Nick de Bois: Why Labour's employment legislation means even cancer patients are made to worry unnecessarily about redundancy

Nick de Bois is the parliamentary candidate for Enfield North, the seat he also fought in 2001 and 2005. Father of four, Nick is also MD of Rapiergroup, an international marketing events company. Here he argues that Labour's recent employment legislation is bad for employers and employees alike.

I suspect I'm not alone in being put in the position where I have had to make some redundancies as a result of the economic mess we find ourselves in. I would also be surprised if, like many other SME business leaders, I am not alone in understanding that this is a very difficult and often distressing time for everyone concerned, not least those people one has had to lose for no real fault of their own.

In our case we have had to lose 5 people from a team of 80. Not bad perhaps when compared with some of the horror stories we read, and definitely a lot better than going into administration. Why is it though that, apart from the enormous stress and upheaval that those 5 people face, government employment legislation ensures almost all of the 80 staff members throughout the company are caught up in the process of redundancy consultation that affects morale, increases stress and ultimately undermines productivity at a time a company can least afford it. I am of course referring to the heavy handed employment process that all bar the smallest companies are forced to submit to.

The reality is that management in a small to medium size business (SME) can readily identify where there is insufficient work to support a full time role, they are almost certainly in control of their forecast business and understand how to redeploy their people to maintain sufficient profit and cash revenue to see them through the downturn.  It surely also is the Directors who are paid to make difficult decisions to make them, without having to ask staff to come up with proposal as to how to avoid the situation, when they are not privy to all the financial information within an organisation.

Nick de Bois: Union members should be able to give their polical levy to the Tories or the TaxPayers' Alliance

Nick de Bois is the Parliamentary Candidate for Enfield North. He fought the seat in 2001 and 2005. Father of four, Nick is also MD of Rapiergroup, an international marketing events company.

More than two decades on from Conservative governments' taming of the unions' destructive power to hold the country to ransom, it is time we took away their power to read their members' minds.

It is easy to pretend that all trade unionists vote Labour – and this week in Brighton, union leaders will certainly try to act as the conscience of Old Labour. But that is not the case now – the last polling says that a quarter of union members would vote Conservative if an election were held tomorrow - and it was not the case previously either. We would do well to remember the politically-neutral stance of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers during the miners' strike for example.

So it is all the more wrong that we still allow union leaders to misrepresent their members' opinions, and to apportion part of their subs to support a party – Labour - for which many of them will not vote.