Trade Union Bill (Second sitting)
Rishi Sunak Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Jo Stevens
Q 111 You do not know anything about facility time?
Julia Manning: No.
Rishi Sunak (Richmond (Yorks)) (Con)
Q 112 Concerning patients’ access to healthcare, as you mentioned, when there are strikes in other sectors outside healthcare, for example, in transport or schools, presumably that impacts a lot of people who are employed by the NHS or other healthcare operators. Do you have any thoughts on the disruption that strikes in those sectors have caused in healthcare and in the NHS, and do you think that this Bill will at all improve patients’ access to healthcare in those circumstances?
Julia Manning: That is an interesting question, particularly in the light of the recent strikes that we have experienced in London and on London transport, which we know have had a significant impact on the ability to run clinics in hospitals across the capital. That is the extent of our interest. Again, I take that back to the patient experience and either their managing to get there and then not being able to be seen, or their being told that they cannot be seen because of that action—the influence that has on someone who requires urgent treatment for sight loss or on someone who is isolated, has had a fall and then had their hip replacement postponed again.
Our interest is very much at that personal patient level, but the repercussions go beyond that individual’s experience, because of those around them and the other circumstances that have had to be arranged. Your point is very valid in terms of the influence of other industrial action on the ability of the health service to do its job and, quite practically, for staff to be able to be on site.
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
Q 113 I wonder what your views are on the opinions of the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives, the British Medical Association and the Society of Radiographers, which all state that there are aspects of this Bill that are deeply concerning to them with regard to patient care. What would your response be in that regard?
Julia Manning: Can you give me an example of one of their concerns?
Stephen Doughty
Q 150 David, I do not have the statistics for the rest of the UK transport network, but do you accept that there is a similar thing here, and that we should keep industrial action in perspective, taking into account other reasons for lost customer hours?
David Sidebottom: I think so. We have specifically asked passengers what the priorities should be for improvement, and we also ask whether they are satisfied with what they have got now. We have focused on those areas where there is high priority for improvement and a low level of satisfaction. Information provision is the key driver of dissatisfaction for Britain’s rail passengers, so we focused on that and how the problem manifests itself.
The challenge that we saw over the summer with Network Rail and the “will they/won’t they?” strike situation caused a dilemma for the industry as much as it did for passengers. That is when we put emergency timetable information on to websites and make it available to the public.
Rishi Sunak
Q 151 Following on from the comments of the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, if the numbers and the percentages seem small, I am puzzled, as you said before, that Londoners seem to have accepted that strikes are just part of London. It makes me think that the constant talk—are they going to happen, are they not going to happen?—and the uncertainty adds to the disruption to people’s lives, as well as the strikes themselves. Would that be a fair comment?
Janet Cooke: Yes, it does add to the uncertainty. My comment was not intended to be flippant, but from the feedback we get there is an air of resignation about commuting in the London area. It is going to be overcrowded; it is great when it works, but it does not always work as well as it might. Maybe my point was slightly inappropriate, but it is part of an overall feeling. I think that, as commuters into London, you just accept, if you commute a long distance into London, what the experience tends to be like.
Rishi Sunak
Q 152 Picking up on something you said earlier, I am interested in how different types of people on different income levels are affected by strikes. You mentioned that people in certain jobs are probably more easily able to work from home—for example, people in office jobs—than people in shift work and lower-paid jobs, where that is more difficult. Will you talk about your experience of that?
Janet Cooke: We at London TravelWatch have not done much research on that. The only thing I could say is that we are in the middle of doing some focus-group research—not on strike action, but things sometimes emerge in focus groups that you are not necessarily expecting—and certainly one or two that I observed a couple of weeks ago were talking about the travel experience in the London area and ways of getting to work. Spontaneously, because there have been quite a lot of tube strikes, there was a lot of discussion about strikes and their impact on people’s lives. These were people on very low incomes whose employers had paid for taxis to get them to work. This is not necessarily statistically accurate; it just happened to be spontaneously coming up in focus groups I was observing.
Julie Elliott
Q 153 You have both talked about your organisations representing passenger feelings. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth said that the overwhelming numbers of days lost through delays and everything else—even in London, the figure is about 80%—is not down to any form of industrial action. I have to say that, outside London, I have not had any lost journey in my regular commute from the north-east in the past five or six years due to industrial action, although I have had many for other reasons. Have you got anything to say about whether the causes of a lost day makes any difference to the impact on the life of a passenger, a member of the community? Secondly, are you aware that nothing in the Bill would impact on any of the rail stoppages that have happened in recent years in London, because they would meet the thresholds on the ballot that they had already held?
David Sidebottom: On the general point about impact, the national rail passenger survey that we run gathers around 60,000 passengers’ views about their journey every year and the biggest driver of dissatisfaction is not just about the fact that there has been disruption but about the way it is managed. It is back to the information story and how you get me out of the situation you have put me in. So there is an impact there.
In answer to the earlier question about the impact on individuals, it is quite telling that when I was at Piccadilly station trying to travel home a few weeks ago on a delayed journey, listening to some conversations that were going on among passengers—people on zero-hours contracts, for example, who were not going to get paid that day because they could not get to their job—it does not just affect people who work 9 to 5. The level of impact can vary.
The Chair
Rishi Sunak
Q 198 Mr Wilson, I have a question for you. One of the things that the Bill will do is to put in place a four-month ballot mandate for industrial action. I think we have heard earlier today that industrial action has been called on ballots that were two years previous, so there ought to be a meaningful change. I would be interested to know how that would impact your business, and how you think about your population of employees and how that changes over the time, and whether this would be a helpful or sensible measure.
Tony Wilson: I think it is a very appropriate measure. Going back to the incident of the strike in January and February, the ballot for that was prior to Christmas, in December 2014. We are still not out of the woods on that. The action has not been called off; it is not over. There have been numerous discussions in the intervening period. We have a turnover rate of 14% or 15% per annum in our bus driver workforce, so by now, the workforce is very different to the one that actually balloted. Clearly, there could be other people who would come in and vote in the same direction, but it is not right to say that the same populace that voted the first time is there today; it simply is not.
I think it is appropriate that ballots run out of time. Purely from a fairness to proportionality perspective, to have a refreshed vote with a new look by the people who are in employment at the time and are now going to be affected by it seems perfectly appropriate to me. I do not think the unions themselves—I do not think Unite would see that as a particular barrier. I think they recognise that even if the legislation changes in the way set out, they will just have to try a bit harder to mobilise their workforce, and they are very effective at that. I do not know that in practice, things will actually change too much. I think they will get more people voting, personally, and we will have a slightly different scenery.
Julie Elliott
Q 199 In your answer to a previous question from a colleague on the Committee, you made great play of the collection of information. Would you accept that for the local authorities or other public bodies that do not do that, there will be a cost to the taxpayer from collecting that information?
Jonathan Isaby: In terms of the amount of time?
Dr Cameron
Q 238 Do you have any particular concerns regarding check-off?
Grahame Smith: We are concerned about the Bill in its entirety. First, we are concerned about the lack of scrutiny by Parliament over the arrangements for check-off. It seems to me unacceptable and, in fact, pretty dangerous and damaging that Ministers in Westminster can, for example, determine whether check-off arrangements apply to public services in Scotland. In many respects these are contractual matters that are agreed between unions and employers in the public services in Scotland.
Check-off and facility time arrangements are an investment made by public service employers in stable and effective industrial relations. They contribute towards the provision of quality public services and stable relations between employers and unions. Any proposal to remove check-off arrangements or reduce the amount of facility time—that is, time that workplace reps can spend representing their members, working constructively with public service employers to address the range of challenges faced by public service employers and workers in Scotland—seems to me to be not only wrong-headed but, as I said earlier, particularly damaging and against the spirit not only of devolution in Scotland and Wales but decentralisation in England. To require local authorities to abandon check-off arrangements is certainly not consistent with the devolution of power to a local level to allow local authorities to be responsive to the needs of their local communities, including their local workforces.
Rishi Sunak
Q 239 Thank you both for your time. You spoke earlier about the good state of industrial relations in Scotland. With that backdrop, if a national strike in Scotland was called with only 20% turnout and a ballot that was two years out of date, would you consider that fair to the ordinary families up and down the country trying to get their kids to school or to get to work?
Roseanna Cunningham: Who is that question to?
Rishi Sunak
To both of you.
Roseanna Cunningham: The point I am making is that the situation in Scotland is such that I would be pretty close to being able to say that we would not allow it to get to that position in the first place. Reaching that position would be a catastrophic failure. We should be ensuring through all the practices—including things such as check-off and facility time—that the proper time is afforded to ensure that the relationship between employer and employee and trade union works effectively so that you do not get into that position.
Grahame Smith: The proposals for facility time and check-off raise the possibility of unfortunate conflict and disagreement in our public services. I would simply point to the statement that was made by the Conservative councillor who is the HR spokesperson for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. He said that he was opposed to the proposals on check-off and facility time for public services, including local authorities. He said that the current arrangements work well for the employer and the trade unions and that
“the costs…are already covered by direct contributions from the trade unions”.
On whether industrial action is legitimate, if a ballot is a measure of legitimacy, I suggest that a number of councillors and Members of the European Parliament would not pass that legitimacy test. On whether a ballot indicates a significant level of support, unions take into account not only the outcome of the ballot, including the majority or the turnout, but union workplace reps know the views of their local members and the feeling of the workforce. A union would not call a strike if it was not confident of the support of the workforce.
On disruption in public services, when I talk to our members, not only are there those who work in public services, but our members are users of public services. Their concerns about the problems in public services are not about strike action. There are very few strikes in public services across the UK and very few in Scotland. They are concerned about underfunding and the lack of investment in staff and staff training, and about the impact of austerity and the pressure that that has on staff who deliver quality public services. That is much more of an issue that needs to be addressed rather than the proposals in the Bill that, frankly, have no evidence base and are questionable in terms of their democratic legitimacy.
Ian Mearns
Q 240 I wonder whether I could also pose the question about check-off and facility time to the Minister. Do you expect the Government’s proposals to apply to the public sector in Scotland? Do you believe that there are any mutually beneficial elements coming from check-off and facility time for both employees and employers in the public sector in Scotland?
Roseanna Cunningham: We value both. We consider that the investment in facility time pays you back in terms of the handling of issues and problems before they get to become major disputes. That is an extremely important aspect of the relationship that we have within the public sector in Scotland. On check-off, we can understand what the problem—[Interruption.]
Trade Union Bill
Rishi Sunak Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Rishi Sunak (Richmond (Yorks)) (Con)
I echo comments that have been made by Members on both sides of the House. Without our trade unions, Britain would not have become the strong nation that it is today. In securing legal representation for employees suffering discrimination and safer working conditions for their members, our nation’s unions have much in their history of which to be proud.
In my own rural constituency, I work closely with the National Farmers Union to back British farmers effectively. I would not support a Bill that stopped trade unions playing any of those constructive roles, because I believe that they are a valuable part of our society. That, however, is not the Bill that is before us; it is quite the opposite. This Bill does not make our trade unions weaker; in the long term it will help them be stronger by making them more transparent, more legitimate and, most of all, more democratic. The greatest danger unions in this country face is not from the legislators of this House; it is from the loss of the public’s trust. Unions have always been powerful advocates for their members’ rights, but it is important that we find a balance between the right of union members to strike and the rights of millions of working people to access the vital public services they rely on and to go about their daily lives without disruption. When 450,000 teachers go on strike in England, more than 8 million children are affected—millions of working families where mums or dads have to take a day off work.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the use of the terms “working families” and “working people” as if people who are involved in trade unions are not good working people is offensive—just as offensive as this Bill is?
Rishi Sunak
I completely reject those comments. There is nothing in this Bill that is offensive: it is a moderate Bill that is attempting to balance the rights—[Interruption.] Absolutely; it is a moderate Bill that is balancing the right to strike with the rights of people who are trying to earn a living in difficult circumstances, and trying to get to work or go about their daily business. When my constituents’ lives are disrupted and they express that frustration to me, I want to be able to tell them, because they want to be able to be sure, that that disruption was genuinely a last resort and a serious matter supported by a strong and continuous mandate. I do not want to have to tell them that their lives were seriously inconvenienced by a strike supported by just 22% of members almost two years ago.
Unions were created to give the weak more power against the strong, yet too often we find that strike action can hit the most vulnerable the hardest. When vital public services are put out of action, it is not well-paid corporate executives who suffer; it is someone doing less well-paid shift work, because if they cannot make it to work, they will not get paid. That is who I am thinking of when I think about the provisions in this Bill.
Despite the scaremongering, this Bill does nothing to prohibit strike action. Instead it simply ensures that the right to strike is balanced with the rights of people who are affected by strikes and have no say in whether or not they will happen. It ensures that those strikes are the result of a clear and positive democratic mandate from members. To me, this balance appears reasonable, fair and necessary.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the context of this Bill is that it is intended to deal with the problem of a 77% increase in the loss of working days over recent times? Last year alone the number of days lost to industrial action was higher than the average of the 1990s and 2000s.
Rishi Sunak
I agree with my hon. Friend. In today’s world, it is important that we maintain a competitive economy and increase employment, and having trade union legislation that is updated for that modern economy is vital if trade unions are to ensure their relevance in today’s economy.
Rishi Sunak
I am sorry, but I would like to make some progress.
I was proud to see that it was the original one nation Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who first legalised the picket line. That is a legacy that I, and I am sure my colleagues on the Front Bench, have no intention of turning away from. In fact I commend the majority of unions who work successfully with the police and other authorities to ensure safe, lawful and constructive picket lines. But if those picket lines become a means to intimidate non-striking workers and impact their families, something has gone wrong. Intimidation or harassment of individuals is simply not acceptable in today’s Britain.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Rishi Sunak
I am sorry but I am keen to carry on.
Therefore it is right that key provisions in the existing picketing code become legally binding. It is right that unions are accountable for the behaviour of their picket lines, to tackle this problem of intimidation, otherwise I fear the reprehensible actions of a few—a tiny minority—will undermine the lawful, peaceful reputation of the vast majority of unions and their members.
In sum, this Bill ensures that unions can continue to play a valuable role, doing the work they do best while operating with the transparency, fairness and democracy they need to retain the public’s confidence. This is not a Bill against trade unions; it is a moderate Bill that balances the rights of unions and people working across this country, and I commend it to the House.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rishi Sunak Excerpts(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman was not here under the previous Labour Government when they cut 200,000 primary school places in the middle of a baby boom. One of the first decisions that we had to take in 2010 was to double the amount of spending on creating more school places. Some £5 billion was spent in the previous Parliament and £7 billion will be spent in this one.
Rishi Sunak (Richmond (Yorks)) (Con)
9. What progress her Department is making on providing fairer funding for schools.
Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)
12. What progress she has made on the introduction of a national funding formula for schools.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Sam Gyimah)
It is deeply unfair that we have a schools funding formula based on historic allocation rather than on actual need of schools and pupils. That is why the manifesto confirmed extra financial support for the least well-funded authorities for 2015-16, protected the schools budget in real terms and committed to making the system fairer. I can confirm that we will be putting proposals before the House for funding reform in due course.
Rishi Sunak
I warmly welcome my hon. Friend’s answer and hope that he can continue to make progress for the students in my constituency. Will he comment on the recent National Audit Office report that recommended a fairer formula so that pupils receive funding that is related
“more closely to their needs, and less affected by where they live”?
Mr Gyimah
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is unfair that a primary pupil eligible for free school meals in Richmond receives £472 extra funding while a similar student in another part of Yorkshire receives almost £300 more. That is why we recently announced that the schools block funding rates for 2016-17 have been baked in the extra funding that we distributed in the last financial year to make funding fairer.
Equal Pay and the Gender Pay Gap
Rishi Sunak Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Nicky Morgan
I entirely agree. I shall say more about careers shortly, but, while we want to get the absolute basics right—the reading, writing and arithmetic—there is no doubt about the importance of inspiring young people, particularly girls, and interesting them in STEM subjects. The week that my son spent touring other classrooms and conducting science projects was one of the most exciting weeks that he had experienced. If we can persuade young people—again, particularly girls—to think about careers that they might not otherwise have thought about, such as engineering, we can all be very proud of that.
Rishi Sunak (Richmond (Yorks) (Con)
I am blessed to be the father of two young daughters. Will my right hon. Friend update the House on the initiative “Your Daughter’s Future”, and explain how it is helping parents like me and, perhaps, many other Members to enable our children to make subject choices that will give them access to the best possible careers?
Nicky Morgan
We launched that programme just before the election. It enables parents to have conversations with their daughters about the types of career that might be out there, the subjects that interest them, and the subject choices that they may need to make in order to secure fulfilling careers. I am delighted to hear that my hon. Friend is the father of two daughters. While it is lovely to have him here, I hope that one of the careers that he might advise them to consider is politics. As we all know, we need more women in the House.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rishi Sunak Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Sajid Javid
There are a number of actions that Government can take, and some of them were taken by the coalition Government and are now bearing fruit, such as cutting taxes and the employment allowance. During the lifetime of this Parliament, there will be a big focus on productivity, and there will be further measures, including on deregulation.
Rishi Sunak (Richmond (Yorks)) (Con)
The last Labour Government had an appalling record on regulation, introducing something like six new regulations a day. What does my right hon. Friend think that did for the productivity of small and medium-sized companies in the UK?
Sajid Javid
I welcome my hon. Friend to the House, and he is absolutely right: the last Labour Government had an appalling record on so many things, including regulation, and the more we can keep the red tape challenge going, and our policy of one in, two out, the more we will help businesses.