---

Blacklisting (Construction Industry)

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment, which I agree with. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007 place an onus on the client to include health and safety in its criteria, and given that the Government are the biggest client in the public sector, they have a responsibility to take on and ensure health and safety. Between 2004 and 2007, a health and safety advisory scheme operated in the construction industry, run jointly by the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians and employers. That scheme, which included the Health and Safety Executive, was considered a success, but it has run into the sand because no more funding is available. Clearly, getting it up and running again is important for safety in construction. Bearing in mind that the 2007 regulations place a responsibility on Government, it is definitely something that they should pick up and put in place. I recently spoke with a construction worker whose name is on the blacklist; I do not want to use his name for obvious reasons. He told me that he believed that the blacklisting was much more insidious than merely a list being kept by the Consulting Association. He had worked all his life in the industry and had been blacklisted for 35 years, basically for standing up for trade union rights, particularly in health and safety. In his view, what happens in the industry is that lists are exchanged from company to company. He came to that conclusion having been moved from one job to another. When he had been on site for only two or three days, he would be visited by the site agent and told that there was no work there for him. That caused him and his family enormous hardship, because he was continually moving from job to job and never having long-stay employment. He told me that the first time that he ever had any security was when he moved into the mining industry to work with construction companies such as Thyssen and Cementation that he had been working with on sites, because in mining they came under the framework of the Mines and Quarries Act 1954 and had to adhere to that. That gave him much more of a feeling of certainty than he had ever had on sites. The fact that he had to move from site to site, taking all his family, shows the kind of hardship that is imposed on a person in the position of being blacklisted by companies involved in construction. An article in The Times on 7 March 2009 indicates the kinds of companies—household names—that are involved in blacklisting. It says:""Sir Robert McAlpine is one of more than 40 companies accused by Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, of breaching data protection laws after an investigation by his office sparked fears that many workers were being unfairly 'blacklisted'.""The commissioner alleges that Ian Kerr, of Droitwich, Worcestershire, charged companies £3,000 a year to consult his database of 3,213 workers, whose names were accompanied by notes such as 'poor timekeeper, will cause trouble' and 'Irish ex-army bad egg'."" It goes on to say that from invoices that have been obtained,""'It would appear that Sir Robert McAlpine and other companies made thousands of requests a year', a spokesman for the Information Commissioner said. He said that each request for information on a specific employee cost about £2.20 on top of the yearly subscription. That suggests that Sir Robert McAlpine made more than 10,000 requests"" for information on individuals in the past year.