Clause 15 - ''Pay'' and other matters subject to collective bargaining
Employment Relations Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon, Conservative)
I support the amendment and believe that the traditional bargaining topics—pay, hours and holidays—should not be extended beyond the current remit. At the very least, anything touching this area of the law should be done only with full parliamentary
scrutiny, rather than through the back door of statutory instruments at the order of the Secretary of State. That would be an enormous concern. However, it was fairly interesting to hear the argument.
Given these proposals, it seems that the Government could be considering including pensions, which would be a grave error. I ask them to think carefully about that. My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk said that that would complicate matters, and it certainly would. It would be a worse disaster than the £5 billion a year that the Government are currently stealth-taxing out from pensions. We are talking about big sums. This is the perfect measure to encourage companies to move their plants to the far east faster than they are currently.
The hon. Member for Strathkelvin and Bearsden spoke about the need to provide workers with security. Pension rights in themselves do not provide security. Time and again in recent years, as pension schemes go bust as companies fold, we have seen that there is no security without a secure company future. The sort of change we are talking about will damage companies' futures.
The hon. Member for Gordon made the interesting point that if unions had been more involved in investment in pension funds in previous years, perhaps—he did not speak in absolute terms—a lot of the final salary schemes with a trust behind them would not have been so bad. The Trade and Industry Select Committee addressed that in a recent review on corporate governance. It found that there were hundreds of trade union representatives on most of the pension funds, and they had been there for some time. The TUC acknowledged that that was a big problem; it had not been providing proper training for people going onto the pension schemes, and it was concerned about their knowledge and their liability.
I hear what the hon. Member for Gordon says, but it is not something the unions have had nothing to do with. They have been intimately involved with it and regard it as a problem. I am not casting any aspersions on the unions working within the pension schemes, or saying whether they contributed to the problems; just that it is not so straightforward as he said.