Kellingley Colliery

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Ian Lavery

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this Adjournment debate.

In just a few days’ time, Kellingley colliery will close. It is Britain’s last working pit. A hundred years ago, over 1 million men worked in the coal industry, and now the last 450 men are set to work their final shift. The coal that they cut through generations powered the industrial revolution, stoked the trains, lit the furnaces, and kept the home fires burning. In our area alone, Fryston, Glashoughton, Wheldale, Allerton Bywater, Sharlston, Prince of Wales and Selby were all once proud pits, now gone. Kellingley stands just inside the constituency of the hon. Member for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams), who is here tonight too.

I represent Knottingley, the town that always supported Kellingley, and grew in the ’60s when Kellingley grew. Kellingley club is still in the heart of the town. In our area, most people have coal in their blood—family who worked in the local pits or further afield. I am the granddaughter of a miner, and my predecessors, Geoff Lofthouse, Bill O’Brien and Joe Harper, all worked in the pits. It is skilled work and tough work, and some gave their lives and others their health. The solidarity that they forged underground is the solidarity that has underpinned our communities too. That is why it is a sad day for us, because people who have worked together, lived together, marched together, been on strike together, and stood together through thick or thin are now watching the last pit close.

We have fought for two years to try to keep Kellingley open. We sought alternative investors. We campaigned for the EU state aid that could have opened new faces and accessed new and rich reserves, and yet the Government deliberately dragged their feet, pushed costs up, and let us down. Closing Kellingley will not cut Britain’s carbon emissions; all it will do is make us more dependent on imported coal. We campaigned too for clean coal technology—carbon capture and storage at Drax—that could have not just supported Kellingley but security of supply here in Britain. It had the potential to cut carbon emissions, to be a great export all over the world, and to cut energy bills here at home, and yet the Government have pulled the plug. Ferrybridge, just down the road, also in my constituency, is set to close in a few months’ time, again years before it needs to, so we will lose more skilled jobs. Experts are raising concern that that capacity has been cut so far that it is likely, in the short term, to be filled instead by smaller diesel energy plants, which are far dirtier than the big power stations that they replace.

However, my main purpose in securing this Adjournment debate was not to talk about the huge incoherence of the Government’s energy policy, but to focus particularly on support for the Kellingley miners. These are the men who have kept the coal industry going until the very end—younger men who started as apprentices just a few years ago, but also many older men who worked in the coal industry for decades. While every other pit closed, they kept going—kept working, kept digging deeper, kept cutting coal. When Kellingley nearly went under, they pulled out all the stops and increased production. When we were fighting to keep Kellingley open, they were ready and willing to do a deal whereby the workforce took over the pit, putting their own money at risk in order to keep it open. When UK Coal nearly went bust, they were ready to accept changes to their pensions and working arrangements just to keep the pit open.

Think what would have happened if the miners had not done that. If they had walked away, as many were tempted to do, UK Coal would have gone bust, the Government would have lost the millions in tax that UK Coal owed, and, more importantly, the Government would have been landed with the bill for closing Kellingley pit—tens of millions of pounds of extra money that they would have had to fork out. It is the miners at Kellingley who have saved the Government from having to pick up the cost of closure and who have kept UK Coal going long enough for it to be able to pay off its bills and the taxes it owed. What have they got in return? Statutory redundancy—is that it?

At the end of decades of keeping our lights on, powering our factories and fuelling the nation, they have got the worst deal of any of the hundreds of thousands of miners who have left the industry over many decades. Frankly, these miners have been betrayed and let down by UK Coal and the Government.

At least the Kellingley miners who left in July got severance pay in lieu of notice—they got 12 weeks of average pay—but, as of today, UK Coal has not even said that it will guarantee the remaining workforce that severance pay. Miners have told me that they have been told that they will probably get it, but it all depends on whether they complete the final phase of work or whether the board decides on Thursday that they can have it. They have no certainty, just threats hanging over them to work even harder as the end draws near.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

I have been contacted by a member of the National Union of Mineworkers who works at Kellingley and has already lost plenty of their pension. When their father, who worked at Kellingley colliery, left the industry 27 years ago, he got three times more then than what is on offer for the people who are leaving the industry now. Surely that cannot be the case and surely we need some sort of intervention to make sure that these people get justice.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. I have also been contacted by constituents. One man who has worked in the coal industry at Kellingley for 29 years told me that his dad, who left in 1988, got three times as much as he will get in redundancy pay. These miners will get only statutory redundancy pay, rather than the enhanced redundancy deal that even Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine made sure that miners got when they left the coal industry. Such a deal is recognition not only of the difficult job they do, but of how skilled it is and how hard it is for them to find similar skilled work in our communities.