House of Commons Hansard Debates for 18 Feb 1992

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Mr. Nicholls : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Marlow : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blair : I shall give way in a moment. I see that I have a reception party, which is flattering.

As the Secretary of State has raised his agenda of industrial law, let me repeat that we have made it clear that there will be no return to the trade union legislation of the 1970s. There will be no mass or flying pickets. There will be ballots before strikes and for trade union elections. Trade unions will be entitled to the same rights, but subject to the same responsibilities, as their counterparts in other European and western countries.

Mr. Howard : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blair : I shall give way in a moment.

Britain now has the fastest rising unemployment in Europe, a crisis in the nation's skills and a recession that is claiming new victims every day. It wants a Government who will meet those responsibilities and will not refight the battles of the 1970s because they have no answers to the problems of the 1990s.

Mr. Howard : The hon. Gentleman talked about ballots. Will he confirm that, in the terms of his party's published policy documents, an employer would have no remedy in respect of a strike called without a ballot, and an employee would have no remedy until he had exhausted his internal trade union procedures? That is what the hon. Gentleman's party's published policy documents say. Will he confirm that?

Mr. Blair : I shall not confirm that, because it is entirely untrue. The right hon. and learned Gentleman keeps making the allegation. He put the allegation in the policy document that he issued yesterday. Over the past year, in correspondence with the newspapers that has been published in response to the right hon. and learned Gentleman's allegations, we have stated time and again that there will be pre-strike ballots and that employers will have to gain access to the courts if there is a breach of the ballot provisions. We have said that on many occasions. The right hon. and learned Gentleman keeps repeating the same old fallacies because he does not want to debate the issues for which he has responsibility.

Mr. Howard : Will the hon. Gentleman now answer the question that he was asked, and refer us to the passage in his policy document in which that is stated? The fact of the matter is that that is not what the documents say.

Mr. Blair : That is complete nonsense. I have before me correspondence with the Secretary of State, into which I entered nearly two years ago. In that correspondence, I repeated the words that appear in our policy review :

"To qualify for legal protection, industrial action requires the support of a properly conducted ballot."

Mr. Quentin Davies (Stamford and Spalding) : I have been listening to the hon. Gentleman with great interest. He is attempting to put over the message that the Labour party, in its new guise, will now accept some of the crucial elements in our employment Acts which it bitterly opposed when we introduced them. For the avoidance of all doubt, will the hon. Gentleman now state clearly and specifically which of our employment and trade union Acts he proposes to repeal, and which he proposes to retain?

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Mr. Blair : I have just been answering the Secretary of State's questions. I answer them every time that they are raised, and I have answered them again this afternoon. Let me tell the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends that what people want to know today are the answers that the Government have to the problems that confront the country.

Several hon. Members rose --

Mr. Blair : I shall take the interventions in turn. First, I give way to the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Mr. Nicholls).

Mr. Nicholls : Will the hon. Gentleman name a single major strike that the Labour party has condemned over the past 10 years?

Mr. Blair : We have made it absolutely clear that we want a fair and balanced framework of law and good industrial relations. If I were in the hon. Gentleman's position, I should be answering and asking questions about the 1,000 or more additional people who have become unemployed in his constituency over the past year.

Mr. Janman : People want the answers to two questions. First, if--in the unlikely event of Labour's being elected to govern, and in the unlikely event of the hon. Gentleman's occupying the post of Secretary of State for Employment--a number of people take strike action in a company without going through the balloting procedure, or infringe some other part of what now constitutes the definition of a trade dispute, will their employer be able to obtain an injunction from the courts requiring the union to stop its action? Secondly, if the injunction is granted, will the court still have powers to sequestrate the funds of a union that ignores it?

Those are the questions that people are asking, and they want to hear the answers from the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair).

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Harold Walker) : Order. Interventions should be brief.

Mr. Blair : Let me answer both those questions. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Janman) speaks as though they had not been answered before. Let me repeat what I stated in published correspondence, referring to our policy document :

"To qualify for legal protection, industrial action requires the support of a properly conducted ballot."

It could not be put more clearly than that. As for the courts' powers to implement matters, we state that they will have "the full powers of enforcement and damages."

What I would expect from the hon. Gentleman is some hint of apology for having promised his constituents that there would be no recession, given that more than 1,000 extra people have lost their jobs in his constituency over the past year. We have heard no such apology from him.

Mr. Marlow : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blair : I will give way once more, but then I must get on.

Mr. Marlow : I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. At the outset of his speech, he said that what we should be talking about is how we are to get out of the recession. How are we to get out of the recession, if the hon. Gentleman and his party want to impose a tax on

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savings and a tax on investment ; if they want to impose the social charter--the curse of Delors--on industry ; and if they want to revise the law on secondary picketing, allowing secondary pickets of Wagnerian proportions to run up and down the country? How will that get us out of the recession?

Mr. Blair : The hon. Gentleman will know, if he reads The Independent --perhaps he does not--that even the Democratic group in the European Parliament, which his party is seeking to join--he may not know that--has just issued a statement in which it deplores the Prime Minister's attitude to the European social charter. That is what sensible people think.

Mr. Phillip Oppenheim (Amber Valley) : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blair : No. I am sorry, but I wish to get on.

Today, we will set out a modern agenda for people at the workplace. That, surely, should start with their having a workplace to be at ; but, since March 1990, nearly 1 million extra people have become unemployed. Every region of Britain has been affected. In the south-east, 400,000 more people have become unemployed ; in the midlands, 200,000 more ; in the south-west, 100,000 more ; in the north-west, 80,000 more. Tens of thousands more have become unemployed in Wales, Scotland and the north-east.

According to figures published today, youth unemployment--which the Secretary of State did not even mention--has risen by 35 per cent. in the past year. Nearly 800,000 young people between the ages of 18 and 24 are now unemployed. According to the figures on long-term unemployment--also announced today--three quarters of a million people in this country have now been out of work for over a year. We did not hear a single mention of that from the Secretary of State.

Mr. Donald Anderson (Swansea, East) : I agree with my hon. Friend. These are the questions that our people are asking--2.6 million of them, including 800,000 young people. They will be amazed at the nerve and cheek that the Government have displayed in arranging such a debate at such a time. In so far as the Secretary of State and his right hon. and hon. Friends have any expertise at all in this regard, it is expertise in job destruction.

Mr. Blair : My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Is it not staggering that the two subjects that the Secretary of State did not mention were unemployment and training? Those, surely, are the subjects that we should be debating nowadays.

Men in their 50s have been made redundant, and are unlikely ever to work again. Young people now roam the streets of our cities without work, hope or welfare. On the radio today, we heard of a new initiative launched by food companies to help people who are suffering from malnutrition--not in eastern Europe or in the developing world, but here, in today's Tory Britain. That is the scandal that we should be debating.

We should be debating the plight of young couples who were promised an economic miracle, who budgeted, borrowed and planned on that basis, and who now find that one partner--if not both--is without work and without the means to pay the mortgage, while their wealth is tied up in a house that is a declining asset.

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We should consider those who were encouraged to go out and spend, and who are now being told that they should not have been so reckless. Those people are not the authors of their own misfortune ; the authors are a Government, and a Prime Minister, who first promised them that there would never be a recession, who then said that the recession would be shallow and not deep and who, for the past year, have pretended that recovery was under way when they must have known that it was not.

Mr. Hain : Does my hon. Friend agree that the Secretary of State should apologise to the House, not only for the misdemeanours of his office over the past year but for the answer that he gave me earlier when I raised the question of industrial accidents?

The Secretary of State cited a meeting of the Health and Safety Commission at which he was present. I have since spoken to a TUC representative on the commission, Mr. Alan Tuffin of the Union of Communication Workers. He flatly denies the representation of the facts that the House were given this afternoon.

The Secretary of State said that the TUC had admitted that regulations of operating elsewhere in Europe were not necessarily as good as those operating in the United Kingdom. The fact is, however, that the number of industrial accidents is increasing. That is the fact that the Secretary of State refused to concede. The TUC put the point to him this very morning. Why did he not mention that in his reply to me?

Mr. Howard rose --

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. We do not have intervention on intervention.

Mr. Blair : My hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr. Hain) has made a telling point. It has to be said that it should not entirely surprise us in regard to the Secretary of State, since, whatever qualities he has, the keen pursuit of the absolute truth is not one of them.

Mr. Howard : The hon. Member for Neath (Mr. Hain) is wrong in what he said. The specific point raised at the meeting of the Health and Safety Commission that I attended was that recent research has taken place on the level of industrial accidents across Europe. The clear conclusion is that we have a lower rate of accidents than practically any other member state of the European Community. The fact that they are increasing is a different point, and certainly not a point which I made earlier. It has nothing to do with what I said earlier. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw his entirely unsubstantiated and unjustified remark.

Mr. Blair : We can study the record. I did not think that that was quite the point which my hon. Friend was putting to the Secretary of State earlier. Perhaps they can have correspondence. It would be a relief if the right hon. and learned Gentleman was writing to someone other than me.

Mr. John Evans (St. Helens, North) : Is my hon. Friend aware that industrial accidents are increasing? Is it not also a fact that under the Employment Act 1990, individual employees are not allowed to walk off a job even when the job is unsafe and dangerous? Is my hon. Friend aware that this morning I attended a memorial service, organised by the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians, at the Westminster Roman Catholic cathedral, in respect of the 129 UCATT members who lost

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their lives in industrial accidents in Great Britain last year? Does my hon. Friend agree that industrial accidents are increasing in Tory Britain partly because of the legislation that the Secretary of State put through the House?

Mr. Blair : My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is extraordinary that in a debate on industrial relations the Secretary of State does not deal with these points.

I was talking about the predictions of recovery that used to be made by Ministers. For example, the Prime Minister said : "Britain's position is strengthening month by month".

That is what he told us in the middle of last year. The Chancellor, back in May said :

"Things are starting to go rather well for the economy." The Prime Minister again :

"I am confident that in the second half of the year the economy will begin to take off."

Of course, there was the famous statement by the Chancellor : "The green shoots of economic spring are appearing once again." The Secretary of State himself was never outdone by the Chancellor or the Prime Minister. He said last year :

"There is abundant evidence our policies are working extremely effectively."

He also said that there were

"unmistakable signs of the end of the recession."

He finally outdid himself when, on the eve of bad unemployment figures, he talked about a golden decade about to break upon the economy.

The Government's incompetence in giving us the recession was bad enough, but what people will not forgive or forget is the deception that sought to persuade people that the recession was over when, in truth, it was only entering its second phase. Why were they telling us in June, July and October last year that the recession was over and the economy was getting better? It was so that they could have an election in November before the country discovered the truth. Of course, the country has discovered the truth, so they have moved on and they tell us that the problem is all to do with the world recession. We should look at the Department's own figures for employment and unemployment over the past year in Europe. No other country has suffered as great a rise in unemployment as us. The same is projected for next year. The Secretary of State's ultimate excuse was that the three-monthly trend in unemployment was at least down. Last Thursday, that also failed. Every day in Britain, thousands more join the dole queue as a result of the errors of his Government. Let us be clear : it is not over-powerful trade unions which have made redundant those people and hundreds of thousands more, but a Government who had the power to help them and now have deserted them.

Mr. Nicholls rose --

Mr. Blair : No, I want to press on.

It is eight months since the Secretary of State announced his emergency programme, employment action, to help the unemployed, in particular in the south. Since then 300,000 more have become unemployed, to add to the 700,000 extra since the recession began. May I tell the House how many people are on the unemployment action programme? It is around 10,000, as the Secretary of State admitted today. That is only a fraction of the increase in the numbers of unemployed, let alone digging deep into those who were already unemployed before the

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recession began. Instead of attacking the trade unions today, why did not the Secretary of State announce a proper programme for the unemployed?

Mr. Nicholls rose --

Mr. Blair : No, I am not giving way.

It is just like that other great initiative of Majorism--the proposal for the homeless announced last November. I understand that the so-called emergency package has not yet stopped a single repossession. It is not trade unions which have made the people homeless. It is not strikes which are making businesses bankrupt. The people made redundant know that their problems are caused not by their employers but by a Government who have betrayed both them and their employers during the recession.

Mr. Rowe : Any objective observer has to accept that there may have been some rashness in cutting interest rates at the moment the Government did, which may have helped to worsen the economic position. What the hon. Gentleman has to explain is why, when that possible misjudgment was made, the shadow Chancellor demanded that much more of a cut should have been made in interest rates.

Mr. Blair : As we have told the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends many times, the fault was to combine interest rate cuts with a tax-cutting Budget in 1988 which ruined the economy. [Interruption.] Hon. Members need not take our word for it. Even the Chancellor the other day was saying that the deregulation of the financial markets was a major factor in the recession.

Mr. Janman rose --

Mr. Blair : No, I will have to get on ; I have given way to the hon. Gentleman already.

The downfall of those people has not been poor industrial relations but incompetent government. Good industrial relations are vital. What is more, there is a virtual consensus, including unions and employers, about a modern agenda for industrial relations. The damage in continually harping back is not just that the difficulties of the 1990s lie unaddressed but that the solutions to those difficulties become obscured and even obstructed.

After unemployment, the single most important issue facing the country is the need to improve radically and urgently the education of our work force. It is only in the past few weeks that new and profoundly worrying evidence of the skills gap between Britain and our main competitors has emerged. The school of education at the university of Manchester, within the last few weeks, has said : "Because schools in effect dismiss a large proportion of the population as unacademic rather than developing their talents for making things, designing things and working with people, Britain lacks the range and level of developed skills that other countries have at their disposal."

A study by Professor Rose at Strathclyde university just a few months ago indicated that we are falling behind Germany even as a proportion of those getting access to decent training and education. Mr. Nicholls rose --

Mr. Blair : I have given way a great deal.

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The number of apprentices in the United Kingdom stands at 350,000. In Germany it is 1.5 million. Is it any wonder when, over the 13 years of Conservative Government, Germany has been investing 50 per cent. more in employees to make sure that those apprenticeships happen? What is the Government's response to that crisis? After black Thursday came black Friday last week ; according to the Department's own spending figures, £170 million in real terms will be cut from training next year. There will be cuts of £60 million in youth training and £50 million in employment training.

Since March 1990, when unemployment started rising, even on the Government's own figures 130,000 places have gone from training for young people and the unemployed. All over the country, training places are collapsing, training providers are closing and trainers are being made redundant. In those circumstances, it is the height of irresponsibility for the Secretary of State to fail even to mention today the training problems that this country faces.

When we raised the matter last November, the Secretary of State told us that the information that had been given by training and enterprise councils to the Select Committee on Employment about their problems in meeting the youth training guarantee was all out of date. We were told that the letters had been written before there was a settlement. I defy the Secretary of State to say now that there is not widespread concern and anger throughout training and enterprise councils and training providers at what is being offered in both youth training and employment training.

I defy the Secretary of State to tell us that TECs have not been in touch with his Department to complain bitterly about the cuts that he is currently forcing through. Indeed, since last November, the very time when he told us that these problems had been sorted out, Fullemploy has collapsed, as have Apex Trust, Hexagon--which was mentioned during the speech of the Secretary of State--Jobstream, and Sefton Dale training centre. Training providers up and down the country who could be skilling our work force for the 1990s are going out of business because of the policies that the Secretary of State is pursuing.

Over the past four years, £1 billion in real terms has been cut from training provision. Nothing could be more irresponsible or more incompetent. In our view, there is nothing more important than investment in training and in skills. In manufacturing, the key will be the application of ever more sophisticated technology by ever more highly trained people. In services, public or private, the consumer will demand ever higher levels of choice and satisfaction from employees, who must be able to supply them. In our view, a modern framework of industrial relations should start with the training and education of our work force.

If the quality of the work force is the key to transformation of our industrial relations we shall not get the best out of our employees by treating them like the worst. Fair treatment at the workplace today is not only a question of justice but an essential part of a modern economy. That is why we and every other party--Labour or Conservative--in Europe support the European social charter and the idea of basic employment standards across Europe.

Let us consider the declaration made by the very group in the European Parliament that the Secretary of State's party is trying to join. That group supports the European

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social charter. When, over the past few weeks, we had discussions in the capitals of Europe, even from conservative Employment Ministers we heard ridicule of the plans of the Secretary of State for Employment. Those people said that the social charter was an essential aspect of a decent, modern, productive work force. Why should not we have decent maternity leave benefits across the Community to enable women to raise a family and work? Why should not part-time employees have equal status with full-time employees so that they may have the benefits to which they are entitled? There should be a right to decent information about the decisions that affect employees and to participation in those decisions. And, of course, we need health and safety legislation to protect employees against the short-cut to profit that puts them at risk. Then there is the need for action to eradicate poverty levels of pay and to stop the taxpayers' subsidising of the low-pay employer. On top of that, why should not a work force have the right to membership of a free and independent trade union and to the benefits of that membership? Every other country in Europe and in the rest of the western world gives those rights to people. Why cannot such rights be granted to our employees? Why not, as part of the start of a fair system of work, reverse the ban on free and independent trade unions at GCHQ, as any sensible Government would do?

The Secretary of State talks about abuses at the workplace. Let me tell him what many people believe to be the abuses at the workplace in 1992. I refer, for instance, to some of the salary increases granted to utilities chairmen under privatisation. What about the golden goodbyes, golden parachutes, given to people leaving firms, even when those firms have failed?

Mr. Lawrence Cooklin, chief executive of Burton--a group showing a loss of £165 million, which represents a halving of the value of its stock-- gets, as the penalty, a £1 million golden goodbye. Mr. Warman and Mr. Bannister, of Saatchi and Saatchi, have received over £1 million. The finance director of British Aerospace received a pay-off of £500,000 days after the company had made 2,000 people redundant. I say that those are some of the abuses at the workplace today.

Surely these are the issues of the new agenda for industrial relations : unemployment, training, better opportunities for women, and fairness at the workplace. Those will address the new challenges. Britain cannot compete in the 21st century as a low-skill, low-tech economy, trying to undercut the low wages of the developing world. That way--the Tory way--has been tried for 13 years, and it has not worked. Our competitors, not just in Europe but even in the developing world, know that. It is not just France, but now even Hong Kong, which has recently adopted a training levy ; it is not just Germany but now South Korea, which has a higher proportion of its school leavers in full-time education than does Britain ; It is not just Italy, but now Indonesia, which is making investment in high-level manufacturing production a priority.

These new challenges cannot be met either by turning the clock back or through the old and familiar litany of bigotry and prejudice that we heard today. A Conservative party, faced with the profound problems of recession- -rising unemployment, a crisis in the nation's skills and training--has as its sole response, stripped of its pretentions, simply an old-fashioned rant about trade

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unions. Such a party does not deserve re- election as the Government of Great Britain. People do not want to go back. That is agreed and accepted. I say that in this decade they want to go forward, and under Labour they will be able to do so.

Hon. Members : Hear, hear!

5.6 pm

Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent) : If I am allowed to interrupt this orgy of self-congratulation from the Opposition, I should like to try to be a little emollient in what has become a somewhat heated exchange. The Labour party deserves encouragement. It has come a long way since it opposed strike ballots ; it has come a long way since it fought to retain closed shops ; it has come a long way since its Members of Parliament revelled in the publicity that they could achieve by standing on bloated picket lines. I hope that I may encourage it to move a little further. We might sometimes even see some of its spokesmen prepared to condemn strikes, rather than consistently encourage them. We might get Opposition Members to understand a little of the basic economics of employment and pay.

As I pointed out in an intervention during the speech of my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State, it is a remarkable fact that the Labour party, in its most recent policy document, attacks the Conservative party's record. That attack includes the following sentence :

"Unit labour costs in the United Kingdom have gone up, while those in Germany, Italy and France have fallen."

A little later in the same policy document, the Opposition emerges with its solution to that problem. Its solution is, of course, the statutory minimum wage.

I am not clear how the statutory minimum wage which is to be introduced immediately Labour takes office will resolve the problem of unit labour costs in the United Kingdom being higher than those of our competitors. One of the remarkable achievements of recent months has been the fall in those costs--a necessary prerequisite for our economy to start on the recovery for which it is extremely well prepared.

I was interested to hear the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) glorying in the fact that he would return to a compulsory training levy. I wonder how many employers--especially smaller employers--will welcome that commitment. The compulsory training levy was one of the burdens on industry which employers were anxious to remove. The consequence of its removal has been a dramatic shift from the position in 1979 when everyone looked to central Government to provide all the training budget to one in which the vast majority of training expenditure now falls, quite properly, on employers.

Mr. Robert N. Wareing (Liverpool, West Derby) : The hon. Gentleman talks about unit labour costs. Is he aware that unit labour costs might fall if labour were given more capital to spend? One of the problems in this country is that we have not had the same manufacturing investment as Germany, France and Italy. We noticed that the Secretary of State refused to answer any questions about the comparison with other countries in the Community in terms of manufacturing investment since 1979 because we are near the bottom of the league--only Greece has been lower in that league table.

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Mr. Rowe : I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. The more investment there is per employee, the greater the opportunity to make a profit ; but by far the soundest basis for investment is the profitability of a company, and it is the reinvestment of profits which makes the difference. If taxation and compulsory basic wage regimes make it harder for companies to make and retain their profits, they will have less to invest. If the hon. Gentleman wants to see the truth of that, he has only to consider two British

companies--British Gas and Glaxo--to see the amount they invest in providing not only technology but training for their employees. They are very successful companies, but there are dangers if one is also trying to increase employment in the short term.

There is no doubt that the more technology that is given to individual employees, the fewer employees one requires in the short term, but I realise that, in the medium and long term, that is the only way in which to proceed. I hope that we shall rapidly return to a position in which companies make very large profits so that they can invest those profits in the training and new machinery that they require.

Another terribly important change that has taken place in recent years is that companies have ceased to do all their innovative work in house. They have decided--quite properly--that it is more flexible, efficient and rewarding to put the work out, often to small specialist subcontractors, who are quicker on their feet and more in touch with the cutting edge of technology, and who can adapt what they do more quickly than many large companies can in house. As a consequence, not only is the number of employees employed by large companies falling, but smaller firms cannot survive if they are bound by such regulation as the European Community would like to force on us.

It was a courageous step by the Prime Minister at Maastricht to refuse to sign the European social charter. There are already clear signs that Germany in particular, but other countries too, are beginning to think very hard about the rigidity which will be forced on them by that charter.

It was interesting to hear the hon. Member for Sedgefield talk with such passion and fervour about the interview in which he said that he would in no circumstances encourage the sympathetic strike action which his interlocutor was trying to elicit. From the Labour party's latest policy document--I think that it is the latest, but it might be the second latest- -it is clear that, if an employer is deemed in any way to be assisting the employer against whom the strike action is being taken, it will allow, indeed encourage, secondary action. From the example that the hon. Gentleman quoted in his interview, I should have thought that, if a power station or something similar were being picketed, the chances of secondary action against anyone who attempted to supply it or to offer any other supportive action would be very great. In that case, we would be straight back to the destructive industrial action from which the Government have mercifully released us. I hope that members of the public will remember what it was like in the days when such sympathy action and secondary picketing was paramount.

Even though at present there is a lamentable number of people out of work-- I certainly understand the cost to people who lose their jobs--we should congratulate ourselves that 2 million more people are in work now than

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