- Committee (1st Day)
- Relevant documents: 10th Report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, 27th Report from the Delegated Powers Committee, 14th Report from the Constitution Committee
- 11:50 am
- Clause 1 agreed.
- The Schedule: Minimum service levels for certain strikes
- Amendment 1
- 1: The Schedule, page 3, line 15, leave out “even if” and insert “unless” Member’s explanatory statement The amendment seeks to stop regulations under this Bill from being applied to strikes which have already been balloted for.
- My Lords, I am sure that the Minister will feel a bit like me, having done two days of Committee on the retained EU law Bill and now going straight into this. I hope the Committee will forgive me if I stray into areas where my brain could still be stuck on that Bill. Anyway, let us have a go. The difficulty with this Bill—it is similar to the one we were considering for five days—is that it is a skeleton Bill. It is very difficult to understand the policy objectives and purposes, and what the meaning of these things will be. We do not really have a clear impact assessment of it.I start with my amendment in this group about the lack of reports we have received. Certainly, no reports or impact assessments were available when the Commons considered these issues. We have now had them, and our own Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee gave a very clear statement about the Bill. However, I want to focus on the Joint Committee on Human Rights report referenced in my amendment. I have never seen a report condemn a Bill in such a way. The Committee found that“the Government has not adequately made the case that this Bill meets the UK’s human rights obligations”.It highlighted—we will address this in other amendments—the lack of clarity around“The requirement that trade unions take ‘reasonable steps’ to ensure their members comply with a work notice”,which may fall foul of Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. At Second Reading, the Minister constantly said that we are meeting our international obligations, but the Joint Committee on Human Rights certainly does not agree.The fact that we are uncertain about what these things mean leads me to the question of how the Bill will impact existing disputes. Not only do we have a poor definition of the sectors which may be engaged and such broad categories that we do not know exactly what will be in it, we also do not understand what minimum service levels are, how they will be applied and how they will be applied in those categories. Absolutely nothing is clear. It is all going to be reliant on statutory instruments—secondary legislation.
- My Lords, the first two amendments in this group look, sequentially, either backwards or forwards. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and his colleague the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, that the Bill should not apply retroactively. I am sure we agree that it should not apply at all, but the arguments set out by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, about the unfairness of retroactivity are clear, and probing the Government’s intentions for how the Bill would be applied is very helpful.
- 12:00 pm
- I suspect that the motivation of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, is that it will not apply at all. He is playing what I would call the Micawber amendment, in that he plans to punt its commencement some time into the future and wait to see whether something turns up. I look forward to his speech shortly.
- I will focus on the third of these amendments. Although the noble Lord, Lord Collins, said that he will come back to the Joint Committee on Human Rights report later, we can perhaps set things up with the Minister’s answers to my questions, which will enable him to further probe the Government’s view on this. Rather cleverly, the third amendment presaged a report—I do not know whether the proposers knew one was coming—because surely riding over the horizon is the JCHR’s report on the Bill. I trust that the Minister has read it all; there is quite a lot, and it is all pretty scathing about the Bill.
- The JCHR is clear that the legislation risks contravening the UK’s responsibilities under international human rights laws and conventions to which the UK is a signatory. This includes Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which establishes the right to assembly and association, and the right to strike, as established by the International Labour Organization conventions. Although Governments are permitted to impose restrictions on the application of these laws and conventions, the Joint Committee said, this must be justified, proportionate and necessary. Overall, it finds that that justification is not made within the Bill.
- In particular, I will highlight the following details. In the view of the JCHR,
- “the Government has not adequately made the case that this Bill meets the UK’s human rights obligations”.
- One of the reasons why it has formed this view is that:
- “The lack of any limits on the level of service that the Secretary of State may impose by regulations risks a failure to comply with the Article 11 requirement”—
- in the ECHR—
- “of being ‘in accordance with the law’ as the Bill arguably currently allows for potentially arbitrary interferences with the right to strike.”