Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am totally opposed to the Bill, not least because it is an act of evasion and avoids tackling some genuinely dire problems in public services. Instead, it aims to punish ordinary people for daring to ask the perfectly reasonable question: “Will you give us pay rises in line with inflation to get us through this economic crisis, which is not of our making?”.

Yesterday, I spent hours in this Chamber listening to some fine rhetoric from the Government and across the House about levelling up: about improving the lives and living standards of millions of people who are struggling because of where they live and a lack of opportunities. I confess that I had some qualms about a paternalistic tone in terms of helping the northern poor. However, what is interesting today is that we encounter real workers—not passive supplicants—standing up for themselves, sometimes bolshie and angry, but unwilling to be forced to accept a pay cut. What is the Government’s response to workers fighting for a bit of DIY levelling up? They call their actions selfish and greedy, and smear them as a risk to public safety.

Yet again, we are offered an unnecessary law. The noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, wrote an excellent article recently in which he noted:

“The itch to announce a new law … often feels irresistible to governments, but it … always has bad results.”


The Minister should read that article because it is a warning of the unintended consequences of overlegislating. There is already a plethora of laws arming the state with emergency powers to ensure that strike action does not seriously threaten people’s welfare and ensures life and limb cover. What is more, the mechanism of the law has been used as a blunt instrument since the 1980s to weaken trade union power, so being able to legally call a strike requires a ridiculously high, but arbitrary, turnout and a voting threshold of 40% and 50% respectively. Note that this unelected Chamber would not often reach that threshold, and we have the temerity to make the laws of the land.

Despite the Trade Union Act 2016 setting such onerous strike-busting restrictions, the recent turnouts in strike ballots across workplaces have smashed through those obstacles. You would hope that might give the Government pause for thought to ask why so many working people who the state relies on to man railways, treat the ill, put out fires, guard borders, teach our kids, and so on, are so unhappy at work that even sectors that have not voted to strike for decades are now downing tools. This should prompt politicians to take these people and their demands seriously. But no; instead, they drag out some Thatcherite cliches about the 1970s and, as always, think the solution is more illiberal law to change the rules and make striking even harder. However, in the haste to play the hard man, we end up with shoddy legislation which even Jacob Rees-Mogg has described as “badly written”, saying that it smacks of “incompetence”.

Introducing the Bill in the other place, the Secretary of State, Grant Shapps, tried to gaslight trade unionists with this repetition: “This is not an attack on the right to strike” —we have heard various iterations of that today. However, with even more cynicism, he emphasised that the Bill is about the rights of the public, who

“work hard and expect the essential services that they pay for to be there when they need them”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/1/23; col. 54.]

Hear, hear to that. However, if your object is to give public services to the public when they need them, why focus on strikers as the culprits for poor service? Why not target those who consistently run poor services?

I can tell your Lordships, as a regular Avanti West Coast train user, that there has been little difference between strike and non-strike days for months and months. Where are the minimum service regulations or punishments for train operators when trains are routinely cancelled or late, or for those at the top of the NHS who are responsible for the public facing waiting lists of years for treatment? What mechanisms do we have to impose minimum services on government departments which have singularly failed to control our national borders, or will the Government blame the small boats crisis on strikers too?

This whole Bill smacks of a cynical attempt to scapegoat striking workers for the wretched state of public services. It is an unjustified smear to suggest strikers are putting the public’s lives at risk. I find it particularly galling because one recent policy really did deny people health and social service and put their health at risk, with dire consequences; namely the shutting down of society for years in response to the pandemic. Who turned the NHS into a Covid-only service, with no regard for minimum service provision for those at risk of cancer, heart disease and stroke? Not even life and limb cover was provided. While we might not all agree in here on lockdown policies, my point is that those of us who argued for a more proportionate response to Covid and for maintaining services were often shooed away, but those services are now still creaking to recover. Long-term damage and suffering caused to the public, especially children, is a consequence of decisions made here in this Parliament and will be felt for years to come. That is where the energies of Parliament should lie: focus on that and not on offloading blame elsewhere.

One reason why so many workers are demoralised and burned out, as we have heard here today, is staff shortages and the struggle to recruit and retain staff for even minimum services, day in and day out. I am all for the Government trying to tackle this. It will need creative, courageous, radical solutions, and some of these might lead to clashes with trade unions—so be it. For example, I think that we need to look at seven-day NHS provision, and that GP surgeries should be open over weekends and for longer hours. I am impressed by the work of renal consultant Dr Andrew Stein in his 7DS policy, which wants to get more consultants into hospitals over weekends and elective surgery seven days a week. No doubt some of those ideas will clash with the BMA. So what? I support the rights of trade unions but I do not put them on a pedestal. I have no doubt there might be clashes with unions if we shake up public services and deal with the huge task of recruiting more staff to tackle our problems, but this Bill is counterproductive and will not work. Does the Minister think it is a productive use of overstretched public services personnel to invest time and resources to work out who needs to be in work, how many people and where, in order to create work notices? What a bureaucratic waste of time that is, with more management red tape—great.

My final point is on the public. There is no doubt that the strikes are disruptive and a real pain, creating more obstacles to negotiate just to get through the day, and sometimes they are scary, if you need to call an ambulance and so on. Many parents, for example, feel betrayed by education unions that denied children and students even a minimum education over the Covid years, and feel bitter that so many public servants are still working from home and not providing adequate face-to-face services. To the unions I say that there is no room for complacency. After all, only 23% of workers are members of a union, so unions need to work proactively to win hearts and minds beyond their members. To the Government I say do not make assumptions about the public and where they will land on this issue. The Government should not treat the public as their own army. I think the public are intelligent enough to work this out. A great notice we got in preparation for this debate from a group called Organise made the point that many non-trade unionists support these strikes, and their message is that they stand in solidarity—so do I.