LORDS AMENDMENT IN LIEU OF LORDS AMENDMENT No. 17 (Hansard, 15 November 1976)

Lord ORAM

My Lords, I beg to move that this House doth propose the first Amendment in lieu to page 4, line 13, to Amendment No. 17, to which the Commons have disagreed. The provisions of the original subsections (3) to (7) defining the cargo handling shown and providing a procedure for its extension would create a nonsense if, following the Commons agreement to the Amendment confining the operation of the new scheme to definable dock areas within half a mile of harbours or harbour land, they were retained. The purpose of the alternative Amendment proposed is to make a workable and sensible Bill which, if enacted, would still be of benefit to the Docks Industry and the country.

The purpose of the Amendment is to ensure that the spirit of the decisions taken both here and in another place are put into a form which would enable their sensible operation in the future. The Government believe that this must mean allowing the possibility of extension of the definable dock area, just as Clause 4(6) and (7) would have allowed for such a possibility. The procedure for such extension proposed is similar to that previously proposed for the cargo handling zone; that is, consideration by the Board, allowing 60 days for representations and an order, subject to Affirmative Resolution, but as an addititional and substantive safeguard in view of the debate, provision for a public inquiry where objections are 1000 raised to the proposal. This is in line with the Amendment originally proposed by noble Lords opposite at Committee stage to the procedure for extending the cargo-handling zone.

It will not be possible for any part of the country which is not contiguous with an existing definable dock area to be added to the definable dock area by this procedure. Any addition can therefore be only of an exclusion of an existing definable dock area. Since definable dock areas will cover only a very small proportion of the area which the cargo-handling zone would have covered, this places very strict limits to the additional areas which could be added.

The Government hope that this proposal will be acceptable to the House. It seems undesirably inflexible to exclude altogether the possibility of extending definable dock areas other than by new legislation. Premises in a dock estate may be so treated, because the half-mile limitation is outside a definable dock area when it would be sensible to include them. If an employer moves 100 yards from within to without a definable dock area, we think that good industrial relations can best be maintained by allowing for the possibility of an extension of the Scheme. Similarly, half a mile from a harbour or harbour land may, because of geographical configurations of harbours, lead to some obvious nonsenses of the land which is, or is not, to be potentially within the scope of the Scheme if dock work is performed. But this procedure calling for examination by the Board, a public inquiry if objections are made, and then an Affirmative Resolution, should mean that the power will be used only either to correct what was accepted by all to be an anomaly, or where developments had been such that the need for such an extension was very widely felt to be desirable.

The provision in new subsection (3) is desirable because there is a small amount of work, particularly at some container bases in London and Liverpool, which is at present treated by custom and practice as dock work and done by registered workers clearly outside a definable dock area. The Government believe it would be most undesirable and create an enormous amount of industrial ill-feeling if it were not possible 1001 to bring such work under the new Scheme. In addition, it is possible that work done within what are considered as dock work areas, and which is certainly dock work under the 1967 Scheme, may be done more than half a mile from harbours and harbour land. For these reasons, I beg to move the Amendment.

The Earl of GOWRIE

My Lords, I suppose that the most difficult examination which it is possible to sit in in this country is the examination for the Fellowship of All Souls, and I would suggest to the examiners of that college that next year in their political papers they set this question: Discuss the last 10 days in the life of the Dock Work Regulation Bill. The gist, if I may try to summarise it, of what the noble Lord, Lord Oram, has just said is that the Government have accepted the consequences of the House of Commons' Vote last Wednesday and are taking out all mention of the zone. With this of course we are delighted. As the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, said when discussing the Statement of the noble Lord the Leader of the House earlier this afternoon, it makes these long hours, days, weeks and nights in this House on this Bill well worth while.

I want to refer to the position first under the 1967 Scheme; that is, the Scheme which is currently in force and which this Bill seeks to renew or to extend. It was never our intention, those of us who believed that the half-mile Amendment improved the Bill, to declassify existing dock work, and so we fully accept this Amendment—that is, subsection (3) of the Government's new Amendment—as clarifying the agreed position. We have not ceased to make clear on these Benches that we are not against ameliorating the difficulties faced due to technological change and other factors by dock workers. We simply want to limit the extension of dock workers' powers as they may affect the rights and interests of other groups of workers.

I come to the powers of extension by the Secretary of State which are implicit 1002 in the Amendment moved by the noble Lord. Due to a casting vote of the Speaker in another place the Secretary of State's power to extend the zone from half a mile did remain in the Bill in another place, though I think it is fair for me to say that had that vote been taken in your Lordships' House it would have been written out as consequential on the earlier victory. So we on this side were most concerned that these powers could have been used effectively to reverse the House of Commons position and effectively to retain the five-mile zone. If we had been convinced that this might have been the case, I think we would have wished to leave the Bill even in a highly absurd muddled form on the Statute Book so that it would surely be unworkable. But we felt that this position could be tidied up safely because of the hand brakes, if I may so term them, which we have applied to the Secretary of State's machine.

The first of these is the question of timing. It will take the Government some years, perhaps one year or two years, to set up the Scheme, to get it into full operative force, and we have had an effective admission from the Government this afternoon that no early use of it would be likely to be made. But this by itself would not be good enough, and so we have the concession from the Government of a public inquiry, at variance rather with their remarks about there being no need for public inquiries on other items in connection with the Bill at an earlier stage. We also had the important concession that the Secretary of State would only make extensions order by order and district by district.

One of the purposes surely of a Parliamentary proceeding of the Affirmative Resolution procedure which applies here is that while the Affirmative Resolution proceeds through both Houses there is time for outside opinion to mobilise, and for those who might feel adversely affected by the Secretary of State's powers here to make their views and wishes known. We feel that these two additional items give a real braking effect to what the Secretary of State can do as well as, as I said earlier, giving in to the wishes of the House of Commons on the matter.