Industrial Action

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I welcome my noble friend’s support for this legislation in principle. I am happy to reassure him that the minimum service level will not be set by employers; it will be set by Parliament through affirmative regulations. Of course we will consult widely on those regulations. There will be regulations in each individual sector because, as he correctly states, the level varies from sector to sector. This House will vote on those regulations when we bring them forward, but it is our preference not to have to bring them forward. As I mentioned earlier, the nursing unions are very responsible and agree minimum service levels already—voluntarily—so we therefore hope not to need to legislate there, but of course that is not the case for ambulance drivers, where we may need to take action.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I regret that we are having the strikes; I speak with some background in the trade union movement. I urge the Government to be careful. They have had great difficulties in dealing with climate change demonstrators—it is extraordinarily easy these days to disrupt the operation of business in this country. I do not know what the Government would do if they set their minimum levels and they required the employer to get the employees to do the work, and all those employees went off sick. What action would they take and how would the law stand? The Government should be very careful indeed before they move forward, and I am surprised to hear that they have not even consulted ACAS. If we do not watch out, we will go over some silly old ground that we have covered before which caused great damage to the country, so I urge the Government to act with care and caution.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I welcome the noble Lord saying that he regrets the strike action—I think that is the first time I have heard anybody from the Opposition say that they regret the inconvenience that has been caused to the public. I take in good heart his other comments; of course we will proceed with care and caution, and with full consultation. However, we are very clear that this action needs to be taken in some sectors, because the public are getting tired of the disruption caused by the actions of one or two unions to their ability to go about their daily business.

Fire and Rehire

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

The Government promised in their manifesto that there would be an employment Bill. When is it coming?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

We have said that we will deliver when parliamentary time allows, but there are many other ways of delivering what were manifesto commitments than a formal government employment Bill.

Employment Bill

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 6th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I am sorry to hear that the noble Lord is disappointed with our progress on employment, but I am delighted to share with him the great news that unemployment was down again last month to 3.9%, one of the lowest rates in Europe. If we had adopted some of the proposals of the Opposition to have a rigid, inflexible labour market, unemployment would go up and many people would lose their jobs. Surely that would be a bad thing for workers’ rights.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, it is understandable that the Minister cannot give any commitment to what will be in the Bill when it comes. However, given that it was in the 2019 election manifesto and the Government were elected on the basis of delivering that promise, can the Minister give a commitment that they will in fact implement a Bill before this Government go out of office?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I can certainly give the noble Lord a commitment that we are going to attempt to take forward many of the measures that were outlined. There are a number of different vehicles that would enable us to do that, but we have to proceed carefully and cautiously. We do not want to damage the excellent, flexible labour market that we have in this country, which has delivered excellent results, including under the last Labour Government, who also decided not to change our flexible labour market.

Shortages: Protection for the Vulnerable

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to protect the most vulnerable in the event of shortages of (1) energy, and (2) other necessities.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

My Lords, there is no shortage of energy, and the Government have taken action to increase the supply of HGV drivers. The supply of fuel and food is secure. Protecting vulnerable consumers is our top priority, which is why our energy price cap will remain in place. We are supporting vulnerable and low-income households through initiatives such as the £500 million household support fund, the warm home discount, winter fuel payments and cold weather payments.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not agree with the Minister that everything has been fine following the shocks that we have suffered from Covid and Brexit over the past few months, and neither would the underprivileged in our society. Are the Government doing some contingency planning, as we have really big threats coming, possibly with climate change, to protect the most underprivileged and deprived in society to ensure that they are looked after? People are talking in the press about forms of rationing. We could look for schemes through which we could protect them more than we do at the moment. Similarly, we need to get out and make certain that people who are working on the front line are given all the protection they need—including petrol—so that they can get to work and so on. That has certainly not been happening in the past few weeks.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, I can tell the noble Lord that the poorest and most vulnerable are always at the heart of our policies in this area—we always seek to protect them. It is, however, important to emphasise that there is no shortage of essential items, and we have taken action to ensure that supply chains remain robust.

Net-zero Carbon Emissions: Behaviour Change

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I too am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, for her introduction and for giving us this debate. I think we need to spend more time on this question because effecting behavioural change, as many of us know, is very difficult indeed.

The biggest change in my lifetime that affected most people was the Second World War, which brought great social changes but also took millions of people off the planet. The next big change that I remember was under Ted Heath’s Government, when we had a three-day week; for the first time in my life we were living without electricity and had candles in the house. That was major behavioural change. The winter of discontent in 1979, which emerged from my old background of the trade union movement, led to a very big change because we got Mrs Thatcher—and without doubt she effected change in the behaviour of the nation in quite a big way.

However, we have now just come out of the biggest change, in my experience, in our behaviour, through Covid. It would be worth while to reflect on what Covid was all about—what its purpose and meaning is. We have not had that debate. My view is that Covid is here to reduce the numbers on the planet. The numbers have gone down, but perhaps not on the scale that might have been anticipated if we had not had agility and the brains to find the vaccines and so on.

However, it gives us a chance to review what gross national product and growth are all about and whether we can continue to grow in the way that we have in the past—or whether this gives an opportunity to reflect and look for a different direction. We have to look at some of the papers that have been produced by the Government on the major issues: what we eat and how we live at home. Covid has left people working at home—should we have more people working at home? I think the party that produces a policy of allowing people to work at home will get a lot of support, which will grow. Factories have disappeared; offices will disappear. Technology is moving at pace. What the mobile phone has done within a short space of time is absolutely phenomenal, and it is getting faster and faster all the time. My faith is in the youth, not in our age group.

I live in an area where we can change nothing. Since 2015, I have been trying to get them to install charging points for electric cars, but we are still no further forward. People have been working from home, and we have roof spaces and attics that can be converted into rooms and used, but no one will permit anyone to have a window to let fresh air or light into these additional spaces. We need to change the tiles on the roofs so that we have solar panels everywhere—yet we have planning rules that completely prohibit that. This all needs to be reviewed, if we are going to start to move in a different direction.

We need to talk about the numbers on the planet as well. This is controversial. Bill Gates raised this some years ago and said that the easiest solution to the world’s problems is to take 3 billion people out. Of course, he quickly withdrew that, but we need to recognise that we cannot continue to grow at the current pace. We are heading for 10 billion people, and it is quite unsustainable. We have to start talking about policies in which people will limit the number of children that they have.

The Chinese are planning: they need a 5% increase in the Chinese population. This would be a phenomenal problem in terms of climate change, so we need to get people at COP talking about the world population and whether we can reduce it. We need free contraception in order to limit this. We also need the rules on abortion that have been introduced and changed during Covid to continue so that there is greater freedom for that from home.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, will be doing, we need to review the end-of-life issue. There was no mercy in watching some of those people die on machines in an awful state. There is nothing Christian about that. We should look for ways in which we can exercise true mercy. If people want to go, they should be permitted to go. We have the technology for it. Millions of people take a sleeping tablet every night because they cannot sleep, and, if people want to end their lives, they should have a right to have a tablet to come to an end, rather than face the awful lives that you can experience when we spend all our time trying to extend life, rather than focusing on the quality of it.

That is the kind of change that we need to try to make, in economic terms: moving more into quality than quantity. There are many areas in which we can do it that would be beneficial and that the people would be willing to embrace, if it was presented in an educational and sensible way. So I hope that we can have something more radical than we have experienced so far in the debate on climate change—because water and fire will take so many people out if we do not take it seriously and move quickly on it.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 19th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock and the noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, on their great maiden speeches and look forward to hearing them in the future. This has been an extraordinarily long Second Reading and an exceptional one in many respects. However, I think it is worth reflecting on the fact that some of the topics on which there have been the strongest feelings and arguments—for example, Part 5 of the Bill, the opposition to which I fully support—are not actually the topic that is foremost in the minds of the public at the moment. That, of course, is Covid-19 and their health and well-being.

So, like the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, my noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley—who spoke just a few moments ago—I will focus on what might seem to be a fairly narrow area: protecting the UK’s public health, in so far as this Bill will do so. Will the Bill improve it or not after we leave the EU internal market? Does it provide the framework, to which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, referred, that will raise standards, or might the existing ones possibly be at risk?

The devolved Administrations’ views are very clear indeed: they fear the balance between market interests and the public health policies they have been pursuing will be at risk and that the Bill could undermine and diminish their ability to enact essential public health legislation for their countries. For example, on alcohol labelling, they pointed out to me that, currently, alcohol labels lack basic information, such as how many calories are in the product or the Chief Medical Officer’s low-risk drinking guidelines—they are not there. In recent years, both the Scottish and Welsh Governments have worked hard at moving forward with significant changes there. The English lead is well behind; we are looking to consult, but we are well behind on most of these issues.

The devolved Administrations say that the drafting of the mutual recognition principle in the Bill, which unlike the current rules allows no general exemption for protecting health, means that Governments within the UK may set higher labelling standards for products originating in their own nations but these standards will not apply to products sold within their borders that come from other parts of the UK or from overseas via another UK nation. Instead, those products must only meet the standard required in the part of the UK in which they originated.

This is just one of the many key public health policies that will be hampered by the Bill. Although the Government have included a public health exemption from non-discrimination, there is no corresponding exemption for the mutual recognition principle. Others have raised this point and I again ask the Minister to explain why it is necessary to water down the public health protections that have existed in our markets up to this point.