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Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill

That is helpful and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. Knowing the Minister as I do, I am sure that his position has not changed in the short time since then, because he is a very solid chap who would not change his mind so loosely and so quickly. Therefore, we need not worry about that, but we will listen with interest to what he says. It is important to note that the original legislation that the Bill tries to change—the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992—gave protection to trade unions; it was not anti-trade union. Some of its provisions protect the rights of workers in a union that takes action, if necessary by striking, to defend and support their interests when reasonable notice is given and in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute. The Act protects the rights of workers to organise in or leave a union without suffering discrimination or detriment. It also defines trade unions and states that they are subject to legal rights and duties. It provides a framework for unions to engage in collective bargaining for better workplace or business standards with employers, so the thrust of the legislation already on the statute book should be welcomed by Opposition Members. On the proposals of the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington, the Institute of Employment Rights states that the purpose and effect of the Bill is to ensure that small accidental failures in ballots will be disregarded. I am not entirely sure that that is entirely the case, because my understanding of the existing legislation is that it does just that—it provides that small accidental failures in ballots will be disregarded. That is the wording of the existing legislation. The hon. Gentleman is trying to change it so that, so long as unions have demonstrated substantial compliance, such failures will be disregarded. In passing, I wonder about the titles of Bills because they often seem to contradict completely their supposed purpose. For example, the Equality Bill was about all sorts of things but it certainly was not about equality. The Bill that the previous Government introduced to restrict jury trial should have been called the ““We think the public are thick Bill””. We should have some honesty about what Bills are trying to do. This Bill is called the Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill, but it seems that it is not trying to stop minor errors being taken into account, as the law already does that; it is trying to allow unions to be able to make some major errors in the ballot and have those disregarded, too. If the hon. Gentleman ignores all my earlier advice, which I am certain he will do, and brings back the Bill at another date, if he does not manage to get it through on this occasion, I will ask him for the sake of clarity to change the title to the Lawful Industrial Action (Major Errors) Bill because then we might have a better idea of what we are dealing with. The Institute of Employment Rights also claims that minor errors in the information about the result of the ballot will be disregarded and forensic examination of procedures will end. That will worry people. The institute says that the forensic examination of procedures of unions carrying out their ballots will end and be replaced just with the concept of substantial compliance. I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman is renowned for having a laissez-faire attitude to things, but he certainly has a laissez-faire attitude to the running of ballots if he does not think that forensic examination of the procedures involved in the running of a strike ballot should be taken into account. As we have heard, the burden of proof in injunctions will shift in that evidence will be required that substantial compliance has not taken place. How on earth can we expect the employer to carry out that burden-of-proof task of saying whether or not a union ballot was substantially compliant? Others have made that point, but it has to be emphasised because, clearly, only the union itself can demonstrate whether the ballot was substantially compliant. How on earth can the employer make that decision when they have had no control over the running of it and do not have the necessary information? In the speech of the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington? I heard no explanation of how on earth an employer could be expected to do that. I suspect that that is because the hon. Gentleman knows that the employer could not possibly do it, and that therefore this is a tactic to ensure that the employer will never be able to stop any kind of strike action because they will never be in a position to do so. I hope that in his summing up the hon. Gentleman will give some examples of how he thinks employers would be able to demonstrate clearly that a ballot has not been substantially compliant. Even though the original legislation was passed in 1992 by a Conservative Government—for the purposes that I have outlined—it was amended twice by the previous Labour Government, in 1999 and in 2004, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) made clear, the provisions the hon. Gentleman does not like were supported by his party when it was in government. I have not researched this, and I would not want to embarrass anybody in particular, but I certainly hope the hon. Gentleman did not at that time vote for those proposals in a Bill that he must have thought was completely unacceptable. It would be interesting to discover how many of the Members who voted for it in 1999 are today up in arms and complaining that this is an unacceptable piece of legislation, because they seem to be complaining about their own legislation. The previous Labour Government amended the legislation twice, therefore: in 1999 and again five years later. They had acquired five years of evidence of the workings of the legislation before they changed it for the second time, yet they did not take the opportunity to introduce the change the hon. Gentleman proposes. I can only presume that they did not do so because they thought the legislation was working perfectly well, and I venture to suggest that the situation is the same now. The unions also argued in their earlier court cases that the current legislation was contrary to article 11 of the European convention on human rights. I am not a lawyer—and I am certainly not a human rights lawyer as I do not like the Human Rights Act and I would like it to be scrapped—so I do not know whether the unions are right. However, if the hon. Gentleman thinks the existing legislation is incompatible with that convention, his union members can take their case to the European Court of Human Rights. If he is right, they are therefore already protected in law. If he and the unions are absolutely certain that it contravenes the European convention on human rights they do not need to change the law through this Bill as they can be safe in the knowledge that the convention, which we are signed up to and which is enshrined in our legislation through the Human Rights Act, is in place. It needs to be made clear at the outset that this Bill has some vehement opponents, ranging from think tanks and the esteemed Mayor of London to the CBI. I believe that it was my hon. Friend the Member for Dover who said we are relying on business to get us out of the financial mess that we are in. We need the private sector to be flourishing, so we should take note of what it says with great interest. All those opponents argue that the balance of power between trade unions and employers has shifted too much towards the unions over the past 13 years. That touches on a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), who said that perhaps we ought to be looking not at giving further powers to the trade unions and shifting the balance even further towards them, but at whether or not there should be greater regulation of the industrial action that is causing so much damage to our economy. He asked whether we should be considering that, rather than making such action easier. The points that the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington made seemed to suggest that his Bill was based on two cases. I could mention other cases, but I do not wish to detain the House unduly by going through all of them at length, as that would be unnecessary. The two cases that his remarks concentrated on were Network Rail v. RMT and British Airways v. Unite. I just want to touch on those cases and the reasons why they are not a good basis on which to introduce this Bill.