Trade Unions

Part of Orders of the Day — Finance Bill – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 19 June 1974.

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Photo of Mr Robert Carr Mr Robert Carr , Sutton Carshalton 12:00, 19 June 1974

Meanwhile, I prefer to rest on what my right hon. Friend has told me about the meeting, which is that he was not asked to make any retrospective provision. I believe that to be the fact.

I was saying that the Prime Minister said that retrospective legislation is justifiable when it is introduced to right a wrong which it was never intended should be inflicted. I said that I would accept that test as one which might well justify an exceptional measure of retrospective legislation. What I do not accept is that that test is satisfied in this case.

The payment of the tax which it is now proposed under the clause to refund was not inflicted inescapably on the unions by Government action or by the legislation passed by the House. On the contrary, it was a burden which the unions imposed on themselves without making any reasonable, responsible attempt to escape from it in the ways properly made available to them.

I want the Committee to look at the facts of the situation. The first point to stress has already been mentioned. I assured the House for the first time on 23rd March 1971, and again subsequently, that it was not the intention of the then Conservative Government that a union's provident fund should be subjected to extra taxation as a result of the Industrial Relations Act. I reaffirm that assurance today. If unions paid extra taxation on their provident funds, it was not as a result of any failure to honour the obligation in the assurance to which I have referred.

There were two ways in which unions could have protected their provident funds from taxation. The first and easiest way was to register. That was not a particularly difficult or unreasonable thing to ask. It was not an idea, a condition, thought up by a Conservative Government. The Donovan Royal Commission unanimously recommended in paragraph 792 of its report that all trade unions should receive corporate status and be registered. The Commission also unanimously recommended in Chapter XI of its report that certain requirements should be attached to registration.

4.45 p.m.

The previous Labour Government also proposed registration. The White Paper "In Place of Strife", stated in paragraph 114 that it is right and health in a democracy that any powerful body should be subject to outside scrutiny where abuse of its power can most harm the individual. The Labour Government of that time accepted that unions should register, and they said in paragraph 109 of the White Paper that they accept that a condition of registration should be that Unions will be required to have rules governing certain matters". They said in the same paragraph that refusal to register will lay a trade union open to a financial penalty by the Industrial Board. They also accepted, in paragraph 114, that it was necessary that the administration of union rules should be subject to independent review.

Thus, registration as a condition of achieving the benefits and privileges of trade union status was not a Tory invention. It was recommended unanimously by the Donovan Commission, which included trade unionists in its membership, including no less a person than the General Secretary of the TUC. The Commission's report was subsequently accepted by the Labour Government. [HON. MEMBERS: "They were wrong."] That is an opinion held by Labour Members who express it from a sedentary position below the Gangway. But it is a fact that the Labour Party and the Donovan Commission thought up the idea of registration and recommended it to the country. It was certainly not a concept invented by the Tory Party, the last Tory Government or me when I was Secretary of State for Employment.