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Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow): On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Under the rules of the House, points of order must be raised at 11 o'clock. Following the request from my right hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster) and myself, have you had any request from the Government to make a statement on what purports to have come from the office of the Prime Minister's press secretary, Mr. Jonathan Haslam, that, whereas Ministers have been acquitted, civil servants have not, and disciplinary consequences are likely to follow?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): The hon. Gentleman is mistaken in thinking that points of order must be raised at 11 o'clock. I think that he is referring to Government statements, which would be made at 11 o'clock on a Friday morning, so I would have preferred him to allow his hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, Central to complete his speech. However, let me deal with the point that he has raised.
I was present in the Chamber when Madam Speaker made her ruling on this. I can tell the hon. Gentleman that I have not had any subsequent indication, and no indication has been given to Madam Speaker, that the Government wish to make a statement; but, of course, the Minister who is present will have heard the point that the hon. Gentleman has made.
Mr. Derek Foster (Bishop Auckland):
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I apologise to the House and to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds,
The Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs (Mr. John M. Taylor):
I intend no discourtesy to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to the House, to the hon. Member for Linlithgow or to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland. You are right, of course, to say that there has been no ministerial request to make a statement this morning--least of all, if I may say so, by me. I shall certainly report the exchanges this morning to my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade. I give the House my word on that.
Madam Deputy Speaker:
That deals with the matter. We may now return to the speech of the hon. Member for Leeds, Central.
Mr. Fatchett:
We have almost reached the second half of the game, but in no sense do you, Madam Deputy Speaker, need to protect me from my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow. I do not bear a grievance against him, because I know that his intervention would have fallen totally within the remit of the Bill. My hon. Friend's intervention was accurate and in good faith, so I was delighted to have it. It also enabled me to have a few minutes to think before I came to my final comments, so it had another benefit.
I now deal with the compliance cost and the nature of management and secrecy in our society. The hon. Member for Gosport made much about the potential compliance cost to business. My hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn said, correctly, that his Bill will not add to those costs. He also talked about his own experience of running a small business. It will not set up a new regulator, as the hon. Member for Chingford made clear, and I suspect that we would have had great difficulty in persuading him to be a supporter of the Bill if any regulation had been involved.
The Bill directly will not impinge on the overwhelming majority of employment situations--one could almost go as far as to say 99.999 per cent. of them. We are talking about a handful of cases, and for those companies, yes, there will be a small compliance cost if they do not listen to the truth and the whistleblower. The fact is that, if those companies were sensible, there would be not a compliance cost but a compliance gain, because the new practices would enable them to find out what is going on in their organisation much more effectively.
My final point is about what my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn called the culture of secrecy in our society, in which there is power for those who hold information, and a lack of power for those who do not. We need to change that. Those who have read the Scott report should forget the activities of individual Ministers and civil servants. What comes out of the report is a structure, a web of secrecy, a web of confidentiality, not because, in the vast majority of cases, people have been malicious or difficult to others, but simply because that is
the way in which we expect to administer business in our society. We need to change that culture, and good business organisations are already changing that approach. My hon. Friend mentioned some of the companies that have changed their style.
One of the most interesting things about the past few years has been the way in which good private sector organisations have flattened their hierarchies, opened up their communication systems and made it much more possible for the individual to be a team player and to express ideas and provide information.
One thing that desperately worries me is that, while the private sector has adopted good industrial practices in terms of management, the public sector has gone in the other direction. I worry about NHS trusts, for example, which have a new, macho style of management, in which there is an expectation of compliance on the part of the individual. There are real dangers in that. We need to change to a much flatter structure, one that is much more open, and do so in a way that will allow individuals in our society to be creative. My hon. Friend's Bill will open up the valve for those creative abilities, will allow more people to play a real part, and will change the culture of management.
Mr. Michael Stern (Bristol, North-West):
I join colleagues on both sides of the House in congratulating the hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) on raising what is undoubtedly an important subject for debate.
The diversity of the debate so far has shown the extent to which the arguments need to be refined, and perhaps narrowed, before we draft a Bill to deal with the abuses that the hon. Gentleman has rightly dealt with, while at the same time not catching a great deal that does not need to be dealt with or that could be positively damaged by the Bill as drafted.
I mean no disrespect to the hon. Gentleman when I say that I am unhappy about some aspects of the Bill. The public might gain if the Bill went into Committee, but I do not believe that the arguments have been defined with sufficient clarity to enable the Bill to become law in the next few years. I shall express my doubts about some parts of the Bill, and my absolute abhorrence of one part.
I deal first with commercial confidentiality. It is easy to dismiss the effects that the Bill may have on companies and on the climate within those companies, as the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett) just did, by saying that there will be few cases, that they will improve the climate within the company and that they are likely to have little effect. I accept that there are cases in which the hon. Gentleman's description of the climate that would be created by the Bill is correct. However, I hope that he accepts that there are an equal number of cases where the climate created would not be as he described.
One of the largest employers in my constituency is British Aerospace. British Aerospace, especially in major aviation construction on which it concentrates in Filton, faces extremely difficult, cut-throat competition from aerospace industries throughout the world. What typifies
that competition is the desire of the company's competitors to achieve a competitive advantage, by whatever means, and to obtain or influence a contract that will provide employment for many thousands of people for many years. The fear that would be generated by the Bill in circumstances of such extreme competition is that it would be open to an employee, by making a disclosure under the Bill, to destroy the competitive position of the company that had been built up over many years.
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