Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox]

My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 2 on behalf of my noble friend Lady Randerson, who is delayed on official business. After the preliminaries, I hope that we can start to get a little more specific. I would characterise Amendment 2 as a tidying-up exercise which I am sure that the Government will be happy to accept.

As we know, the Bill establishes a legal mechanism to implement minimum service levels when there may be strikes. It does so by amending the 1992 Bill referred to in this amendment, so that minimum service levels are one of the requirements before trade union action is protected from liability in tort.

At Second Reading, my noble friend Lady Randerson queried the list of public services on the grounds that they were vague and that some of them were provided by the private sector—for example, transport—and paid for by consumers, in contrast with schools and the NHS, which are provided by government money and free for the public to use. The Minister responded that the list was based on the Trade Union Act 2016. Page 3, line 22, leaves the definition of relevant services entirely in the hands of the Secretary of State—“Relevant to whom?”, one might question. This amendment seeks to align the meaning of “relevant services” with the definition of “important public services” in existing legislation and attempts to add precision by referring to that piece of well-established legislation, which comes with legal precedents and some understanding.

I suggest, particularly to this side of the House, that your Lordships would welcome anything which limits the amount of interpretative power that is left with Secretaries of State. Parliament should broadly welcome a tiny bit of specificity in the sea of uncertainty that this Bill creates.

I turn to Amendments 5, 11 and 12 in this group, and apologise for speaking before those who have tabled those amendments. These are the first in a series of amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, in a strategy to remove all the services currently named in the Schedule from the Bill. In essence, this is an opportunity to speak about each of these groups separately to probe the Government’s view on how these sections will be viewed. While several groups have been separated out, this group includes three types of workers, as specified in the legislation.

To establish a frame of reference, it is worth reminding ourselves that, as the Library has helpfully noted, the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 made it an offence to take industrial action in the knowledge or belief that human life will be endangered or serious bodily injury caused. As a result, we have seen several unions, particularly those represented in the NHS workforce, agree to provide life and limb cover during strikes. No doubt this will come up in later groups. There is no fixed definition of what this entails in practice, but recent examples have included negotiations to ensure that critical services could still run during the recent strike by paramedics and ambulance service workers. We will hear more of this when we debate the third group.

Under the provisions of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the Government also have general emergency powers that they can use when strikes seriously threaten people’s welfare. In such cases, a Minister may make regulations to protect or restore facilities for transport or health, for example, or to protect human life, health or safety. One of the preconditions for the exercise of this power is that an emergency has occurred. An emergency is defined as

“an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom, … the environment of a place in the United Kingdom, or … war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom”.

Amendment 5 seeks to exclude the fire and rescue service from the Bill. I have other things to say about the fire service in a later group, so I will refrain from speaking at length about it here. However, I ask your Lordships to remember that point about emergencies, because it will be very salient when we talk about fire and rescue services later.

Amendment 11 would remove

“decommissioning of nuclear installations and management of radioactive waste and spent fuel”

from the Bill. There has been no strike action in the nuclear decommissioning and waste management sector, and minimum safe staffing level agreements in the event of industrial action are in place in significant parts of the sector. The presence of this group in the Bill is a provocation rather than anything else.

Finally, Amendment 12 seeks to remove border security from the Bill. There are indeed issues with this service, and members of the Public and Commercial Services Union took strike action at various UK airports and seaports in December 2022. Further action has been announced and may occur later this year but, at a time when the Government are spending so much political capital on border controls, it seems careless to threaten the actual officers and employees that we have in this sector with the sack. The idea that we will improve our borders by firing the workforce we already have beggars belief.

I suspect that this will be a red rag to the ministerial bull but, as the JCHR puts it:

“Far from bringing the UK in line with other European countries, as the Government have argued, the Bill represents a significant departure from their practices where pay and minimum service levels are typically decided through collective negotiations and agreement”,


rather than being imposed,

“with disputes settled between trade unions and employers. Instead, the Bill makes no reference to collective bargaining nor does it subject minimum service levels to independent arbitration should it be necessary.”

This is the first of the groups on which we will have the discussions that focus on those issues.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise, as I was present but did not speak at Second Reading. Given that these amendments are around the list of relevant services and intend to reduce the list of affected services, I was surprised that policing was not included in the list. There is no definition of relevant services in the Act although, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said, emergency services are a clear criteria that has been applied. Given how policing has developed over the last few years, the decision about whether you have this Bill is, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty said, a very political one. That is not something that I want to take a position on. My point is only that if you are to have a list, is it a comprehensive list and can this list be improved?

Over the past 20 or 30 years, policing has been more civilianised. Police officers have been removed from tasks for which they did not need powers, and more police staff—who were called civilians—have been employed because they did not need policing skills or powers and, frankly, they were cheaper. This has been a big push to make sure that the police get more efficient, and I support it generally. It is also true that the trade unions have had voluntary agreements to maintain good services throughout any industrial action, of which there were quite a few instances during my time in policing. Those systems have held, but the Bill addresses where those voluntary agreements do not survive. Therefore, I want to ensure that policing has been considered properly.

The ratio of civilian staff to police officers is about 3:1 around the country; for every three police officers there is one member of support staff. It is slightly different in the Met for operational reasons. The two areas where this ought to be considered seriously are forensic science provision and call handling. Nearly 100% of those who provide forensic science services are police staff, doing an excellent job. It is vital that you collect forensic evidence as soon as possible after the event. It is usually known as the golden hour; any forensic evidence will deteriorate. If you must restrict the number of scenes that you attend or the time that it takes to attend, it will have a significant impact, particularly for serious crime. This is probably swinging the lamp, but I would like to see the police investigate properly more volume crime by going to the scene and seeing whether there is any forensic evidence. We hear of too many instances where sadly that is not the case. That is what should happen. Clearly, forensic science is vital to that. I am afraid that there is no way that police officers can easily step into that field. Even if you could give them the skills, you cannot give them the experience. Just having the skills is not sufficient to make sure that you look in all the right places and in the right way.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd March 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hogan-Howe]

48A: After Clause 3, insert the following new Clause—
“Review: extending restrictions to other services
(1) Within the period of one year beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must review the extent to which this Act has achieved its objectives.(2) The review must consider whether it would be expedient to enact further legislation applying the restrictions provided for under the Schedule to other services, in particular, services that support police services, including forensic investigation services and telephone call handling services.(3) On completing the review, the Secretary of State must lay a report before Parliament.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

Amendment 48A is tabled in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh. I am conscious that it is the last amendment, and I will be brief. I mean it; I do not intend to take too long. I know this has been a big political debate, as has been demonstrated today. My reason for this amendment is not to do with whether the Bill should be here or whether there should be a minimum standard; it is to do with who should be on the list if the Bill becomes an Act.

The reason why I became interested this is twofold. First, in the list of services that are to be included we have ambulance and fire, but the police are excluded, and clearly they are one of the three emergency services, so I was intrigued by that; it seems odd. Secondly, that has been compounded to some extent by the Home Office’s response, for which I will say thank you in a second. I do not think it appreciates the fact that the civilianisation, which is what it is termed, of the police over the past probably 20 years has been a really good thing. It has taken cops out of doing things that they do not need to do and has put people who have better skills in to do them. We have moved from a situation where probably 90% or so of the police were police officers, to a stage now where probably nationally about two-thirds are cops and one-third are “police staff”, which is the term now used for civilianisation. Those people have some incredible skills and are part of the delivery of front-line service. They are not merely, important though it is, support. They are part of the front line.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, who is no longer in his place, for referring my queries in two places to the Home Office, and I am also grateful for the response to my query from the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, which I received yesterday. Even though I received it yesterday, I have not withdrawn my amendment from the Marshalled List as I do not think it really addressed my concerns. I raised two particular groups of police staff whom I thought were representative of the front line, but they are not the only two I could have raised. One was call handlers and the other was forensic scientists and forensic specialists, because I thought they were the easiest to sketch out quickly, but I want to touch briefly on some of the groups I could have mentioned.

The letter I received talked about call handlers only, and I was not persuaded by it for this reason. Of the Metropolitan Police, which has around 50,000 people even now, around 1,500 of them—probably nearer to 2,000—are call handlers. You could argue that that is only 4% of 50,000, but when the Home Office responded on how we can rely on the call handling still happening if police staff withdraw their labour, it assumed that police officers were going to backfill. There are problems with that assumption. First, 1,500 is quite a large number, and it is 1,500 not of the 50,000 but 1,500 front-line police officers. There are probably around 17,000 of them, so we are down to find about 10%. My concern is not just the fact that you would have to take them off the front line to backfill for call handling; you have to train them. They do not have the skills. They cannot do what I used to do, which was merely use the radio, answer the phone and make a written note. You now have to use a computer to work the radio; you have to use a computer to record all the data. There are an awful lot of things you have to be able to do before you can work in a control room. It is not as simple as going there and working. You cannot train someone in one year and then for five years, say, they do not do anything but they just turn up on a Monday and do it.

Secondly, we are talking about a very significant number of calls. Annually in England and Wales there are more than 20 million telephone calls with people in life-threatening situations or, at the other extreme, things that may not be life-threatening—but you do not know until you answer the phone which it is. It is essential that phones are answered and, frankly, it is the main way that people in this country still access police services. I know that there are more online options but, for an emergency, you are going to ring. That call has to be answered, which is why I majored on it.

In forensics, the number of these people is smaller but very significant. There are probably three levels of service provider: the people who go to the scene of the crime and collect the evidence at the scene; the people who work in the lab; and the specialists who try to interpret the results of the first two. They have substantial skills and are very well qualified, and there is now a forensic-accredited regulator. It is impossible for cops to go in and do that job. At the moment, I do not know the exact number of them—the Home Office might possibly mention this in the reply—but I suspect that 98% to 99% of people in forensics are police staff, quite properly. This means that it does not have the skills and it does not have the numbers, and so really is struggling. You could argue that, for a few days, this may not matter too much, but it matters for those low-volume serious crimes, such as murder and terrorism—I will not go through the list as noble Lords will know what is on it. It seems to me pretty important that forensics is still carried out.

The third group, which I did not mention the first time, is surveillance people. It used to be that police officers were the only people who did surveillance, but that is not the case now. Many forces in the country have police staff who are part of the surveillance teams. The argument goes that, if you do not need to arrest someone, why do you need police powers? That is quite right. If you have good observation skills, and are good at noting detail and at blending into the background, that is even more reason why you do not necessarily need to be a police officer. However, it is a big issue because the surveillance teams are employed only on serious crimes—they are not employed for minor crime; they will be used only for serious crime because it drags in so many resources. Without going into numbers, you are talking about significant numbers to get a surveillance team on the ground. It is important that that is still possible.

The final area is one that we do not talk about much in public but one to keep in mind. When you are dealing with serious crime, from terrorism to murder to other serious crimes, one technique involved is listening to telephone calls—surveillance and intercepting. If there is a threat to life, that will be within 24 hours, and probably seven hours a day. Someone has to do it, and it is now members of police staff will carry that out; there is no need to be a police officer.

I mentioned those series of examples, but the response from the Home Office talked only about call handlers. For the reasons I have set out, the response did not fully reassure me.

Noble Lords might be grateful to know that this is my final point. I mentioned in the Cross-Bench meeting my worries about the coastguard service, and the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, faithfully reported that back to the Home Office. People who do not live on the coast often forget that the only way you can co-ordinate the rescue of people at sea by people who are on land, in the air or on the water is through the coastguard. It has the facilities to communicate and map out where people are. It is no good talking to a police control room; it does not understand how things move around on the sea.

The coastguard service is vital, every day. It co-ordinates the lifeboat charity, the outsourced helicopter service, the police, ambulance service and fire service—we all know the people who get involved—and the coastguard who patrol at that point. If the coastguard is not there, I am not sure who the fallback is. It may be that there is a military option but the military has been pared back so significantly that it does not have coast-wide coverage for this reason. It may have coast-wide coverage for defence but I am not sure it has it for rescuing people and for the co-ordination of all the services involved.

I think it is worth considering these people when we talk about life-saving options and emergency services. There was a choice of two services other than the police, but I say that the coastguard service should be considered seriously. As I said, I was not reassured entirely by the Home Office’s reply.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. As the deputy mayor for policing and crime alongside him when he was a very distinguished commissioner, I always defer to his operational understanding. This is someone who led a very large service and understands the constraints that would occur if we saw a withdrawal of labour from these very specialist police staff who do more than just support police officers on the front line.

I draw attention to the fact that there is a real inconsistency here. As a former Fire Minister I am delighted to see that fire is included when it comes to call handling, and as the son of a surgeon I am delighted to see that the London Ambulance Service and other ambulance services are included in the Bill. Let us take London call volumes as an example, to give a sense of the order of magnitude. The Met answers 13,000 calls a day, which is nearly 5 million calls a year. The London Ambulance Service answers just over 2 million calls a year, while for the fire service it is probably nearer to 150,000 calls a year. We need parity when it comes to our three blue-light services, particularly because, as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, put it, some of these calls are about wheels moving fast to save lives, even if they do not always know that is the case. I just do not understand not having the same approach to all three blue lights.

The noble Lord also raised forensics. The clear-up rate is about 95%—I hope that is still true—for murders in our capital city. That is largely down to a team effort that includes the use of forensics, and we have just heard about the importance of surveillance in tackling crime.

I think that even at this late stage we should consider the police service within those public services where we require a look at minimum service levels. It makes intellectual sense, and I know that at this stage we could introduce these amendments. Based on the response from the Home Office, we will see whether we bring this back on Report in the right part of the Bill—we were a bit late tabling the amendment, for various reasons.

It makes sense to have parity between the three blue lights. That is why I support the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. As deputy mayor, I always knew to defer to his operational excellence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

The context for the police is clearly different from that for the fire service, in that the vast bulk of police officers, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, are covered by the provisions of the earlier legislation precluding them from striking. As we discussed, this puts them and the force in a different category.

Contingency plans are largely based on the redeployment of police officers to cover operational staff roles. Police officers are of course prohibited from participating in strike action and, therefore, chief constables are able to meet any such obligations under the Civil Contingencies Act. I hope that goes some way to address the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. The Government currently have no intention to add to the sectors covered by the Bill, and any future amendments would require separate primary legislation.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

The Minister’s point—that arrangements are being put in place for police officers to backfill—is fair, but there are two problems: if you have fewer and fewer cops who can be in the control room all the time, you have to keep them trained, and then you have to withdraw them from the street, which is a significant diminution. First, if you have to train them every year, that costs money and takes time—and then you presumably have to withdraw them when there is some kind of action. For me, it is not a reassuring answer to say that police officers can just backfill, because I am afraid that they cannot without training or experience in this vital part of the service.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

The contingency plans are of course already enabled in the Civil Contingencies Act and, although this situation would be less preferable than the one that prevails in a non-strike scenario, it would be successful in the Government’s view. Furthermore, in the event that police staff take strike action, or when they have taken strike action in the past, police forces will or have put in place plans to ensure resilience among their police officer workforce, to ensure that essential front-line services are maintained. However, as noble Lords would expect, we will keep under review the sectors that we are discussing in this debate, and will not hesitate to take further action if we judge that necessary.

I will briefly address some of the specific points raised by noble Lords. Clearly, from the Government’s perspective, we accept that the points raised by the noble Lord address a broader class of people—of police auxiliaries, if I might style them like that—than just those in call handling. Of course, he made a good point that this goes across the piece; the vital work done by broader police staff is something we should consider.

The noble Lord raised points in relation to His Majesty’s Coastguard. I confirm that the Department for Transport is still considering which other sectors minimum service levels may apply to. Therefore, the position on applying MSLs to coastguard services will be kept under review, and any decision regarding these services will of course be subject to consultation. Similarly, my noble friend Lord Greenhalgh made some powerful points about the importance of auxiliary staff in this context, and I take those very much on board.

As to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, I can confirm that there was consultation with other government departments prior to the selection of the list described in the Bill.

Turning to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, this is clearly not an attempt to ban strikes. The key sectors covered in the Bill are broadly the same set of services as those listed in the Trade Union Act 2016, which have long been recognised as being important for society to function effectively. Strike action in these sectors has the potential for far-reaching consequences for members of the public who are not in any way involved in the dispute, and it is only right that these sectors are included within the scope of the legislation.

For all those reasons I invite the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I am grateful for the Minister’s reply and for the contribution of other noble Lords. I was not sure whether the Minister said that the Home Office or other departments had been consulted, but I will let that rest. I am grateful for the consideration and take his point that there will be further review in due course, be it the police or the coastguard. I am content to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 48A withdrawn.