Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Greenhalgh Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, first, I declare that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association, along with probably half the Chamber. I will reflect on that magnificently crafted maiden speech from my noble friend Lady O’Neill of Bexley—I do not think that it could have been anything else, could it? For me, she embodies the three Cs, two of which I share with her and one of which I do not. The first is Catholicism: we were both brought up in Roman Catholic households; I had only a little bit of Irish, she had a lot of Irish. That gives you a sense of public service and duty; she really exemplifies that, and it is a great C to embody.

The second is genuine conservatism. We are both children of the Thatcher years and share the belief in freedom within the rule of law, the belief in the hand up rather than the handout, and the belief in working hard and playing by the rules. Our whole lives have been shaped by the great lady—mine was as much as my noble friend’s, even though I am a man. The one C I do not share with her is the third: control. If she—Teresa—remembers, I was a council leader before her. It started with Ian Clement, but the other four victories were hers—I managed only two. She managed four successive victories; that makes five in total. She is right that we ignored Bexley—we thought it was somewhere out in Kent—but, little by little, she has established herself as a titan in local government. She did not just control Bexley, she also controlled Bromley: I remember asking her, “What about Bromley?”, and she said, “He does what I tell him”. She will be a hugely great addition to this House.

I feel that this is a tremendously uncontroversial Bill. As someone who is the son of a surgeon and who has been the first deputy mayor for policing and crime of this great capital city and a council leader, I believe that the Bill is not about pay and conditions but about service. It is about public service involving critical things where, if you do not turn up to work, people die. My father is a surgeon. He was nominated as the presidential surgeon for George Bush Sr. They flew a helicopter and landed on Charing Cross Hospital to practise. In the event of the President being shot, who was going to get him off the table? It would have been my father. What if he turned up and said, “I’m going to go on strike today” or, when someone aged 75 with a leaking aneurysm has two hours to live, the ambulance driver decides to go on strike or says, “It’s the middle of the night—I don’t think I’m going to go to work today because I’ve got to get up in the morning”? As a doctor, you take the Hippocratic oath to keep people alive, and if you are a police officer, you do not have the right to strike—the police have not had one since 1919; you take an oath to serve the public, maintain order and stop criminals.

Service is really important. There are also the fire and rescue services—I am a former Fire Minister. We do not want people to burn in buildings; we do not want Grenfell to happen again. We need firefighters who, in the event of such a tragedy, step up and turn up to work. In all conscience, you cannot have a situation where these critical services are able to strike and simply not turn up to work.

I am a loyal Back-Bencher: I support the Government 100% on absolutely everything. I would really like the Government and my noble friend the Minister not to stop with this but to consider extending this legislation to aviation ground services. Ground services ensure that passengers and cargo are ready to safely take off and land. They are critical.

I want to thank a Cross-Bencher—no, not someone party political but a former Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, who wanted me to mention this, as he is not speaking in this debate: the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. He asked that we include in new Section 234B(3) not police officers who hold the office of constable but police staff who create and provide nationally critical functions such as the call-handling services and forensic investigations. Imagine if you call 999 and they go on strike. These people also provide critical services, and we should extend the Bill to cover them as well.

It is fair to say that my memory of 2022 is not of a winter of discontent but of a year of discontent, with the problems around aviation in the summer, nurses going on strike, ambulance drivers going on strike, and the FBU balloting to go on strike. That has drawn the Bill, which is the appropriate response.

I will just pick up a couple of points in previous speeches. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, is entirely wrong to think that we should get Ministers to sort this problem out. Ministers are not employers. In the same way as with local government, for the leader suddenly to become an employer and undermine their senior officers is entirely the wrong thing to do. You do not create parallel management structures.

I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Allan, that we have to embody a spirit of volunteerism. These are critical services. If we do not have a minimum service level, people can die—it is a simple as that. This is entirely essential stuff.

I am not a great lawyer; in fact, I remember my time studying law as one of abject failure. Therefore, when I listen to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, I strain my ears to try to pick up everything that he says. Basically, he was saying, “This is not the right way to do this; this is secondary legislation.” For me—I know there are some Latin scholars out there—it is finis justificat modo: the end justifies the means. We can achieve this good by doing it this way, which is why the Government are entirely right to do this.

I have spoken for only four of the eight minutes, so I can relax a bit because I have a lot more to say. I ask the Government and my noble friend the Minister to invoke the spirit of the Gipper, Ronald Reagan. Does my noble friend remember what Ronald Reagan did over 40 years ago when the air traffic controllers went on strike—all 11,359 of them? They ignored his presidential order to return to work so he fired the lot of them, and he made sure they could never work again as federal employees. I ask the Government to invoke the spirit of the Gipper, because he was entirely right. My message to the Government, as a loyal Back-Bencher, is to be bold and brave—no compromise: it will save lives.