Public Bodies: Appointments

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. Perhaps I may make a general point and then come to her specific question. If the Government are to make real progress in tackling some of the challenges that confront this country—low productivity, reskilling the workforce, getting underrepresented groups back into the labour market, driving up the quality of apprenticeships and reducing the gender pay gap—we will make faster progress if we have a positive and constructive relationship with those who represent the workforce; that is, the leaders the noble Baroness has just mentioned.

On the specific issue of appointments, until I spoke to the noble Baroness last night I had not appreciated that behind her Question was a concern about the perceived—in her mind—bias against trade union appointees to public bodies. I should like to make some inquiries on this. It is the case that Paul Nowak, deputy general-secretary of the TUC, was reappointed to ACAS last year; Sally Hunt, the current president of the TUC, was reappointed to ACAS in November last year; Michael Hayes, who sits on the Unison national executive, was appointed to the HSE in November; and David Chrimes of the FDA was appointed to the Social Security Advisory Committee in October. However, I should like to do some more work on this and write to the noble Baroness.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, while the Minister is doing that work, could he also look into the political affiliations declared by people for public appointments? It has been said, although I have no idea if it is true, that the number of political affiliations declared in, say, the last 10 years are quite dramatically in favour of the Opposition rather than the government side.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

First, the number of appointees with declared political activity has fallen; it has halved since 2010, so there are fewer political appointees. Of those appointed in the last year for which I have statistics, we appointed more candidates who have declared affiliations to the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats than those with affiliations to my party—something that may irritate someone sitting behind me.