Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Baroness Twycross Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as London’s Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience and a member of the National Joint Council for Local Authority Fire and Rescue Services—a body which, as the Minister will be aware, is responsible for national collective bargaining in the fire sector. I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, on her maiden speech. Having spent many hours in meetings with her and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, during the height of the Covid pandemic as part of our cross-party approach to the pandemic in London, I am confident she will be collegiate where appropriate and make a valuable contribution to the work of this House. I share her Irish roots and, like her, I was inspired to be political by the late Baroness Thatcher, but not because I liked what she stood for.

My position on the Bill reflects that of many of the contributions to the debate from this side and other parts of the House. This is unnecessary legislation. It is an attack on key workers and undermines the fundamental right of workers to withdraw their labour and strike. The Bill will also not work in practice and has many flaws, as many noble Lords have already highlighted. It has been introduced by a Government who want to tell public sector workers, in particular, that they are duty-bound not to strike, irrespective of how they are treated and what they are paid; a Government who want to tell people they previously hailed as heroes that their so-called vocation means that they should take what they are given, rather than what they deserve; a Government who acknowledge it would have been cheaper to resolve the rail strikes but have failed to do so; and a Government who appear to believe that threats of dismissal will be more effective than a grown-up discussion.

The only way to resolve disputes with our key workers is to work with them, not against them. The only way to resolve disputes is negotiation, not legislation. One aspect of this legislation that I find most offensive is the apparent underlying belief on the part of government that trade unions use industrial action and the threat of industrial action lightly.

It is time the Government accepted that the current wave of strikes is driven by desperation and frustration on the part of key workers—our nurses, train drivers and teachers, who keep our country running—not by some sinister motive. This is not the public being inconvenienced, as the Minister stated. This is large swathes of the public exercising their right to strike across many parts of the public sector. It is entirely because of a failure of government to address this desperation through negotiation that we are seeing the current high level of industrial disputes: the right to strike is not the problem.

In the remainder of my time I would like to focus on the rights of firefighters, who, as noble Lords will be aware, are being balloted by the Fire Brigades Union on an improved pay offer from the employers, but who voted decisively and understandably to take strike action if an improved pay offer was not received. The FBU does not, despite the government rhetoric around unions, take strike action lightly. Firefighters, as one told me this morning, join the fire service to protect the public. This is what they want to do, and what they do daily; they do not want to go on strike. There has not been a national fire strike over pay since 2003.

Fire and rescue, along with local government, is an area of the public sector in which negotiations are not held directly with government but involve national collective bargaining with employers’ representatives. The current dispute is in the context of a real-terms cut in firefighters’ pay since 2010 of 12%. Had we not had over a decade of government austerity and government-imposed pay restraint, firefighters might be paid around £4,000 more. The current dispute is in the context of the union being asked by firefighters for referrals to food banks.

I will leave others to speak about the rights of those working in other sectors, but it is just over a year since firefighters were a critical part of our national response to Covid, taking on roles that supported our NHS and ambulance services, with the support and backing of the unions. They do not deserve to have their right to strike removed, and it should not be removed.

In London we have worked hard to maintain good relationships with firefighters and their representative bodies. In addition, the Mayor of London identified additional funding to ensure firefighters could be offered a decent pay rise, albeit one that does not match the inflation caused by the Government’s current cost-of-living crisis. I do not want to prejudice the outcome of the firefighters’ ballot, but I am proud to have worked with Labour colleagues to push an improved offer to fire- fighters, rather than dismiss their pay claim as unreasonable, as the Government appear to with so many public sector workers.

I would also like to address some of the government narrative about strikes, particularly the suggestion that our trade union legislation is much more liberal than other European countries’, and which this Government are using repeatedly to support their arguments for the minimum service level legislation this Bill seeks to introduce.

First, the notion that our legislation is liberal and needs strengthening is frankly laughable, given the existing high bar set for strike action. Secondly, as has already been highlighted in this debate, workers in Europe, including firefighters, generally work in an industrial relations climate with more collective bargaining in negotiations than in the UK. In Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the right to strike is guaranteed under their constitutions.

In Italy, minimum service arrangements are set out in collective agreements between unions and employers. In the UK, fire authorities already have a legal duty to plan for business continuity to ensure the public have a minimum level of fire provision in the event of industrial action. On top of this, the FBU has already negotiated a major incident agreement with fire employers in the event of forthcoming strike action, as the union has always done. This is publicly available, so Ministers should be aware of this.

I cannot emphasise sufficiently that this legislation is unnecessary and erodes the fundamental rights of workers. As recently as when the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, was Fire Minister, the Government also appeared to be of the view that it was not necessary to restrict firefighters’ right to strike, as that was not included in his proposals for major fire reform. Good industrial relations, dialogue with unions and negotiation would be a much more constructive way forward than unreasonable legislation and using inflammatory language in an attempt to justify it. Like others, I urge the Government to reconsider this regressive Bill, but also like others, I have very little hope that Ministers will do so.