Regional Pay (Public Sector)

Owen Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Glyn Davies]

I am sure that Mr William Graham will be extremely honoured to be quoted in a debate in this House. I will tell him about that when I speak to him later today, as I have arranged to do—[Interruption.]—not on this issue, but on another one that will be of particular interest to Welsh Members across the board.

This issue has the potential to distort local markets. That was my view 30 years ago, and I still see that potential now. I should have thought that I would have found a measure of agreement with the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in our discussions on Sunday morning, because there are significant questions about the difficulty of transferring from one area to another, for example, and whether inflexibilities will be introduced into the market. There are a host of other issues to consider, too.

We need an inquiry. I understand that one or two Opposition Members feel that the inquiry may not look across the board. I would be disappointed if that were so. We need an inquiry that will bring forward the information that all of us, including the Chancellor, need to make a balanced judgment. The appropriate time for that to happen that will be in six months.

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman undertake to speak to his boss, the Secretary of State for Wales, and perhaps even the Chancellor, because, as he just learned from my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), there is not a review? A series of letters have been sent to the national pay review bodies, asking them to consider the matter. Will he take up the challenge and tell the Chancellor that there ought to be a public review, and that trade unions and other bodies absolutely ought to be involved?

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[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Chope; happy new year.

I, too, offer my congratulations to the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) on securing this important debate, which, as he has rightly pointed out, will be one of the defining debates in respect of economic policy over the coming period. He made a series of telling and well argued points. It was slightly ironic to hear a nationalist Member of the House arguing in effect in favour of collective bargaining on a national, British basis right across the UK. Nevertheless, it was a very interesting point.

[Jonathan Edwards]

I make no apologies for what I said, because at the moment sovereignty over these issues resides in this place, and as someone who has been sent here to represent the ordinary working people of Carmarthenshire, I will continue to do so as long as that is the case.

[Owen Smith]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention and pleased that he makes no apologies for what he said. I entirely agree with the arguments that he made in respect of solidarity and collaboration right across the UK for people who have similar interests across Britain, whichever area of the country they live in. I wholeheartedly share his views about that, which is why I am a Unionist, not a nationalist, on today of all days.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) and for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson), who made a powerful speech, and of course the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies), who I am delighted is taking up the challenge of telling the Secretary of State for Wales and the Chancellor of the Exchequer that we need a proper review to address this very complex issue—as he described it—as opposed to a couple of private letters to the heads of the national pay review bodies.

Public sector workers must wake up every morning wondering what this Government will do to them next. We have seen the continuing pay freeze; we have seen additional cuts in wages when inflation is taken into account for the next two years; we have seen the 3% additional effective cut in wages as a result of the changes in public sector pensions; and 710,000 public sector workers, up from the 400,000 previously admitted to, are waiting to see whether they will be in a job at the end of this spending period.

Against that backdrop, there was the bombshell in the Chancellor’s autumn statement that regional pay will be re-examined. The Chancellor said that the evidence suggests that regional pay should be considered, because there are disparities between pay bands in the public sector across the UK. As we know, the Chancellor is very keen on evidence-based policy, so I thought that I would assess the evidence in respect of regional pay to date, because we have some experience of it.

London weighting is well established. It is a means of trying to deal with the problems, particularly in respect of housing, for people working in London on lower public sector wages. The previous Government sought to expand that by looking at key worker status and further help for key workers in London. As several hon. Members have said today, and as the Chancellor said repeatedly when he appeared before the Treasury Select Committee, we also have the experience of the Courts Service. However, the Chancellor has been slightly less than fair with the facts in respect of the Courts Service. The fact is that the Courts Service changes that were introduced in 2008—the previous Labour Government introduced zonal pay and five zones across the UK—were a significant improvement on the disparities that existed hitherto. The Courts Service came together in 2005. There was a merger involving the magistrates courts, the county courts, the Crown court and the Supreme Court. Before that point, more than 50 rates of pay were being applied across the Courts Service, so we went from 50 to five. The reality is that despite protestations by some of the unions at the time, most members happily opted into that service; indeed, more than 95% did so.

Opposition Members, who believe in evidence-based policy, would like the Government properly to review the experience of workers in the Courts Service. They should consider retention, rates of pay and the way in which the system has facilitated movement or otherwise across the country, and bring that to the table as part of the evidence for the current proposal.

[Glyn Davies]

It has become fashionable for Opposition Members to disown the policies of the previous Government and, in fact, to disown their own policies at the start of this Government. I have listened to the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith), who has discussed the five regional zones and evidence-based policy. He has described the current proposal as a bombshell, which indicates to me that he has no interest in the results of the inquiry. All we are hearing is knee-jerk opposition to make a point before we have even heard the facts.

[Owen Smith]

For the third time, I have to tell the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire that there is no inquiry. A couple of letters have gone from the Chancellor to the heads of the pay review bodies asking them to come forward with evidence on how local pay might reflect local market conditions, which is not an open inquiry. I thought that the hon. Gentleman had taken up the challenge to appeal for an inquiry.

The world has changed since the policies were implemented in 2008 on the Courts Service, which took place in an economy that was growing right across the UK. The world has changed. When the facts change, we reconsider our views, and we are doing that right now. We are thinking about the meaning of the Government’s proposals on regional pay and what the evidence shows us. We will come to a considered view when we know what the Government are proposing, but let us look at the evidence.

Of course, it was a previous Tory Chancellor, in the 1990s, who first talked about introducing regional pay on a much wider scale. What happened in the NHS? Local bits of the NHS were given the right to conduct local bargaining, but they lacked the necessary experience and were unable properly to assess local market conditions. As a consequence, there was more than a year’s delay before regional pay bands were set. When regional pay bands were set, the differential across the country was 0.1%. The rationale for that was, of course, that managers understood that, given the problems and complexity that widespread differentials would throw up, a collective agreement right across the country was the best possible option. The Chancellor agreed, and a year later he took back the power, concerned that there might have been spiralling costs had the situation continued.

[Hywel Williams]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Owen Smith]

I will give way in a moment.

NHS trusts have the capacity to engage in a greater degree of differentiation, but by and large they do not do so, because they accept that it would be unfair and lead to unintended consequences. We saw some such unintended consequences when the police looked into regional pay. In the London Metropolitan area, there was an agreement a few years ago to offer a much higher rate of pay to Metropolitan police officers. The unintended consequence was that officers transferred in droves from the areas around central London, and outer metropolitan boroughs consequently had to set higher rates themselves. Such a policy leads to unintended consequences and involves significant risks, so the Government need to think carefully before they pursue it.

[Hywel Williams]

I do not want to dwell on the policies of the previous Government, because I think that those of the current one are infinitely more damaging, but before we leave 2008, will the hon. Gentleman confirm that the previous Government were not considering regional pay in any other part of the public sector apart from HM Courts Service? Was it just the Courts Service?

[Owen Smith]

The hon. Gentleman knows that I was not in the House in 2008, but as far as I am aware, we introduced the policy in the Courts Service and there was further consideration. The former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), certainly talked about regional pay, but we did not introduce it in other areas. At the end of our period in government, there had been some experimentation in respect of the Courts Service, but we did not introduce the policy elsewhere.

Let us look at what happened at the Courts Service and consider where we go from here, because there are significant risks. At the time, the Government, and certainly the Treasury, understood that there were risks. My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield has mentioned the Treasury paper in 2004-05, which stated that

“extremely devolved arrangements are not desirable. There are risks of workers being treated differently for no good reason. There could be dangers of leapfrogging and parts of the public sector competing against each other for the best staff.”

That takes us to the motive: why have the Government now decided to bring this forward? If it was not a good idea a few years ago, why is it a good idea now? The reason is, of course, found in the two issues that they have with the public and private sectors. First, they believe in a totally outmoded, almost Manichean split—the public sector is bad, bloated and inefficient and the private sector is good, lean, hungry and eager to work. That is their understanding.

Secondly, the Government have a thoroughly outmoded notion that cutting the public sector and effectively forcing people to transfer to the private sector—through actively cutting jobs, as we heard was the strategy in the Budget, or through reducing regional pay, as we now hear might be the strategy—will somehow inflate the private sector. There is absolutely no evidence to support that. It is a totally misguided prescription, and one I fear that the Government will repeat.

The Treasury has said that the reason for looking at getting rid of national pay bargaining is to produce

“an economic reform to boost regions of the economy that are over-dependent on the public sector. All the evidence is that flexible public sector pay to reflect local labour market conditions will allow the private sector to flourish.”

Show us the money and show us the evidence, because we cannot see it at the moment. We can see a pamphlet with a lot of inflammatory language about the Manichean split between the fat public sector and the lean and hungry private sector from a think-tank which is pretty close to the Prime Minister and which some would say is a free-market, right-wing organisation, but apart from that I do not see a lot of evidence to support the position.

I suspect that the Minister will come out with some inflammatory comparisons, but I hope that she will not. We have heard so often about paramedics earning 16% more in the public sector than in the private sector, and I hope that we will not hear such unnecessary and unfair comparisons now. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies itself has said, such comparisons do not take into account the fact that there are invariably older and more experienced workers with better qualifications in the public sector. When such factors are taken into account, the differential between the public sector and their private sector counterparts is perhaps only 2%.

[Jonathan Edwards]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. This morning, the Bevan Foundation responded to the debate by stating that the IFS figures do not compare like with like and that it is deeply misleading to use the figures in that way.

[Owen Smith]

I entirely agree. The evidence is shaky and a leap of faith is required—just as we were meant to believe that cutting the public sector would lead to a flourishing private sector. As we have heard, there is no reasonable basis for making that leap of faith. On job creation in the public versus private sector, we learned that in the last quarter, for every 13 jobs lost in the public sector, only one was created in the private sector. That is the reality of what is happening in the economy. We should not take, with any degree of faith, the Government’s reassurances that changing regional pay will make a key difference.

On both sides of the House, we have come to understand that fairness is an important theme in modern politics. In politics, we seem to be tussling daily over who can be the fairest, and the Government have to stand against the test of fairness on this issue. They need to answer the question whether it is fair to target public sector workers once more to pick up the bill for a crisis in our economy that they did not cause. Is it fair for the Government to implement a policy that will once more impact disproportionately on less affluent areas that have greater health problems due to the legacy of heavy industry and other issues? Is it fair to implement a policy that will suck demand out of their economies and further reduce the incomes of people living there?

The Government have a manifestly failing economic strategy to reduce the deficit that has led, on their admission, to an increased level of borrowing— £158 billion extra is being borrowed as a result of the their policy. That is why they are thrashing around looking for extra savings and why they are countenancing further unfair and destructive measures. They need to think hard about the policy, conduct a proper review and provide evidence to substantiate their dangerous claims.

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[Miss Smith]

Absolutely—which I am clearly not ready for at 10 to 11 on a Tuesday morning.

The point that I was going to make, which is the most important one that I want to leave behind in this debate, is that the Government have set out no detailed proposals at this stage. As I think all hon. Members know, the proposal that has been made so far, through the autumn statement and subsequently, is only to ask the experts how public sector pay might better reflect local markets. I, for one, do not have a problem with that being done by letter. I hear what hon. Members have said about that. However, I am also particularly delighted that the hon. Member for Pontypridd changes his mind when facts change. I hope that in this case also he will wait for the evidence.

[Owen Smith]

Does the Minister accept that the Chancellor has clearly indicated that he is in favour of the reform? He spoke before the Treasury Committee, and no one can be in any doubt that he thinks it is a good idea.

[Miss Smith]

It is perfectly possible to think that something is a good idea and then to ask experts how it could happen.