P&O Ferries Redundancies

Debate between Andy McDonald and Margaret Greenwood

Tuesday 28th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I thank the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) for his forensic speech, and for granting me permission to say a few words about the appalling redundancies of those 800 seafarers, and the lessons that have not been learned from the experience.

My hon. Friend outlined the outrage we all felt when Peter Hebblethwaite, the CEO, made an incredibly shocking admission in Parliament that he knowingly decided to break the law. I was on the Joint Committee when he told us:

“There is absolutely no doubt that we were required to consult with the unions. We chose not to do so.”

They made a calculated decision to break the law because they reckoned, rightly, that the unions would not accept an offer that would slash workers’ wages. They considered it more expedient to absent themselves from their legal obligations and price in the cost of law-breaking, and engage agency staff on pay as low as £1.80 an hour. They did that safe in the knowledge that any compensation that they would have to hand out to former unionised workers would be offset by the benefits of paying poverty wages to their replacements. They belong in the pages of a Dickens novel, not in 21st-century Britain. The fact that Mr Hebblethwaite remains in post at P&O is staggering. He should be disqualified from being a company director.

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that agency crews are working unsafe roster patterns, being at sea for up to 17 weeks? That has implications for everybody who travels on those ferries.

[Andy McDonald]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is utterly staggering that those are the terms and conditions that these major companies are prepared to inflict on workers. It does not matter whether they are from Britain, Poland or wherever in the world. That they would treat human beings in that way is beyond barbaric. Sadly, the Government have simply not learned the lessons from that scandal. The action taken has been insufficient. The Secretary of State passed the buck to the Insolvency Service, which, after months of prevarication, said it would take no further action.

In lieu of that, Ministers could have imposed an unlimited fine on the company. The Opposition made it clear that we would have supported any necessary changes to legislation, but the Tories let P&O off the hook, I am afraid. Thanks to that inaction, we are witnessing a race to the bottom, which is likely spelling the end of any residual UK maritime workforce. All the while, P&O’s parent company, DP World, announced earlier this month that it had received record profits and a £3 billion final dividend for 2022. It also gets financial help from the Government for the berth at London Gateway.

I fear it is not just companies in the maritime industry that will follow suit; there will be others. Businesses across the economy will know that they can blithely commit such crimes of corporate thuggery, and decimate workers’ rights and protections in the process. I am going to finish, because I want to give the Minister the opportunity to respond. The events of the P&O Ferries scandal serve to underscore how much we need reform of employment rights and protections in this country.