Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am perplexed by this Bill and how it is worded. I am beginning to think that some deal has been done to promote the concept of an elected House of Lords because, if everything goes to statutory instruments and regulations, I am not sure of the purpose of the current revising Chamber. Perhaps some reverse Henry VIII amendments should be put in to assist that process, because this kind of business is as bad as it gets in that context.

In referencing my voluntary rather than unpaid interests, while “morale” has been mentioned, I home in on this question of the practicalities within schools. Can the Minister confirm whether any schools or larger multi-academy trusts have requested the inclusion of education and thereby schools in this legislation? If so, what rationale have they used to request that inclusion? Schools are struggling with the complexity of negotiating the additional contact hours that the Government are requiring of teachers.

My experience is primarily within the red wall. I am bemused at the politics. I have always found a Government of any colour, flavour or party picking on a particular section of the electorate and giving the impression that they are targeting them to be quite bad politics. Therefore, I am perplexed at what this is meant to do. Certainly, the parents within the red-wall areas of the country are in no way antagonistic towards a group such as teachers occasionally taking industrial action. It is very rare, but I have never witnessed or heard any antagonism in relation to that. There is sometimes sympathy, and often an agnostic position, but of the hundreds of thousands of emails that I have ever received, there has never been one on this issue. I have never heard it from a single person, even when such disputes have been in play.

That perplexes me, but something else really worries me. Can the Government confirm that the absentee rates in English schools are at the highest level in our history—27.5% on average? Is it true that in the more deprived areas, which would incorporate the red wall and beyond, it is at 33.5%, so one in three is not attending school at the moment? There are many reasons, particularly the aftermath of the pandemic and lockdown, but the behavioural issues are with younger children rather than older children, in secondary school years 7 and 8, which has not been the norm historically. Do the Government agree that with this absenteeism level, the critical factor is the good will of teachers and the flexibility of teachers to work beyond normal contract hours with those families and pupils to get the pupils back into school or to hold them in school?

That is the experience that I see and hear coming through very powerfully, and it correlates further—to elaborate a little on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady—in that, the more successful a school is, the more motivated the teachers tend to be. The more motivated the teachers are, the more flexibility they have and the more successful the school is. Those little bits on the side that teachers do, assisting individual pupils, are critical to how a school performs in the league tables and to what we deem a successful school.

We are in a crisis of the worst absenteeism in our schools in recorded history. How does that fit into the Government’s strategy on this? It seems to me that the inclusion of education—indeed, the whole Bill—makes no political or legislative sense. From my point of view, the inclusion of education will have the reverse impact to what the Government want on a system that is in crisis, because of the pandemic, in a way that it has never been before.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mann, in many respects. I began teaching in 1973 and I can count on the fingers of both hands—probably not even using them all—the number of times that I have been on strike. One of the reasons why I was not on strike in the early phases of my career was because we had sectoral collective bargaining: we could make an impact on what was happening with our pay and conditions. I very much regret the loss of collective bargaining in education because it has had a material impact on the way in which teachers are able to pursue issues with their own pay and conditions.

However, let us move on to what the Bill would do. The noble Lords, Lord Mann and Lord Fox, are of course right: there is a very serious situation with regard to recruitment and retention of teachers. That is one of the reasons why there is such a high rate of parental and carers’ support for the action that teachers are taking. To take just one example, one in eight maths lessons in schools in England is taught by someone who has no qualification in mathematics. What chance do we have of providing coherent maths teaching to the age of 18 or 19, as the Prime Minister would like, if we cannot provide it for all the children who have it at the moment?

I cannot tell you how many emails, messages and phone calls I had after people read the WhatsApp messages. The notion that a Secretary of State would say that all teachers were work-shy and did not like or want to go to work beggars belief, to be honest. For anyone who has never been a teacher, I can tell you that teaching is not for everybody, and there are people who voluntarily leave teaching because going into a classroom every day and not being successful is devastating. That is why lots of people leave the profession—because they cannot manage the stress of not just the teaching but all the accountability measures. We really need to hang on to the teachers we have, who are still going to school every day and, for the most part, enjoying their jobs, notwithstanding the terrible levels of pressure that they face. We really need to make sure that we have a proper retention system.

It seems to me that threatening those teachers with the possibility that they will be sacked if they have legitimately voted for and taken industrial action, very much as a last resort—as I am sure everybody in this Chamber knows and as has been said by Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted, the joint general secretaries of the NEU—will not only risk the possibility of more people leaving teaching, but I cannot imagine that anyone is going to want to come into teaching when there are so many difficulties and challenges that we have at the moment.

On the other issue about cogs and wheels, I am not in favour of the fragmentation that we have seen in our education service, but fragmentation we have. The idea that we can have a minimum service level across 26,000 or 28,000 schools, not accounting for alternative provision and so on, simply is not workable. Much more importantly for me, it is not desirable. It conveys exactly the wrong impression to teachers, and we need to be talking up teaching—I am very prepared to do it—because even on a slightly bad day it is a wonderful job when you are actually in there with the children. It is not so great when you are dealing with Ofsted, and when you look at your pay at the end of the month, but it is fantastic when you are actually dealing with children and young people.

This is absolutely the wrong place to be going. I oppose this Bill in its totality, but I certainly oppose what is being said about education in this.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I just wanted to rise briefly to follow up on a couple of points we made in the previous group that I think are applicable here. In some ways, we are dealing with apples and pears; the Health Minister talked about the legislation as being essential because of life and death situations, and I do not think that any of us, however much we value education, would argue that we are in the same game here. But on another level it is apples and apples, because the problem with both the framings in the Bill is that they just say “health services” or “education services” in this incredibly vague way. I think that some of the same criticisms about foreseeability and predictability apply here, as they did with the previous group.

Specifically in the context of education, I am keen to hear from the Education Minister a similar assurance to that we were given by the Health Minister that these are permissive powers: that affected entities may give work orders, but that they will never be forced by the Government to do so. Even if a minimum service level is established in education, I hope we are going to hear that no school, college or university would be made to give work orders; they are simply empowered to do so. I hope that will be the Government’s position; that would be consistent with the previous group. Even if they agree that this is the case, I still have concerns about the effect in practice, as I did with the previous group.

I have children who are, at the moment, in a school affected by strikes. The school is managing incredibly well; it is keeping the children in exam years in school and finding ways to safeguard the others. The principal writes to us and explains why he supports his striking staff and why they deserve a better deal. That principal is never going to implement these work orders if the Government put them in place, except in two circumstances. I think we need to explore that in the context of all the powers in this Bill.

The first circumstance is that the Government in some way try to make the principal give work orders that he does not want to give to his staff. They can do that through funding mechanisms—“You don’t have to give the work orders but, if you don’t, we’ll kick your windows in”. That is not really a free choice, yet we have to worry that this is the intention of the Government. Certainly if this Government stay in power, that is the way they would handle future disputes: “Now we’ve done the minimum service levels, there is no excuse for any school not to implement it and issue work orders, whether they like it or not”.

The second mechanism was again raised on the health trust situation, and I think it is also relevant here. It is that an educational institution feels legally vulnerable if it does not implement the minimum service levels. It could be the case for schools, but it is particularly a concern for universities. We already see universities being sued by students for alleged failures to deliver the service that they signed up for. I will not go into the rights and wrongs of those cases, but again you can imagine a situation in which a university says, “Our industrial relations are good. Yes, there is a strike. Yes, we can manage it. Yes, there is a government regulation that talks about minimum service levels, but we don’t want to give work orders to our staff because we think that will worsen the situation, not improve it”, and then find itself subject to legal action. With that threat hanging over them, the leadership of our education institutions ends up doing things it does not want to do and has not chosen to do.

The word “may” sits in the Bill and is at the heart of everything. I think this Minister will say, as the previous Minister said, “This is all optional—a backstop power—and we are not going to force anyone”. That only works if the Government can give us assurances that they are not going to run a protection racket—“Issue the work orders or we kick the window in”, name and shame, or whatever mechanism they want to use—and that they have taken the advice that says that even if they have implemented the regulations, our institutions are not required to implement them and cannot be sued through civil claims simply for failing to implement a minimum service level in a regulation under this legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

One of the issues in teaching is precisely that all the voluntary activity is entirely without contractual arrangements. I am sure the Minister will agree that, if we bear down on people’s arrangements in the way this legislation proposes, good will—which is how we normally describe it—will evaporate as teachers will not feel valued and will certainly not feel properly rewarded.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think the only thing I can say is that all these matters would be taken into account in any consultation if the Government decide to proceed.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Baroness Blower Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a genuine pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, whom I have known for many years in various capacities. I believe that the Front Bench opposite would do well to listen to both his intricate technical knowledge and his general principles in relation to the Bill.

As many noble Lords have already said, this proposed legislation is anti-democratic, draconian, counter- productive and unnecessary. I shall not speak to each of those elements of the Bill but there is ample evidence in the briefing from the TUC for all of them. I do, however, wish to say a few words about the draconian nature of the proposals. They would be unacceptable at any time but, in the context of the longest pay squeeze for decades, in the middle of a cost of living crisis and with the failure to recruit enough workers to provide our vital public services, they are both draconian and ill conceived.

As my noble friend Lord Monks said, in the 2019 Queen’s Speech, the Government pledged to ensure

“that sanctions are not directed at individual workers”.

However, what we see in this skeleton Bill—I will not go there; everyone has discussed it already—is that, if a person specified in a work notice takes strike action, work notice notwithstanding, they will lose their protection from automatic unfair dismissal. This is not only unacceptable for the individual concerned; it also begs the question as to whether the strike might be deemed unlawful. The Library briefing suggests that the whole strike will be deemed illegal and the protection of all employees against automatic unfair dismissal would thereby be removed, meaning that all employees could therefore be sacked—a point made by my noble friend Lady O’Grady. Can the Minister say why the Government have changed their position from that stated in the 2019 Queen’s Speech?

Given the Government’s abject failure to recruit to the thousands of vacancies in health and education, what assessment have they made of the impact of these proposals on recruitment and retention in those aspects of the public sector? I remind the Minister that the Government missed their own targets for the recruitment of secondary school teachers by 41%; that 13% of the teachers who qualified in 2019 have already left the profession; and that one in eight maths lessons—our Prime Minister is a great fan of them—is being taught by a teacher who is not qualified in the subject. That is not the level of service that our young people should expect.

These are the issues to which this Government should turn their attention, rather than seeking to place further restrictions on the right of workers to strike in pursuit of legitimate demands. The proposals in the Bill, such as they are, are simply not compatible with international law. In saying that other jurisdictions have minimum service levels, the Government are completely silent on the different legislative frameworks that obtain. Sectoral collective bargaining is an approach that obtains in many European countries; we do not see it here in the UK.

Those who are engaged with the work of the International Labour Organization know that it has already raised concerns about existing UK labour law, which the Government have failed to address. I am pleased to quote Tonia Novitz, a professor of labour law at the University of Bristol:

“Far from bringing the UK into line with the standards and practices of other European states … the proposed minimum service legislation constitutes a further departure from established norms and treaty obligations.”


I am sure that the Minister disagrees. Can he say how the Government have addressed the prior outstanding recommendations from the ILO on the right to strike in the UK?

The TUC briefing makes it clear that local arrangements are put in place during industrial action. It is therefore unnecessary to grant such sweeping powers to a Secretary of State to determine minimum service levels. Let us consider the fire and rescue services, as my noble friend Lady Twycross did; bear in mind that the firefighter establishment has suffered a 20% cut since 2010. Since 2004, Ministers have told the public that there is no need for national standards, and that emergency response is a local matter so is nothing to do with them, yet free rein is now to be given to a Secretary of State to make determinations. As a union that takes public safety very seriously, the FBU signed a major incident agreement—noble Lords have heard about this already—with fire employees through the national joint council, covering the whole of the UK, on 23 December last year; some of your Lordships were probably on holiday by then.

As to earlier disputes, the FBU co-operated to deliver the level of cover sought by the employers. In previous periods of strike action, Ministers and chief fire officers have assured the public that communities are safe and measures are in place. Unless that was untrue and the public were misled, there can be no justification for replacing those agreed arrangements and that system with a draconian imposition. Good industrial relations and the avoidance of industrial action are possible through collective bargaining and what the FBU calls “cordial social dialogue”. Draconian diktats are counterproductive.

Perhaps the Minister could comment on the Regulatory Policy Committee’s report—it was referenced by my noble friend Lady O’Grady—which states that the impact assessment

“has not clearly established a counterfactual supported by evidence, outlining what is expected to occur in the absence of legislation being introduced. The Department describes, within the policy background section that voluntary action already occurs, yet later in the IA … the Department assumes a baseline service level of provision of zero. This is a conservative position to take, given that voluntary provision of service in sectors is uncertain.”

It would seem to follow, then, that this proposed legislation is indeed unnecessary and draconian. Its being introduced before any of the relevant consultation with sectors has been completed is simply not acceptable.