My Lords, my noble friend Lord Monks has made a sophisticated case to the Government for making this whole clause and the invention of the assurer more palatable, or at least more workable. He has had to do so in a very complicated way because of the nature of the proposition. My opposition and that of my noble friend Lord Lea to the clause standing part is a more straightforward proposition: we are basically seeking to delete the clause.
We still have not had a proper explanation of why there should be an assurer. Incidentally, I need to apologise to the Committee and to Hansard: on occasion in the previous debate, I referred to an “assessor” rather than an “assurer”. I also apologise to the Minister. It was almost certainly down to my writing. The term “assurer” has a nice touch about it; it is as though the man from the Pru is coming round to collect your life assurance every now and again. However, it is not quite like that. What qualifications and what legal requirements does the assurer have to have? He or she is going to be employed by the union but approved by the state. This person may well be somebody with auditing qualifications but he or she is not an auditor, an accountant, a lawyer or a scrutineer in the sense of the ballot scrutineer, to which my noble friend referred. The post is an entirely new invention.
I go back to my earlier point. Why do we need this new invention? If the Government’s intention is to tighten things up, why do they not do that? Can we not rationally look at a proposition saying that the certification officer should have more powers or that the requirements on the union should be clearer or more stringent? However, that is not what the Government have proposed. They have simply proposed this intermediary, which is very strange.
I do not know how the general public will take to this. What is the assurer? It sounds to me like a third-rate television series: “The Assurer—Licensed to Check Membership Records”. Even more sinisterly, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it could be the kind of person who meticulously took notes of the proceedings of a committee in the old Soviet Union. He sat in the corner and nobody quite knew who he was, but you knew he was reporting on you, and you knew he was reporting to the Central Committee. Such a role is not of the organisation; it is not of the state; and it is not of a recognised profession; it is a new invention. To do exactly what? I do not think that, in all their interventions so far, or in what they have done with their advisers, the Government have come up with a clear definition of what this person is to do.
For the smaller unions—those with fewer than 10,000 members—the requirements in Clause 36 relate to an audit certificate. That is slightly more understandable. It has to be signed off by senior officers of the union. That is a procedure that many organisations know about. They have to bring in external auditors to check it and, if it is complicated, they have on occasion to ensure that their lawyers have seen it.
However, this new profession is not known to science or to society—or, so far as I am aware, is it known to legislation. If the Minister can point to a precedent I would be grateful, but it is not in any part of society that I am aware of, or in any part that bears any relationship to the context in which trade unions and employers operate.
If I were the Government, I would think that that best thing would be to delete this whole new proposition and instead get around to telling us clearly what this part of the Bill is supposed to do. Then we could have a rational debate. We might still disagree, but at least we would know what we were talking about. The main proposition here is to introduce into a very delicate and sensitive area—the issues of human rights and data protection have already been touched on, and will be again—an entity and a role that is unknown to all the players and unknown to the courts. If the Government were sensible, they would approach this in a cleaner way. They would make a proposition as to how they want unions to change their behaviour and what standards they want them to meet, and we would be able to see whether those were reasonable, rather than putting things in the hands of an entirely new concoction.
I therefore propose that Clause 37 should not stand part of the Bill. I hope that by the time we have completed our consideration of the Bill the Government will either have deleted it entirely or put something much simpler and more straightforward in its place.