Examination of Witnesses (Questions 164-179)
MR NIGEL
STANLEY
28 JUNE 2006
Q164 Chairman: Mr Stanley, you have had
the benefit of hearing our line of questions to Mr Cridland from
the CBI. The questions are the same basically because what we
are looking at is whether, and in what way, the legislative process
should be improved, in this case from the perspective of the TUC.
Mr Stanley: I think it is quite
hard for outsiders to answer all the lines of question to date.
To some extent our job is to understand the system as it is and
then work out the best ways of influencing it. The more the system
changes, the more we will look for different ways to influence
it. The answers to all of your questions are we are going to want
more points of access, more opportunities to influence the decisions
that we do not like and we do not want to see the people who disagree
with us having points of access to decisions we do like. To some
extent, we judge the legislative process by its outcome rather
than by the procedures it goes through. In general, I associate
the TUC with the views of the CBI that the more pre-legislative
scrutiny there is, the more debate, the more opportunity there
is to put our point of view, the better we like it.
Q165 Chairman: I understand the point
you are making but the issue is, is the current system a wholly
rational one, has it reached a state of grace that does not require
any further amendment, and I think the answer to both those questions
is no, in which case how do we improve it so Parliament can do
its job better, and the Commons can, so we are scrutinising legislation
more effectively. As part of that, what opportunity is there for
members of the public and for important national organisations,
in this case the TUC, to make an input which has better effect
than it does at the moment. On issues like special standing committee
Mr Cridland was pretty clear that he would like something approaching
that process. Is that also your view?
Mr Stanley: Yes, on the kind of
bills where it is suitable. One has to talk about the politics
of different bills. There are some bills where there is really
a lot of debate about the technical detail, they are very, very
complicated, and others where there are much more flagship political
decisions where I suspect that all will be reverting to some of
the political arguments about it. Bills like the Company Law Reform
Bill, which is hugely complicated, hugely technical, lots of room
for debate about how best to do things, are an ideal opportunity
to do things, but if you take something like the minimum wage,
which was highly controversial but of great interest to the TUC,
it may not have been quite so appropriate, it was a relatively
simple procedure, a debate about whether it was a good thing or
not. There have to be some horses for courses. The more complicated,
the more technical, the more there is a desire by everyone to
get some degree of stakeholder consensus about the legislation,
the more appropriate those kinds of procedures become.
Q166 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Can
I ask you, Mr Stanley, the same question I asked Mr Cridland,
the first question. If you had the opportunity of dictating changes
to our legislative process, and I know you have associated yourself
very much with a great deal of what Mr Cridland said on behalf
of the CBI, what would those two changes be to our legislative
process to make it more relevant, to make it more transparent,
to make it easier—to use the Chairman's word—for stakeholders
to influence legislation?
Mr Stanley: I think the first
change would be exactly the same as Mr Cridland's: more pre-legislative
scrutiny, more special standing committees, more opportunities
to present evidence to parliamentarians before they start getting
into the detail of the Bill. The second change is almost more
of a cultural change. The impression we get is that very many
standing committees on bills are very ritualised, there is not
very much in the way of real debate or real change. We do not
put a lot of resources into influencing things at the standing
committee stage because it is very much the government wants to
get its business through, and I understand that, and I have seen
it operate in governments of different parties.
Sir Nicholas Winterton: Can I just interrupt
for a moment. One of the sadnesses, and I witness it because I
chair standing committees, is that the government of the day,
and I am not levelling any greater accusation against the present
government than I would a previous Conservative and Unionist government—
Chairman: You can if you want!
Q167 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Do you
feel it is unfortunate that governments seem to believe that the
bill is presented to the House as a virility symbol and that it
must not be changed and, therefore, even if excellent amendments
are tabled, sometimes by their own members let alone opposition
parties, they are reluctant to accept them?
Mr Stanley: I would agree with
that but I would also add the caveat that perhaps oppositions
need to resist the temptation to shout "u-turn" every
time such a change gets made in standing committee.
Chairman: That is a very good answer.
Sir Nicholas Winterton: One which I did
not expect! Thank you.
Q168 Mr Burstow: Can I just pick
up on the point you were making about standing committees not
being an area where you would invest a great deal of your effort
in terms of trying to influence the outcome of the process. Could
you talk us through, from your perspective, where you generally
regard the best points of influence to be, where the best points
of leverage are from your point of view in experiencing the process.
Mr Stanley: I would say they tend
to be directly with government because it is government that draws
up the bills, it is government that wants to get them through.
We are a big national organisation but we have limited resources
and the sheer quantity of legislation, and that is not a criticism,
it is just an observation, means that we cannot follow every bill
through every process. It is easier to have a structured conversation
with government and with ministers about what they want to get
through the bill so, on the whole, that is where we put our efforts
and where we hope to make the most difference. There are some
issues which become live issues amongst MPs where you sense that
there is some point in doing that. To give an example from recent
deliberations, I would say in the debate about smoking in the
workplace, where we had a very clear point of view, there was
clearly disagreement amongst MPs, it was not much of a party issue.
We argued all along it should be a free vote, and eventually it
became one, so we did put quite a lot of effort into that, but
that was not so much in the formal processes, it was more raising
it as an issue and getting the sense that something must be done
which is usually the prerequisite before there being any legislation.
Q169 Mr Burstow: Just to follow that
up one step further, I assume your remarks are primarily addressed
to procedures in the Commons and the process in the Commons?
Mr Stanley: Yes.
Q170 Mr Burstow: Obviously that is
what we are focusing on. But do you take any different view about
attempting to take part in and influence the process when it reaches
the Lords' stages?
Mr Stanley: The Lords has a different
atmosphere, there is less strength of party whipping. It is sometimes
easier for the Executive to change things in the Lords because
it does not get into this macho, u-turn type stuff. I do not want
to give the impression that I buy into the idea that everything
in the Lords is superior to the Commons and everyone is a great
expert, there are many debates that do not always bear out that
view in the Lords, but sometimes there is definite expertise and
you can get a real debate amongst people who have a lot to say
about something with some deep personal knowledge and that can
make some difference at the margin. Again, they tend to be about
the more technical aspects of bills rather than the more political
ideological elements of bills. There is something that can be
learned from that. The Moses Room procedure is rather interesting
where you have perhaps got time on less controversial issues with
people with real expertise to spend quite a bit of time looking
at something in a rather constructive way than the ritualistic
way you get sometimes in standing committees.
Q171 Mr Knight: Is what you are saying
this, in effect, that the publication of a draft bill and the
pre-legislative scrutiny process should become the norm rather
than the exception because ministers are willing to be more flexible
and there can be no accusations of a u-turn because nothing is
set in stone?
Mr Stanley: I am not sure I am
going to say the majority. I am going to say that I think there
are bills where it is particularly appropriate and it is useful
when the government does that because they are almost signalling,
"This is a bill over which perhaps we are prepared to make
adjustments, we do not necessarily have fixed ways of doing it.
Perhaps the objectives are clear and rather consensual but there
is a lot of room to debate about mechanisms". There are some
bills, short ones, highly controversial ones, where that would
be less appropriate. There has to be some judgment. My worry would
be that if it was a rule that applied to all of them that the
rather ritualistic nature of standing committees might then start
to apply to some of these other procedures as well and there would
not be the signal there is at the moment which organisations like
the TUC find really useful, that this is somewhere we can make
a difference, this is somewhere it is really worth putting some
of our resources into.
Q172 Mark Lazarowicz: It strikes
me that if we were to end up with a much more open system where
organisations like your own could get involved in the consultative
processes and put a lot of their views to us, there would be a
panic amongst your organisation and others as to how they would
respond to those offers of consultation and involvement. Presumably
you would have to prioritise how you got involved and you would
have to make changes. To do that you would require good information
about what is going on. I would be interested in knowing first
of all what kind of information you would find particularly useful,
if there should be more than we provide at the moment to allow
you to decide where best to get yourself involved in the process
of consultation and, in that context, what is your opinion of
the current information that accompanies bills, Explanatory Memoranda
and all the rest of it, do you find that useful and what else
could be provided?
Mr Stanley: I think there are
a number of questions bundled up there. First of all, you are
right, it is very hard even for organisations like the TUC, and
I would guess the CBI, to really understand everything that is
going on that might have some implications for our concerns. To
some extent, asking for more information to be published is possibly
not the right thing. It is making it useful, making it easy to
find, easy to search. The ability to search is so much more powerful
than the ability to just order an enormous number of documents
and have to go through them. In general, we find Explanatory Notes
helpful. Legislation can be very hard to follow, particularly
when it refers to changes in previous legislation and you have
to try and find that, and that is not always easy to do. The more
things that are in plain English, the better. The easier it is
to trace the changes in bills as they go through the parliamentary
procedure, the better that is. All of these things are very helpful
to us.
Q173 Paddy Tipping: Could I ask about
RIAs. Clearly they have got implications for your membership.
I find them helpful. Do you think they are evidence-based and
are you involved in the formulation of the RIAs?
Mr Stanley: We are. I think we
would agree they are getting better but we have had some severe
problems with them in the past. The classic one that we always
cite is the original Regulatory Impact Assessment around the European
Working Time Directive and the limitation to 48 hours as the average
working week. The Regulatory Impact Assessment worked out the
cost of this by assuming that employers would continue to have
exactly the same numbers of hours of labour and would employ extra
people and pay them exactly the same, which we thought was an
extremely pessimistic view of the ingenuity of British management
that they could not think of some way of increasing their productivity.
That figure is out there, it is regularly quoted as a "This
is the cost of red tape in Britain" figure when actually
the evidence base for that was very bad. A lot of these things
are very hard to assess. Clearly there are some cost implications
in a measure like that but what they will be and how ingenious
people will be in responding to them is very hard to capture.
We are not against RIAs but we are sometimes a bit sceptical about
them. Often it is much harder to quantify the benefits that regulations
have as well and to put a monetary figure on those, so they do
not tend to get put into the equation. Sometimes there is also
confusion between the cost of implementation and the cost of the
policy. If we take the minimum wage, there is clearly a cost in
paying people more money but the actual cost of implementing it
is not very bureaucratic, it is just a simple wage you have to
pay, compared with, say, the working time rules where there are
records to be kept, it is really rather complicated, it is quite
difficult for unions to understand and for managers to understand
because it is not a straightforward, simple rule. Differentiating
between those two costs, the cost of actually implementing and
the cost of administering, is often a missed opportunity in RIAs.
Q174 Paddy Tipping: But you think
they are improving?
Mr Stanley: We think they are
getting better. We are not certain they have got it yet.
Chairman: Mr Stanley, I am one of the
people who quoted the cost of implementing the Working Time Directive
in that form so I think it is a pretty pukka figure but, anyway,
we will not go down that route.
Q175 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Could
I just ask Mr Stanley whether he would support the CBI—I
am not sure he has indicated—in their view that secondary
legislation could and should be subject to amendment because increasingly
secondary legislation forms part of primary legislation and when
secondary legislation is introduced it can add considerable burdens
and regulation to existing legislation. Do you think it should
be subject to amendment?
Mr Stanley: I think we have some
strong sympathy with the idea that a lot of secondary legislation,
as I think you said in your earlier question, is becoming a bigger
feature of bills and has been for some time, it is not associated
with this government in particular, and it does not often get
enough scrutiny. I would be a bit worried about having a simple
amendment stage because you could end up with some political dissatisfaction
being expressed through an amendment to a set of regulations which
then become very hard to implement because they would be technically
unsound in some way. I think we should have a simple, let us have
a debate where we can have amendments to it without getting a
surprise, but if you have a full parliamentary procedure with
further chances to scrutinise then you may end up with simply
having the legislation again and bottlenecks and all kinds of
things. I am not sure there is a simple solution to this problem
but there is a problem. It may be that you should borrow something
from the trade union movement which is to refer things back sometimes
if you think the government has got it wrong and say to the government,
"You need to redraft this, it does not meet our desires".
Q176 Sir Nicholas Winterton: That
could be achieved by a sunset clause which, again, the CBI did
mention. That means that after, say, two years, three years, five
years, a particular aspect of a piece of legislation could automatically
end and be reviewed.
Mr Stanley: Again, the general
support for this is from those who are generally opposed to regulations
in the first place, which I am not sure I want to associate the
TUC with. I think it is a horses for courses issue. There may
well be a case for some regulations to have reviews, just as in
the way there is a case often for putting positive agreement so
there has to be a formal vote on regulatory changes as well. I
would not want to generalise too much. If you had a sunset clause
on everything, after a few years there would be so many reviews
of, frankly, very uncontroversial sunset clauses you would end
up with another bottleneck, another huge amount of monitoring
for people trying to follow parliamentary business and you may
end up clogging your arteries with sunset clauses after a while.
Chairman: Just on this point about reference
back. The problem with reference back is at the moment you have
got a procedure which is either yes or no, and if it is no then
the thing has to start again. Just to tease out what you are saying,
Mr Stanley, it might be possible to have a halfway house where
it is not that the Commons has rejected a piece of legislation
but it could, for example, delay it and that may be something
we need to look at. Personally, I think there are some quite serious
problems in the way of amending regulations just in practice,
being responsible for volumes of these things. That is a matter
to be discussed.
Q177 Sir Nicholas Winterton: 1,500
statutory instruments in the course of a year. We are already
faced with that.
Mr Stanley: Yes.
Q178 Paddy Tipping: Could I ask about
European legislation. How do you think we can deal with that?
How can that be improved?
Mr Stanley: In general I think
we take the view if it is European legislation we expect it to
be implemented and on very much of it, in some sense, having a
long debate is something I can see the point of but it is not
something that we would choose to deploy our resources or be involved
in because the outcome of it is still going to be whether it follows
the European requirements or not. The idea of having the same
MPs gaining expertise on the domestic and the European implications
of things, which was discussed earlier, is one that inherently
makes sense to me. Giving MPs a chance to build up expertise so
that any measures are going to people who do know something about
what they are scrutinising must be a good thing. We do not put
very much effort into following the path of European legislation.
Again, we might talk to government about how they intend to do
it but it is not somewhere where there is much opportunity for
people who are not parliamentarians to have much of an impact
on what will happen, so it is not something where we put much
of our resources.
Q179 Mr Sanders: At the European
level do you not try and influence questioning, either the need
or desirability for a certain course of action or, indeed, to
propose a certain set of regulations given the amount of European
legislation that relates to employment issues that would impact
on your members?
Mr Stanley: Absolutely, yes. We
do put a lot of resources into work in Brussels, and to a lesser
extent in Strasbourg. That is where the key decisions are taken
about European legislation, so that is where we put our limited
resources. I would agree with your evaluation that we are quite
good at it and we have made some significant differences to people
at work from the kind of work we have done at the European level.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
We are very grateful to you.
|
