Public Sector Pay Cap

Lord Sawyer Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sawyer (Lab)]

My Lords, I also thank my noble friend Lord Haskel for initiating this debate.

With my union, the National Union of Public Employees, I spent a working lifetime thinking about how to help public service workers to improve their pay and conditions and how to be properly and fairly valued by the people they served. Back in 1970 when I started, with the so-called “dirty jobs” strike we thought that the conventional method of strike action, which at that time seemed to be so successful in the private sector, was the way forward. It was not until 1979 and a much bigger dispute—the so-called winter of discontent—that I personally came to the conclusion that strikes as we had pursued them in the past no longer worked. The big thing to do was not to win a strike but to win the battle of public opinion.

One good example of how this was achieved was in 1989, when the late Roger Poole led a team of negotiators into a pay round on behalf of ambulance personnel against the Secretary of State for Health, Kenneth Clarke. This dispute was not fought on the picket line but on the television screens—in every home in the country. Some 4 million people signed a petition of support for the ambulance workers. They won a 16.9% pay award—amazing—and, more importantly, the ambulance staff who were on the road took the proper paramedical status that they had always wanted, but which, sadly, they had to take industrial action to achieve. Roger Poole was voted the No. 2 man of the year on the Radio 4 “Today” programme, and Kenneth Clarke, as noble Lords would expect, crept away with good will and good grace. Why do I tell the Minister this story? Why do I want him to pass it on to his colleagues in the Government? It is because I believe that today we are in a similar position with the pay review boards. Luckily for the Minister, he is not facing Roger Poole, but he should heed the lesson: public opinion is very much against what the Government are doing with these pay review bodies. He should make clear now, if they want to make any headway, that the Government intend to lift the cap.

Unfortunately, however, this will not be enough. If the Government want to regain public support, they will have to do the right thing; they will have to show the public that they understand the pressure and hardship faced by public service workers, including the majority not covered by pay review bodies. They will have to do that by looking seriously at the stresses and strains that public service workers work under today, including in the caring and nursing professions. The Minister has only to look at the article by Dr Rachel Clarke in yesterday’s Guardian or today’s Telegraph to see from an independent, non-political perspective what people are going through in the public services. Do not listen to the politicians but to the people—they are telling the Government what they want them to do.

Before I sit down, I will give the Minister one more lesson about how to go forward and how to do something for more than the pay review bodies. He should look at how a large group of staff in the National Health Service negotiated a very good settlement in 2003. The unions were represented by a man called Bob Abberley and the Government by Alan Milburn. The unions set out to improve the pay and conditions for a large group of public service staff and also, as has been mentioned in the debate today, to improve productivity in the health service. Pay and conditions and improved productivity go together. This was the Agenda for Change, a ground-breaking agreement in the National Health Service, the principles of which could even be applied today. If I picked up the phone, I think I could get Bob Abberley to come back to help today—I do not have a more generous offer than that.

I ask the Minister to look at how these things can be done and how they were done in the past and not to squander the immense good will that has been built up between the public service workers and the community, in places such as Manchester, but shared right across the country, and assure noble Lords that, by listening to what is happening in the real world, the Government intend to take things forward, help public service workers and help the communities that they serve.