HL Deb 13 June 1980 vol 410 cc752-69

11.26 a.m.

The MINISTER of STATE, DEPARTMENT of EMPLOYMENT (The Earl Gowrie)

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now again resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

Moved, that the House do now again resolve itself into Committee.—(The Earl of Gowrie.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

House in Committee accordingly.

[The Earl of Listowel in the Chair.]

Clause 17 [Acts to compel trade union membership]:

Lord WEDDERBURN of CHARLTON moved Amendment No. 80R: Page 20, line 18, at end insert ("and in this subsection 'contract' means a contract existing at the time of the doing of the act in respect of which liability is alleged ")

The noble Lord said: I beg to move—

Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS

Before the noble Lord moves his amendment, may I try to prevail upon him to bring his voluminous words and papers one by one? It is intimidating to see them brought in altogether. Is there some way of keeping the equanimity of the House on a better level by asking him to do that?

Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE

The more the noble Lord is intimidated, the better for us all!

Lord WEDDERBURN of CHARLTON

I always try to anticipate the extremely difficult questions which are raised by the very able Ministers on the Government Benches, which require that one should have a certain amount of information with one. This clause is an important one, in that it lays open to civil liability not just the practices which were disapproved of by a number of people, revealed in the recent Leggatt Report, but many types of long-standing trade union activity and, in particular, industrial action which workers frequently take where work or products are sent into their own firm from non-unionised "cowboy" outfits which are under-cutting decent standards of employment and doing it in particular by resisting unionisation of their workforce. It is a normal feature of the trade union world that in those circumstances workers will frequently say, "we are not prepared to work on the products sent in by the non-unionised workforce" and, by doing so, apply industrial pressure in order to maintain standards for their brother workers in other firms and enterprises.

This particular amendment goes to a tiny but important point. The clause, as it stands, prevents the workers from taking such action in terms of their civil liabilities in respect of interference with certain types of contract. The point of this amendment is that the case law in the High Court and the Court of Appeal—and I anticipate that it may be so in the Court of Session—has made it clear that those liabilities may extend to interference with contracts which are about to be made, on the argument put in the Court of Appeal, in England at least, in the case of Torquay Hotel v. Cousins, which was mentioned earlier this morning; namely, that if trade union defendants say, "We will take action against you if you do not refrain, for example, from taking in work and undercutting special contractors", the court may say, "It is true that that is not interference with a contract, hut it is a threat to interfere with a contract if it is made". That is enough for an injunction which, in England at least, we know as a quia timet injunction. I believe there is an appropriate similar procedure of interdict in Scotland.

The noble and learned Lord the Lord Advocate yesterday suggested to my noble friend Lord McCarthy, when he said, in arguing the logic of one of his amendments, that workers might not know about the contracts that were made by their employers, that that was far-fetched. I cannot quote his exact words, but the drift of his argument was that workers knew a lot about the commercial contracts of their employers, and would get to know about them very easily. For the purposes of this clause, we accept that argument, but say that, if that is right, what they cannot know about and frequently do not know about, and what the employer frequently does not want them to know about, are negotiations on contracts that are not yet made.

Therefore, since the liability can arise in the law of tort in respect of contracts which are not yet made, as the Torquay Hotel case showed in one of the injunctions that was granted, and since, as the noble and learned Lord suggested, employees might know about actual contracts but not so much about negotiations for new contracts, the point of this amendment is to limit the liabilities that can be encountered to, at any rate, contracts existing, as the amendment suggests, at the time of the doing of the act in respect of which liability is alleged. It is an amendment which, in our submission, goes to a simple piece of justice in terms of what workers can and cannot know about their future liabilities. I beg to move.

11.32 a.m.

The LORD ADVOCATE (Lord Mackay of Clashfern)

If I may, I would say a word or two on Clause 17 in general.

It is aimed at the type of coercive recruitment campaign mounted in particular by the SLADE union. SLADE's attempts to force unwilling artists and designers to join the SLADE Art Union are described in considerable detail in the very useful report by Mr Andrew Leggatt, QC. I do not propose to dwell on the details of the report. It is sufficient to say that SLADE was able to compel workers to join the Art Union within the existing law. The purpose of Clause 17 is, quite simply, to remove this statutory immunity, which at present allows workers to be coerced into joining a trade union by the threat that their work will be blacked at other companies.

The clause operates in the same way as Clauses 15 and 16. It restores some of the common law remedies against a person who induces a breach of contract and who, at present, has immunity under Section 13 of the Act of 1974. Clause 17 overrides Section 13 and restores the common law remedy when the conditions set out in the clause are met. Those conditions are designed to focus the clause on the problem of coercive trade union recruitment. Although the clause may at first sight appear complicated, its effect is really quite simple. It makes it unlawful—to be more precise, it removes immunity—for the employees of one employer to black goods or work produced elsewhere by workers of another employer, if the purpose of that blacking is to compel the second group of workers to join a particular trade union.

Against that background, let us look at this amendment. It is clear from subsection (1) of the clause that it operates only where there is either inducement of employees to break their contracts of employment, or where there is inducement of a breach or interference with performance of a commercial contract by means of employees being induced to break their contracts of employment. So what would this amendment achieve? To be frank, I very much doubt whether it would achieve anything. The clause is, by definition, relevant only where there is inducement of a breach or interference with performance of a contract. I do not see how one can induce the breach or interfere with performance of a contract which does not exist at the time when one is trying to induce its breach or interfere with its performance. That is a novel and puzzling proposition. I am therefore unable to see how this amendment would serve any purpose and, accordingly, I ask noble Lords not to agree to it.

Even if the noble Lord is right in his exposition of the law, I still cannot see any justification for this amendment. We are considering the position where the employees of one firm say: "Unless the workers of another firm join our trade union, we will not handle any work from them arising out of a contract which our employer concludes with their employer". The employees are threatening to break their contracts. Their own employer has a remedy if the threat is made with the intention of compelling workers to join a particular trade union, and the other conditions of Clause 17 are satisfied. Does the other employer also have a remedy before the commercial contract is concluded? The noble Lord thinks he would. My advice is that he would not. But I would not be unhappy if the noble Lord is right and the second employer could seek an injunction to restrain interference with the contract before it is concluded. That would be a further restraint on the unacceptable practices at which this clause is aimed.

Accordingly, my primary view is that the amendment achieves nothing, but, if the correct position on the present law is as the noble Lord says, then the present clause is satisfactory for the second reason which I have given. I invite your Lordships not to agree to this amendment.

Lord WEDDERBURN of CHARLTON

We are disappointed by the noble and learned Lord's response. It is not appropriate to argue fine points of law with him across the Chamber, but I must refer him to the Torquay Hotel decision. In one sentence, what happened in one aspect of that case was that a firm which had no contract with the Imperial Hotel was blacked by the Transport and General Workers' Union, there being no contract at all, and the Court of Appeal issued an injunction on the basis that the defendants had done acts which meant, in reality, that if a contract were made they would interfere with it. There is more authority of that kind. The issue really is not whether that authority is right or wrong—I say it is right, and therefore the liability would be co-extensive with this principle.

The noble and learned Lord then went on to say that, even if I am right, he does not want it in the clause. On that, I can only say that my noble friends and I regard this as rather unjust. This is a heavy area of liability for damages and injunctions upon trade unionists and workers, and it is rather extensive to put that liability upon them in regard to negotiations about which they cannot possibly know. However, we shall deal with this amendment as we customarily did with amendments yesterday. We shall not ask leave to withdraw it, but shall not divide and shall register our opinion in the customary manner.

On Question, amendment negatived.

[Amendment No. 80S not moved.]

11.37 a.m.

Lord WEDDERBURN of CHARLTON moved Amendment No. 80T: Page 20, line 21, leave out ("or of one or two or more particular trade unions")

The noble Lord said: This amendment refers to a part of the clause which is of extreme importance to the trade union movement. It relates to what, I believe, was perhaps a slip of the tongue by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Advocate. The noble and learned Lord, in replying to the last amendment, said that the clause prevented workers from taking industrial action and saying about workers at another place "They must join our union". That is not at all what the clause says. I do not wish to press the noble and learned Lord about his precise words, because I think there was a slip of the tongue, as subsection (2) of Clause 17 prevents workers from doing that for the purpose of getting other workers at another place, to become members of a particular trade union or of one of two or more particular trade unions".

That means that it is very much wider than has been suggested by the Government. It is very much wider than what their working paper on the matter suggested they would introduce as legislation. It goes into the traditional right of workers in unions affiliated to the Trades Union Congress to say, "This work has been done by non-unionists, in the sense that they are not members of any affiliated union". It is the undercutting subcontract position again. But the clause, by including the words, or of one of two or more particular trade unions", means that the workers do not even have the right to say "We want this work that comes into us to be dealt with not by undercutting firms that do not allow a worker to join a TUC union." That would be quite enough to trigger off the clause.

It is extraordinary to see workers' rights in Britain being restricted in this manner. When one looks abroad, one finds, for example in Sweden, that since the Act of 1976 trade unions have had right by law even to veto sub-contracted work by the employer, in certain circumstances of an undercutting kind. Yet here we have the Government who are going to take away all kinds of other legal machinery that can keep up low pay conditions, such as Schedule 11, and they add a clause which is so extensive that even that right to say, "We do not want to work on processes or goods that have not been dealt with by any member of an affiliated union of the TUC", is removed. No wonder the international Transport Workers' Federation, as reported in today's papers, in their report on the attack on trade unions around the world, picked out this Employment Bill as one of the foremost examples. I beg to move.

Lord ALPORT

When this amendment was called, the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, appeared to indicate that it was not the intention of the Front Bench to move it. May I ask, therefore, whether the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, is speaking for himself on this occasion or for the official Front Bench on the other side?

Lord McCARTHY

The noble Lord was wrong. He was looking at the wrong place in his notes; that is all.

Lord MOTTISTONE

Will the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, not agree that the reason a clause on these lines has to be considered is, as my noble and learned friend said in relation to the earlier amendment, due to the most unsavoury and unpleasant actions of SLADE? Had they not done that, we might not have found ourselves in the position of having to seek a way to curb that sort of thing in the future. As I understand it, although I am no expert in this line, the Government have done their best, notwithstanding the measures they have taken to prevent what I think is universally agreed as an unsuitable and unsavoury practice on the part of a trade union like SLADE, still to give the maximum what one might call traditional freedom to trade unions which behave in a proper sort of way. It would seem to me that this amendment is going to sweep away the corrective action and that therefore it should not be supported.

Lord ROCHESTER

My understanding of the effect of leaving out these words is that people not involved in a dispute but working for someone else at a different place could be forced to join, not necessarily the union involved in the dispute but another union. Surely that would be just as intolerable an affront to individual liberty as the direct SLADE-type action to which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Advocate referred earlier, and which this clause, as he said, is designed to outlaw. Therefore, unless someone can persuade me that my interpretation of the effect of this amendment is different from the way in which I now see it, I and my noble friends will certainly oppose it.

Lord RENTON

The words which it is proposed should be left out would, I suggest, be sadly left out because SLADE, for example, tried to set up a satellite union in order to attract members who would not join SLADE. They gave certain undertakings to the satellite union, which was called the SLADE art union, about their autonomy, their freedom to form their own rules. They got several thousand members to join, but it was found, when they had done so, that this was a complete delusion. I will not weary your Lordships with the whole of the history of this lamentable case, but if these words were taken out that sort of history might easily be repeated.

11.43 a.m.

The Earl of GOWRIE

As my noble friend Lord Mottistone correctly noticed, Clause 17 deals, and is designed to deal, with secondary action taken at one place to compel workers of another employer at another place to join a particular trade union, usually against their will. That is the point of what happened in the SLADE campaign. The clause does not and is not intended to tackle a situation where union members at a workplace refuse to work with non-union workers who are coming to that place of work to do a job. That is another issue. The clause as drafted applies to secondary industrial action whose purpose is to compel people to join a union or one or two or more trade unions.

The amendment seeks to remove the words or of one of two or more particular trade unions", so that the clause would apply only to action to compel membership of one particular trade union. It is quite clear, as I said, that we are targeting on a specific problem; that is the problem connected with the really outrageous recruitment tactics of SLADE. We must all hope that no other union will ever contemplate recruiting members in a similar way. The Leggatt Report on the SLADE recruiting tactics confirmed that with a few very minor exceptions the union was acting within the law, and so the law must be changed.

My noble friend Lord Renton is absolutely right when he says that it would not be difficult for two unions to combine and issue an ultimatum which effectively said, "Join one or other of us, or else". It is the "or else" that we are trying to tackle. That, of course, would not make the coercion we object to any more accceptable. It would create a major loophole in this clause if we had done nothing to meet it. It may be argued that collusion of the type I have suggested between unions is unlikely, but there has been a notable instance of it and, in our view, we have a duty to protect this very specifically designed and targeted legislation against loopholes which effectively would frustrate it. It would be disingenuous of the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, to pretend that his amendment would do anything other than frustrate it. That is why his amendment should be firmly resisted by the Committee.

Lord WEDDERBURN of CHARLTON

I wish to make three points in reply. The noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, and the noble Earl, Lord Gowrie, said that the clause was targeted on the practices of SLADE. The first point is that if this amendment were passed the clause would deal exactly with the practices complained of. The second argument is one that the noble Lord, Lord Rochester, mentioned, which related in particular to the objection to workers compelling trade union membership in other places of work. When one speaks about workers "compelling" things, what it means, in a situation of this kind, is that the only way that they have of compelling is to say they will withdraw their labour because they cannot accept the terms or circumstances on which they are being asked to work.

The Earl of GOWRIE

Blacking.

Lord WEDDERBURN of CHARLTON

The noble Earl says "blacking". That is a form of withdrawing their labour. If the noble Earl wishes to outlaw blacking completely no doubt he will bring forward a clause to do so. I suspect he has done so already in other parts of the Bill. I say that there are circumstances when it is justifiable for workers to withdraw their labour in whole or in part because they see that other workers who have been associated with the work and products upon which they are engaged are working for employers who do not grant them proper conditions. In the eyes of the first group of workers the latter should therefore be organised in a trade union. The workers in the second firm may well wish to be organised in a trade union. It does not say anything in this clause about the workers in the other place wanting or not wanting to be members of the union.

I take the point about collusion and I accept that, as drafted, the amendment would not wholly meet the Government's intentions because of points of that sort. What I would therefore like to ask the Government—the noble Earl did not quite cover this point—in begging leave to withdraw this amendment, is that we should come back to it at Report stage to see whether the Government really can produce a clause that is targeted upon their own object of aim but which does not include the situation which I put to the Government, of workers saying, "We will not work on these products because they are produced from an undercutting, cowboy firm where nobody belongs even to a TUC union".

I think that if the Government are saying to the Trades Union Congress that all the 12 million members of their affiliated organisations no longer have a lawful right to say that they will help workers in other firms by saying that they will black that work because they are not members of a TUC union, which would help them to attain better conditions, they would be taking a very serious step indeed, and one that has almost nothing whatever to do with SLADE but has much wider industrial consequences. Although I do not think that this is an undertaking which I shall get from the noble Earl, I invite the Government to come back on this at Report, and in the meantime beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

11.50 a.m.

Lord SPENS moved Amendment No. 80TA: Page 20, line 22, leave out ("or at the same place").

The noble Lord said: This amendment relates to the special problem of civil engineering contractors. We introduced to the Committee Amendment No. 53 which was discussed at rather a late hour —12.18 a.m.—on Wednesday. In case there are any members of the Committee here today who were not present for that discussion, I should like very briefly to run through what happened then. In our amendment we asked for the power to try and stop unlawful discrimination against contractors by clauses in tenders compelling them to use only members of trade unions for particular work.

These contractors have something like 900,000 employees. They are not the lump; they are all properly paid employees under the PAYE system. But of those 900,000 employees only some 250,000 are at present members of trade unions. Therefore, the contractors are now presented with an almost insoluble problem: that under the conditions that will come into effect when the Bill becomes law they will have to try to create inside their firms a closed shop in order to compete for contracts, most of which are offered by public authorities and the nationalised industries.

With only one-third of their employees at present belonging to trade unions, I do not think it is very likely that many of those contractors would be in a situation where 80 per cent. of their employees would vote to belong to a trade union. So the closed shop is out, and they will very possibly be faced at some stage or other with having to withdraw from a contract or else having to dismiss employees who are not members of trade unions.

In that earlier debate we discussed the possibility that the unions might be joined in any action for damages which one of the contractor's workers might bring in a case where he had been dismissed. The noble Earl the Minister said that he was interested in that suggestion and that he would take it away and study it. We are very glad that he did so. We feel that if the words "or at the same place" remain in Clause 17 they will nullify any possible help which the Minister may be able to give to these contractors because their contracts are always at the same place. We therefore suggest that the words "or at the same place" should be deleted from this clause. I beg to move.

The Earl of GOWRIE

I think that I have already moved a certain way in the direction of the noble Lord because this amendment tries to deal with another aspect of the problem which arose in connection with Amendment No. 53. We indicated in the debate on Amendment No. 53 that we share the noble Lord's dislike of some of these practices, but we think that it would be difficult to make sweeping changes in this complex area without first having greater public discussion and consultation than we have been able to have so far.

It is one of the essential principles of the Employment Bill now under discussion —this is what is widely called "he step by step approach"—that we aim at specific and widely agreed abuses and that we take the ordinary members of trade unions with us every step of the way so that the groundswell of support for these reforms works from the ground upwards and whatever the leaders say may be refuted by the response of the members. In our view, that is the way to get the Bill to stick and that is the way to improve industrial relations. Therefore, the Bill does not seek to remedy every single abuse. However, that does not mean to say that it is complacent towards abuses or that we do not reserve our position to return and try to clear some of them up.

I indicated in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning that I would seriously consider the suggestion put forward by my noble friend Lord Caldecote that there might be an amendment at Report stage to provide a new right of joinder against client employers who insisted upon the implementation of a term in a commercial contract requiring the contractor's employees to be union members. This might help to provide, if not an absolute correction, a very powerful disincentive to the adoption of such clauses in future contracts. We think that that would be a more effective way in the first instance of setting about providing a corrective than under Clause 17 which, as I said earlier, is aimed at the specific abuses in connection with SLADE. That is why, having moved considerably towards the noble Lord and given that undertaking, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Spens, will not press his amendment.

Lord SPENS

I am most grateful to the Minister for that reply. I accept entirely that he must use a step-by-step approach—getting the groundswell up from the union members through to the top. But in this situation the groundswell is not from union members; it is from non-union members—500,000 of them—whose employment may be placed in jeopardy unless something is done to help them. In withdrawing the amendment now, I would ask the Minister to bear that in mind. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Amendments Nos. 80U, 80V, 80W, 80X and 80Y not moved.]

On Question, Whether Clause 17 shall stand part of the Bill?

Lord McCARTHY

The noble Lord, Lord Alport, will be pleased to know that I have found my place! We do not support this clause. We wish to dissent from it, but I do not wish to burden the Committee with another speech.

The EARL of GOWRIE

I take the splendid silence of the noble Lord as a tacit method of saying, "We don't like SLADE-type practices but we think that the Government have got the correction to them wrong". I do not think that anything which the noble Lord or his noble friend have said has convinced us that we have got it wrong, but I hope that he is not saying to us that in not supporting the clause he is supporting the kind of practices which we have seen.

Clause 17 agreed to.

12 noon

Lord WEDDERBURN of CHARLTON moved Amendment No. 80Z:

After Clause 17 insert the following new clause:

("Liabilities and Unlawful Means.

  1. .—(1) This section applies to an act or omission in respect of which liability arises by reason of a contravention of, or a failure to observe any provision of sections 1 to 17 above, or of any regulation made or code issued under any of those sections, other than liability in tort and criminal liability.
  2. (2) No act or omission to which this section applies shall be regarded as an unlawful act or the use of unlawful means for the purpose of establishing liability in tort.")

The noble Lord said: In the interests of speed, I will not repeat a number of the authorities to which I referred yesterday in establishing the proposition that it is now a civil wrong and a tort to use unlawful means calculated to injure another person, save to say, if I may for the record, that in mentioning the learned work of Windfield on Tort, edited by Professor Jolowicz, the passage I was actually thinking of was in the learned work on the Law of Torts by Professor Street. I think that is only a matter of my correcting the record.

There are a large number of cases on this, and if the Government deal with it in detail, obviously I shall have to reply if they resist the establishment of that civil liability. But on the basis of our discussion yesterday, on the basis of the fact that there is such a liability, obviously it can be established against a defendant who has made use of a breach or contravention of a statute, albeit that the statute itself gives rise on its face only perhaps to a criminal liability or only to a right of action to certain other persons. There is an area of difficult borderline to draw as to exactly where the locus standi of the possible plaintiffs should be put, but that there is such a wrong is now clear and therefore it is our proposition that perhaps in statutes generally, and certainly in a statute dealing with such a delicate part of the social fabric as labour relations, those who might incur a liability should know where they stand. I have already put the two best examples under this Bill to the Ministers under Clause 6, where there is the threat of or actual industrial action in protest against an employer not concluding a union membership arrangement, either without the ballot or in some other way contravening the new Clause 6. I understood the Government position to be that they did not think that would be actionable. The authorities clearly show that it is arguable that it might be.

Similarly, in regard to Clause 3, there was much discussion in another place on industrial action to secure the non-employment by an employer of a worker who had been compelled or forced into the union by an order of the industrial tribunal under their new powers under Clause 3. Again the Government in another place said that was unlikely to be unlawful; but it is plainly arguable that the workers concerned in the action might be said to be employing unlawful means. The Clause 6 example is perhaps the stronger of the two.

There are others in the Bill but I will not take up the time of the Committee in laying them out. What we say is that, except where the Bill creates criminal liability—which it is argued that it does not do in picketing, and we have suggested that it may just do so—but where it does not establish criminal liability or liability in tort on its face, then a failure to abide by its conditions should give rise only to the liabilities as stated in the Bill. That is fair enough, but there should not be a hidden minefield of other liabilities which plaintiffs of unknown identity could well rely upon in the courts and make the defendants liable for, when, on reading the Bill, they would not appreciate that there could be any such remedy of injunction or damages against them. I beg to move.

12.3 p.m.

Lord MACKAY of CLASHFERN

I must confess to having a good deal of difficulty in understanding the new clause and its effect. It talks in subsection (1) of liability arising other than liability in tort and criminal liability and then, in subsection (2), it goes on effectively to say that liability in tort is not to arise in that case. I think I understand the point that the noble Lord is aiming at, but I am not certain that the clause deals with it effectively.

As the noble Lord has said, we have debated this issue already in relation to Amendment No. 52 and, like him, I shall not go over the matter again. I should like to say first that the noble Lord keeps talking about "unlawful means". I think the means used in the examples that he has put forward were means of inducing the employees to break their contracts of employment, which in these circumstances is protected by Section 13(1) of the Act of 1974. What the noble Lord now seems to have in mind is the claim that they have been induced to undertake an unlawful act; namely, that inducing the employer to break his statutory duty will be "unlawful means" in some sense. However, we believe that there is all the difference between inducing someone to breach a statutory duty, as in the case of Meade v. Haringey Borough Council—the duty to provide education—and inducing someone to act in a manner which in fact infringes another person's rights under an Act for which a remedy is already provided under that Act; for example, in this case the right not to be unfairly dismissed.

The second point is that if there is a problem to which this amendment is directed it is a problem which is present under the existing law and is not caused by or limited to this Bill. Indeed, it was noticeable that the example that the noble Lord gave when debating Amendment No. 52 was one which could arise under the present law.

If there is a possible action in tort for inducing or causing an infringement of somebody's statutory rights, then this would not arise exclusively in relation to the provisions of this Bill. It would also apply to all the other statutory rights for individuals given by the previous legislation in 1974, 1975 and 1978, or to matters like inducing an employer to discriminate contrary to the Race Relations Act or the Sex Discrimination Act. If any avoidance of doubt clause like that proposed in the amendment were necessary it would need to be generally phrased to cover all these and possibly a number of other rights. The fact that none of the legislation of the previous Administration

to which I have referred contains any such provision tends to confirm our view that none is necessary. I would therefore invite your Lordships not to agree to the insertion of the suggested clause.

Lord RENTON

I think my noble and learned friend is being remarkably kind and gentle in his reply. This appears to me to be a wrecking amendment.

Lord WEDDERBURN of CHARLTON

If I may reply in one sentence, my noble friends and I do not accept the argument which the noble and learned Lord has put to us. Most of the other statutes to which he referred are not in similar case. Clause 6 is a particular example and I answer his authority which he put to me of the Meade case by saying that in the case of the Daily Mirror v. Gardner in 1968 the use of an agreement which was a contravention only of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act and merely void was "unlawful means"; and plainly, under this Bill, similar types of unlawful means could arise. We think it quite unwise not to spell this out and we mean to press this amendment.

12.8 p.m.

On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 80Z) shall be agreed to?

Their Lordships divided: Contents, 42; Not-Contents, 94.

CONTENTS
Ardwick, L. Gosford, E. Phillips, B.
Aylestone, L. Hale, L. Plant, L.
Birk, B. Hatch of Lusby, L. Ponsonby of Shulbrede, L.
Boston of Faversham, L. Henderson, L. Ritchie-Calder, L.
Brockway, L. Houghton of Sowerby, L. Sainsbury, L.
Cledwyn of Penrhos, L. Janner, L. Stewart of Alvechurch, B.
Collison, L. Kilbracken, L. Stewart of Fulham, L.
Cooper of Stockton Heath, L. Leatherland, L. Strabolgi, L.
David, B. [Teller.] Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe, B. [Teller.] Underhill, L.
Davies of Leek, L. Wallace of Coslany, L.
Elwyn-Jones, L. McCarthy, L. Wedderburn of Charlton, L.
Gaitskell, B. Northfield, L. Wells-Pestell, L.
Galpern, L. Oram, L. Whaddon, L.
Gordon-Walker, L. Pargiter, L.
Goronwy-Roberts, L. Peart, L.
NOT-CONTENTS
Abinger, L. Berkeley, B. Davidson, V.
Alport, L. Bessborough, E. de Clifford, L.
Amherst, E. Bolton, L. De La Warr, E.
Ampthill, L. Cairns, E. Denham, L. [Teller.]
Auckland, L. Cathcart, E. Drumalbyn, L.
Banks, L. Clancarty, E. Dundee, E.
Barnby, L. Cockfield, L. Effingham, E.
Barrington, V. Craigavon, V. Elton, L.
Belstead, L. Cullen of Ashbourne, L. Evans of Hungershall, L.
Ferrers, E. Kinnoull, E. Redmayne, L.
Fraser of Kilmorack, L. Launderdale, E. Reigate, L.
Gainford, L. Lindsey and Abingdon, E. Renton, L.
Gormanston, V. Lloyd of Kilgerran, L. Robbins, L.
Gowrie, E. London, Bp. Rochester, L.
Greenway, L. Long, V. Saltoun, Ly.
Gridley, L. Lovat, L. Sand ford., L.
Grimston of Westbury, L. Lyell, L. Sandys, L. [Teller.]
Grimthorpe, L. MacAndrew, L. Selkirk, E.
Hailsham of Saint Marylebone L. (L. Chancellor.) Mackay of Clashfern, L. Sempill, Ly.
Macleod of Borve, B. Soames, L. (L. President.)
Halsbury, E. Mancroft, L. Spens, L.
Hanworth, V. Mansfield, E. Stamp, L.
Hives, L. Margadale, L. Teviot, L.
Home of the Hirsel, L. Marley, L. Trefgarne, L.
Hood, V. Merrivale, L. Trenchard, V.
Hooson, L. Milverton, L. Vaizey, L.
Hornsby-Smith, B. Morris, L. Vickers, B.
Hylton-Foster, B. Mottistone, L. Vivian, L.
Ilchester, E. Mowbray and Stourton, L. Wakefield of Kendal, L.
Keith of Castleacre, L. Murton of Lindisfarne, L. Westbury, L.
Kilmarnock, L. Porritt, L. Wigoder, L.
Kinnaird, L.

On Question, amendment agreed to.

The EARL of GOWRIE

My Lords, in view of the impending Statements, I beg to move that the House do now resume.

House resumed.