Clause 31 - Information and consultation
Employment Relations Bill
9:30 am
Mr Malcolm Bruce (Shadow Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, Trade & Industry; Gordon, Liberal Democrat)
I made a point about that on Second Reading. I am unsure about whether the Government could have been more confident and assertive in encouraging the adoption of good practice.
Examples of where a good atmosphere of consultation would have led to less strife and hardship and better decisions have been well reported, so I will not dwell on them for long. The way in which BMW sold Rover was astonishing. I was a member of Trade and Industry Committee delegation that visited Rover at the time of the takeover. Undertakings that were given were breached, for example on the style of management. When we were in Munich, the management told us that it was so good to its employees that whenever any of them got married the company's habit was to pay a contribution towards the cost of the wedding reception and the bride's trousseau. That wonderful generosity in Bavaria did not fit in well with the decision to sell an acquisition without any consultation. Most of the employees at the Vauxhall plant at Luton heard about the decision to close it on the radio. There was a similar situation in south Wales when Corus decided to make 6,000 people redundant.
There is a marked contrast between what happened in those cases and what happened to Marks and Spencer when it dealt with falling profits by taking a management decision, which I have no quarrel with, to withdraw from the continent. Some people thought that that was an odd decision because the company
closed its most profitable stores. It decided for core management reasons that it needed to concentrate on its home base. It announced its intention to close those stores British-style, before consulting with the work force. In France, it was taken to court and forced to go through a longer period of consultation and a slower closure process than it had intended.
The most topical current example is the outsourcing of jobs by financial institutions to Asia, and particularly to India. I am on record as saying that it is difficult for us to object to countries with developing economies fighting for and securing jobs for their own people, particularly if we wish the working and living conditions of those countries' people to improve.
With regard to yesterday's announcement about asylum seekers and migrants, if we wish to limit the number of migrants coming to this country, we cannot object when jobs are sourced elsewhere. However, that should be done with proper timing and consultation. Many people have had concerns about companies making announcements to the press, or just giving hints about things, without having any consultations with their employees. Some of them do not go through any process of explaining the rationale behind their decision, perhaps by stressing positive dimensions such as the hope that reinvestment and savings can produce new jobs, which has sometimes subsequently been claimed to be the case, and increase their competitiveness. Some do not explain the time scale in which workers who will lose their jobs will be made redundant and how that will happen. That causes much more anxiety and unease among employees than is necessary, and than good management practice would warrant.