I hope that I can give the hon. Gentleman some reassurance. It is not a question of every single membership entry having to be audited; it is about the process the union has in place for doing so. The certificate needs to be provided to give assurance on that. He also said—a few Members mentioned this—that the proposed powers somehow exist already, but they are actually very narrowly drawn. The certification officer’s power to investigate a complaint by an individual member applies only to that individual’s membership record; it does not extend to other members in the organisation. Indeed, it does not give those who might not be a member of a trade union the ability to complain. Of course, a member might not know that there is a problem with their records. Indeed, if they are not receiving information from the union, they might not know when there is a ballot for a committee, for example.
I will turn now to the specific amendments and respond to some of the points that have been raised. Amendment 103 would remove the annual duty to provide a membership audit certificate. Instead, the certificate would need to be submitted only if a complaint were received by the certification officer and he thought that it was necessary. Amendment 121 would go along with amendment 103 by removing the duty to appoint an assurer. I do not think that the amendments are useful, because they stop the key policy objective. I agree
that there is clearly a difference of opinion between both sides of the Committee on the reasonableness of the measure, but that is why the Government do not support the amendments. The current arrangements just do not give that assurance, because they rely on members proactively checking the register. Even if they do check the register, they cannot see all of it and they do not know whether other names and addresses are up to date; and nor would they know who should and should not be on the register.
Various Members have mentioned the difficulties of tracking membership. Indeed, the Engineering Employers Federation has commented that trade unions
“do not have a unified way of tracking membership and it remains difficult for them to do so”.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development said that
“Unions have stated difficulties at times maintaining the addresses of members”.
Amendment 104 would allow for delaying the submission of a membership audit certificate if the union were appealing. I absolutely understand that unions do not want an assurer to send mistakenly or maliciously a qualified certificate to the certification officer without their knowing about it, but I believe that the amendment is unnecessary and hope to give some reassurance why. The current drafting states that the assurer will send the copy of the membership audit certificate to the certification officer only after it is provided to the union, which means that the union will already have seen the certificate and had that opportunity to talk with the assurer. Of course, it is worth noting that it is the union that will appoint the assurer, and it has every ability within the agreement it makes in appointing an assurer to say that it would like the opportunity to see the certificate and comment before it is sent off .