Last night (5 November) the House of Commons rejected the latest Lords’ amendments to the Bill (see our earlier blog here for details). However, they have made some concessions, in the hope of persuading the Lords to back down when the Bill returns to them for the third time.
No date has yet been set for what the Government will be hoping will be the final stage in the Bill’s passage through Parliament, but it is expected to be later this month.
The Government’s key concessions are as follows:
- Day one unfair dismissal rights: provisions have been inserted in the Bill which will require the Government to consult “such persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate” before making the regulations which are required to implement these measures. The Government has previously committed to consult on these regulations, so this could be regarded as a cosmetic rather than substantive concession.
- Ballot thresholds: an amendment has been made that will require the Secretary of State to consider the likely impact of the introduction of non-postal balloting on voter turnout, when deciding whether to bring clause 65 of the Bill into effect. This is the measure that will remove the 50% turnout threshold for industrial action ballots. Again, this concession does not represent a change of Government policy. That is because it had already decided to defer bringing clause 65 into effect, so that the repeal of the turnout threshold coincides with the introduction of electronic balloting.
We will have to wait and see what the House of Lords does when the Bill returns to them, probably later this month. However, given that the gap between the two houses of Parliament has continued to narrow, it seems unlikely that Lords will continue to insist on further amendments to the Bill.
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