Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, I shall speak in particular to the amendments regarding communication with workers. I think it was Amendment 207 but, whichever one it is, I think noble Lords will know. The reason I bring this up is that my noble friend has just referred to aspects of cybersecurity. By the way, I am not suggesting that any trade union would be seeking to cause this havoc, but we know this is a particular challenge. I am struggling to understand how, under wider confidentiality, how anybody would have access to this or be expected to. It may be that the employer is required to pass on an email, I do not know. I am also struggling to find the justification for this. In introducing the Bill, the Government did not make any reference to digital communication or this other communication; they referred only to physical access. I cannot find any justification put forward by the Minister for this. I cannot find the amendment in Committee, and I am struggling to find the amendment on Report, in the Bill documents on the parliamentary website. I am sure they are there; I am just struggling to find them. I certainly cannot find any reference by the Minister in the other place to why this is deemed necessary. I appreciate that it is not necessarily the job of the Government to do my research for me, but that would be very useful to hear, because it certainly was not in the Bill introduced to the Commons. I would be grateful if the Minister could give this House a justification, because one of the things that is causing concern among employers’ representatives is this sort of process. It is fairly well established that trade unions are often invited in; that is all part of good industrial relations. The legislation talks about being able to organise. I think the Minister in the other place talked about using it as an opportunity to recruit new trade union members, to organise, to have meetings and so forth. I want to clarify something. The Bill states, in line 15 on page 75, that “the access purposes do not include organising industrial action”, so I would be grateful to understand this better. How is the Minister in the other place saying that you can organise different from organising industrial action? I am genuinely concerned that anyone can just be told, “Please email all your employees with this material”. Fortunately, at the moment, it does not seem that we have prescription that the Secretary of State will write the words that need to be said—I expect they would not be writing on behalf of the trade union—but, again, I am trying to understand why employers would need to allow that to happen. On that, I will draw my comments to a conclusion.