My Lords, as has been made evident from the speeches that we have heard, this is about ensuring that, should the Bill progress and be brought into law, it will operate with a reasonable chance of success. As we have heard, it puts additional red tape on a number of bodies which are technically independent. They are part of civic society admittedly, but not those which are necessarily controlled by any one group. They are self-governing or self-operating, so it will take time for it to be absorbed.
There are new procedures and assurers—if that is what they are to be called, it is an ugly name—who will need to be nominated on a list to be promulgated. There have to be appointments made, new reporting processes brought in and inspections, and all sorts of procedures relate to that. We have a plethora of activity and burdens on trade unions that need to be bedded in. If the Government were thinking about the effectiveness and efficiency of the operations, it makes sense to give it time to bed in and get the best chance.
We have also heard from those who know—and perhaps they know a lot better than those who are advising Ministers—about the practical difficulties of trying to get changes into all these independent bodies in sufficient time and on an appropriate scale in order that the legislation can be made to work effectively. What does a bit of a delay cost us? We might return to that.
This is also about trying to do legislation properly. I made plain in my earlier remarks that the Minister’s letter-writing needs will prey heavily on his mind over the next week or two, because of all my questions. About seven of them were about the report from the Regulatory Policy Committee on the impact assessment. I will run over one or two of them, because they raise issues that are not susceptible to the timescale to which we are told the Bill is being progressed. In effect, what was called for was a new impact assessment. I asked the Minister whether we will have one, but he did not respond.
Will there be new figures? Will the RPC be able to look at and make comment on them? Will the figures do what the RPC requests of the Government and involve those stakeholders and others who were not properly consulted before? Will there be an opportunity for the Bill to be refined, to answer the question that the RPC asked about how accurate an updated membership register would have to be for a union to be considered compliant with the new recommendations? Unless that is made clear, it is very hard to assess or
even guess whether the costs that will be placed on the trade unions are worth the additional assurances available to those who will in time wish to depend on that register.
All this is criticised to a great extent in the impact assessment report and, therefore, we assume a new report will need to be put in. The Minister said that part of the blame for this was because those carrying out the impact assessment did not get sufficient responses from the trade unions. That may be because trying to consult with a body in a four-week period starting at the end of July and finishing before the end of August is not likely to maximise the chances of getting a good response.
There may be other reasons, but it is more that there is a lack of understanding about how independent bodies such as trade unions operate and how to get the information that is available within them for compliance. It does not exactly fill one with confidence to read in the report from the RPC that the impact assessment provides figures in relation to small unions that seem to have been based on one respondent. The Government could do better than that. That will take time and compete with the other issues that we are talking about and, therefore, again plays to a suggestion in the amendment that there should be a delay in commencement until such time as the Secretary of State has placed in the Libraries a review of the burden of regulatory responsibility. That is just one proposal but others that have been discussed by my noble friends suggest a date that would allow sufficient time for the legislation to bed in. I recommend that proposal also because it would provide an alternative approach.
This point regarding commencement will come back, as my noble friend Lord Whitty mentioned. There are other commencement issues regarding Parts 1 and 2. Other amendments in the group technically relate to Part 4 and we will therefore have an opportunity to debate them again. I invite the Minister to give us a considered response, unless he feels that behind all this the “drop dead” date of May 2015 will suffice, and stating anything other than what he previously said would therefore merely be provocation.