My Lords, I have four amendments in this group that relate to roughly the same territory—Amendments 145, 146, 148 and 149. In the previous clause we were concerned about the access of the assurer and those who approach the assurer to the membership records of a trade union. My amendments relate to the certification officer and the inspectors, or staff, of the certification officer.
Obviously, when there is a complaint from a member about the way in which his records have been dealt with, the certification officer or his agent needs to be able to look at that part of the records. However, the totality of the records of the trade union needs to be protected in almost all circumstances. My amendments propose that the documents that can be demanded by the enforcement authorities will not normally include the complete register of members.
On earlier amendments, my noble friend Lady Drake and others emphasised how important this is to civil liberties. When you are organising a trade union against employer hostility and the employer can go to the authorities to find out who in his workforce, or which potential recruits into his workforce, are members of a trade union, that is a serious restriction on the right to join a trade union with no detriment.
Taken one stage further, this relates to the issue of blacklisting. It has probably been a serious underestimate that some 2,000 people have been blacklisted over the years through the mechanisms established by certain companies in the construction industry. If all that the employers needed to do was get sight of a list of registered members of a trade union, or if there was a requirement after a third-party complaint for the certification officer to produce that list, the incidence of blacklisting would go well beyond the confines of the construction industry and the other areas where historically it has applied.
There is an important civil liberties, human rights and data protection issue here. I seriously counsel the Government to look again at the provisions here and to build in some safeguards themselves. The last thing that they want to do, I should have thought, would be to transgress data protection provisions. I hope that they would not wish to transgress the European Convention on Human Rights or the ILO conventions on the freedom to organise, join or not join a trade union. Yet these provisions in this part of the Bill and the role of the assurer move in that direction, and we need far firmer protections than are in the Bill to ensure that that is not exactly what will happen.
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I know that the Government sometimes appear to be pretty nonchalant about international obligations to the EU and the convention on human rights. However,
I hope that in the area of employee protection this is not a policy emanating from the heart of government that states that these things do not matter. Protection from abusive employers and others over the right to choose whether to be a member of a trade union must be stated clearly in law. If the law is moving in a different direction to a new form of regulation, as this Bill purports to try to do, those protections need explicitly to be built into the legislation.
As my noble friend Lord Monks said, there are lawyers who say that the form of words in the Bill runs into difficulties on both the human rights side and the ILO convention side. I have no doubt that the Government could find a lawyer who would say the opposite. You can always find another lawyer, but as this is grey territory in which the Government could find themselves, instead of being a beacon for democratic and human rights, condemned in the councils of the world for breaching them, given that we are preaching democracy and freedom of association to less well favoured regimes in other countries.
I am not saying that the Government have yet got into that territory, but they are pretty close to it, and I hope that before the Bill disappears from this House we can see—from the Government preferably—some protections in this regard, not simply airy-fairy assertions that the Bill does not conflict with human rights legislation.