My Lords, in focusing on the last of these regulations I do not mean to say that I agree with any of the previous five. However, the points have already been made on those.
I served on the Select Committee during the passage of this Bill, and the last of these amendments is out of keeping, in two senses, with the recommendations of that committee. First, as has already been alluded to, it presents unions with a very severe administrative problem. Secondly—to my mind this is the largest problem—even to proceed on this basis is a major constitutional outrage. I will come back to that.
Having received representations from both sides—and to try to maintain consensus—the Select Committee said that the transition period should be a minimum of 12 months. That, however, was subject to a consultation with the unions. I wanted a minimum of 18 months, subject to consultation, but we agreed on what currently stands.
The noble Lord, Lord Foster, has already referred to evidence from USDAW. I suspect that the belated report on the consultation on this point will reveal that several unions will be hard hit because of the timing of
this regulation. Most unions have their conference between March and June. USDAW has it in April; my own union, the GMB, has it in June. It is impossible, in both those cases, to abide by both your own rulebook and the timetable laid down as a result of this regulation. Had the Government decided to trigger it and give them 12 months in, say, August, that would have given the unions plenty of time to abide by all the pre-proceedings of conferences and rule changes by this time next year. Instead, the Government have done so in such a way as to sabotage the ability of a conference such as USDAW’s in April—since the proceedings for it have already started—to meet the requirements of its own rules while complying with the regulation.
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USDAW, a union which gave oral and written evidence to the Select Committee—I think even the committee’s Conservative members were quite impressed by how it dealt with opting out of political funds under the present arrangements—wishes to abide by the law but also to abide by its rules. The Government’s proposition presents it with a dilemma which will be difficult to overcome. I plead with the Minister to think again on this regulation and extend the period, if it has to be triggered in March, to 18 months or to trigger the one-year period later in the year, if that is indeed what the Government want.
I had hoped that after the furore during the passage of what became the Trade Union Act, we would settle down to implement it in a sensible way. This regulation is not a sensible way. It will put unions that wish to comply with the law into difficulties and I request that the Minister thinks again. Indeed, his failure to provide in time the results of the consultation give me cause to support the views of the Delegated Powers Committee that the Government have acted entirely out of order on this basis.
However, there is a bigger point here. The first conclusion of the Select Committee, unanimously, was that while the Bill dealt with union political funds, and therefore in the nature of history and the structure of our political arrangements hit the finances of only one party, there should be a government initiative to look at political funding in general. It should look at all institutions and sources of funding which come to political parties. That put the responsibility not on the political parties themselves but on the Government. All of us were concerned that Ministers at that time refused to recognise and carry out what was in the Conservative Party manifesto: that a review of political funding should take place.
Leaving aside the money that goes from rich individuals, more money goes from other institutions into political parties than from trade unions. Yet none of those other institutions, whether they are public or private companies, partnerships or whatever, are required to have a separate political fund—let alone to have any detailed requirements on opting in and opting out on review, and repeating that exercise every five years. Only the trade unions are already subject to that restriction, as they have been since 1913. Other institutions actually provide more money to a range of political parties, including the Labour Party, through their own decisions simply to donate money to them. In the
case of quoted companies, there has to be a vote but there is no requirement to have a separate political fund.
This has always been a hugely partisan measure to hit at the finances of the major opposition party. It is being made even worse by the detailed provisions in this regulation, in that unions will find it difficult to comply with it in the short term. The bigger question, which Ministers were pressed to answer a few weeks ago in this House, is: when are the Government going to have a ‘look at political parties’ funding, across the board, on a fair, reasonable and equitable basis? Until they do, they cannot pretend that this is a sensible, democratic or reasonable measure and I hope that the Minister can at least give us an inkling today of the way in which his colleagues will approach this before this Parliament is out.
The reputation of political parties and the whole political process depends on us cleaning it up. The Government think they have cleaned up the trade union contribution to the Labour Party to some extent but there is a much deeper and wider problem than this. It is about time the body politic as a whole addressed it. I hope the Minister can tell us that, at least, he and his colleagues are preparing to address it. If not, then once again we are at an impasse. This has been exposed as a hugely partisan, unilateral decision by one political party to try to bankrupt another.