Mark Clarke: Francis Maude’s union crackdown is a good start but a concerted push across government is needed

Mark Clarke is the Chief Executive of the Trade Union Reform Campaign. He was previously the candidate in Tooting, during which campaign he exposed full-time trade unionist Jane Pilgrim, who gave her name to the trade union “Pilgrims”. Follow Mark on Twitter.

Francis Maude’s long-awaited clampdown on the abuse of taxpayers’ money by trade unions is underway. To be fair, he has made a formidable start. Firstly, he has forensically uncovered the scale of abuse across the civil service. Not content with the first answer he received, he asked again and again what was going on. Every time he asked, he uncovered a larger and larger number of civil servants moonlighting from their jobs as trade union activists. He also uncovered scandals beyond even the worse ruminations of Conservative activists, such as the fact that some full time trade union activists had been promoted in the civil service pay grade while doing nothing more that trade union activity.

The fact that Labour entered into a faustian pact with the unions and allowed, even encouraged, this abuse should be hung around their neck each and every time we talk about the wasteful years of their rule.

The even more remarkable part of Francis Maude’s achievement is that he had to achieve this from a standing start. The Conservatives were caught on the hop by this issue and were largely unaware of the spread of the union movement during the years we were in opposition. As a result, we had nothing in our manifesto and no clear point of view. It is testament to the campaigning of the broader conservative movement in the form of the TaxPayers' Alliance, the Trade Union Reform Campaign, ConservativeHome, Guido Fawkes and many backbench MPs that this issue has been fully exposed and forced onto the agenda.

Mark Clarke: The government's consultation into trade union Pilgrims is a good start — now more must be done

Mark Clarke is the Chief Executive of the Trade Union Reform Campaign. He was previously the candidate in Tooting, during which campaign he exposed full-time trade unionist Jane Pilgrim, who gave her name to the trade union “Pilgrims”.

Yesterday those of us who follow the Trade Union movement heaved a sigh of relief that the consultation into ending Trade Union Pilgrims — reps paid by the taxpayer to undertake union duties — was finally published.

This is a campaign which embraces the Conservative movement, and it is about time that the Government moved on it. Guido Fawkes and the Mail on Sunday publicised the infamous Jane Pilgrim, whom I uncovered when campaigning in Tooting. Aidan Burley MP led a feisty adjournment debate which saw him threatened afterwards by Labour’s union bully boys. Jesse Norman MP introduced a ten minute rule bill calling for unions to be charged for the facility time. Priti Patel has been tireless in exposing abuse after abuse. David Cameron personally welcomed the launch of the Trade Union Reform Campaign by myself and over a dozen MPs to campaign on this matter. Finally, and by no means least, ConservativeHome identified this area as one of the keys to achieving an overall majority.

Mark Clarke: Competition Law in the NHS will lead to better services at lower costs

Mark Clarke was candidate for Tooting at the 2010 General Election.

Imagine an industry in which companies sought to gain ever larger scale, developing effective local monopolies, through vertical or horizontal integration – or both. The companies could argue that the increased efficiency savings from horizontal integration would mean reduced costs – which could be invested into product improvement, price reduction or even profit increase thereby encouraging increased investment by increasing the companies internal rate of return. They could argue that the decreased handovers which would result from vertical integration would mean better service as there were less problems for handovers between different organisations.

But we all know that the disadvantages would outweigh these advantages. You would see less product differentiation offered to consumers, and increase in pricing. That’s why we break up monopolies and have laws against price collusion.

Alas under Labour’s reforms this over-consolidation of the NHS providers is already occurring under the aegis of greater efficiency. Some hospitals like my local hospital, St George’s, are pursuing vertical integration by taking over local community services. On the upside this means fewer problems for patients with handovers from in-patient to out-patient services or vice versa. But under the old system patients could choose whether to have the diagnostic services run in the community by the PCT or in the hospital run by St George’s – now they have no choice but to use a St George’s run service.

Now is this a problem?

Mark Clarke: We must make the NHS even more whistleblower-friendly

Mark Clarke was the Conservative candidate for Tooting at the general election.

At Mid Staffordshire Hospital there was a culture of fear. Some NHS staff knew that there were problems but were too afraid to speak up. Had they, lives would have been saved. This is a real and alive concern and not unique to Mid Staffordshire.

When I was a candidate I ran many stories exposing hygiene concerns, financial waste and staff victimisation in local NHS Trusts. As a consequence some management would conduct witch hunts among staff members to try to find the sources.

The truth was that there were so many sources that it was a hopeless task for them. Everyone from board members to secretaries, doctors, nurses, volunteers and porters were giving me examples of issues which were clearly in the public interest. This did not stop some management doing their best to destroy the careers of staff who they believed had whistleblowed.

That is why it is welcome that the Andrew Lansley is so committed to making whistleblowing easier. But if we are to stamp out victimisation of legitimate whistleblowers we need to go even further than the Government are proposing. The currently consultation offers whistleblower protection to too few people, over too few issues which are right to be exposed, and to too few organisations which should legitimately receive information, and with a new, unnecessary quango.

Mark Clarke: If we want to get more rape convictions, the police should stop using women as bait

Mark Clarke was Conservative candidate for Tooting at the general election.

Two years ago I sat down with residents in my local ward with our local police teams and we thrashed out what we thought the policing priorities for the area should be. The meeting descended into a heated debate about whether dog dirt should be a higher priority than graffiti. We eventually settled on dog dirt, unruly kids on buses and graffiti. The police sergeant congratulated us on a good meeting. We left feeling happy that we had done our civic duty.

While we were being engaged citizens, several hundred yards down the road a young woman was travelling home on the 155 bus from Clapham to Tooting in South London. A man followed her home from the bus stop and seriously sexually assaulted her on her own doorstep.

When she reported the incident the police officers were not surprised. They knew that there was a serial rapist working the 155 bus route in Clapham, Balham and Tooting. They had linked him to dozens of sex attacks and rapes but had yet to catch him.

But the woman who was attacked had no idea that she was walking home alone in a rapist’s hunting ground. Had she known, she might have taken a taxi home, left a little earlier or asked a friend to meet her. But the police had told no one.  Over the next few months at least nine more women went to their local police station to report a sexual attack. DNA told the police that it was the same man. But still they told no one.

Eventually, the police caught their man. He was Kirk Reid. He was eventually convicted of 2 rapes and 26 sexual assaults. So far he has been linked to 71 attacks on women in the Wandsworth area. The total is probably much higher because so few victims come forward.  He was given a life sentence – although with a minimum of a paltry seven and a half years in prison.

Mark Clarke: Scores of vulnerable women rely on the police's Human Trafficking Unit, yet it is under threat - despite Gordon Brown's promises to the contrary

Mark Clarke is the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Tooting.

Two years ago in Tooting a brothel was raided by the police. They found a 15-year-old Estonian girl who had been trafficked and kept as a slave. Ironically, this occurred on the 200th anniversary of the supposed abolition of the slave trade, the campaign for which was started in Clapham, barely half a mile away.

Following this I set up with some local churches and Carol Freeman, a former charity worker for a Human Trafficking charity, an organisation called the “Wandsworth Anti Slavery Campaign”. We wanted to see if this was a one-off or if there was a systemic problem with trafficking in our area. Initially, people told us that these issues were not really significant in suburban Tooting – this was a Soho problem. How wrong they were.

Research by local church volunteers uncovered a dozen brothels within half a mile of Tooting Broadway. The majority had indicators of trafficking – very low pricing, an indifferent attitude to safe sex and not one English woman. They were embedded in our community. One was on the same road as the local police station; one was opposite the Labour MP's office, one was in the same building as a refugees’ charity. We identified over thirty women whom we believed had a reasonable likelihood of being trafficked. With research suggesting that each woman is required to have sex with around ten men a day, that equated to potentially 300 rapes a day in Tooting.

The local churches organised prayer walks around Tooting to pray for those involved and with the church leaders we approached Wandsworth Council and the local police Borough Commander and gave them full details of the intelligence we had gathered and asked them to take action.

Wandsworth police were superb. They raided every single brothel, made several arrests, identified common management across some brothels, and found women who have been raped and assaulted. They have also asked the shop owners to remove advertisements from their windows. And they have much more activity planned in the coming weeks about which I can obviously not go into further detail.

Mark Clarke: We Need A Looser Labour Market - The Swiss Model

Mark Clarke is a Strategy Consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and prior to that was a Brand Manager for five years with Procter and Gamble. He has lived and worked in the UK, the US and in Switzerland.

What do you do if you have an employee who is just not delivering? It is not that they are demonstrably and wilfully not co-operating. It is not that they have been caught with their hands in the till. It is just that they are not delivering with the high level of competence and passion that you think your organisation deserves. Well, in this country the answer is that there is legally very little you can do. You cannot get rid of someone for being ‘barely adequate’ - despite the fact that your customers demand products and service well in excess of ‘barely adequate’. In an increasingly people based economy, many companies see this is a problem.

The major companies get around this problem by effectively bribing their ‘barely adequate’ management with a mixture of sizeable pay-offs and good references in return for leaving quietly. Obviously this places an additional cost on business.

But the public sector has no such recourse available. For example, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, Chris Woodhead, said ten years ago that there were 15,000 incompetent teachers in our schools. Common sense tells us this was right. We all remember the good and the bad teachers at our own schools. Well, the bad ones are still there. They haven’t raided the school funds or got caught in the wrong changing rooms so they are allowed to continue with ‘barely adequate’ teaching.

So what can we do about it?

Working in Switzerland for a major multinational introduced me to a different employment model. I had an employee who was not going to make the next level. There was nothing abysmal about her but in the performance driven culture of that company it was time for her to move on. Our company lawyer was on holiday so I called the largest law firm in Geneva to talk to their employment practice to obtain some advice. They did not have an employment law practice.  I called the second largest firm. They didn’t really understand what I was asking for. Finally I found a generalist lawyer who explained the situation to me.

Essentially, in Switzerland they have contract law not employment law. They have contracts which appear in a very similar form as in the UK. Except that they are two way contracts. In the UK the employee can leave by giving the employer the standard notice period; but the employer cannot enforce the same contractual terms. In Switzerland, however, the notice period is two way. The employer can terminate the employment with no cause  - in exactly the same way an employee can and does. Essentially, the State does not feel that it should interfere with a contractual relationship between two adult parties.

The effect of this ‘looser’ labour market is dramatic. Companies are flooding to Switzerland. In recent years Procter and Gamble, Gillette, Unilever’s Elida Faberge business, Caterpillar, Medtronic, Hewlett Packard, Dow and Frito Lay have all moved their European or global headquarters there. They have moved UK jobs to Switzerland and dramatically reduced their corporation tax payments to the UK. Their UK operations are now little more than powerless branch offices. 10% of Swiss GDP now comes from companies such as this. As a result, Switzerland has the lowest unemployment rate in Europe which is 25% lower than the UK’s already low unemployment rates at 4.3% vs the UK’s 5.3% or the EU15 at 7.6%.

If we want to remain competitive in the world we need to confront the global challenge of a global economy. We need to understand that companies have choices and are choosing to exercise that choice against the over-regulated UK and the EU model. We should be looking to further liberalise our employment legislation. We should not to be trying to defend the Thatcher reforms but instead, following Switzerland’s example, and extending them.

Incidentally, the woman who I had to let go is now far happier and far more successful in a different company with a different culture.