P&O Ferries and Employment Rights

Christian Wakeford Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The first thing I want to do is express my solidarity with the 800 seafarers and their families, and pay tribute to the RMT and Nautilus for the swift support that they gave their members, along with the whole of the TUC.

I am pleased that Ministers and Tory Members have said how disgraceful P&O’s behaviour has been, but they have said how unacceptable such practices are on previous occasions. It appears today, from both their words and their body language, that they are embarrassed. Maybe somebody has been saying “Shame on you”. It is almost as if it is more about justifying this disgusting treatment of summarily firing the workforce and justifying why they did not outlaw it five months ago when they had that opportunity.

[Christian Wakeford (Bury South) (Lab)]

I was a supporter of my hon. Friend’s Bill when he brought it forward, despite being on the Conservative Benches at the time, and I even shared a platform with him at the party conference. We heard from the Secretary of State earlier that ACAS would be bringing forward further guidance, but guidance would not have helped the people from P&O. Does my hon. Friend agree that guidance is not the solution and that we need legislation to prevent this from happening again?

[Barry Gardiner]

I do agree with my hon. Friend. It is clear that nothing currently in the law could have stopped this incident from happening and that, whatever the outcome, 800 families are suffering as a consequence. Had it been clear in statute and had the company known that it could not take advantage in such a way, it would not have done so. It is the Government’s lassitude on this matter that has led to where we are now.

I do not want to engage in recriminations about who said what. Let us try to be positive and think of a way in which we could develop a law in this country that could solve these problems. The first thing, to which the Minister alluded earlier, is the importance of negotiation and the fact that the negotiations that ultimately took place in previous disputes were positive. Let us get it round the right way, so that we have consultation at the beginning of the process and a statutory obligation on the employer to consult, to negotiate and to be transparent. Incidentally, that happens to be in clause 1 of my Bill.

The hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) referred to proposed new section 187B, but she knows very well that this was not about a duty of disclosure on employers that was completely open-ended. No, it was a very specific one. It involved information that would be in accordance with good industrial relations practice that the employer should disclose for the purposes of the consultation and

“without which the appropriate representatives would be to a material extent impeded in carrying on consultation with the employer”.

It was a measured, sensible approach, and if the Government had any concerns about it, they could have been ironed out in Committee, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) said. But the Government were not prepared to do that.

There was also the facility in my Bill to make complaints about the failure to follow good practice. The Bill was all about instantiating good practice and penalising bad practice. That would have meant that where an employer had not followed the rules properly, not obeyed the statute, not consulted or engaged openly with their workforce or not negotiated transparently, a complaint could have been made to the central arbitration committee and ultimately an injunction could have been made to restore the jobs of the people who were fired. That is not about rehire; it is all about fire. The Minister for lassitude whispered in the ear of his colleague the other day that this issue was not about fire and rehire, but those measures would have protected the workers in this situation and the Government now need to act. They should take this opportunity. They have had a rap over the knuckles and they have been embarrassed. Now they must legislate.