UK business secretary Grant Shapps has defended the government’s plan to impose new minimum service levels on most of the public sector, saying ministers were not entirely removing people’s right to strike.
The legislation introducing the MSAs, which will be presented to parliament later today, has prompted criticism from trade unions. It means that a certain proportion of workers in many critical sectors will have to keep working during industrial action.
The government will use the bill to impose the arrangements on ambulance, fire and rail services following a public consultation.
Ministers hope to reach voluntary agreements on minimum safety levels for other sectors covered by the bill — education, border security, nuclear decommissioning, other health services and other transport services. But if voluntary deals cannot be reached the government would unilaterally impose the arrangements.
Shapps told Times Radio on Tuesday that “every other European country” had some form of minimum safety levels in place. “We want to make sure that we’re doing the same thing to protect the British people,” he said.
The Royal College of Nursing had voluntarily agreed a national level of cover during recent strikes, he pointed out. “I don’t think any civilised society should have a situation where we can’t get agreement to, for example, have an ambulance turn up on a strike day for the most serious of all types of ailments.”
But Shapps said the new rules were more modest than in some other countries such as Australia and Canada where strikes were banned altogether in so-called “blue light services”. Ministers were not planning to implement an outright ban of the sort that has applied to the police in the UK for a century, he said.
“It can’t be right that the British public are exposed to that variance in service depending on where they happen to live,” Shapps told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Until recently the government had planned to limit the imposition of new MSAs to the railways, which have seen disruptive strikes since the summer.
The government’s own impact assessment of that proposal suggested legislation could trigger a wave of pre-emptive strikes and ultimately lead to more disruption stopping short of strikes, for example “work to rule” action.
But Shapps said he did not believe that would be the case.
“Impact assessments do the job of having a look all around and saying, what would be the risks, what are the opportunities, and they often say these things,” he said.
It emerged on Monday that ministers were considering trade union proposals to backdate the coming year’s NHS pay rise to January 2023, and for a lump-sum payment to staff.
The business secretary said the government was “bending over backwards” to find a resolution to what he called the “forever strikes”.
“We want to bring this to a close,” he said.
