Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I have two points to make about this disturbing Bill. The first is as a lifetime member of the First Division Association. We did not often go on strike, not being at the sharp end of working conditions, and the Government were generally well-disposed to the negotiations of our excellent general secretary, my noble friend Lady Symons. However, members of a civil service union will now strike. That signifies serious malfunctioning in their working lives, as my noble friends, who have a range of direct experience of this over many sectors, have elaborated. For the public services to pay the price of the Truss Government’s miscalculation and subsequent inflation, on top of the long-standing wage squeeze, is manifestly unjust. No such constraint is applied to the private sector.

I echo the point powerfully made by my noble friend Lady O’Grady that the defence of unfair dismissal is also quite unjustly curtailed. If I understand paragraph 8 of the Schedule correctly, it looks as if employees can be sacked if they are not covered by a work notice or if their involvement in a strike is considered not to be compliant with one. Will the Minister please clarify this? I remember from my days as a member of employment tribunals that it was already difficult to prove unfair dismissal in quite a few instances.

Secondly, what I find alarming about the Bill is its whole premise that the Executive can dispense with our structure of democracy. My noble friend Lady Donaghy, many other noble Lords on all sides and two highly authoritative committee reports have focused on this, so I will very briefly add my voice.

In principle, Governments have manifestos; they are voted in with a majority and they have a mandate. But they do not thereby have a right to deal Parliament out of the process of implementing that mandate. The Bill erodes the role of the legislature by putting crucial detail into secondary legislation, which gets scant scrutiny and no scope for amendment. That weakens the essential arm of democracy—it is Parliament which decides what the law shall be, in our rule of law. In our system, laws are not intended to be made through skeleton Bills, wide delegated powers or untrammelled Executive fiat, even over laws not actually made yet, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, pointed out. The Bill abounds in just such provisions.

The instances of Clause 3 and Clause 2 in the Schedule mean that neither Parliament nor the public will be able fully to grasp what the law will actually mean. What, for instance, is a minimum level of service? How much of the education sector is covered? School caretakers? Ofsted? In effect, if all these clauses stand, Parliament will have been stripped of the capacity fully to scrutinise how people will in fact be affected by the law. The result is that Parliament would lose the capacity to reflect the interests of the electorate properly. It is not surprising that impact assessments have been slow in coming, because there is so little concrete information for the analysts to work on.

We did not subscribe to a rule of law made by the Executive. That carries the elective dictatorship—already a problem, as noted by a distinguished Conservative Lord Chancellor—a step too far. It fundamentally undermines the accountability of the Government to Parliament.

Finally, our Parliament has weathered many blows over the centuries of its evolution. This is one which needs to be comprehensively dealt with. This Bill is not the right way to use law and it is very far from the right way to tackle workplace protest against intolerable conditions. To remove Parliament from the process of law-making is a dangerous assault on our democracy. “Taking back control” rings hollow indeed.