Trade Unions: Skilled Professional Graduate Workers

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have, if any, to support the lives and prospects of skilled professional graduate workers who are members of a trade union.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for the slight delay. We have a technical issue with the clocks which we had hoped would be resolved by the start of this debate, but I am told that that has not happened. We are relying on smoke signals and messages on the officials chat. I call the noble Lord, Lord Balfe.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is unusual to begin a speech by congratulating someone on a speech they have not given, but I would like to be the first person to congratulate my noble friend Lady Swinburne on the maiden speech that we are going to hear and commiserate with her that it has to be in reply to a debate rather than her having 10 minutes all on her own.

Secondly, I remind the Committee that I am president of BALPA. I know I do it often, but I am told that I often ought to do it, so I remind noble Lords of that. I thank BALPA. I also thank Prospect, which did a special brief for me for this debate; the House of Lords Library, which supplemented its already extensive brief; and other organisations including UNISON, the BMA, the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association and the British Dietetic Association, which I was president of at one time, and sundry others.

We have just had Question Time. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, spoke about the eternal policy of making the poor more comfortable. This is not about that. It is about the forgotten class of Britain, as I think of them: the 3.9 million of the 6.3 million members of trade unions affiliated to the TUC who are graduates earning well. In the minds of many, particularly in the Conservative Party, the average TUC worker works down the pit or in some awful occupation. That is not true today. The majority are graduates and are a highly intelligent, very influential bunch, of whom almost 2 million vote for the Conservative Party. Therefore, they deserve to be represented on this side of the Room.

In recent times, they have moved from where Theresa May put them—“just about managing”—into just not managing, because we forget this terribly important group of people who are the backbone of the country. They provide skills. They go to work every day and want a better life for their families. They work extremely hard and get very little. Teachers, civil servants, air traffic controllers and people in the heritage sector, as Prospect calls them, who work to keep our museums and our country’s heritage together, are middle and upper income earners, but not rich income earners.

For instance, a recent Prospect survey showed that 28% of its members were receiving some sort of support from their wider family to keep going, particularly if they have children. Some 13% of them had rising credit card debts because their situation is so difficult. Today, of course, virtually every family in the middle-income group is faced with a rising mortgage bill, not by £10 or £20 but often £100 or more a week. I speak from experience—my daughter and son are both on the receiving end of this, and the bank of grandpa, which can always be more generous, is sometimes called into use.

Let us look at a family of two children with a parent who earns £60,000 a year. People say, “Oh, that’s a lot of money—aren’t they rich?” and so on. It is not a lot of money. When they got to £50,000, they started losing their child benefit. They came into the higher tax rate at £50,270, and from then on, their tax rate was 42%—40% tax, 2% NI. By the time they got to £60,000, they had lost all their child benefit, at a marginal tax rate of 61%, higher than anything that is paid for even by those in the top tax bracket. Therefore, £10,000 more income from working hard to get from £50,000 to £60,000 yielded that family £3,900—they got to take home 39% of their money.

People talk about 10% pay increases. In fact, it is a 5.8% pay increase when you take off just the tax, so it is not a huge increase. In addition—I direct this to my noble friend—the Government have pledged to freeze tax rates until 2028, for five more years. Last year, half a million people became higher-rate taxpayers. At this rate, another 2 million to 3 million will be higher-rate taxpayers by 2028, all of them worse off. If I was the policy director of the Labour Party, I would be saying, “This is an excellent policy. We must really get the Government to stick to it because it is the one way of them losing the election, as people will get so fed up with high tax and no remission”.

We are going to have an election in 2024. At the moment, the Government are going to go into that election saying, “Your tax is going to be frozen for four more years while your income, hopefully, might go up a bit”. If my noble friend wants a recipe for losing an election, she very much has it here, and if she wants to change that, she had better change it around a bit—I am sorry; I am trying to keep an eye on my automatic timer.

I get an email virtually every day of the week from the people whose priorities are our priorities—that is the Government’s slogan. They want to halve inflation—fine; that would be nice. They want to grow the economy; there is not much sign of that happening. They want to reduce debt. That sounds good, but why? There is nothing sacred about debt. We are not as indebted as many European countries and we do not have to make all the working people pay for reducing the debt. We could quite easily reduce it at a much slower rate, and I suggest that we should.

We want to cut waiting lists, but maybe we should look at what is on them. Perhaps we are trying to do a bit too much. If there are really umpteen hundred thousand people waiting for hospital appointments, maybe we are trying to do too many. The NHS has never had more money than at present or more crises than it appears to have at present. The one thing that is popular is stopping the boats. Most people do not object to immigration, but they do object to unfairness; they see crossing the channel as unfair. It would be nice to think that government policy will stop the boats, although I have grave doubts about whether it will make any difference at all.

I always like to finish by quoting someone other than myself. GK Chesterton comes to mind:

“Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;

For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet”.

These people will speak next year. Unless the Government pull their socks up and get some decent policies into play, they will not like the message.