Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, I rise with the soothing balm of cross-party collaboration to support the excellent amendments put forward by the noble Lords, Lord Pitkeathley of Camden Town and Lord Palmer of Childs Hill. I declare at the outset an interest as a member for more than 20 years of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, an estimable professional body. More importantly, I have been made redundant twice. My experience of redundancy is that it is often a difficult and traumatic experience if you are working for a small company or if you are relatively new to the company. I certainly had a great deal of sustenance and support from my trade union representative in securing and expediting a reasonably successful outcome in what could have been a very difficult period financially for me in that situation—this is many years ago. I think the benefit of these amendments is that they look from the perspective of the small employer in the example given by the noble Lord, Lord Pitkeathley, and from the employee’s perspective in the example given by the noble Lord, Lord Palmer. I think that, for people who have, for various reasons, chosen not to join a trade union, it is important that not just anyone, not their mate from the pub, but a professional accredited person can accompany and support them in this. Normally, I would not want to amend a Bill unnecessarily, but I genuinely think it would not be administratively and financially onerous for these amendments to be added to the Bill, and in fact they would improve it. I would not say they are cost free, but they would be important in saving potentially significant amounts of money if, as the noble Lord, Lord Pitkeathley, has said, they would alleviate or ameliorate the possibility of an escalation to expensive litigation and an employment tribunal. Having an expert in the room with you can sometimes dissipate the anger, the frustration and the sense of a battle between two sides, and in that respect it is sensible. For those reasons, with the proviso that I have experienced these issues myself, I think the amendments are sensible and I look to the Minister to give them due consideration. They would not add to the burden of businesses, and in the long term they would save significant amounts of money.