Trade Union Bill — House of Lords, 2016-02-10
Topic: Law and Crime
John Stephen Monks (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham. I ask the same question about this and about certain other aspects of the Bill. What is the problem? If you ask the police whether picketing is high on their list of concerns, the answer will be no. They are not bothered beyond turning up, having a word with the pickets, seeing that things are okay and saying that if there is any trouble they will be back. That is it. If there is any trouble, they are back. That is the way I have known pickets working over the years in a decent relationship with the police: a wise word, a kind word, a firm word, just to make sure that people know what they are doing and what they can do The code of practice is a good guide in many ways. It has a bit of flexibility. For example, the normal maximum that the law aims for is six pickets. If there happen to be seven there and the police turn up, would they make a big issue of it? They would not. It would be different if there were a lot more. So I say we should stick to the code of practice—it has been found to be rather successful. I agree very much with what the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, said: a picket can be a difficult exercise for a union, especially when tempers are running high and little things inflame because they are set down rigidly in concrete in the statute law of the United Kingdom. I think that really is doing the wrong thing The Carr report, to which reference was made, was basically about leveraging. The concept was that you could turn up outside somebody’s house, golf club or whatever and embarrass the boss who was being hard-faced and difficult. That is not picketing. That is some sort of demonstration. Picketing, as was said, is allowed only at or near the place of work for the purposes of peaceful persuasion of the case of those on the picket line. I do not accept that they are the same thing. I could not find any evidence in the impact assessment of any problems on the picketing front. In fact, somewhere it says that there are no problems with the conduct of pickets. It goes straight into leveraging, the Carr report and bits of his creative writing We are aware that the provisions are strongly criticised by a range of civil liberties organisations, including the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which say that they may be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and so on. I do not want to get too much into that at this stage, because I am trying to adopt a common-sense, pragmatic approach. The code of practice is working, because it has a bit of give, flexibility and scope for the police, union officials and others in a way that putting things in statute does not The National Police Chiefs’ Council said that the provisions could waste police resources and are unnecessary as this is not a problem and that they have enough pressures on them without having to enforce a new statute in this area. If you are making a change, you need some good reasons for it and I do not think the Government have any. I very much support the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Burt.