HC Deb 28 July 1971 vol 822 cc631-9

Lords Amendment: No. 2, in page 3, line 1, after "shall" insert: after consultation with the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry".

The Under-Secretary of State for Employment (Mr. Dudley Smith)

I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.

The Amendment will oblige the Secretary of State to consult the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry before preparing a draft revision of the Code of Industrial Relations Practice or of any part of it. The Amendment was made in another place at the suggestion of an Opposition Peer. It does not mean that only the two bodies I have mentioned will be consulted by the Secretary of State. It has always been my right hon. Friend's intention to consult as widely and fully as possible those concerned with industrial relations over the preparation of the draft code and the subsequent revisions which are bound to be made from time to time.

That has been made clear many times, and nothing makes the point better than the Consultative Document which was published not long ago. My right hon. Friend said in the foreword: I hope these proposals will be most carefully studied by management, trade unions and all others concerned with relations between employers and employees. I shall welcome the fullest possible discussion and consultation. In the light of this discussion and of the comments received, I shall be preparing a further version of the code which 1 hope to submit to Parliament for approval before the end of this year.

Mr. Ronald King Murray

Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that this House is to have no opportunity to debate the code until the Bill is enacted?

Mr. Smith

The hon. and learned Gentleman knows that that is not a matter for me. It is for the Leader of the House, and no doubt the hon. and learned Member will wish to ask my right hon. Friend about it. It would be wrong or me to pass an opinion on it. My right hon. Friend is having the widest consultation before evolving the code which will be debated in the House. I am sorry that the Trades Union Congress has not agreed to give its comments on the code. I hope very much that it will do so, because we want it to have the widest possible currency before the Government finally pronounce on it.

Mr. Rees-Davies

On a point of order. The question of the code of conduct has been raised by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh, Leith (Mr. Ronald King Murray) in a question he put to my hon. Friend. It would seem that this matter is now being pursued. I respectfully submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that it must be out of order to consider on this Amendment anything other than consultation with the T.U.C. and the C.B.I. The establishment of the code and the question whether it is debatable do not arise on this Amendment.

Mr. Paul B. Rose (Manchester, Blackley)

Further to that point of order. Is it not bad enough to be guillotined without being gagged before being guillotined? The hon. Gentleman seems to have set himself up as a temporary Mr. Speaker. Is it not right that the Minister was dealing with the Lords Amendment perfectly properly and right to introduce this matter of the code so that the Lords Amendment might be properly debated?

Mr. Speaker

I think it much better that Mr. Speaker should be left to decide what is in order.

Mr. Dudley Smith

I was only endeavouring to be helpful. I was about to give way to the hon. Member for Gloucestershire, West (Mr. Loughlin).

Mr. Loughlin

I wanted information about consultation. The hon. Gentleman said that it is the intention to consult the T.U.C. and the C.B.I, as far as possible. He then made play with the fact that he would consult other people, other bodies, other organisations. Will he tell us who are those people?

Mr. Dudley Smith

They are a very wide range of many interested parties. Already my right hon. Friend has had quite a number of submissions on the draft of the code of industrial practice and there will probably be many more. We are prepared to accept advice and opinions from anybody, from hon. Members, from trade unions, from professional organisations, or indeed anyone who in any way may be affected by the code. I do not want to go too far about it or go out of order, because obviously that would upset certain hon. Gentlemen.

Mr. McNamara

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, but I think I have an important point, and I am not seeking to curtail his argument. Under the Bill the T.U.C. cannot register till all the affiliates are registered. Does he mean that he will consult the Trades Union Congress and Congress will be consulted about conditions of work as contained in the code and that, therefore, they will be negotiating about work practices to be employed by unions not affiliated? That would seem to make nonsense of the situation.

Mr. Dudley Smith

I do not think it would. We cannot see the future and what exactly will happen over registration. That is another question to be debated, but my right hon. Friend intends, before deciding to revise this code of practice, to have consultation with the two main bodies which have always been associated with industry in this country, the T.U.C. on the workers 'side and the C.B.I, on the employers' side. I think that any reasonable person would accept that this would be worth while. I thought that, with the Bill as it was before originally, it was pretty plain that my right hon. Friend would have very wide consultations indeed, but to put the matter entirely beyond doubt we have accepted the Amendment moved in another place, and that is why I recommend the House to accept it now.

Mr. Rose

I should like to preface my remarks by saying, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) did, that I do not accept the premises of this Bill and totally reject them. Anything I say will be addressed to the Lords Amendment, and is not to be understood as suggesting in any way that the premises of the Bill are to be acceptable.

I would also say in rebuttal of the suggestion made by the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies), who is now, happily, leaving the Chamber, that the matters raised by the Minister were quite properly raised, and that it would be quite wrong to try to deal with this Lords Amendment in a vacuum or in a purely legalistic way divorced from the problems of industrial relations which is what the Bill is all about.

By accepting the need for consultation with both the C.B.I, and the T.U.C. the Government are giving effect to an Amendment which was first tabled during Committee on the Bill in this House by my hon. and right hon. Friends in respect of two matters where we think consultation to be necessary for good industrial relations.

We think that repentance is good for the soul and we on this side will always be happy to welcome converts, even on their death beds. What we are astonished at in this case is that repentance has come, as it were, after death, because we debated the Bill in the House, we debated it in Committee, we debated it on Report, and then it was considered in Committee and on Report by the other place; there was the so-called Consultative Document on the Bill and there was the other so-called document on the code of practice. We have had all that, but the one thing we have not had is consultation. Indeed, the first document was aptly termed by many of my hon. Friends "In Place of Consultation". The consultation of which the hon. Gentleman spoke, so far as it related to the T.U.C, has been non-existent. Whose fault it is I will deal with in a moment, but if the Government support this Lords Amendment it means that they have themselves felt the need for repentance. Now their words speak louder than their actions.

At least they pay lip service to the principle of consultation, and for this, at least, we are grateful and thankful to the Secretary of State, but I hope that he will assure the House that consultation means something more than telling the T.U.C. what he proposes, with advance warning that nothing the T.U.C. will say will move him from his entrenched position which he will have taken up. That has been his attitude all along. He told us that he was prepared to consult hon. Members on details, not matters of principle. Consultation must be about details, but, above all, consultation, if it is to mean anything, must be about principles as well, and I hope that he will accept that it means that in this context.

The Secretary of State has been reluctant to consult, but the documents which have already appeared follow directly from the Bill, and he refused any meaningful consultation with the T.U.C., and there must be grave doubt in the minds of many of my hon. Friends whether this Lords Amendment is other than a pious hope.

We have to accept that the Government are pledged to consult——

Mr. Carr

I know the hon. Gentleman likes to be fair, and I think he usually is, but what he is saying about my willingness or unwillingness to consult can be described, within the terms used in this House, only as the opposite of the facts.

Mr. Rose

The right hon. Gentleman contends that he is willing to consult, but he is not willing to consult in the sense of being willing to consult on the principles of the Bill or of the code of practice, and yet the code of practice is derived directly from the Bill. It could not exist separate and apart from the Bill, and he refuses to consult about the principles in relation to the Bill. Therefore it is impossible for him to say that he is willing to consult about the code of industrial practice when he was unwilling to consult about the principles in the Bill from which the code was derived. I cannot accept his protestations, try as I will to be fair to him.

As I say, he is now pledged to consult, and I hope that he will realise that he is vulnerable—perhaps legally, but certainly politically. He will be vulnerable if he fails to consult fully with the T.U.C. I hope the right hon. Gentleman will realise that without consultation—and this has been his failing all along—there can be no co-operation, and that without cooperation there can be no peace in industry.

Mr. Dudley Smith

My right hon. Friend is only too anxious to consult the T.U.C. I tried to make that point in my speech. The door is open, but, so far, unfortunately, no one has come through it.

Mr. Rose

The door is open to the trap which the right hon. Gentleman has laid, because what has happened is that we now have a Bill which is totally unacceptable not only to us on this side of the House but to the trade union movement. Part of the Bill provides for a code of fair industrial practice, and that is derived from the Bill, and it takes its premise from the Bill. That is not acceptable. There is no point in the Minister saying that he is prepared to negotiate about something which was no longer negotiable. It was negotiable before the Bill was put before the House. At that stage the right hon. Gentleman refused to negotiate with the trade union movement on matters of principle.

6.30 p.m.

I will not stray too far beyond the bounds of the Amendment. We accept the Amendment in the spirit in which it was first moved by the Opposition. Although we are sceptical, we are nevertheless generous and, therefore, we are reluctant to disappoint the Minister. We support the Amendment in the spirit in which we believe these words should be taken.

In doing so I again emphasise that we hope that in future these words will be acted upon and that there will be full co-operation. There have been a few indications that the Secretary of State is beginning to learn that there is a necessity for real consultation and not the open door which he thinks now exists, whereas in fact the door was firmly shut long before the Bill came before the House

Mr. Rees-Davies

I must intervene to put the record straight, because what was said by the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Mr. Rose) is the reverse of the truth. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has followed an open-door policy throughout in the preparation of, and in the revision of, any draft code of practice. He has always indicated that he would be delighted to consult the T.U.C. and the C.B.I. At the instance of the Opposition this is now written into the Bill. The T.U.C. does not want to use it. These are the facts. Having got the facts straight, let us try to get on with another agreed Amendment without another long debate.

Mr. Gower

I welcome that statement made by my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary that there will be consultation throughout and that there will always be consultation when there is any desire to revise. The origin of this Amendment is similar to the origin of the first Amendment. It is the result of an Amendment moved by the Opposition in another place. 1 appreciate the fact that the Government have accepted the Amendment in an honest wish to meet the Opposition's anxieties and views.

I do not like this wording, because if there is a provision to the effect that the Government must consult two named bodies—the C.B.I, and the T.U.C.—the inference is that the Government have done all that is necessary once they have consulted those two bodies. It would have been better had bodies not been specified and if there had been some general wording requiring the Secretary of State to consult as widely as was deemed necessary. However, to meet the Opposition the Government have gone a little further than they might have felt inclined to go and have specified the bodies suggested by the Opposition. To that extent, I welcome my hon. Friend's assurance that the consultation will be constant and wide.

Mr. Charles Loughlin (Gloucestershire, West)

As I read the Bill together with the Amendment, it places upon the Secretary of State the statutory obligation to consult two bodies—the T.U.C. and the C.B.I.; he must do that before he can produce his code of practice. In the event of the refusal of either the C.B.I, or the T.U.C. to consult, is it the position that the Secretary of State is prevented from carrying out his statutory obligations and that the code of practice cannot be published?

Mr. R, Carr

Of course it does not mean what the hon. Gentleman has implied. It would be totally improper and unconstitutional if a private party in the community, merely by refusing to consult when given every opportunity to do so, could frustrate the will of an elected Government. This provision imposes upon me the duty to consult. I shall do that, and I am sure that my successors will do it, with great genuineness. It cannot be put in the hands of some party entirely outside the House to deny and frustrate the will of Parliament and the will of a properly elected Government acting through Parliament. If people refuse to consult or do not wish to consult, my duty is discharged.

Question put and agreed to.

Lords Amendment: No. 3, in page 3, line 7, leave out from "and" to "shall" in line 8 and insert: shall arrange for any such advice to be published in such manner as he may consider appropriate; and, if the Secretary of State determines to proceed with the draft, he".

Mr. Dudley Smith

I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.

The effect of the Amendment is to require the Secretary of State to publish advice given to him by the Commission on Industrial Relations relating to a proposed revision of all or part of the code of practice. Following what was said in the previous short debate, I make it clear that we wish to be as open and possible over the code and its subsequent revision which may take place from time to time.

The suggestion was made in Committee in another place that it would be helpful for it to be on the record as to what the C.I.R. had said in its reference to my right hon. Friend. Eventually this Amendment was incorporated in the Bill. We can see nothing against it. We are all in favour of greater clarification. In the circumstances, I hope that the House will see its way clear to accepting the Amendment.

Mr. Harold Walker

In welcoming the Amendment I wish to raise a small query. I do not challenge the hon. Gentleman's integrity. I hope that I have not got an over-suspicious mind. In view of the Minister's statement in another place that one reason for the Government's original reluctance was that the C.I.R. might not in certain circumstances wish its advice to be made public, will the hon. Gentleman shed a little light on the need to insert the qualification— published in such manner as he may consider appropriate"? I hope that there is no intention of seeking to avoid any of the openness to which the hon. Gentleman has just given expression.

Mr. Dudley Smith

I give that assurance. There is no question of trying to dodge the issue. These are the usual words used in such circumstances. There is nothing sinister about them. It will probably be for general agreement between the C.I.R. and the Secretary of State of the day as to how it should be published. I take note of the hon. Gentleman's point. I assure him that there is no question of this being an effort to be selective as to the type of publication that will take place. I look forward to, and hope that there will be, very good co-operation and understanding on matters of this sort between C.I.R. and the Secretary of State.

Question put and agreed to.

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