My Lords, my Amendment 91A follows the theme of my earlier Amendment 162A. The thrust of this amendment is that in determining whether to let a public contract to a bidder, a public authority should have the power to take into consideration the conduct of the potential supplier vis-à-vis its staff.
The Government are to be praised for accepting that public procurement is a useful tool to maintain and raise standards, hence the emphasis on public good, even without the benefit of Amendment 46. Clause 29, for example, excludes those guilty of improper behaviour of various kinds. Schedule 6 provides that there are mandatory exclusions, among other things, for suppliers who have been convicted of various offences: corporate manslaughter, homicide, terrorism, theft, fraud, bribery, organised crime, tax offences, and cartel offences.
8.15 pm
Under the heading “Labour market, slavery and human trafficking offences”, various convictions under the legislation for employment agencies are listed: national minimum wage, gangmasters, trafficking and slavery.
Schedule 7, which covers discretionary grounds for exclusion, permits the exclusion of public authorities to exclude suppliers who are not convicted of such offences, but who have been subjected to trafficking or slavery prevention orders, various environmental misconduct, insolvency, bankruptcy, competition infringement, professional misconduct or serious breach of contract and various other matters.
Clearly, many of the grounds I have listed are capable of applying to the conditions of working life of the staff who carry out these public contracts. That is appropriate because, as the Minister said earlier, public procurement involves nearly £300 billion-worth of contracts each year, which is a substantial part of the GDP, at least 105,000 small and medium-sized enterprises and dozens of larger ones, and millions of workers.
Given that the principle is accepted, my amendment is intended to give public authorities the right to exclude suppliers that breach workers’ rights. I suggest that this could not be more important or topical. P&O Ferries is the tip of a sinister iceberg. Wage cuts, unfair dismissals, redundancies without consultation, discrimination, zero-hours contracts and so on are
rife. Collective bargaining coverage, which could have resolved these issues, is now at its lowest since the 1920s. Looking at the other legal options, there are backlogs of tens of thousands of employment tribunal cases. The waiting time for getting a case on is between a year and two years.
This Bill presents a vitally useful tool for maintaining or raising standards and preventing good employers being undercut by bad ones. I hope that the Government will take at least something from my proposed amendment.