Clause 24 - Conciliation
Employment Bill
6:30 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 37, in page 33, line 35, at end add—
'(4) The Secretary of State shall within 90 days of this section coming into force, prepare and publish an assessment of the additional resources required by the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service to facilitate the conciliation process as provided for in this section'.
External bodies on both sides of industry have expressed concern about the resources available to ACAS. The regulations will give ACAS a greatly increased role. Conciliation is a laudable objective, but we all agree that there must be a time limit. The worst scenario is that we write into legislation a requirement for a conciliation period. That would, in effect, be tokenism, and one can imagine someone from ACAS talking to someone on the telephone for five minutes, because that is all that the available resources will allow. It is generally agreed that ACAS services are stretched, even though the number of days lost through disputes might lead us to believe that demand is low.
I am concerned that the Government are, if not imposing, greatly encouraging the use of conciliation by writing it into the statutory procedure, without giving ACAS adequate resources to provide the service necessary if conciliation is to work. The amendment would place on the Secretary of State a duty to assess the requirements of ACAS in the light of the new legislation and to publish the results of that assessment. That would put the Minister on the spot to provide the resources to make effective the system that he and his Government have invented.
If the issue is not addressed, conciliation could easily become an empty box—a delaying process—in the tribunal system, and would not have a fair chance of working and demonstrating its ability to reduce the number of cases that reach tribunals, simply because there are no conciliation officers. All hon. Members will have come across child protection cases in their constituencies in which a social worker was assigned to a child who had never seen them before or who last saw them two or three years before.
The bureaucratic process of providing resources and input is not the same as the mechanism of delivering adequate resources to ensure that the opportunity that the legislation seeks to provide is properly exploited by all parties to maximum effect. The amendment would ensure that the Minister had to make a public assessment of what was really needed.