Public Sector Pay: Proposed Strike Action

Debate between Chris Bryant and Edward Leigh

Tuesday 1st November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is always a delight to see you in the Chair, Sir Edward.

I should declare that I am a member of the GMB. When I was a priest in the Church of England, no union would take us, because if we did go on strike, it would not be very obvious what had not happened. MSF took us on for a while, and then we became members of Unite, but when Burberry was trying to close its factory in Treorchy, Rhondda, a few years ago, I worked so closely with the GMB that I thought it was right to join. I am a very proud member.

I start with the principle that it is a fundamental human right for people to be able to withdraw their labour, and any attempt to undermine that right is a contradiction of all our human rights. There may be many different reasons why someone needs to withdraw their labour, but it is worth reminding people that no trade unionist, trade union leader or member of a trade union ever takes the decision to go on strike lightly, for the very simple reason that, apart from anything else, it costs them and their family money—goodness gracious, the miners of the Rhondda knew that in spades back in the 1980s. Individual members of trade unions are proud of the work they do, so they do not want to not be in work—they want to be in work.

Many of the people we are talking about have been described as “key workers”. That phrase came into existence during the covid pandemic, when people suddenly discovered that bus drivers, train drivers, bus conductors and people who work in supermarkets or for a local council—many of whom suffered more than anybody during covid, because they were at daily risk—are all key workers because the whole of the rest of the economy simply cannot function without them. Those people know that they are essential to society, and they do not want to let down their customers, clients, passengers and patients or the people with whom they work. They are proud of their work, and they want to be in work, so it takes a lot to get a trade union or an individual member to vote for strike action.

My constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter)—not “Sinon Valley”, as Tony Blair always used to call it—is absolutely right about the cost of living crisis. Energy costs in our constituencies are often even higher because many homes are difficult to insulate and to keep warm and dry, as they are basically made out of stone and rubble. If someone is on very low wages, seeing their energy costs double in a year makes a dramatic difference, whatever the Government may have done this year, and people are anxious about what will happen after April. Inflation for the poorest is even higher than the 10.1% that has been mentioned, not least because poorer people spend more of their money on the essentials in life—food, energy and housing costs—and the cost of cheaper brands has risen the most. The cost of things that fill kids’ bellies more readily, such as pasta, have risen by 45%, 47% or 48%, while bread has gone up by 34%, so inflation is even worse for the poorest.

My constituency may be different from other poorer constituencies, because more than 70% of people in the Rhondda own their homes. Many have small mortgages, but some have substantial ones. They may not have taken a long fixed-rate mortgage, because they were not sure how things would work out and did not want to be in a difficult situation in five years’ time. If someone sees their monthly rate going from £300 to £500, they will be thinking about losing their home. The problems that many pensioners are having are intensified by the fact that, if they had a small pension pot of, say, £35,000 in July, it may now be worth only £25,000 after the mini-Budget, so the annuity they might get if they retire now will be lower.

Then, on top of all that, there is wage suppression, which we have seen for 12 years for nearly every key worker. Apart from anything else, that has been counterproductive. One reason we are not getting people back into work is that there is an enormous backlog in the NHS. I am not making a partisan point here, because we have the same problem in Wales—there is an NHS backlog across the whole UK. If wages are suppressed in the NHS, fewer and fewer people will choose to work in it, more and more people will retire, and more and more people will leave it entirely, which will exacerbate the problem.

I completely support the CWU’s strike at the Royal Mail. It seems utterly preposterous to make such a small offer to the workers when significant amounts have been awarded to senior managers and shareholders. That is completely wrong. In my patch, people are worried about Royal Mail deliveries, but I am not blaming the staff; I am blaming the managers, because quite often they simply have not employed enough people to get the work done. I should add that I also support the CWU in its dispute with Openreach, which suffers from exactly the same problems as the Royal Mail.

My final points are about the Government’s role. First, it is to ensure that the laws in this land are fair to the employer and the employee. I do not think we have laws that are fair to the employee at the moment—I think the law is unbalanced. The former Prime Minister—the one we have just lost—would not have been able to become Prime Minister if the rules that presently exist for a strike ballot had been exercised for her. That is an utter hypocrisy in the Government’s line.

Secondly, where the Government have a direct, indirect or even just tangential interest or role in a dispute, they should do everything in their power to keep both sides at the table. In my experience, trade union members and trade union officials are the best deal makers in the land. The Government should learn from them and not the other way round.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Let us be fair to all our colleagues—five minutes, brothers, please.

Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster

Debate between Chris Bryant and Edward Leigh

Tuesday 12th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

That was an interesting speech, although I am not sure that the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) carried the rest of the House. This is the iconic centre of the United Kingdom, and it is not surprising that the SNP wants to make it into a museum.

I commend the Leader of the House for the moderate, sensible, open-minded way in which he opened the debate. I suspect that very few people would disagree with anything he said, and most of what the shadow Leader of the House the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) said was sensible, too. We all agree that we have to just get on with it. There have been too many delays, and—let us be realistic—they will probably still be working around us in 50, 60 or 100 years’ time. That is the way of these old buildings.

I hope we will move on from this endless debate about whether or not we have a decant. I rather resent the fact that those of us who have been arguing the case against a very lengthy decant are accused by others of just wanting to live in a comfortable place. I serve on the Sponsor Body with my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Robin Millar). If we had proceeded with its plans, which would have entailed a decant of up to 20 years, that decant would not have started before 2031. I can assure the House that by 2031, I will certainly be retired and quite possibly dead, so it is nothing to do with me. What the Sponsor Body finally came up with might have been a fair evaluation of what it would cost to do a full singing-and-dancing renovation and change of everything, but it was totally unrealistic, and the Commission had to step in.

There will be ways of working creatively around us. I accept that it may well be necessary to have a decant, but we have no idea how long that decant will last. If we get rid of the Daily Mail September sittings and stop sweating the building through the entire summer recess, there may come a point where we will break in July and not come back until the following January, or it may take longer—we have no idea. However, I say with the greatest respect to my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) that we should not, I am afraid, accept an amendment that just lays down a set time. We have to look at the evidence. The new Commission will do its work, and will do whatever is necessary.

There has been so much delay, and I think it is very unfair of the hon. Member for Bristol West who leads for the Opposition to blame the Government and the former Leader of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), for that fact. The reason why we have had so much delay is that the Sponsor Body has come up with wildly expensive proposals, the first of which was the demolition of Richmond House. That would have been financially wasteful, with millions of pounds spent on a white elephant permanent replica Chamber; it would have been architecturally destructive, making a mockery of heritage laws; and it could have cost up to £1 billion. That proposal caused an enormous amount of delay, and I think there is a general consensus that it was right for us to do away with it. It has been delay, delay, delay.

The plans for the Palace were not much better. The Sponsor Body was planning on removing 14 lift shafts, and wanted office space for MPs cut by as much as one fifth. The programme was in danger of becoming a vast feeding frenzy for contractors and consultants at the taxpayer’s expense. A lot of those ideas were simply unrealisable, so the plans for the R&R programme that have been put forward have failed. As the Leader of the House said, we need to look at working models that have been successful, such as that used for Elizabeth Tower, which has been beautifully restored—of course, that project went over time and over budget because too little preparatory work was done, but the result is magnificent. The cast-iron roofing that the Leader of the House talked about has been an immense success. It is the largest cast-iron roof in Europe. Each piece has been taken apart, restored or replaced, and put back with meticulous skill, so I do not think it is fair to criticise the estates programme.

[Chris Bryant]

One of the problems is that lots of people advocate for having lots more of those individual projects. Something like 32 or 33 projects are going on at the moment, and one of the difficulties with the estate is that it is very tight for space, with nearly every available inch already covered in a portakabin or some kind of contractor’s arrangements. We cannot do many more projects at the same time as the current ones, and the cast-iron roofs would have been done quite a bit quicker if the previous Speaker had not insisted that work stopped whenever he was in his house. That is what is going to happen if we keep on trying to do all the work around the building while we are still in it.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The hon. Gentleman makes his point and we just have to learn to compromise. He mentions Mr Speaker. We should congratulate Mr Speaker on his own creative thinking. The Speaker’s house needed urgent repairs, which meant he had to be accommodated elsewhere. The R&R programme drew up plans costing £20 million, to tear up a Georgian townhouse on the estate and put a lift shaft through it. Mr Speaker and the previous Leader of the House grasped the nettle, visited the site itself, and decided it just needed a lick of paint and some basic work. The right hon. Member for North East Somerset, who is sitting in his place, reported that it cost just 5% of the planned £20 million to get all three empty houses back into use. That is exactly the kind of mentality we need. It requires good decision making, an eye for savings, and cutting out unnecessary embellishments.

Serving on the sponsor body has been informative. The sponsor body’s job is to oversee and scrutinise the delivery authority, but I personally believe that the information provided to the sponsor body has often been mired in the worst kind of management speak. Operations are often totally opaque and lacking in clarity. I believe that our ability to thoroughly scrutinise work has not been fully facilitated. Every time it came across a problem, it reached for the most invasive and most expensive solution. I believe that in the end it was going to provide very bad value for money. Every time we proposed alternatives, ridiculous claims about costing and timescale were thrown back. Inadequate figures were given to us. There was a lack of awareness of MPs’ work. For example, it was suggested that MPs’ staff move to shared open-plan offices. Parliamentary politics requires privacy and discretion, and dealing with constituents’ cases even more so. Often, we deal with very sensitive information. We do not work like other entities and we have to accept that Parliament is a unique place.

In conclusion, I believe that what the Leader of the House is proposing today is a sensible compromise. We are not ruling anything in or anything out. We are going to get on with it. We love this building. We are not going to put ourselves first and we are going to do the absolutely essential work to restore this Barry and Pugin masterpiece. We are not going to make it carbon neutral and fill in atriums and all the courtyards. All that sort of expensive stuff is for the birds. We are going to make this building safe and fireproof, and we will do it, hopefully, with good preparatory work, within time and within budget.

Restoration and Renewal

Debate between Chris Bryant and Edward Leigh

Thursday 16th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I, too, wish we were debating something else. I would like to be debating, for instance, the way British Airways is treating its staff and, for that matter, its customers, but we have this debate this afternoon. I could just say, “I refer hon. Members to the speech that I made last time”, or to the one before, but, unfortunately, I am not going to do that.

I do love this building. Sometimes, it is the small quirky bits of the building that I love. It is not just the obvious historical bits. When one walks through St Stephen’s Hall, there is the painting of Wolsey demanding more money from Thomas More, who was Speaker at the time. It is a great moment of British history. I love it because it was painted by Vivian Forbes and his lover Glyn Philpot. The sad story is that, when the painting was finished and Glyn Philpot died, Vivian Forbes took his own life 24 hours later. There are so many different layers of history in this building—it is woven into every single aspect of our history—and I think that we need to preserve it, not in aspic, but we need to preserve it.

There are lots of things that have not changed since the last debate. The truth is—notwithstanding the comments from the SNP earlier, or, for that matter, from the Prime Minister in his letter yesterday—we are not going anywhere else. As I am sure the Leader of the House will remember, when they tried to get Parliament to go to York in the1460s, there was no business to transact, so it ended up not sitting properly at all. And when Parliament met in York in the 14th century it only did so because the king was terrified of an invasion by the Scots. I do not think that that is the concern of the Prime Minister at the moment, although there are some worries about a border.

I made an important point earlier about the capacity for doing additional work here in the Palace. It seems crazy, but we emptied out the cloisters to do work immediately, we got rid of all the staff who were working there, and the cloisters are still completely empty; there is no extra space on the parliamentary estate to put extra workers to be able to get the work done. That is an increasing problem. There are projects that have been done very successfully. The cast-iron roofs have been done on time and on budget. It has been an excellent project. The inside of the roof in Westminster Hall has been attended to very well. There are projects that are going well, but we are accumulating, every year, more and more additional projects, and the backlog is getting worse.

Richmond House is still contiguous to the Northern Estate where most of our parliamentary offices are. That was one of the main reasons, when I was on the Joint Committee, that we considered using Richmond House. It diminished the security threats of crossing over to some other building across the road. It is not about the convenience of Members; it just made it possible for people to do their jobs safely.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

When the hon. Gentleman was on the Joint Committee, there was not a proposal to demolish the building.

[Chris Bryant]

Actually, there was. The memory of the right hon. Gentleman is failing him, I am afraid. There was a proposal to demolish it. The bit that I think he differs on is whether there was a proposal to demolish the staircases, which some people think are intrinsic to Richmond House. Personally, I think that they are the ugliest bit of the building. The truth is, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said earlier, it would be perfectly possible if people like the right hon. Gentleman had not been complaining that we had to have a Chamber that was identical to this Chamber—[Interruption.] If I am diminishing the right hon. Gentleman, my memory is different from his. If we wanted to go to a system where we slightly changed the parameters of what is in there, I am up for that, but it remains a fact that Richmond House is the only piece of land that is contiguous to the rest of the parliamentary estate and therefore safe.

As for the other things that have not changed, the building was designed as a whole, not from the very beginning, but after the fire. After 1834, one of the great, clever things that Barry and Pugin did was to amalgamate the estate into a single proposition about the British constitution, from the Commons through to the Lords and the monarch and incorporating the ancient Westminster Hall from the 11th century. That poses a real problem for those who want us to decant in part, because there is one central heating system, which is steam under high pressure; there is one electricity system; there is one drainage system; there is one water system; and there is one basement, interconnected, with a set of risers that connect it to the one attic and roof. That is the problem for the future safety of the building.

The reason I completely disagree with the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown)—it is rare for us to disagree on matters of this kind—about the idea of a partial decant, and the Commons going down to the Lords while the Lords go elsewhere, is that the Lords is not contiguous to the offices on the northern estate. So a safe passageway would be needed for votes and for people to be able to take part in debates, or people would have to walk along the pavements outside. All the advice that was given to us was that that was a security risk for us. More importantly, one of the problems with trying to keep us in the Lords—which, incidentally, is too small a Chamber with far too few seats for the House of Commons to be able to sit in—is that if we kept this building working while it was a building site, we would dramatically increase the risk of a further fire and we would increase the risk to the staff who were working in it. That was precisely the problem in Notre Dame, and that is what led to the massive fire there.