Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Monks Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, here we go again. The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, has taken us through some of the industrial relations history, going back many centuries in some cases. It shows that it is a rite of passage for successive Conservative Governments, since Mrs Thatcher and Lord Tebbit, to legislate against trade unions and to minimise their scope for action. We are the old enemy, as has just been very graphically described in that last contribution. It reflects a nostalgia to replay the epic battles of the 1980s, only this time it is nurses and NHS staff, fresh from being applauded in the pandemic, who are now on the front line. It is not coal miners or printers; the world has changed since Lord Tebbit’s high-water years. As can be seen regularly from the polls, these workers who have been taking action are getting a lot of public support at the present time. That must be taken into account.

This is all against the background that we have seen in recent decades of rising inequality, the poor getting poorer and many workers working on a more insecure basis. If you are talking about balance, the other side of this House has got the balance wrong. The right way is to give workers more scope.

By the way, where is the employment Bill we were promised, which was going to give workers in the gig economy greater rights and greater freedom? That is buried somewhere, while staff have been diverted to the exercise that we are debating today.

At the moment, there are mixed messages all over the place from the Government: one minute Ministers are cooing that they want to talk to unions, while the next minute this crude club of a Bill is being swung at the unions, despite the fact that we already have some of the toughest trade union laws in the democratic world.

The Government must face up to the fact that, with inflation running at 10%, with pay in the private sector rising at around 6%, and with the public sector lagging well behind at half that, they have a very big problem in respect of their own employees. In a democracy, you cannot dam the wave of discontent, and this is a legitimate discontent that we are talking about at the moment; you have to find settlements and a way through.

Others will comment on the constitutional outrage of this skeleton Bill, with its absence of any detail about what minimum standards are needed to run, say, a railway or a hospital. The extensive claiming of Henry VIII powers would make even the old king and Thomas Cromwell blush. In his intervention in the debate in the other place, the Member for North East Somerset—Mr Rees-Mogg, no less—put it very well when he invited explicitly your Lordships’ House, our House, not to accept the Bill in its present form. He regarded it as unconstitutional, and he is right on this Bill. Of course, no one can accuse him of consistency, because he is the author of the retained EU law Bill, which will be in a Committee of this House on Thursday, which is also a skeleton Bill, giving wide powers to Ministers to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.

I am not against minimum standards, particularly as far as public services are concerned, but they will work only if they command respect and are fair. In particular, they need to be agreed. Agreements exist in some key sectors already; we heard about the ambulance service, and nuclear decommissioning is another one. In other sectors, nobody has ever thought that they were necessary. If they are going to be necessary, you would assume that the Government would be thinking about how they could get support for such measures, not issuing diktats. In fact, when you look at those countries overseas that have these arrangements, you see they are part of far more union-friendly labour codes than our restrictive regime in the UK. To take just one part of the Bill—the withdrawal of unfair dismissal protection from workers who refuse to work when called in during a strike—no other democratic country has a measure of that kind.

I ask your Lordships to look at the Bill from the point of view of a union. A dispute has arisen and there is a grievance. Before it does anything about it, the union has to hold a secret postal ballot, it has to surmount the thresholds on turnout and majorities, and it has to give due notice to the employer—all of which have been introduced, as we heard in the history lesson given by the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs. If the union can leap those hurdles, the strike can commence. But once this Bill’s provisions have been enacted, individual members can be called into work, in effect to break the strike. That is what they will be asked to do, and if they refuse they can be fairly dismissed. That is a recipe for a whole lot of extra trouble, at a time when the emphasis should be on finding a solution to the original dispute. The result will be an additional dispute, and a very bitter one at that. In the 2019 Queen’s Speech, the Government stated that no individual worker would be targeted. What happened to that promise? It seems to have disappeared.

It used to be the case that Governments tried to be exemplary employers, setting an example to the private sector; Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill and others always made that clear. But now the public sector is in crisis, with pay falling drastically behind many other sectors, chronic staff shortages and too many services not performing acceptably—on a normal day, TransPennine, for example, would struggle to meet any decent minimum service. The Government need an initiative to tackle these real problems, instead of messing around with this tiresome Bill.

Could the Minister put the Bill to one side? Could he consider launching a consultation with the TUC and relevant unions on minimum standards to see whether agreements could be reached where they do not already exist? Let us face it: to get an agreement could require some uprating in pay. That is what some other countries have done, by the way, in their minimum standards agreements. If not, the Bill will, if enacted, inject poison into already difficult situations.

The impact assessment for the old Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill warned of more frequent disputes, as did my noble friend earlier, and more action short of strikes. Others have warned of mass sickies. This is a time for industrial relations statesmanship, not political preening and posturing. It is time the Government took a different course.