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Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill

My hon. Friend anticipates what I was about to say. Although it is true that in recent years there have been more applications for court injunctions, we must put that increase into some perspective. It is still relatively rare for the courts to intervene in industrial disputes. Over the past five years, just seven injunctions have been sought, on average, per year. During the five years from 2005 to 2009, there were on average 132 work stoppages each year. With an average of seven injunctions and 132 work stoppages, it is clearly not the case that employers are always going to court and that it is difficult for trade unions to ballot their members, give notices in the proper way and hold industrial action when their members so vote. I am afraid that the facts are entirely against the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington. Moreover, these cases have not always gone the way of the employer, even when there have been injunctions, as my hon. Friends have said. The Bill's explanatory notes refer to the case of British Airways v. Unite the Union. That case concerned the way that the union notified its members about the outcome of an industrial action ballot. On this occasion, the Court of Appeal upheld the union's appeal and the injunction was overturned. There are of course other cases in which the trade union lost. Reference has been made to another case involving British Airways and Unite. I freely acknowledge that most balloting processes across our society will contain some flaws. Existing industrial action law makes some allowance for such small errors, but in the case of British Airways and Unite that Unite lost, the union had made serious mistakes in the balloting process and a large number of people were mistakenly accorded an entitlement to vote. We are talking about a tightly knit group of workers, all belonging to the same, very well-resourced, branch of the Unite union. The union should have known better. Frankly, the union got it wrong and, quite rightly, it had to re-run the ballot.