Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I will try not to repeat and cite every speaker with whom I have agreed but I congratulate the previous two speakers: my BALPA colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who sits on the Conservative Benches these days but nevertheless understands that industrial relations cannot be conducted through draconian government decrees, as the Henry VIII powers in this Bill envisage; and my noble friend Lady Blower, who explained the difficulties with the Bill. I speak as the son of a former branch secretary of the NUT.

In a debate a few months ago, I asked the Minister whether the Government believe in the right to strike. He rather sheepishly proclaimed that they do. I think he should have added in the small print, “As long as they’re not effective”. In other words, the Government have the right to have draconian interventions—often at the last minute, as the powers in this skeletal Bill would allow—and lay down what service will be delivered and which workers will work. That is a recipe for disaster.

I was going to congratulate the Minister on two things: first, the shortness of this Bill, although others have pointed to the disadvantages of that; and, secondly, his sudden conversion to all things European in citing his apparent understanding of what goes on in Germany, Spain and elsewhere. I hope that he shows the same enthusiasm when we return to the retained European legislation Bill later in the week.

The reality is that the Bill exists because, as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe—I nearly called him “my noble friend”—said, this is a panic measure. We are in a period with a lot of strikes happening, for different reasons but at the same time. They appear to be cumulative and the Government are panicking. They want to be seen to be doing something, so they have come up with this Bill, which originated as part of a more balanced Bill of employment rights—that seems to have disappeared—then as part of a transport Bill, from which this provision has been greatly expanded. This is not the way to make legislation, or how the House of Lords should allow legislation to be made. A large part of the Bill should be rejected by this House, if not the whole of it.

I should have said that in addition to my declared interests, I am a veteran of the previous so-called winter of discontent. I was one of those crypto-Marxist officials with one of the unions involved at the time. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, who is no longer in his place, on the history of that and the subsequent period. My recollection is somewhat different. Yes, the unions made a lot of mistakes in that period. For example, we did not include gravediggers in the areas which were to be immune from strike action. That lost us a lot of public support. However, by and large there was no threat to life or limb.

I see that my noble friend Lord Donoughue, who has experience from the other side, is no longer here but I say to your Lordships that the Callaghan Government stopped talking. I recollect, two or three days before Christmas, going with a bit of paper that was drawn up by myself and my friend Lord Gladwin, a future Member of this House, to give to the then Government. It set out possible terms which had been agreed with the general secretaries of the other unions concerned. That was rejected by the Callaghan Government. A month later, the strikes began. We obeyed notice of strikes even then, though it was not at that time compulsory in law. A month or so later, the Government had to settle with the unions on almost identical terms to those that we had presented two months earlier.

When Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Government took over, she learned some of those lessons. She is wrongly depicted in some ways as the equivalent of Ronald Reagan, as the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, said. She did not negotiate herself, of course, but she did allow her officials to negotiate. There was continued industrial unrest in the early years of the Thatcher regime but she kept the door open. Agreements were reached, sometimes after strikes. I recall that she even agreed after the water strike that there would be compulsory arbitration through ACAS and that the Government would agree to its terms. We have none of that in this Bill—there is no ACAS involvement, as my noble friend Lady Donaghy said. There are better ways of operating. There are better ways of conducting industrial relations than threatening long-standing arrangements between employers and unions or imposing new ones when a strike is threatened.

I do not like to compare the Minister with his late Majesty Richard III, but at the beginning of the play that King says,

“Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer”.

It did not work out too well for him, and I am afraid that this Bill will not work out too well for the Minister either. There is an alternative and he should learn from history. The alternative is to sit down now and negotiate. For as long as the Government refuse to do that, we will have a winter of discontent.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

For those reasons, it is my opinion that the view expressed by the Joint Committee on Human Rights is too modest. If the Bill goes through, we run a real danger in this country of violating the convention, and I would be grateful to hear a refutation of those views from the Minister.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Hendy. This discussion on the first amendment is bound to stray widely, but one of the areas it does have to consider is whether the various sub-committees and our adherence to and acceptance of international conventions going back more than half a century need to be jeopardised by this rather inadequate Bill. It is also a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Balfe; he says this Bill is unnecessary, and I totally agree.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, implied but did not say, it is not only hyper-skeletal but hyper-political. It is political in a way which is dangerous, not least to the Government themselves. The clause we are debating does not say when or at what stage in the process Ministers would intervene and, if necessary, unilaterally set minimum service levels. Is it when a strike is first contemplated? Is it when the executive starts consulting its members? Is it when the members vote yes, in accordance with legal provisions? Is it when the first strike day is announced, or on the strike day? When is it? Either way, the difficulty is that in many cases, the Minister will be intervening unilaterally with a minimum of parliamentary scrutiny, and, as my noble friend said, there will already be jointly agreed minimum service levels. That is why it is dangerous to the Government: every dispute in which the Minister intervenes in this way becomes a political dispute.

We have spent years trying to take industrial relations out of politics, but this brings them right back in. A central feature of this Bill is that at any stage, the Minister’s own view can override all agreements and unilateral action by the unions to observe the health and welfare of the population at large and the minimum service level. That politicises industrial relations in a way that has not happened for many years. I hope the Conservative Party understands what it is doing in this respect.

The Bill is also unnecessary and political in the sense that the reason for it—which is largely coincidental—is that a number of different disputes have arisen at roughly the same time because of the cost of living crisis and the squeeze on public sector pay. The public are getting anxious about the situation and they see the Government are not able to resolve it, so the Government have invented this Bill. They want to use the period from now until the general election, which the noble Lord, Lord Balfe wants to jump, to tell the public that they have a solution to all this industrial unrest. But it is not the solution; it is a promulgation, if they are not careful, of that industrial unrest.

When I intervened at Second Reading, I told the Government that they had an alternative: they could sit down and talk, make a new offer and change things. At least somebody in government—albeit not universally—has listened to me or come to the same conclusion. As a result, the Government are now sitting down with the RCN, which they refused to do at one point. They have made a better offer to firefighters—or at least, the fire brigade’s executive thinks the offer could be referred back to its members. Even in some of the disputes involving the railways, the next period of strikes has been postponed because the employer or the Government have moved. That is the alternative to intervening unilaterally and politically, in a way which is very dangerous to this Government and to the rights of workers and trades unions. But think how much worse it would have been if, instead of making an offer to the FBU, the Government had taken a unilateral decision to make the present MSL irrelevant and to statutorily impose a new one, and if some firefighters or their representatives had been nominated in the employer’s work notice, been told they had to strike-break, and refused to. Workers would have been dismissed, becoming potential trade union martyrs, and the union could have been sued for vast sums.

If that happened, how would noble Lords imagine that trade union executives, and ultimately members, would respond? This measure, the ability to intervene in this way, will actually prolong strikes and create more strikes, not solve them. The Government are going to tell the country that they have the solution but they have the opposite, and it is time this Bill was withdrawn.