Trade Union Bill — House of Lords, 2016-02-25
Topic: Labor
Richard Balfe (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I will speak in particular to Amendment 93, which is in my name, but will also make a general contribution to this debate. I start fundamentally from a belief that this is a matter for local decision. Any Government with a localism agenda should not be promoting this amendment, because it has nothing at all to do with localism I began my life, as I suspect many people who have a long history of trade union involvement did, as a sub-collector—someone who went round collecting subscriptions from members. I was in a monthly-paid Civil Service job and on the first two days of each month I used to go round and collect subscriptions. It was a very pleasant experience as it meant that I had about an hour and a half off on each of those days, and because we had a branch rule that you could not take money home, I also had half an hour off at the end of each day when I went over to the treasurer in another building and handed over the small amount of money I had collected. Management decided that this was not a very efficient way for its employees to behave, and in the course of the 1960s, management decided that it would be a lot easier if it had a system called check-off. I was in a very odd union branch: the chairman was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the secretary was a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. I became the vice-chairman because the two parties could not agree on anyone, so they decided that someone young should do the job. However, our branch rigorously opposed check-off because it would break the link with members. What we meant was that it would obviate our ability to wander round the office on what in those days was known as foot patrol, because many of the members in our office had recently had experience of the Army. I notice that part of the impact assessment says that this will foster a more direct relationship with members. If you want to have people wandering around the office, fine, but I put that in by way of background because this was not fought for by the unions, but was largely asked for by management and accepted by the unions, because of course sub-collecting was a very random experience Let us move forward, to a tale of two unions. When I became the TU envoy for my party, we went to all the unions. Many of them were very helpful but some of the big ones were not, particularly Unite and the GMB. However, two of them were; the Minister will be very familiar with one, USDAW, whose general secretary John Hannett not only came to meet the party leader David Cameron but made it quite clear that he and USDAW did not support the Conservative Party. However, he also made it very clear that he wanted a constructive relationship with any party that might become the Government. He did not come to meet the Conservative Government; he came to meet the Conservative Opposition to benefit his members with a direct relationship. He sought a constructive attitude, which we associate with USDAW. That union is not affected by this measure because it has had some very good people looking after its personnel in the past and it has very good industrial relations.