Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, I will speak very briefly to Amendment 25 in the name of my noble friend Lord Sharpe of Epsom. I reiterate his key point that the imperative is to make it clear that the closed shop is not coming back and that the Government are committed to free but fair bargaining. Let us remember that the closed shop has never actually been that popular. In the United States, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 outlawed the closed shop, and in the UK—even before I was born—in 1964 Rookes v Barnard involving the British Overseas Airways Corporation began the fightback against the closed shop when that organisation sacked a worker who refused to join a trade union. As noble Lords will know, in effect the closed shop was made illegal by the Employment Act 1990 and the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. The fact that we accept that the closed shop is damaging and an anachronism is, as much as anything, a reflection of the different working regimes in which the 40-odd million working people, or potentially working people, in this country exist. The closed shop was very much of a time when heavy manufacturing, manual labour and a heavily unionised workforce were prevalent, and that is now different. The working environment of young people particularly is a much more modern, diverse, dynamic and disaggregated labour market where the closed shop is a throwback and an anachronism. There are good reasons why it is important to put in primary legislation that even this Government—who are legislating in a very negative way, which will cost jobs and opportunities and force people not to hire workers—will not go back to the bad old days of the 1970s and institute a closed shop. Labour market flexibility is reduced by the closed shop because the capacity of employers to employ the best-qualified candidates—regardless of union membership—is reduced. That inevitably leads to a misallocation of labour resources, higher business costs, higher prices and, ipso facto, a lower number of jobs.