Clause 14 - Information about union membership and employment in bargaining unit
Employment Relations Bill
4:00 pm
Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Employment Relations, Competition and Consumers), Department of Trade and Industry; Bradford South, Labour)
I would like to help the hon. Gentleman, but again I cannot take the final step on the amendments.
Clause 14 places various requirements on employers, unions and, in limited cases, workers to supply the CAC with information. It does so by inserting new paragraph 170A. Amendments Nos. 31, 32 and 33 would ensure that the CAC could not demand that the information be supplied within seven days. They deal with the requirements on employers, unions and workers respectively. All the amendments deal with the same basic issue, so I shall address them together.
It may be worth reminding ourselves of the types of information that may be required. In most cases, that will be confined to the names and addresses of individual workers, or the names of individual union members. Often, the numbers involved are small. So far, many cases relating to the CAC have involved 100 or fewer workers.
We do not need to give the parties as long as seven days, as a minimum, to produce such basic information, which they will often hold as a matter of course anyway. The amendments would unnecessarily delay the process. The information is limited to that in the possession of the party in question. In other words, that party does not need to gather new data. Again, that lightens the potential burden and ensures that information can be produced quickly.
On occasion, the request to supply information may be more complicated and involve assembling a large number of records. I am sure that the CAC would be sensitive to the concerns of the party involved. In such
situations, the CAC would not impose excessively short deadlines. It has always acted reasonably in such matters up to now, so we can safely leave it in the hands of the CAC to take decisions about deadlines. There is no need to impose statutory minimums.
The amendments would create unnecessary and unwelcome rigidity in the statutory procedures. They could lead to unnecessary delay and play into the hands of those who seek to string out the process. I understand the spirit in which the hon. Gentleman proposed the amendments, but unfortunately I cannot support them. I ask him to withdraw amendment No. 31 and not to press amendments Nos. 32 and 33.