My Lords, I declare an interest in that I have been a member of the GMB for 40 years this year and was a member of other unions prior to that. I therefore have an axe to grind—not a pecuniary one—and I share that interest with millions of our fellow citizens and with many who are not in trade unions but who, nevertheless, benefit from the way in which trade unions operate in the market.
My Amendment 118C seeks to delete from the clause the reference to this peculiar new invention of an assessor. The Government have seen fit to invent a whole new profession and office for reasons which, as my noble friend Lord Monks said, are not entirely clear. The role of the assessor is dealt with in more detail in Clause 37, and I will return to make more detailed remarks in that respect. The central point is why the Government think that they need to invent a relatively costly new bureaucratic structure when they already have the powers in the role of the certification officer, who can deal with any complaint received, intervene and censure a union if inadequate documentation is provided. As my noble friend has said, there are already substantial penalties available
to certification officers if ever one of the few complaints they receive is upheld. In this section of the 1992 Act, there is also the possibility for individuals to complain, not only to the certification officer but to the courts, about the failure of trade unions to maintain proper records and many other provisions of that Act.
So why is a new structure being proposed? As my noble friend Lord Monks has said, there are problems in maintaining a register of trade unions with names and addresses and accurate records. By and large, most of the population moves every four years, and the impact assessment recognises this. People change their address every four years and tend to move job slightly more frequently than that. In some cases, they change the way in which they pay their union dues, or the name of the company for which they work changes. At any given point, it is difficult to maintain a 100% accurate register, but the Act rightly says,
“so far as is reasonably practicable”.
That is the basis on which the certification officer makes a judgment.
It is not clear in this Bill whether the Government intend to invoke more stringent principles of how to decide whether or not it is an accurate register. If they are, it is not in the Bill. Is the assessor, or whoever advises them, to develop new codes? If so, the House should be told before we proceed. I will return to the role of the assessor, which appears in the next clause.
I also strongly support the aim of the amendment of my noble friends Lord Monks and Lord Stevenson to delete this clause and this whole part of the Bill. We have looked at the impact assessment, which estimates the costs to unions, the Government and employers. For unions, it is assessed at around £400,000. I have had representations from all sorts of unions—my own, the National Union of Teachers, which is not affiliated to this party, and the Royal College of Nursing, to which my noble friend has referred and which is not affiliated either to the TUC or to the party. These indicate clearly that the cost of implementing these provisions and initiating the changes in procedure and rules that is required would be substantially more than that.
Even more interesting is that only £140,000 is allocated to additional costs to the Government, whereas if they were really trying to enforce this, they should give the certification officer significantly more powers. It is arguable that under the present rules the certification officer may need more resources, but that is not what this Bill is about. It is about an entirely new approach to this area. The even more interesting part of the impact assessment is that the benefit at one point is described as nil. That is a pretty telling internal report on a proposal from Ministers: at a cost of £400,000, which I think will be rather larger, plus £100,000 or so to the Government, the benefit is nil.
My noble friend Lord Monks has already cited the Regulatory Policy Committee, which basically says that this is one of the daftest proposals that has ever come before it, and there is no justification for it. Even the Government, who have been scraping around for supporters of this Bill during a rushed consultation period over the holiday month, could not get more than lukewarm support from the CBI, which said that
it would not be its first priority. Where are the Government coming from on this? The benefit to restating and providing a bureaucratic infrastructure to enforce the requirement of unions to keep membership records effectively is not justified in anything the Government have so far said about this, either in the impact assessment or in speeches in the House of Commons, which was of course very late in the proceedings.
5 pm
That has naturally given rise to various levels of paranoia from the trade union movement. I should say on behalf of me and my colleagues: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”. There are some hints in the impact assessment that they may really be talking about strike ballots, which are not relevant, as my noble friend Lord Monks said. The issue in a strike ballot is whether the people who are balloted are those, and all those, in a particular bargaining unit. That depends on the definition by the union and the employer; it does not depend on the totality of any union’s register of members and their addresses. An alternative suggestion was that the proposal relates to internal elections within unions because the Government, in some way or other, do not like the people who are being elected. Occasionally the Labour Party leadership does not like them, either. The fact of the matter is that if something is wrong with an election, the defeated candidate can complain to the certification officer, as happened in a recent case to which my noble friend referred. If an officer finds in favour of the complainant, then the election is run again. What additional powers do the Government see coming out of these changes that would affect that situation?
My final reason is perhaps the most sinister. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has left the Chamber, even though he made remarks at Second Reading that suggested that the Liberal Democrats in particular were on about trade union political funds, which, of course, are dealt with in entirely different legislation. I agree that decent membership records are required but political funds are not dealt with in this part of the Bill. Even if the Government were out to bankrupt the Labour Party, this proposal would not do so. I therefore have to say to Ministers that if those more Machiavellian motives were their real motives, they have got it wrong. If, however, the proposals were a reasonable and fair-minded attempt simply to improve the situation, then again they have got it wrong because the present powers are sufficient.
The Government are introducing something which, if they had imposed it on any other entity within our civic society, would have been regarded as otiose or even oppressive. We shall come later to the oppressive aspects of these proposals. We have yet to hear from the Minister today on this; we certainly did not hear from him at Second Reading. Unless he can give us a more coherent and persuasive argument as to why these matters need to be addressed and why this new structure has to be imposed, this clause—indeed, this whole section of the Bill—would be best left out and we should not proceed further with it.
That would be a drastic measure but there is time in which the Government could think up some new reasons as to why they are making these proposals.
There is a pause in relation to Part 2: if the Government use that time to engage in a proper consultation, they may conclude that these proposals are unnecessary, or they may be able to concoct more convincing reasons as to why they are necessary. However, for the moment, as it stands, the Bill is nonsensical and unnecessary, and imposes a cost on trade unions and their members that does not deliver any benefit, as the Government’s impact assessment suggests. That is good reason enough for them at least to pause but possibly abandon this part of the Bill.