law prescribes exactly that. It says that trade unions should ensure that they do all that is—we will come back to this terminology again—“reasonably practicable” to maintain their membership lists.
While the Government trumpet the slashing of red tape for business, as my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie) said—and for “slashing red tape” read “demolishing workers’ rights back to what they were in Victorian times”—they are imposing a completely unnecessary burden on trade unions to resolve a problem that does not exist. Indeed, officials at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills cannot tell us what the problem is.
Amendment 103, with consequential amendment 121, would result in part 3 of the Bill coming into force only if a complaint was received and verified by the certification officer as a valid compliant, and if the certification officer felt that a membership certificate process was required. That goes back to the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North (Mr Doran). The trade unions have absolutely nothing to hide. The amendment would mean that part 3 would come into force only if a verifiable and non-vexatious claim came forward.