John Longworth: Labour’s ‘right to roam’ will be a Trojan horse for the trades unions
JOHN LONGWORTH
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John Longworth is Chairman of the Independent Business Network, a former MEP, and former Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce.
The Government’s Employment Rights Bill has been sold as a great leveller – a charter of fairness, a long-awaited correction to the imbalances of modern working life. Ministers assure us that it will lift the downtrodden, tame the unruly employer and usher in a golden age of “dignity at work”.
Yet beneath the usual bluster and media spin is a piece of legislation that threatens to choke the very businesses on which our national prosperity depends.
The Bill is vast in scope, and in an effort to placate Angela Rayner and the Labour left, it manages to smother the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that form the backbone of the British economy.
It is as if the Government has convinced itself that a family-run bakery in Bolton can shoulder the same administrative burdens as a multinational conglomerate sprawling across continents. That innovative start-up looking to fix the great issue of the day – strangled. Any employer who has actually signed a payslip knows exactly what will happen.
While the Government have recently rolled back the ‘day one’ rights, two further provisions in the legislation are especially alarming for business. The first is the new regime on trade union access and recognition. In principle, no sensible person objects to workers seeking representation.
But the Bill does far more than protect individual rights: it opens the gates for unions to enter any business of any size, at any time, provided only that a handful of staff request it.
Once inside, they are granted not only a foothold but a right to roam – access to workplaces, digital systems and, in some cases, confidential internal processes. In the hands of a responsible union, this may be a nuisance; in the hands of an activist one, it becomes a Trojan horse.
For a small firm, this is not a matter of principle but survival. A shop employing 21 people could suddenly find a single aggrieved worker unlocking the door to a full-blown Stasi reprisal.
There will be meetings, ballots, consultations, disclosures and procedural duties that stretch from dawn til dusk. Quite how this will work in your local corner shop remains to be seen.
The right to roam – a phrase innocently invoking bucolic visions from the countryside – takes on an Orwellian flavour in the workplace. It means an official union presence not merely visiting but entrenching itself: walking the shop floor, accessing internal networks, poring over the inner machinations of an SME as though it were a coal mine in 1984.
For SMEs already wrestling with taxes, energy costs and regulation, it risks becoming yet another straw on the camel’s back. Meanwhile the Government bizarrely insists that one size must fit all. Its indifference to scale reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about business. The large corporates can cope, they have HR departments so vast they could fill Wembley.
But if a union establishes itself tomorrow in a small haulage firm or a local café, the owners will be endlessly dealing with paperwork, lawyers and rising costs. Many are already on the brink.
If the Government truly wishes to extend protections quickly and sensibly, it should begin where the greatest number of workers actually are: in the major employers.
Businesses with over 250 employees already have the structures, the staff and the budgets to handle formalised union engagement. By focusing there first, ministers would protect millions in one stroke and avoid crippling the enterprises that keep our high streets alive.
The Government must exempt businesses under 250 employees from the trade union access and right-to-roam provisions. It is not a retreat from fairness, but an embrace of it. This u-turn is not enough; unless ministers rethink this Bill, we may find that in the name of protecting workers, they have destroyed their workplaces. In the end, you cannot champion growth while binding the same very hands that create it.