Clause 22 - Employment tribunals
Employment Bill
10:30 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
In our short progress to date, I have found the Minister's responses constructive and helpful, but he seems to be departing from that. I am unsure whether the Minister is deliberately or inadvertently misinterpreting the amendment, but it is clear to me that its purpose is to allow the Minister the scope to provide the tribunal with a remedy against representatives who are not paid. The Bill already contains remedies for dealing with representatives who are paid—we shall return to the issue of defining who those are—but contains no remedies for dealing with those who are unpaid. The purpose of the clause is to ensure that those who abuse tribunal proceedings can be dealt with properly. In the case of paid representatives, that will be achieved by the imposition of financial penalties.
The Minister has made it absolutely clear that he does not favour the imposition of financial penalties on those who are unpaid, so I am proposing a non-financial remedy to ensure that someone who abuses the procedure can be penalised. The Minister has not addressed the purpose of the amendment and has said
nothing about how he intends to deal with those unpaid representatives who abuse the tribunal proceedings.