Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, various circumstances may lead to legislation being rushed through Parliament. We might have to respond to international developments beyond our control: a conflict breaking out, or an urgent need to approve a treaty. There may have been an unexpected incident where it is clear that our current law is inadequate and there is cross-party agreement to work urgently to fill a gap. Alternatively, we may have a Government who find themselves in trouble and cook up some kind of legislative proposal so they can fill their media grid by appearing to be doing something.

There are no prizes for guessing which of those scenarios we on these Benches believe we find ourselves in today. There is no outside pressure or unexpected gap in the law, but we do have a Government who are floundering and seeking to distract attention rather than dealing with the real problems facing our country. I will focus on the crisis in health and social care in my remarks, while other noble friends will speak to transport and broader concerns about industrial relations later.

First, I want to flush out one area which illustrates the hollow political intent behind this legislation. That is the Government’s attempt to sell it as a copy of what happens in other European countries. To hear this Government, of all people, ask for support for regulation on the basis of aligning with EU countries tells us either that they completely lack a sense of irony or that they actually want us to laugh at them. You can imagine someone in No. 10 getting excited about this angle as one which will confound those pesky Europhile Opposition politicians: “How can they oppose this if we point out that it is just like the EU countries that they love?” Gosh, you have really got us there; what can we say? Oh yes, we can say that this is nonsense. There might be an argument for saying that this is alignment if the Government were planning to import French, German or Spanish labour law wholesale, with works councils, collective bargaining and the whole kit and caboodle. Can the Minister confirm today what other elements of EU labour law the Government plan to adopt in the near future? But, of course, that is not what they are proposing, and their argument falls apart as soon as you recognise that each country has a unique way of managing relations between workers and employers that depends on a complex web of relationships and legal powers.

Let us turn to one of the areas that the Government say is a primary driver for the Bill: health and social care. There is as near to consensus as you ever get in politics that the biggest challenge facing our health and care sectors is a lack of staff to provide the services that we need. We discuss these staff shortages in this House continually, and the Government themselves agree that we cannot improve these essential services without solving them.

These shortages pile extra stress on to those who are having to cover gaps, making the idea of going into these essential roles even less attractive. The overriding priority for any Government faced with this situation should be to work at making these professions more attractive, and that does mean looking at pay, but also at the morale of the profession. What we are seeing from this Government is the opposite of that: they set out to give the impression that they are immovable on pay, that they have few ideas on staffing levels, and as icing on that hard cake they come up with this Bill as a warning to anyone who dares to challenge them.

There is nothing in this Bill that will lead to more health and social care staff being hired, but it rather represents another signal from this Government about how they intend to treat those who are employed in these essential services. Staff in the NHS taking industrial action feel caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. They are dedicated professionals who would rather be at work caring for people than on the picket line, but they are genuinely concerned that their living standards will keep eroding if they do not take a stand to defend them.

There is an opening for a positive discussion between the Government and those professionals about what a fair settlement would look like, and about how they can work together to ensure that there are adequate staffing levels all year round to help patients and the staff themselves. Instead, under this Bill, the Government will be forcing conversations about staffing levels to happen under threat of sanctions. That is hardly conducive to good dialogue.

The Government have one more trick in their media playbook: the consultations they are running on minimum service levels that are engineered to be able to show public support. There is no option in the consultation to see whether people would rather the Government settled the dispute so that industrial action itself went away—something I suspect would have overwhelming public support in the case of NHS staff—and there is no attempt to explain the trade-offs and complexities involved in a mandated versus a mutually agreed approach.

The Government’s case is not that there has been a failure to provide baseline cover during recent strikes but that they want more consistency and prior notice. But if the price of that consistency is a worsening climate of hostility between employers and staff, we have to ask whether this is worth it. In sectors where there is a queue of people wanting to take on jobs, playing hardball like this might be defensible, but where those queues are empty and our overriding public goal has to be to fill them, this is a very high-risk strategy. As always, we do not wish for the Government to fail, but we would be remiss in our duty if we did not raise a flag where we think this is likely to be the case. The Government have had their announcement and shown that they are not taking the strikes lying down, but the price of following this approach to the bitter end is that it risks undermining their overwhelming priority, which is to improve public service staff recruitment and retention.

It is not too late for the Government to think again about where their time and energy should be best directed if we are to see meaningful, systemic improvements to health and social care rather than a mere manoeuvre past a bump in the road. The risk otherwise is that in pushing hard to establish mandated minimum service levels during industrial action, this very effort will contribute to being unable to maintain what are all too often inadequate levels of service in these vital sectors all year round.

I always find the impact assessments that come with legislation illuminating, and we received the one for this Bill today, which did not disappoint. It shows us another possible way forward. The first option is voluntary minimum service level agreements, with no government incentives, in key public services. The impact assessment suggests that similar benefits could be derived from voluntary agreements, with the main downside being that employers would need to offer incentives in return, perhaps in terms of pay and working conditions.

I close with a question to the Minister and ask him to explain whether this option to make a good-faith effort to negotiate more voluntary arrangements for strike cover was ever seriously explored. This would be a way both to guarantee services and to motivate staff to join and stay in these public services. I suggest to the Minister that in the current climate, we might get further by offering more carrots rather than waving ever-bigger sticks.