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.