Employment Rights Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, I admit that I am a little perplexed by Amendment 1, particularly in the light of the latest TUC-commissioned poll that was published last night. Not only is the Bill popular with the public, including a majority of Conservative and Reform voters, but, when they are faced with robust arguments against its key provisions, the Bill becomes even more popular with voters.

I am not sure that your Lordships or the public need this amendment to know that the Bill is about fairness, security and the right to an independent voice at work. The public are already well aware and, frankly, appalled that, under the previous Government, low pay and insecurity became mainstream in British working life. They want change.

Underlying this amendment—this might be my suspicious mind—is the worry that it is really about undermining the role of independent trade unions in representing workers’ interests. The ILO uses the term “workers’ organisations” for a reason. International law upholds the right to collective bargaining and freedom of association. Independent trade unions are workers’ best chance of getting their rights enforced and built on for better pay, safer workplaces, training opportunities and family-friendly hours, and they provide a democratic voice at work.

Without repeating the arguments from Second Reading, I encourage your Lordships to look at the evidence about just how far Britain has fallen behind other countries in employment protection, and how giving ordinary working people a stronger collective voice can help deliver more responsible businesses and a healthier and more equal society.

I encourage the noble Lord, Lord Fox, to cast his mind back to Labour’s introduction of a national minimum wage. He may remember that the Conservative Party and the business lobby said that a national minimum wage would cause mass unemployment and that businesses would collapse. In reality, the national minimum wage is now widely respected as one of Britain’s most successful policies. It has made a difference to millions of working lives in the teeth of opposition from the business lobby at the time. It is worth remembering that.

I end by saying that it is time to get on with and get behind the Bill, so that Britain takes the high road to improving business productivity by treating workers fairly, as human beings and not just commodities.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to address a quorate meeting of the TUC General Council. I should declare an interest at the beginning: I am the honorary president of BALPA, the British Airline Pilots Association, a union that covers all the people who fly you on holiday and back again. Its motto or strapline for many years was

“every flight a safe flight”.

It regarded its job as to deal not only with the members but with safety. In dealing with the companies that we dealt with and still deal with, aircraft safety and looking after passengers was as much at the front of our mission as anything to do with pay and conditions. Of course, we were interested in them—we were a trade union, after all—but we were a responsible trade union. I stand on this side of the House pretty convinced that probably a majority of the members of BALPA support this party. Let me remind the House why.

Most people do not join a trade union for any political purpose. They often join, as I did at the age of 16, because it is there. Nowadays, most trade unions, particularly the better ones, have a free legal advice service and will get you a discount on your car insurance. I have told this story once before, I think, but at a point when we had a silly dispute between my family and the bursar of our local private school, I rang up the union solicitor and he drafted me a letter to send to the bursar very quickly. I apologised and said, “I am sorry. I dare say this is not what you are normally here for”. I will always remember his reply. He said, “Mr Balfe”, for I was that in those days, “we are not here to judge our membership. We are here to help them”. At the basis of virtually every trade union official and action is the desire to help the membership. Nobody I know regards going on strike as anything other than a defeat, because it means the members do not get paid, you often lose pension entitlement, and you lose your wages. You know, people go to work to get their work done, to get a reasonable wage.

I always had a lot of time for a person who is almost unmentionable in modern politics, Edward Heath, because I thought that he came nearer to understanding the TU movement than probably any leader of the Conservative Party and maybe any leader overall. Indeed, I remember when I was a much younger trade union person in the 1960s asking a group of Conservatives who they thought was the best Secretary of State for Labour there had ever been. The result was unanimous: Sir Walter Monckton, Conservative Minister under Churchill, was reckoned to be the one who listened to them the most. You always have to have a runner-up in these things just in case one falls down, and that was Iain Macleod.

Employment Rights Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I place on record my thanks to the four maiden speakers and to the three former TUC general secretaries who have joined us for this debate, not to mention the last speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Prentis, whose union was always very helpful to me when I was David Cameron’s envoy to the TU movement.

I declare an interest: I am the president of BALPA, the pilots’ union, which is a TUC-affiliated union. I do not think I would be giving many secrets away if I said that the majority of our members probably vote Conservative at most elections.

Most people do not join trade unions for political reasons; they join because they want to be looked after and to have someone to consult if times get rough. The other thing is that most of them join because you get a good discount on your car insurance and a free legal advice service. My subs to AUEW-TASS, which is now part of Unite, were covered completely by the amount of money I got off my car insurance.

Just to rub it home a little bit, the legal service was excellent. My children went to a private school. We once got into a bit of trouble with the bursar, who was trying to pull a fast one. I rang the union legal service, and a very helpful solicitor drafted me a letter. I said, “I dare say you’re not used to helping your members challenge private schools”. I always remember his reply. He said, “Sir, we are not here to judge the members; we’re here to help them”. Those two facts about unions are a great comfort to many ordinary people who have to work for their living.

I have known quite a lot of Prime Ministers. The only Conservative one that I thought was on the right track was Ted Heath. If things had turned out differently, this party might well have a somewhat different relationship. I got to know Ted quite well after he retired because he used to enjoy coming to Brussels. They are so obsessive there about political balance and I was about the only Labour Party member willing to sit next to him at dinner, so we had lots of very interesting conversations.

I welcome this Bill—I am probably the only one on this side who does—because I think it clears up a lot of anomalies that need clearing up. I served 25 years in the European Parliament and I saw European trade unionism, based on the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, where you respect the rights of workers. It is as simple as that. But I do think that, if we are going to move forward, those in the TU movement will have to change. They have to get Conservatives into the annual congress; they have to make them come and explain what they are up to, not have them as the hate figure on the wall. The TU movement itself has to look at how it deals with the one-third of its members who vote for the Conservative Party. That is as much of a challenge as our challenge to pass this law and make things better for the workers.

Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill [HL]

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 1st March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, in this debate. I trust that what I say is fully within the guidelines laid down by my noble friend Lord Cameron when, as the then Prime Minister, he appointed me here and said, “See what you can do to help the trade unions—just make sure it does not cost us any money”. I think the Bill helps the trade unions and I am not sure it costs the Treasury any money—so it is within those guidelines.

First, I should make some personal declarations. As the register will record, I am the honorary president of BALPA, the pilots union, and very proud to be. I have also spent most of my life as a member of AUEW, TASS and its successors, which now puts me in the same union as the noble Lord, Lord Woodley. When I began my trade union career at the age of 16, it was in the Civil Service Clerical Association, which is now the PCS. On this day, when it launches its ballot for industrial action, it gives me great pleasure to endorse what the PCS general secretary, Fran Heathcote, said: fire and rehire is nothing short of bullying and is a nasty ploy used by unscrupulous employers to drive down pay, terms and conditions. It is worth placing that on the record. It was with that union that I held my first union position, when I became the acting chairman at 17. Because the communists of the Labour Party could not agree who should be the vice-chairman, it ended up as me, and then the chairman very inconveniently fell ill. At the age of 17, my bedtime reading was Citrine. I will not move today that the previous question be put, but that was one of my favourites in the Citrine handbook.

Let me move on. This Bill effectively tightens the rules around fire and rehire, but it really is an absolutely disgraceful practice for workers such as those I just quoted in the PCS ballot, many of whom have had their terms and conditions for 20 or 30 years—this is not something they got in a recent industrial action. This is not the way you build good industrial relations. Now, the CIPD recently did a survey and could not work out how many employers had used fire and rehire. It decided in the end that it was about 3% who had done so by dismissing and rehiring workers. That sounds a very small number, does it not? But it is over 40,000 employers. That is a big number, so we need to remember that, while this is not the biggest problem in Britain, it is certainly a big problem, particularly if you happen to be one of the workers involved.

I have spent my entire life in bits of the trade union movement; 25 years of it was spent in the European Parliament. One of the differences between that Parliament and our Parliament is that with the people in that Parliament who sit on this side of the House—the Christian Democrats, which was where I was for at least some of the time I was there—there is a trade union organisation within the party, led by a German Christian Democrat trade unionist. We used to have regular meetings, and our job was to harmonise the relations between capital and labour—not to stir them up but to make them work better, in the interests of society and industry. That is best done by co-operating with each other.

The trouble I sense with the present Government, I am afraid, is that the default position seems to be disinterest bordering on hostility. That is not a sensible way forward in industrial relations. All the people who go to work every day—I often use this example in my union—do not come from privileged backgrounds. Most pilots have worked their way up; they have been to technical school, found places in universities, become graduates and then engaged in very expensive training to do this hugely skilled job. The reason BALPA’s strapline was “Every flight a safe flight” was because the pilot is responsible for possibly 300 passengers and £150 million-worth of equipment. There was not a single fatal passenger plane crash in the world last year, but that exists because of work between the two sides of industry—and that should be our standard.

The standard we should be working to—I am afraid I have a lot of unfortunate heroes in my life—is that put forward by the late Ted Heath. He genuinely believed —although he got it a bit wrong on occasions—that the two sides of industry had to work together. They do have to work together; that is how we get a prosperous economy.

Apart from my history lectures, one of the things I talk about from time to time is the Conservative Party and its tremendous ability to reinvent itself. It has been doing so ever since it stood up for James II in 1688; noble Lords will recall that that does not appear in the manifesto anymore. But the fact of the matter is that, if we are going to move forward, the new Conservative Party has got to take a leaf out of the Ted Heath book and the European progressive trade union book, and has to learn that the future prosperity of Britain rests on both sides of industry working together for the common good. Working people need a decent wage and the employers need a decent dividend, but what they should not be doing is preying at each other’s throats all the time. That is not the way to build a successful country and a successful economy. I am pleased to support the Bill.

Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses (Amendment) Regulations 2022

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask His Majesty’s Government why, having suffered a defeat in the High Court, they are seeking to revive the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses (Amendment) Regulations 2022.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade and Scotland Office (Lord Offord of Garvel) (Con)]

My Lords, the High Court overturned the Government’s previous repeal of Regulation 7 of the conduct regulations due to insufficient consultation. The Government continue to believe there is a strong case for removing what is a blanket restriction, which disproportionately interferes with the freedoms of both employers and agency workers. The purpose of the consultation is to gather views and evidence to better inform a future decision on whether to proceed with repealing Regulation 7.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I thank the Minister for the reply, but I am sure he realises that there is no demand whatever for this measure from employers or trade unions. Rather like the deduction of TU subs, which was debated yesterday, this is seen as a being a rather spiteful attack on trade unions. How many more Conservative votes does the Minister wish to dispose of from the trade union movement? I also have a question for the Labour Opposition. I was at the TUC on 9 December, and there was a widespread feeling of “We’ll believe it when we see it” around the changes we may or may not get to trade union legislation. I did send the Leader of the Opposition an email—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Lord True) (Con)]

I remind my noble friend that this is Questions for Ministers, not the Opposition.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I think I have asked my question to the Minister.

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his supplementary question. The right to strike is enshrined in UK law. There is no ambition on the part of the Government to undermine that fundamental right. But there is a balance to be struck between the rights of employers and agency workers being able to find work if there is work available. Therefore, this consultation will focus entirely on whether there is a need for private companies to be able to provide agency staff where they have a need for employment.

Workers’ Rights

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have spent some years looking at the case for electronic balloting in trade unions, and have got nowhere. Since it is okay for the Conservative Party to elect its leadership by electronic balloting, does the Minister accept that the technical problems have now been overcome, and that we should speed towards getting electronic balloting allowed for trade unions in electing their general secretaries, et cetera?

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

I rejoice that the electronic ballot results have produced the leader of my own party. I recommend that trade unions look at ways to modernise—not just the way they ballot but the way they look at the economy. Ending the concept of labour flexibility in this country would be devastating, particularly to the sorts of investment I work on daily, including the celebration of over £20 billion of new capital committed to this country two days ago by a number of Korean companies. They are coming here because of our economic growth prospects and the flexibility of our labour markets, among other things. Trade unionists and all my colleagues opposite should remember that.

Workers’ Rights

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 6th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

This is important, because if you do not have a strong economy, you cannot deliver the sorts of benefits this country needs and the strength of pay, which is the most important thing in a proper workforce.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure the catalogue the Minister read out is welcome to many people. I was here last Friday when we brought some of those laws forward, but the fact of the matter is that the wealth generators of this country who go to work every day feel that the Government do not particularly see them as colleagues. May I ask the Minister to do his best to get the social partners back together again and, in particular, to meet with the TUC and other people who want to improve the benefits and productivity of this country so we can all work together as a team?

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for raising that point. It is important that we work collaboratively, and my department does meet regularly with the unions in terms of trade advisory groups. We will continue to do so, and to collaborate to ensure that we have the best framework for employment, employment rights and business in this country.