Draft Strikes (Minimum Service Levels: Border Security) Regulations 2023

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2023 General Committees

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

As always, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Elliott.

The ink is barely dry on the primary legislation under which these regulations are being made, yet the Government are already telling us quite a different story from the one they set out in the arguments made during the passage of the Bill—now an Act—through Parliament. As Members will recall, one of the Bill’s primary stated purposes was to give Ministers the power to define, in secondary legislation such as this, the scope of the definition of the relevant services covered and the particular minimum service levels that will apply to the services in question.

On the first issue, we were led to believe during the Bill’s passage that the only services for which the Home Office is responsible that were likely to be covered by the legislation were those relating to border security—namely, roles carried out by Border Force employees. The regulations go much further than that. Their scope will also include some Passport Office employees, but we have no idea how many or which roles, because the Government are not saying. The impact assessment tells us only that what is likely to be a small number of employees of HM Passport Office will be covered. This apparently last-minute addition to the draft regulations is so poorly defined that it is impossible to scrutinise, and the Opposition will never accept that.

In the absence of the key data from the impact assessment, perhaps the Minister could tell us now exactly—or even approximately—how many HMPO staff are likely to be required to meet the service levels the Government intend to impose, and exactly which roles in HMPO are likely to be included. If he cannot answer those questions, would he accept that bringing that agency into the scope of the new minimum service levels today is at best premature and at worst impossible to justify.

These questions matter because the consultation process that the Act requires, as part of the process of setting new minimum service levels, made no mention of any prospect that HMPO staff would be included. In a foreword to the consultation document, published over the summer, the previous Home Secretary suggested that other services under her remit could potentially be included alongside Border Force within the scope of the new rules. She asked for views from the stakeholders consulted as to whether any additional services should be included and if so, which ones. According to the Home Office, the majority of the responses it received said that only Border Force staff should be subject to minimum service levels among the Department’s employees. There were no suggestions from any stakeholders that Passport Office staff should be included.

The first and most obvious question is when the decision was made. Beyond that, can the Minister explain the rationale for HMPO to be brought into scope, and can he explain why his Department failed at any stage to consult the trade unions and employees who stand to be significantly affected by the regulations?

More broadly, some of the most obvious questions and concerns are conspicuous by their absence from the Government’s impact assessment. In other words, it seems that the Home Office is simply ignoring the questions that it does not wish to answer. For instance, have the Government made any assessment of how the introduction of the proposed minimum service levels might affect the ability of both Border Force and HMPO to recruit and retain the qualified and experienced staff that they need? If so, information on any such assessment is not included in the impact assessment. Why is that?

I am sure the Minister is aware of statements that several trade unions have made to the effect that they may adopt a strategy of deliberate non-co-operation or non-compliance with the proposed changes. With those unions responding with understandable anger to the changes under discussion, does the Minister accept that the Government’s heavy-handed approach to setting the minimum service levels we are discussing—and, particularly, his Department’s wilful refusal to carry out the most cursory of consultation processes with its own employees—risk seriously undermining his ability to bring union members to the table for negotiations in good faith on any potential disputes in the future? In so doing, have not the Government made even more likely the kind of industrial unrest that the legislation is supposed to be aimed at preventing? In light of our profound concerns about the regulations, I confirm that Labour will seek a Division this evening and will vote against them.