Lord Stoneham of Droxford
Main Page: Lord Stoneham of Droxford (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Mawhinney (Con)
My Lords, I, too, want to look briefly at Amendment 69. When the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, introduced these amendments, he did so, if he does not mind my saying so, rather well—at least for the bits that he talked about, but it is the bit that he did not talk about that I want to draw to his attention. I will read to your Lordships from new subsection (1A)(c) proposed in Amendment 69:
“Expenditure of money on the following shall not be treated as spending on political objects— … encouraging the electorate not to vote for a political party or candidate”.
I had the honour to stand seven times for election to the other place. The first of those seven was the routine safe-loser seat that parties frequently invite prospective candidates to stand for, and I did very well in Stockton and Billingham—I lost by only 18,000. I won the other six. In those elections, there were people encouraging my constituents not to vote for me and there were people encouraging my constituents to vote for somebody else. I say gently, and with a good deal of warm feeling towards the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, that the noble Lord needs to make up his mind. He either says that the money cannot be spent or that it can be spent, but the logic behind new subsection (1A)(c) in Amendment 69 is totally inconsistent. I hope that your Lordships notice—I am trying to contribute to that noticing—the fact that he did not mention it, and that the contradiction was passed over by the more high-flown rhetoric and passionate exposition on other aspects of political funds. He needs to explain with a good deal more clarity than he has so far attempted, and I hope that the Minister will encourage him to do so, how this particular aspect of Amendment 69 is meant to hold together.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
My Lords, I will contain my remarks to just a couple of points that have been made during the debate. I do not think this problem would exist if the Government were not actually trying to reduce the amount that is raised through the political levy. That is at the bottom of the story here. They are trying to reduce the political fund money, and these amendments—which I accept complicate the whole process of accounting for political funds—are being drafted only because trade unions are concerned about where will they get the funds for the activities they want to carry out if they are to lose so much funding and their political funds are restricted. So the issue is both the cost to trade unions of the bureaucratic requirements to comply with this legislation, and the fact—although the impact study will not admit this—that a major objective is to reduce the amount of money coming forward in the political funds.
The points have been very well made. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, made the point that those of us who believe in civic society support the principle that funds must be available in the political process, and one of the major sources of funds in our political system is the trade unions. If that source is being constrained by the opposing side—as it clearly is—then we regard that as unfair, unless they are also taking the opportunity to look at exactly what they are raising and spending in opposition to the trade unions and, indeed, the Labour Party and ourselves. We want to see fairness in this whole process.
There are quite strict requirements already in the system. The unions have ballots to support or not support the operation of political funds every 10 years, so there is accountability. They are required to account for this money. All the Government’s efforts are clearly designed to reduce the amount of money in the pool. For those reasons, we are opposed to this aspect of the Bill, and we hope that the Select Committee will find a much fairer way through it than the Government clearly are intending at the moment.
The Earl of Sandwich (CB)
My Lords, I am unusually tempted to come into this debate, but it has had an international character and I will not delay the Minister for more than a minute. I support everything that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said about civil society all around the world and the importance of trade unions, and I was very cheered by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, bringing me back to the 1994 elections in South Africa and all the work that he did and churches and trade unions alongside each other. I could not resist saying something about that, having been on the staff and the board of Christian Aid and seeing at first hand how the churches were woven into society.
Nor can I resist having a go at the Conservative Party and taking it back to those days when my father was a Member of Parliament for 21 years for the Conservatives. When they ousted him for being against the Common Market, they sent him up to Accrington. There, he needed to take a loudspeaker to the factory gate because trade unionists were behind gates and could not be approached, except through a megaphone. The Conservative Party has come a long way from there, but it is significant that today it is still catching up with everyone else.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for making those points about having this debate in a vacuum. I support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Collins. I appreciate that the discussion on the role of the Certification Officer will take place on day four of Committee, but in case my silence was taken as meaning that the issue was not sufficiently important, I felt that I should place on the record that Clause 11 will provide the Certification Officer with new powers to investigate how unions’ political funds are used and where the money goes.
As part of their annual return, unions will be required to report to the CO on how all expenditure from their political funds has been used, who it has been paid to and for what purpose. This is not even-handed, as the Government claim. It might apply to employers’ associations in theory. However, none of the 94 employers’ associations listed by the Certification Officer currently has a political fund—not one. Instead, companies choose to make political donations individually or via other channels. These measures will create significant new administrative burdens for unions, as my noble friend Lord Collins said. They will need to collate detailed information on political expenditure at branch and regional level, and the Government will be able to monitor how unions spend their resources and will invite significant public scrutiny of how unions choose to use their political funds.
In itself, this might not be of significance to anyone outside the trade union movement—if it was the only thing in this area relating to the subject. However, if you combine it with the ability of anyone outside the trade union to launch a complaint, it starts to look like an attack on trade unions. The Government may not be concerned about strangling trade unions with all the extra red tape under the guise of consistency of information, which is what I think the Minister is concerned about with these amendments, but they should consider very carefully how this will change the nature of the function of the Certification Officer. It will become a much more political position and because this function will be essentially one-sided, it will lead to accusations of political bias.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford
My Lords, I agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and the noble Lord, Lord Collins, have said.
I thought that the Conservatives were in favour of reducing regulation and bureaucracy and simplifying the way we go about things. That seems to be with the complete exception of the trade unions—I wonder why. It is not realistic or proportionate to require all items of expenditure in excess of £2,000 to be reported to the Certification Officer. How is he going to cope with this? It is mammoth and unnecessary bureaucracy, whereas if you were really intent on having greater scrutiny, you would have a review of the categories of expenditure and you would look to see that there was greater transparency. But to require every invoice over £2,000 in a total expenditure of more than £20 million—the bureaucracy just beggars belief. We know that the Government failed to consult the Certification Officer on the implications of this—that has come out in the work of the Select Committee. They seem to be blindly going ahead without any comprehension of the workload and the way in which the trade unions will be bogged down in the bureaucracy of fulfilling all these requirements.
For those reasons, the Government must question whether it really is necessary to put this bureaucracy on the unions. Is the figure of £2,000 realistic? In the other place, the Minister sort of said that this figure of £2,000 was comparable to that for company donations to political parties that have to be declared. The type of expenditure we are talking about here is not just donations, but all trade union expenditure. That will vary, as speakers have already said, from sending people to political conferences, to paying for stands as part of campaigns and hiring vehicles—or whatever it is—but it is all very detailed expenditure. Is the Certification Officer meant to go through all these invoices and check that they have been done properly?
We have seen the great difficulty the Conservative Party already has with its invoices, and now it seems it will impose this on the trade unions. We should not forget that the Electoral Commission is already looking at all political donations in excess, depending on the recipient, of £1,500—£7,500 for the national parties—so all the information is there. Have there been discussions with the Electoral Commission and has it been consulted on the twin track of bureaucracy the Government are now imposing on trade unions—through the submissions they already make to the Electoral Commission and the excessive ones they are now going to have to give to the Certification Officer? Have they also found out from the Certification Officer what dealing with all this extra work is going to do to his staffing and expenditure requirements?
Lord Leigh of Hurley
I do not think anyone is suggesting that these are improper payments; the suggestion is that there is a lack of transparency as to what they are. I am not sure I take the point about the Conservative Party being undemocratic, but we will leave that for a moment. The noble Lord invited me to look at the accounts on the Certification Officer’s website, and I have done so. The total political funding is about £24 million. The largest fund is that of Unite, with £7.8 million of income. When one tries to understand the expenditure within that, one sees that it simply states that political fund expenditure was £1.17 million and that expenditure under Section 82 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 was £3.82 million. No further information is supplied, other than the quite interesting information that Unite has in its balance sheet of the political fund £14.8 million. It is much the same for other unions—I have been through quite a few of them.
The point remains that I am sure that many members of unions would like to know and to have reported where their money is spent. Are all union members who are working on Trident submarines happy that union funds are spent supporting CND?
Lord Stoneham of Droxford
The noble Lord is a director of companies. Would he say, in the interests of transparency, that for a company with a turnover of, say, £20 million, he would require to see every invoice over £2,000, or rather, as an accountant, would he seek to improve the categorisation of that expenditure? The Government are demanding that we have every invoice over £2,000 revealed, rather than improve the categorisation.
Lord Leigh of Hurley
With respect, a director of a private company, as I am, is a different phenomenon from a public body, such as a union. Directors of private companies have to account for all expenditure.
Baroness Donaghy
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, for putting some balance into the debate. I have a lot of respect for his experience. He called for honesty. I could say a few words about my experience when I was chair of ACAS of certain behaviours on both sides of industry but I do not think it would be a good idea or take the debate forward, but I would be very happy to have private discussions with him at some stage so that we could swap examples. I am also very grateful to my noble friend Lord Harris, who reminded me what it was like to be a lay union representative, which I was for 33 very long years, for both NALGO and UNISON. I was not a full-time official; we prided ourselves on dealing with our problems without needing a full-time officer.
This issue of transparency needs to be looked at in the context of the Trade Union Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, touched on this just now. This is not just about transparency being a good thing, so that everybody who undertakes a fishing expedition can find out wicked things about what certain individual trade unionists are up to; the context is that the Bill appears to be a general attack on the trade union movement. The context is the clause that is coming up next, which talks about cutting, curtailing and capping facility time. One of the things that I worry about is that facility time should be seen in the light of a cost-benefit analysis. Nothing has been said by the Front Bench on the government side about the positive work that is done by union officials and the savings that are made by union health and safety representatives and union learning reps, through saving time dealing with grievances, redundancies and reorganisations.
There were times during my trade union lay career when I was accused of being a management stooge because I was delivering an unwelcome message to the members about what was practical; there were times in ACAS when I was accused of being a management stooge because I was not in a position to agree with everything that the union said; and there were times when I was accused of being a union stooge because of my background and because I did not always entirely accept what the management argument said. It is extremely important that we keep on reminding ourselves, in the context of the Bill, that things of this kind are not just about saying, “Oh let’s get some information; it’ll be a jolly good idea”. It is more like a scene from an Arnold Schwarzenegger film with him standing there, fully armed, and saying, “We are not going to do you any harm, just give us the information”.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford
My Lords, I share experience of the print industry with the noble Lord, Lord King, although mine is slightly more recent than his, I think. I know the benefit of union facilities. I also accept that both management and unions should question those facilities from time to time to ensure that they are efficient and the money is well spent. It also has to be said—here I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Hayward—that if we just look at this from a slightly anti-union perspective, we will not take into account the fact that, often, more union facilities are needed when the management is poor. I do not know the detail, but I suspect that in the modern successful car plants we now operate in this country, they will have union facilities but not to the degree that they needed them in the 1960s and 1970s when they had all their problems. They will now have much more professional management and, indeed, much more professional union representatives.
Union facilities are also a factor in change. When you are undertaking a lot of change, you need more facilities, such as when you have redundancies because skills and so on are changing. I remember in the print industry taking union delegations abroad to try to negotiate manning agreements on the basis of what our competitors were doing on machinery. Noble Lords may remember that. It took a lot of time and cost to do that, but that was because we were conducting major changes.
I also find it extraordinary that a Conservative Government can advocate another layer of bureaucracy to achieve this so-called change, but that is what they are doing. The impact assessment says it is going to cost £2.4 million to have the information collected regularly. The initial cost of getting that information together will be over £2 million and then there will be another £2 million going on. The Government also say that they expect there will be £100 million of savings. I accept that is not insignificant and that it is important to have those changes, but I question, when we are trying to find £35 billion of cost savings in the public sector, with all the change that that requires, whether this is the priority. I suspect we are just going up a blind alley here, and it is wrong.