My Lords, in the course of thinking about this last week I went to the Public Bill Office. I do not know whether I should mention the clerk’s name, but it was Simon Burton and he is right there. I wrote something down and asked whether we could put 1 January 2116. He said, “2116?”. I said, “Yes”, and he said, “Don’t you mean 2016?”. I said, “Oh, I probably do, but hang about a minute, why not make it 2116?”, but I chickened out.
Anyway, the more this discussion goes on today, the more obvious it is that we are juggling lots of timescales and deficiencies in the procedure so far, such as no pre-legislative scrutiny, no scrutiny by the Constitution Committee of the House of Lords, no discussion of post-legislative scrutiny, and so on. Yet, everybody knows, and the Minister has said it several times, that ostensibly it is because of the difficulties that unions have in getting their membership lists up to date. I wonder why that is not true of electoral rolls, but let us stay with what we are on. This will take some time, so what is the connection between that and commencement dates?
The other point that I want to bring into this discussion concerns the pause. The pause for Part 2 has been for a particular purpose, but the pause in Part 3 is simply a consequence of the pause on Part 2. I do not know why the Minister is looking puzzled, but there is de facto a pause before we have the next discussion at the same time as Report of the Bill? Am I not right? Yes, of course. That is how it is. So, between now and the new year all sorts of people, including the Cross-Benchers and so on, will be thinking about all sorts of ideas.
In the middle of this I happened to read, being an insomniac, a very interesting discussion in the Moses Room led by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, on the importance of commencement dates. Indeed, I noticed that my noble friend Baroness Royall took part in that discussion. I was quite amazed that commencement dates are a key part of our constitution, but even Ministers sometimes do not know who takes the decision. Certainly as often as not there is no further parliamentary discussion or decision on them, yet I suppose that we could find, for the anoraks on these matters, some reference to the Joint Committee
on Statutory Instruments and so on. Therefore, I think that we could bring into the mix the problems that have been mentioned for our consideration between now and the new year.
This thing is half-baked. One of the reasons it is half-baked is that it should be in the oven for at least an hour but has only been in for 20 minutes. That is one of the reasons it is half-baked. We should take this in the spirit that it is intended—namely, where should commencement dates come in the Bill? Obviously, we are not advocating that we pass legislation that is never implemented. That is, however, not as stupid a comment as one might think because apparently a huge amount of legislation is never implemented. Just read the report of the noble Lord, Lord Norton. He was the chairman of the commission on this very question. That might be nice, as I say, or implemented in 2116.
De facto, I thought somebody might notice that there is a general election coming up between now and 2016. All I would say about that is—and it cuts both ways—in 2016 and those sorts of periods, people will at least not be thinking all the time about how these matters may affect a general election. They are matters that have a serious footprint into the trade union movement, as we demonstrated this evening, including all the different timetables of changing union rules. The Minister may not have tried to deny that, but he did not appreciate that one cannot simply go to the next conference in Blackpool and say, “We’ll put a rules revision on the agenda”. There are rules for the procedures and timings of rules revision conferences.
Therefore, I think at the moment—there is no voting this evening—we would like to link this proposition with the one that my noble friend Lord Monks referred to. We are trying to relate this, with considerable difficulty, to the realities on the ground. If something in this field is to be done, it has got to be done within a timescale that allows for post-legislative scrutiny. I will ask the Minister a specific question about that. Where does post-legislative scrutiny now fit into his conception of where we will be going on this? I look forward to his comments.
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