If that is how the hon. Gentleman describes my answer to his hon. Friend, I would be interested to hear how he would describe several of the speeches we heard during the debate.
Trade unions have a significant impact on the lives of people in our country. We want to ensure that their membership lists are up to date, and everyone has an interest in that being achieved. As hon. Members have said, we know that that can often be a challenging process, for good reasons, so we want to provide assurance that it will happen.
Clause 36 will give wide assurance that unions know how to contact their members so that their decisions will reflect what their members want. We do not want to
change the vital and positive role that unions play in society, but we do want to give confidence in their accountability.
Under section 24 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, unions have to ensure that their lists of members’ names and postal addresses is accurate and up to date
“so far as is reasonably practicable”.
That section allows any union member to find out whether there is an entry relating to him or her and to see a copy of the information. Clause 36 builds on that by making unions give the certification officer an annual membership audit certificate alongside the annual return that they already submit. Clause 37 provides a union with more than 10,000 members will have to appoint an independent assurer to produce the certificate, as well as setting out what is required for that process, but clause 36 states what smaller unions with fewer than 10,000 members will have to do. They will be able to have a union officer sign off the certificate with a statement that, to the best of their knowledge, the union has complied with its duties under section 24. I hope that the Committee will agree that that is a pretty light-touch approach and that the duty is not onerous in the slightest. Of course, we expect that smaller unions will have a less complicated register, so it is reasonable that a union officer would know the content well enough to be able to make such a statement.
As the clause is designed to give widespread assurance, all unions of any size will have to let anyone who asks to see their most recent certificate to do so, for which they may charge a reasonable amount, if they want. The certification officer will have to keep copies of all certificates and to allow the public to look at them. Subsections (3) and (4) allow a trade union to fulfil the new duty on behalf of its branches and require that federated unions must comply with the new duty. Our aim is not to change what unions should already be doing to maintain their membership data, but to get them to provide assurance of what they are doing to their members and the public.