Trade Union Bill — House of Lords, 2016-02-08
Topic: Labor
Lucy Neville-Rolfe (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, as I have already explained, strike action in services that people rely on every day can trigger a significant amount of disruption. It is particularly unfair when strike action goes ahead without strong support from union members. For example, in 2011 NHS workers were balloted by UNISON for strike action—the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is not in his place, but this was not a London-focused matter—and, according to reports, only 11% of 250,000 members supported strike action. This is disproportionate to the 1 million patients that the wonderful NHS assists in England every 24 hours, who would have been affected by the action taken. That is why we introduced a further threshold in Clause 3 to apply to important public services in, as I have said, the fire, health, education, transport, border security and nuclear decommissioning sectors. The Bill limits the threshold in this way because we recognise the particularly serious impact that strike action can have in these areas. The objective of the threshold is not to ban strikes altogether, but to ensure that strike action in important public services can take place only if it obtains a strong democratic mandate On Amendment 3 and the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Collins, the Bill has been drafted to take account of the fact that most workers will have a range of roles and responsibilities, which may vary across the year or sometimes even in a single day. For example, London Underground control room staff may spend only part of their time monitoring the network and co-ordinating the response to critical incidents, and the remainder on other responsibilities. They may not engage solely in "important public services". However, their absence in the event of strike action could severely disrupt the service, as they are critical to ensuring that it runs safely and securely. The existence of the threshold would be ineffective if they were excluded on the basis that they do not spend 100% of their time in the control room, as there are few roles in the modern workplace that engage in only a single activity. To my mind, that would make no sense On Amendments 5, 10, 12 and 13, we have used the term "important public services" to describe the services that will be subject to the 40% threshold. The term is intended to capture those services where strike action could have the most significant impact on the wider public. That is why the Bill limits the application of the threshold to six sectors. We consulted over the summer, as was said. In the analysis of the 200 responses, we reviewed the available evidence on the impact of strike action across different public services. We listened to people’s concerns. We were troubled by concerns that the threshold could be applied broadly, despite the Government’s clear intention that it should be limited to those services where the impact of strike action is most significant on the public. We listened and responded. We set out our findings in the skeleton regulations, which were referred to. I shall explain this with one or two examples The pressing social need that we are addressing in the health sector is the risk to life, or of injury to the public, in the event of industrial action. We have therefore focused the threshold on only publicly funded emergency, urgent and critical care. This is where reduced service levels can have the most immediate impact on the lives and safety of patients and the public. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, asked about orthopaedics and midwives. If they are normally engaged in the provision of emergency, urgent or critical healthcare services—which sounds like midwives in hospitals—then they will be included in the threshold In the fire sector, our aim was, again, to protect the public against the risk to life or of injury. In the light of this, we have focused on firefighting services, including co-ordination of the emergency response, because these are all critical to ensuring that fires are dealt with promptly and effectively in order to protect the public.