Draft Strikes (Minimum Service Levels: Passenger Railway Services) Regulations 2023

Debate between Huw Merriman and John McDonnell

Monday 27th November 2023 General Committees

[Huw Merriman]

I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their points. I should start with the right hon. Member for Warley, given that I said I would come back to him. His question was along the lines of what steps will be required. It is a generic test—it is a legal definition that one would look at. I can read it to him. It is not off a blue Post-it note; it is actually in the guidance. To paraphrase, when a work notice has been issued by a relevant employer, a trade union is under an obligation to take reasonable steps to ensure that its members named in the work notice comply with its requirements. In that regard, there is not that much of a role to play. I should make it absolutely clear—I think there were errors in some hon. Members’ starting points—that a work notice makes no differentiation between whether an employee is a member of a trade union or not, or whether they want to work or not. It is a generic test in that sense.

On the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West, certain individuals may therefore find themselves on a work notice more than others, so some regard will be given to ensure that if a work notice has been given to an employee in one particular industrial action, they are not taken up the next time to ensure they have their right to strike. To go back to the right hon. Member for Warley, it is more that the trade union should not take any steps to stop that individual coming to work under a work notice, rather than it being required to do anything, but it is a test. I worked as an in-house lawyer for 18 years, and I often looked at what reasonable steps meant and how I would interpret that. There is enough precedent in court to do that.

[John McDonnell]

It is absolutely critical to get this clear. If a trade union leader engages in a debate during a dispute and argues that the offer from the employer is not satisfactory, and therefore that there should be a strike and people should take industrial action, does that influence the requirements of taking reasonable steps, or does it go beyond reasonable steps?

[Huw Merriman]

What the right hon. Gentleman is describing is the calling of industrial action in the first place. The idea behind these regulations, of course, is that, when industrial action has been called and an employer chooses at their discretion to issue a work notice—I will come back to that, because it is key that it is not the Government but the employer who decides—that is where the determination comes in. It is whether the trade union, after the work notice has been issued, is taking reasonable steps, so I would differentiate in that regard.

[John McDonnell]

So if that debate takes place while the strike is on, and the trade union general secretary urges their members to continue with the strike, does that influence it? Is that part of undermining and encouragement?

[Huw Merriman]

Well, I am going into a lot of detail here, and that would ultimately be for a court to determine. I suppose the right hon. Gentleman is asking what happens if a person is known to be on a work notice and somebody reads out, “X must ensure they are taking industrial action.” The courts might argue that that is not a reasonable step, but hopefully our examples have given enough clarity.

Again, I want to be absolutely clear on this point. I have a great deal of respect for the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North, and I was interested in the point he made about Scotland. It is absolutely clear that it is down to each individual employer to determine whether they wish to issue work notices or whether they are able to gain enough traction from the workforce without the issuance of work notices. That is not a matter for Government; it is down to the employer. I was intrigued that the hon. Gentleman made it pretty clear that he would not give the same freedom to employers when it comes to ScotRail, because he seemed to intimate that it would not be taking part. He seems to be taking more of a forthright view of what the employer should do than the Government.

Rail Strikes

Debate between Huw Merriman and John McDonnell

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

Let me press on.

Let us also be clear about wages in the industry, which are linked. The median wage is £31,000. Drivers are largely represented by ASLEF, so the vast bulk of people who we are talking about are station staff, cleaners and others whose wages range between £20,000 and £30,000. We are not talking about people on very high wages, so inflation proofing is important to them at the moment

The third demand is where we have some problems—I understand that. It is that when there are changes in jobs and conditions of work, they should be subject to negotiation and—this is the difficult bit—agreement. We know that this dispute will be settled at some stage, so the issue is how bloody it will get. What we all have to do, as I say on the RMT parliamentary group as well, is to facilitate an exchange that enables a resolution.

That is why today’s letter is important. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle is right to say, “Well, it was unconditional”, but it is unconditional from the Government as well. At the moment, it is important to just get everyone through the door. The Government have not put conditions on and neither has the union. The union has not asked for conditions from the Government, and nor should the Government ask for conditions from it. Often, in organising a ballot about industrial action, time limits are in place. At this time, when we are faced with the disruption that is there, an act of good faith such as sitting in the same room is important—it might not work.

[Huw Merriman]

I am in danger of agreeing with the right hon. Gentleman, who makes a very good point. It may well be, in return for giving way a little in saying, “Okay, we’ll sit down with you and then not strike”, that the RMT needs to hear that there will not be a need for compulsory redundancies, because the way the workforce works, voluntary redundancies should probably be taken up anyway and then that could be the natural progression.

[John McDonnell]

The hon. Gentleman knows what these negotiations are like. My background is the National Union of Mineworkers, then the TUC and so on—I have been a trade unionist for the last 50 years—and in every sort of negotiation, the key issue is just getting through that door. Once we get through that door and are face to face starting those negotiations off, anything can happen. We have all been there, and we can have a bloody great row, but at least we are talking. That is all the RMT is asking for.

Let me just say that Members need to know the atmosphere at the moment. I have been talking at various union conferences—I was at Unison yesterday and all the rest—and there is a concern that we are going back to the 1980s, and I saw what happened in the 1980s. My hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), who is here, was an active miner at the time, and I was a member of the NUM head office. What happened then was that there was a Government will to somehow take on the trade union movement, and we got described as the “enemy within”.

If anyone thinks it is to their advantage politically to start taking the RMT on as the enemy within in this situation, they are sorely mistaken, because it is not just about the RMT. At every union conference I have been to, there is a real anxiety. There is an anxiety about protection of their members against this cost of living crisis, and I have to say that there is an anxiety about protecting themselves against some of the threats that have come from the Government—minimal services, bans on overtime and all the rest—which is inflammatory when we are trying to get a negotiated settlement.

Budget Resolutions

Debate between Huw Merriman and John McDonnell

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

There are now waiting lists of 4 million in the NHS, predicted to rise to 5 million because of the lack of investment. We welcome the increase in those in employment, but 800,000 are zero-hour contracts, and we now have more than 2 million people in insecure work. It is no wonder that people are anxious about their futures.

As I have said, the Chancellor has borrowed £145 billion —more than £5,000 per household—which is more in his first year in the job than any other Chancellor in history. The OBR now expects the deficit in 2021 to be almost three times higher than it forecast in March. It blames this deterioration on the collapse in productivity growth, but productivity growth has collapsed because investment has fallen. Government investment is £20 billion less in real terms today than it was in the last year of the previous Labour Government.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

May I ask the shadow Chancellor, or indeed his iPad, how much it would cost to service the Government debt in the event that his own spending plans came to fruition?

The Economy and Work

Debate between Huw Merriman and John McDonnell

Thursday 26th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

I have a Conservative council. In my constituency tonight I will have possibly 200 families living in bed and breakfasts. There are individuals sleeping in our parks and along the canals. In my constituency, we have reinvented the back-to-back, where one family rents the front of a house and another rents the back. We have beds in sheds rented to families. It is a disgrace. This Government have been in power for six years and homelessness has escalated.

According to the Queen’s Speech, the Government will “spread economic prosperity”. Tell that to the steelworkers I met in Redcar, where the Government failed even to mothball the plant to save their local futures. Tell that to the British Home Stores workers facing redundancy as their boss, Sir Philip Green—a Government adviser—stripped their business clean.

In the Queen’s Speech the Government said they will

“continue to support the…Northern Powerhouse.”

That will be why they are closing its Sheffield office and threatening another six offices across the north with closure. That will be why, of the top 15 infrastructure projects with the most public funding, one is in the north.

In the Queen’s Speech, the Government say not that they will tackle poverty and deprivation, but that they will redefine them. The Chancellor’s shameful response to the 1 million people using our food banks every year is to

“introduce new indicators for measuring life chances”.

His failed austerity programme has a human cost, with 500,000 more children in this country forced into poverty and nearly 13 million people now living in poverty. More than half of those people are in work. This Queen’s Speech offers no solutions to those who have barely enough to feed their families and cannot pay to heat their houses. Instead, the Government will simply make sure that they are counting those people’s misery properly.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

Will the shadow Chancellor consider celebrating the fact that one third of the working constituents in Bexhill and Battle are receiving a pay rise because of the national living wage, taking those people off the breadline and further up the pay scale?

[John McDonnell]

I would celebrate it if it was a real living wage and if many of those people were not also suffering from cuts to universal credit.

The reality is that after six years of desperate efforts to impose cuts on our economy, against the best available advice from the economics profession itself, the Chancellor is staring an entirely predictable failure in the face. He started out with such high-flown promises. There was going to be a “march of the makers”, yet today, manufacturing is still smaller than in 2008. There was going to be a rebalancing of the economy, yet today for every three jobs created in London just one is created in the rest of the country. There was going to be a modernised tax service, but, as the National Audit Office pointed out in a damning report earlier this week, the quality of service at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has collapsed in the past year as a result of staffing cuts. He promised increased investment, but he cut Government investment spending and now plans to cut it further. In 2010 he forecast the fastest recovery in living memory, but he has delivered the slowest recovery in modern British history.

Let us talk about job creation. The Chancellor and his Government have, perhaps understandably, clung to the job creation figures. Every month they are greeted with rare enthusiasm by Ministers. The reality is that two thirds of those in poverty—nearly 9 million people—are in work. [Interruption.]

Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Debate between Huw Merriman and John McDonnell

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

It is not just a matter of tax, is it? It is not just a matter of income tax, either. Of course I recognise those figures, but distributional analysis has been undertaken independently of the Government. Conservative party policy since 2010 has seen some of the biggest losses for the poorest, not the wealthiest. The Women’s Budget Group put together the tax gains, the tax paid, the services cut and the benefit cuts. The poorest 10% will lose 21% of their income annually as a result of this Government’s policy—five times more than the top 10%. The analysis of the Institute for Fiscal Studies clearly shows that this year’s Budget hits the poorest 80% harder than the richest. Eighty per cent. of those cuts fall on whom? It is on women.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way—he is always generous with his time. As well as appreciating the fact that 1% of the highest-income earners pay 28%, would he consider that since 2010 this Government have taken millions out of tax altogether by increasing the tax allowance—it is now £11,500?

[John McDonnell]

Let me deal with the tax threshold issue. The IFS has said that the biggest gains from the shift in the lower tax thresholds come for the higher earners. They are the ones who get the most and they benefit from the tax threshold moves. It describes the shifting of the tax thresholds as

“very much a giveaway to the better off”.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Huw Merriman and John McDonnell

Thursday 17th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

That relates to the US economy. The figures that I quoted were not mine. They were from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which referred to domestic productivity falls.

Young people have also paid a heavy price during the Chancellor’s tenure. It is not just the education maintenance cuts in the last Parliament, or the enormous hikes in tuition fees; it is the dream of home ownership receding into the distance for young people on average incomes. The new Lifetime ISA will not resolve that. With pay falling so sharply for the young, there can be very few who can afford to save £4,000 a year.

We know that so far on the Chancellor’s watch, people with severe disabilities have been hit 19 times harder than those without disabilities. If that were not enough, the Government are now taking over £100 a week out of the pockets of disabled people. Even for a Chancellor who has repeatedly cut public spending on the backs of those least likely or least able to fight back, this represents a new low. I believe it is morally reprehensible.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

The shadow Chancellor is being very generous with his time. With respect to owning one’s own home, will he not take into account that the Help to Buy scheme has helped thousands of first-time buyers, 82% of whom would not have been able to buy their home without that scheme?

[John McDonnell]

The problem, as the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge, is housing supply. Because of the failure to build homes under this Budget, I fear that the interventions that the Government may make, which I often welcome, may force up prices, rather than allowing access to homes. The hon. Gentleman shares with me the desire that young people should be able to afford a home, and with me he should campaign now for more housing construction. That means investment, and sometimes you have to borrow to invest.