Corporate Insolvency and Governance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-06-16
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Andrew Adonis (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made two very powerful remarks earlier in the debate when he said that this Bill seeks to do two separate things. The first is to introduce the emergency provisions in respect of the crisis we are in, and the second is making permanent changes to insolvency law. He also drew attention to the absolutely devastating report on the Bill by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which highlights a wider set of Henry VIII clauses than I have ever seen in a Bill of this kind, including the whole definition of which companies are affected by it under new Schedule ZA1, which can be changed by the Government by order, without any primary legislation. I am sure that we will want to return to that Even more extraordinary is the Government’s justification for why they have included all these Henry VIII powers, which is "the undesirability of taking up Parliament’s time unnecessarily." Surely it is the job of Parliament to decide whether its time is being taken up unnecessarily, not that of the Government. I draw the particular attention of the Committee to paragraph 8 of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report, which states: "In our view, the presumption should be that where something needs changing which Parliament has enacted, Parliament should enact the changes by primary legislation rather than ministers make the changes by secondary legislation." That points the way to a number of key amendments that need to be made on Report. Turning to this group of amendments, it suffers from exactly the same problem that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said the Bill suffers from, which is that it puts together a whole lot of separate things that do not actually go together. Over the past hour and a half, we have debated three completely separate matters: the issue of the independence of the monitor, which is hugely important—my noble friend Lord Stevenson’s amendments in that regard are utterly compelling—along with the issue of wider conflicts of interest in the whole handling of the moratorium arrangements and the people who play a part in them, which again is a wider and separate issue. The third issue, which has been covered comprehensively by my noble friends Lord Hendy and Lord Hain, is the hugely important matter of consultation with the workforce and the priority to be given to employees and workers in these moratorium arrangements and anything that might follow from them. I hope that in his reply, the Minister will be able to pay substantial attention to all three of these areas I do not want to go over ground that has already been covered by my noble friends, but I would like to ask the Minister one specific question. In the early stages of the coronavirus crisis, the Government made great virtue of the fact that they were consulting employee organisations, trade unions and the TUC in order to create a consensus on the kinds of measures which would be needed to deal with it. Indeed, in the construction of the furlough scheme, the Chancellor of the Exchequer made great play of the fact that he had been talking to the general secretary of the TUC, Frances O’Grady. It is quite clear that there are concerns among trade unions about the whole way that these provisions will cut across established insolvency provisions and redundancy provisions. Therefore, I want to ask the Minister a specific question—or rather, two related questions First, what representations have been made to the Government about the role of employees and their interests in this Bill? Secondly, can he tell us whether he personally or any of his ministerial colleagues have met the TUC general secretary or officials from the TUC to discuss these provisions? I ask that because if we are seeking to proceed by consensus, by the time we get to Report, we will want to know what actual discussions have taken place with representatives of employees and whether we can satisfy ourselves that there has been adequate consultation. If not, the arguments made by my noble friends Lord Hain and Lord Hendy are compelling when it comes to amendments that we will need to make on Report.