Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Fox Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. There is an old maxim that applies here and now: everything has been said, but not everyone has said it—and now it is my turn to say it.

This has been an interesting Second Reading— I really mean that—and I have enjoyed your Lordships’ contributions, particularly that of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. I am sure she is going to be a strident voice on local government, and we welcome that voice. Even if we do not always agree with what it says, it is representing a sector that has been underrepresented in your Lordships’ House, so I say to the noble Baroness: welcome.

As we have heard, the Bill imposes obligations on trade unions and individuals to comply with minimum service levels, enabling employers within specific services to issue work notices to roster the workforce required to secure those minimum service levels on a strike day. At its heart, the Bill seeks to grant broad powers to Ministers to limit strike action, and to introduce sweeping Henry VIII powers to amend, repeal or revoke primary legislation through regulation. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, so eloquently explained, this is another attempt at shifting power from Parliament to Ministers.

My noble friends Lord Allan, Lord Strasburger and Lady Randerson, along with many of your Lordships, explained that, in reality, the Bill is another attempt by the Conservatives to distract from their appalling mismanagement of the economy and their failure to avert public sector strikes in the first place. This is a political Bill. It has nothing to do with the practical needs of industrial relations or the real-life delivery of services. It was designed to protect the Government from a strike backlash, and it has failed to do that. The government spokespeople do not even mention the Bill anymore, because they know that it does not work; it has failed. I say to the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, that this Bill was not in the Conservative Party manifesto. One that dealt specifically with rail services and trains was in the manifesto, but this Bill is a bigger and different animal from that Bill altogether.

But more deeply, this Bill fails to get under the skin of the real crises in public services, and we have heard that from many of your Lordships. These crises should be seen in the context of the relentless effect of the past few years on employee morale, mental health and well-being.

Further, this Bill is an admission that the Government do not understand how the lives and livelihoods of our valued public sector workers have been eroded over time. It fails to grasp the recruitment crisis across the public sector. Far from making it more attractive to work in these services, this Bill is a huge disincentive to possible new recruits.

Looking beyond this huge array of failures, I will now talk about the concept of minimum service levels. As we have heard from many of your Lordships, the notion of a minimum service level is one that should start from the day-to-day level of service we get when there are no strikes at all. Are the tens of thousands of people waiting weeks to see their GP getting a minimum service level? Are the people right across Britain waiting sometimes tens of hours for ambulances getting a minimum service level? Are the people trying to travel by train from Manchester to Leeds experiencing a minimum service level?

This is the baseline from which this legislation is working. In health, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Allan and many others, minimum service levels will not cut waiting lists or help solve staff shortages in the NHS. There will still be huge overcrowding and delays and terrible problems for people who are facing an emergency.

On the railways, even the Government’s Transport Secretary—I forget which one—has said that this legislation will make no difference to the current strikes. As we have heard time and again, the best way to avoid disruption of this kind and to prevent strikes in the first place is to get around the table and have meaningful, trusted talks with staff and their employers.

Judging by this evening’s news, it seems that there may be the beginning of a damascene conversion coming for the Government, but it is late. You solve strikes only by people sitting down and discussing them. That is how strikes end. They always end with an agreement and that is what the Government should have been seeking from day one.

Then, there is a central concern around the erosion of the rights of the individual, something we on these Benches hold very dear. This Bill shifts the responsibility for delivering a minimum service level on to the individual worker. We believe that this is fundamentally wrong. In setting out their minimum service levels the Government are shirking their duty of care and shifting the onus of service delivery squarely on to named individuals. It is not the Minister, the bosses, or even the union leaders who will be sacked in the morning if the Government’s standards are not met; it is those individual workers.

To be clear, the Bill removes protection from workers who are currently allowed to strike without losing their jobs. As we have heard from the Minister very clearly, there is no automatic protection from unfair dismissal for an employee who is identified in a valid work notice but participates in a strike contrary to that work notice. Quite simply, an employee identified in a valid work notice for a strike day who takes strike action that day and fails to comply with the work notice can be sacked. I am pretty sure that is not what the ILO had in mind.

Moving on, the Bill does not contain any detail about what the minimum service levels will be; however, some consultations have begun to appear and are now out for scrutiny. That is helpful, although the latest arrived only about an hour before we convened in this room.

My noble friend Lord Allan spoke about the ambulance service consultation. I will not repeat what he said, except to say that we do not have a national ambulance service, so how do the Government plan to implement a national minimum service level without doing what they are already doing, which is having local discussions with local service deliverers?

Then, there is the fire and rescue minimum service level consultation document. The consultation notes for this document offer an interesting confirmation of the importance of collective bargaining. It cites Portugal, France, Spain and Italy and makes it clear, as we have heard from many noble Lords, that in each of these cases the minimum service levels on offer in these countries are the result of collective agreement between employers and unions. We thank the Minister and the Government for confirming the essential difference between this legislation and the situation in other countries—a difference which effectively undermines the approach of this Bill completely.

However, I really want to bring one element of this fire service document to your Lordships’ attention; it was alluded to en passant by the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh. In the foreword to the consultation, the Home Secretary raises the horror of the Grenfell Tower tragedy while, at the same time, calling for minimum service levels during strikes. Page 11 of the online consultation then adds to this by raising the Manchester Arena disaster. I remind your Lordships that this is a minimum service level consultation document.

Whatever failings existed around those two tragedies, they would not in any way have been altered or met through a minimum service level agreement on striking. It is entirely inappropriate, and a dreadful piece of political opportunism, that these two issues have been conflated. I believe that it is beneath the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, whom I respect; I mean that, I really do. I ask him both to use his response to distance himself from that approach and to go back to his department and seek to remove those passages from the consultation document.

To close, the Bill is taking powers from individuals and giving them to Ministers. Individuals could be fired by ministerial edict if they refuse to work when they have been given a work notice during a strike. Meanwhile, the Bill hands powers to Ministers at the expense of Parliament. It remains unclear what the specific provisions for minimum service levels will be and how they will relate to day-to-day service levels that are widely falling short of need and expectation. Several speakers have talked about balancing rights and responsibilities. If there is to be any such balancing activity it should be Parliament that does the weighing, not Ministers or Secretaries of State.

For those reasons, when the Bill Committee convenes, it needs to address at least a number of issues. We should aim to remove the Henry VIII powers; ensure that minimum service regulations are made only after consultation and negotiation with social partners, and then properly approved by Parliament; conduct realistic impact assessments on the Bill before it comes into operation; and remove the onus on individuals to carry the can for delivering minimum service levels. We on these Benches promise the Minister a high service level when it comes to that Committee’s work. We will do our best to help him take out the invidious elements of the Bill, which, frankly, make up most of it.