Public Sector Pay: Proposed Strike Action

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

You are very kind, Sir Edward; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) for securing this important debate.

Another winter of discontent looms over hard-working public sector workers. We are talking about loyal, hard-working workers who put society above their own needs to see us through the worst of the pandemic. They are dedicated, industrious workers whose pay has declined in real terms, whose benefits have been eroded, whose hours have increased and whose food and energy bills have become unaffordable while they suffer in-work poverty.

Public sector workers are in two or sometimes three jobs, relying on food banks with their heating off. These people are down, yes, but not out. Workers are organising up and down the country. They are balloting and co-ordinating mass strikes to make this Government listen. It is a shame that hospitals in Leicestershire, including the general hospital in my own constituency of Leicester East, have opened food banks to feed dedicated NHS staff. Nurses’ pay is no longer enough to pay for food. They carried us through the pandemic and, in response, this Government sent them to food banks.

Covid-19 proved that the Government can act when they announced billions of pounds of new spending to fight coronavirus, support businesses and protect livelihoods during the crisis. The Bank of England created £200 billion of new money via quantitative easing to buy Government and corporate bonds. It then designed a new covid corporate financing facility to lend directly to big business and started funding the Treasury directly via the ways and means facility, which, in essence, is the Government’s overdraft at the Bank. The Government can spend without borrowing from private markets.

A month ago, the bankers’ Budget presented by the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng), caused a financial market crisis that led the Bank of England to bail out the Government to the tune of £65 billion. Any excuse that the Government might use for not raising the pay of public sector workers, who need it the most, has been well and truly shattered. When the Government set a Budget, it does not function like a household budget. The Government cannot run out of money, but they seem reluctant to use it—or refuse to do so—for public sector workers. In-work poverty, like austerity and the cost of living crisis that is heaping misery on families, is a political choice made here. Where have the hundreds of billions of pounds of fresh cash created by the Bank of England gone? They have gone into the pockets of the rich. Total wealth in the UK, skewed heavily at the top, is now an earth-shattering £15 trillion—five times our GDP. The wealth of those in the top 20% has doubled from £5 trillion in 2008 to nearly £10 trillion in 2020.

As we have heard, there are myriad options available to raise funds from the wealthiest. Wealth taxes, taxes on trades in financial markets, inheritance and unearned income taxes are just a few of the ways we could raise billions from wealth. We could fund public sector pay by redistributing the idle wealth from that £15 trillion. We must fund the NHS and bring our essential services back under public ownership. That is how we reduce inequality and how we should go about levelling up, if we really mean to do it.

When public sector workers call for wages to be increased in real terms and the Government respond by saying that they need to balance the budget, they are, to be frank, being disingenuous. The ideology of the free market and of deregulation results in profits and power for the few and misery for the masses. Industrial action is completely justified, and it will always remain a human right to withdraw one’s labour—

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Order. Could the hon. Lady bring her contribution to an end?

[Claudia Webbe]

I will wind up now. That is despite the Government wanting a return to feudal Britain. Austerity, which has been debunked by many progressive scholars as economically illiterate, needlessly pushed working people into another level of destitution, and contributed to more than 140,000 deaths in the UK. Put simply, whether it is austerity or the cost of living crisis, crisis after crisis has made the UK worker pay with their lives while inequality widens and the wealth trickles up.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Order. I am afraid I must end you there.