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Employment Bill [HL]

I have a great deal of sympathy with what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I admire the work of the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution, with which he is associated. However, I have always understood—and, in a way, preferred—the idea of mediation as a voluntary procedure. As I understand it, in proposed new paragraph (b) in the amendment, it is not only that before anyone can go to a tribunal there has to be a certificate in writing from the conciliation officer that, "““he has endeavoured to promote a settlement””," but that the parties to the dispute must have, "““co-operated with the conciliation procedure or … confirmed that they have participated in an independent mediation or conciliation procedure””." In other words, I gather from what the noble Lord said in introducing his amendment that he requires people to go through some kind of mediation before they can get anywhere near a tribunal. That seems to take his perfectly good idea rather too far, and I question it.