Employment Rights Bill

Lord Monks Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 23rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendment 147. The compromise formula that my noble friend Lord Barber has just talked about was a very practical solution to a tricky problem in the period when the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his committee did such good work. However, I take issue with his claim that it was some kind of permanent solution, any more than was an agreement on contracting out reached by the Thatcher Government in 1984, headed by the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, who I am sorry is not in his place today, with the TUC. The provisions of that meant that the unions would be obliged to notify people regularly about the right to contract out, in the union journal and on the website, along with all the kinds of things that unions communicate with members about.

It is worth briefly dwelling on that. It stipulated obligations on unions, as I said—and we thought that we had a lasting settlement then, but we were wrong. In 2016, the then Government came along with a Bill to provide for general contracting in; they did not initially mention the King-TUC agreement and gave no initial examples of union abuses of it. They had made no approaches to the TUC or to any unions about things that were not quite working. The certification officer was happy with what was going on. It seemed to me that the Government at that time were either forgetting about the agreement—which they might have done, I guess, given the interval—or ignoring it. Only when I gave notice to the noble Lord, Lord King, that I was going to raise the question of the agreement in this Chamber in the initial debates on the Bill did the Government embark on a frantic quest to find examples of union non-compliance, which were later challenged by the TUC.

The Burns committee did its work and came up with a good deal—but why should it be regarded as permanent, any more than the TUC-King agreement was regarded as permanent? There is another problem with the Burns formula being regarded as permanent. Initially, in 2016, the bulk of union members remained contracted out only; it was only the new members that unions had to actively recruit. Of course, in the past nine years, the relative proportion of contracted-out and contracted-in members has changed considerably. If we give it another nine years, as in the period from the 2016 agreement to now, there will not be many contracted-out members left. In effect, what we will have seen is that the Burns formula in practical terms becomes a phased introduction of contracting in—and that is just not acceptable.

This is not an attack on the Burns formula, far from it, but it was of its time, as was the TUC-King agreement. The only permanent solution to this historic and bitter issue—because the history that my noble friend Lord Barber spoke about is a bitter one—will be a fair agreement on the fundraising of all the political parties, as my noble friend Lord Whitty has spoken about already. I oppose the amendment.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, it will probably not surprise noble Lords that I support the amendment. This situation has cursed the whole of the trade union movement’s relations with the Labour Party for far too long. As some of you will remember, I am the president of BALPA, the pilots’ union, a non-political union that does not have a political fund. In so far as it has ever been discussed in the union executive, the unanimous conclusion has been that to have a political fund would be extremely divisive and not a path that we should go down.

To some people, the solution to this situation— I will not call it a problem—is to pass a simple law saying that trade unions cannot make political donations. If we are not prepared to accept this compromise, then that is what we are drifting towards. If we look at the Labour Party accounts, we see that it gets far more money from non-trade union sources than from trade union sources. When I went through the accounts, I saw that there was one very rich lady who appeared to give more to the Labour Party than all the trade unions put together. I am not sure that she was of British nationality, either. But that is irrelevant—the fact is that political funding has got completely out of control in both parties. We need reform, but one interesting thing is that the arguments of the Labour Party appear to be very similar to the arguments of the diehard Conservatives as to why we should not abolish the hereditary peerage; namely, that we should wait for comprehensive reform. We are probably not going to get a comprehensive reform of political donations in this way. I would suggest that the compromise from the noble Lord, Lord Burns, is a very good one. It has worked and has kept the peace for a long time.

There has to be clear consent—to my mind, clear consent is a quite reasonable thing. Why should you not ask for clear consent before you deduct money from people’s contributions? It seems like a no-brainer to me. I would suggest that we leave things in place, adopt the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and hope that this matter will go to sleep for at least another 10 years, during which time the parties will have as much time as they like to come up with reforms.

I should remind noble Lords that at the beginning of the Parliament Act 1911 on the reform of the House of Lords were the historic words “pending a full reform”. We are still told by Conservative Party Members that what is proposed by the Labour Party for the House of Lords is not a full reform. I have said, and will say it here, that we will never get one—we will never get that agreed.

I would like to see reform on the amount of money that people can put into political parties. I do not think that the people who put vast amounts of money into the Conservative Party do so because they have no expectation of any sort of reward. I think that they do it because they think that the Conservative Party will deliver what they want—whether that has happened is for them to now judge. The fact is that people do not support political parties other than with the aim of changing power and of getting changes in society.

My union general secretary, a certain Sharon Graham, has my full support, because for the first time in what I still think of as the T&G—my original union was AUEW-TASS—we have a general secretary who I think is fully behind the people who are paying her salary, and this is something quite different, but I think this demand is going to grow. If there was an open ballot in BALPA with a simple question, “Should we construct and set up a political fund?”, it probably would not get 10% in favour, because the whole way in which political funds have developed is not seen by the ordinary branch member as something they want to indulge in. Most of them see it as a sort of slush fund for the senior officers. I am sorry, but we have to face that and we need to get away from it.

So I hope that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, will be accepted and that we will carry on with the admittedly unsatisfactory present system until we get this full reform that we have been asking for, although it will be a long time after I have left this place.