Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Sahota has reminded me, in his excellent speech, that I should declare an interest as a member of the GMB. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, on her maiden speech. Having spent 20 years of my life on different local authorities, I am very keen on the voice of local government being stronger in this House, and I am sure that that is what she will bring.

I have a lot of sympathy for the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, in his role as Minister here. A fortnight ago, he introduced for us the revocation of EU law Bill, which I described as one of the silliest Bills ever to come before this House. Today, he is defending this strikes Bill, which I think is one of the stupidest Bills ever to come before this House, because its effects will be totally negative.

One may not have agreed with Margaret Thatcher—a lot of us did not—when she legislated for trade union reform, but she did it for what she regarded as a constructive economic and social purpose. This Bill does not have a constructive economic and social purpose; it is about gesture politics, about making headlines and about making the fractious, disillusioned members of the Tory party feel good about themselves, bringing back memories of the Thatcher days, hoping against all hope that they might return. I think it is a scandalously opportunistic, trivial measure.

I have some sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, when she said—in a very good speech, if I may say so—that the public need a safety net. I sympathise with that, but I do not think it is practical to legislate for it. I do not think a safety net can be put in place by ministerial direction. Circumstances vary enormously from one public service to another—in fact, from one hospital to another, and all the rest. To a large extent, as we have heard from many contributions in this debate, a safety net already exists, because local representatives and management have agreed what line cannot be crossed. We are much more likely to make progress, if we want a safety net, by a patient process of negotiation than by ministerial directions from on high that can only make matters worse.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, in his characteristically brilliant speech, said that this legislation raises major questions of principle. He is right and I hope everyone here—I believe they do—believes that the right to strike is a crucial democratic right. Now I am going to say something that some people on my side might not agree with. I do not think it is an unfettered right.

Personally, after the winter of discontent and the 1979 election, when 80%, I think, of people who voted Labour in that election thought that trade union reform was necessary, I supported reform. I supported ballots and I supported restrictions on mass picketing. When the Social Charter came in, which was the great revolution in this area, bringing in individual legal rights, I recognised that the closed shop was no longer sustainable. So I do not support an unfettered right, but I do very much agree that it is extremely dangerous for the right to strike for this Bill to enact what is a huge surrender of parliamentary sovereignty to the Executive; what in 1930s Germany would have been called an enabling Bill—that is what this Bill is.

The Bill gives Ministers the power to change the law—even to change laws that do not presently exist. I just do not think it is right that this degree of discretion, which could result, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said, in a situation where the right to strike was, in effect, illegal, is acceptable. I just do not think it is acceptable. We know in our House that the fact that these statutory instruments will come to us through the affirmative procedure is a very weak form of parliamentary accountability, unless we change the practice that we have adopted over many years.

Fundamentally, the Bill is a distraction from the central question, and here I agree with what my noble friends Lady Kennedy and Lady Chakrabarti and others have said. The central issue we face is a crisis in public services, which face a real existential threat as a consequence of a pay policy which is holding back public sector pay as against private sector pay in the face of the cost of living crisis. I have to say to the Government that it is not sustainable, it simply is not.

I know care workers in Cumbria who are going off to work in supermarkets and we cannot recruit any replacements. I know nurses who are leaving the profession. The fact is that as they leave, we are recruiting more, but we cannot make up for the numbers who are going. I know doctors who are looking for the earliest opportunity to retire because they just cannot fact the pressure.

If we are going to run effective public services, we have to have larger numbers of people working in them who are contented with their lot. That is not the case at the moment. It is not sustainable to simply hold down public sector pay as a means of trying to keep public expenditure under control. I say to the Government that I know why they are doing that: they want to promise tax cuts before the next election. But are we to face the ruination of our public services for this electorally opportunist goal? I do not think that we should.

What we need is a new approach to public sector pay. We should be looking at the way the review body system works and the criteria those bodies look at when they come up with their recommendations. Less regard should be paid to what is called affordability and more regard paid to labour market sustainability. Employers should engage with the unions on how we can change working practices in the public services so that we can afford higher pay. I do not agree, by the way, with the RMT position of demanding an unconditional offer. I think that is unacceptable; you have to be willing to negotiate on working practices as well as on pay. I would like to see more use of arbitration. Again, that is something the Government should be promoting—but they should not promote this Bill. This Bill is crazy. It does nothing to help the public service crisis. It will only make the situation worse, and we really deserve something much better.