Clubs are trumps
THE LAW R. A. CLINE
What havoc a recent decision of the House of Lords has played with the Industrial Training Act and what a trail of problems it will have created for Mrs Barbara Castle! The story can be told very shortly.
The personnel of the hotel and catering industry were considered by the Govern- ment to require training so as to improve their standards of skill. So under the Act a Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board was created which would establish courses and dish out grants to enable people in the industry to take these courses.
But the training board needs money to do this and the money has to come from somewhere other than the Treasury. The scheme of the Industrial Training Act en- enables the board to finance the training by a levy on employers in the hotel and catering industry. To be precise the Act does not quite put the matter in that way. It em- powers the Labour Minister to 'specify any activities of industry or commerce' over which the board is to exercise its powers, and then it empowers the board to extract the money it needs from employers who carry on such activities.
The effect is that if an employer finds himself carrying on one of these activities, he has to pay the levy and support the board. Now one of the activities specified by the Minister was the supplying of food and drink by people who run clubs. Among these was the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall who greatly objected to the notion that the club was in the hotel and catering industry. It asked the High Court to rule that the Minister never had any right to specify the activities of a club as attracting the levy. There was a difference of opinion among the three judges of the Court of Appeal and so the matter came before the House of Lords.
The issue between the Minister and the Pall Mall club was essentially a very simple one. The club contended that as it was not in industry or commerce, its kitchen activi- ties could not be an activity of industry or commerce. The Minister contended that cooking meals is part of the trade of a hotel keeper or caterer, therefore it is an activity of industry; and the club was carry- ing on this 'activity of industry'.
There was little to choose between the two interpretations; either was possible if the wording of the Act alone is to be re- garded. What worried their Lordships was that if the Minister was right, private house- holders who employ cooks and domestic staff would fall foul of the levy. On the other hand social and public policy suggests that if the board trains an hotel cook to reach cordon bleu standards, and he then
moves off to Pall Mall, the clubs get the advantage of the training without having to pay the levy.
In the event the club won, with the result that, unless the Ministry now acts quickly, the training boards which have been set up in many industries will be in the un- happy position of having to disgorge sums which may well amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds. The moral is that when it is about to raid our pockets, Parlia- ment must draw a deep breath and spell out by clear and precise drafting matters of social policy.
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