Lord Brett
Main Page: Lord Brett (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Brett
My Lords, I will echo a number of contributions by noble Lords but I start by declaring an interest. For 10 years, I was the general secretary of the Institution of Professional Civil Servants, whose new name is Prospect. It was then the second largest union with trade union membership in the Civil Service and it remains that today. At that time, in the days of national pay bargaining and then departmental bargaining, I had some 25 years of experience of negotiations in the Civil Service and before that 12 years in the private sector—not least under the watchful eye of my noble friend Lady Turner, who was my boss for a number of years.
In all that time, particularly in the Civil Service negotiations, I learned that getting a solution involved two very clear requirements: trust and motivation. There needed to be trust that both sides were seeking agreement and motivation to find the means to reach that agreement. I negotiated with many senior civil servants, some of whom are Members of your Lordships’ House, and a number of Ministers in the Cabinet Office, some of whom are also now Members of your Lordships' House, and never at any time did I find any lack of trust or motivation in seeking agreement. In no way do I impugn the motives of the Government, the Ministers in the Cabinet Office and the noble Lord representing the Government today or suggest that they have anything other than the same pure instincts of negotiation. However, that is not the problem; the problem is the Bill before us.
In this House, we also have many captains of industry, captains of finance and moguls of the retail sector who all have experience of motivating staff in large companies to achieve change, but I doubt that any of them would recommend, by accident or by design, the present situation facing the Civil Service. There is denigration. That denigration does not necessarily involve demonising by individual Ministers—Ministers are supportive of the Civil Service—but somebody has been briefing the press that there is a wasteland of inefficiency occupied by civil servants. If civil servants resent that, it is because the previous Administration placed on them year-on-year efficiency cuts of not less than 3 per cent, so there has been a long-term pressure on productivity. Yes, we hear of wage freezes in the private sector, but wage freezes are being imposed in the public sector also. Now we face massive job cuts.
I felt that in our discussions this afternoon, we on occasion got confused between the public service and the Civil Service. The Civil Service has not benefited financially as much as some other parts of the public service, but it looks like it will be hit just as badly as, if not worse than, some other parts of the public service in facing massive job cuts. To be added on top of that cake is the reducing of redundancy compensation.
Is that a way to motivate staff to reorganise and render substantial increases in productivity? I think that the answer is obviously no. If I was asked, “Do you see it enhancing trust?”, I would have to say, “No, rather the reverse”. Yet that is where we are in respect of this Bill. The issue is not what we would like to have but where we are, and this Bill is about coercing the Civil Service trade unions to the negotiating table and at the negotiating table. I share with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, a fear of negotiation by statute. At the end of the day, negotiations may lead to an impasse which, in governing a country, may lead a Government to determine that there needs to be a legal remedy. It is not normal to have that in front of the negotiations. When we have a clause, in Clause 2, that the Government say that they hope not to use and that they will repeal the day after there is an agreement, it begs the question whether that is helpful to the trust and motivation to bring about an agreement at all.
The other question is: what is the likely reaction of civil servants and their trade unions to seeking to coerce and bully them? The normal British reaction to bullying—going back hundreds of years in all four parts of this country of ours—has been to resist. Therefore, it will be counterproductive to reaching a negotiated settlement if Clause 2 remains in the Bill. Discussions are taking place—in good faith, I hope, on both sides—to find an amendment to the clause that will introduce the caps. We should be seeking to create the right atmosphere to bring that about. As my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton said, we want the Government and Civil Service trade unions to find an agreed solution in those discussions. We wish those discussions well, but the solution has to be acceptable to all.
We are told that, in that event, we will have the immediate dropping of Clause 2, but we will still have Clause 3—the zombie clause, although I would prefer to call it the twilight zone clause—which suggests that, even if there is a solution at that stage, there may be a retention or resuscitation of the clause in one or two years’ time. How does that help the climate of negotiation? How does that increase the degree of trust of the trade unions either at active level—the trade union negotiators—or at the level of the trade union members, who direct those negotiations?
What can we do to help? We must help to create the ambience for those negotiations to succeed. We therefore need to see how we can improve the Bill. I agree with my noble friend Lord Morris, and others, who said that the negotiating process is the way forward. Therefore, we believe that it would assist progress if we amended the Bill in the manner suggested by several noble Lords on both Government and Opposition Benches by removing the cap and the zombie clause in the hope that negotiations will bring a solution in early course. That would allow us to see the Bill in a much more benign form at Report. Those discussions can take place between now and then. I believe that we can help that in Committee by more thorough discussion of each of the clauses.