Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

Jack Straw’s amendment to today’s Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill aimed to prevent industrial action by prison officers opens up a hornet’s nest.

In May last year the Prison Officers Association (POA) gave 12 months’ notice, expiring on 8 May this year, that it intended to withdraw from the voluntary agreement made in 2001, replaced in 2005 by a joint industrial relations procedural agreement (JIRPA) which provides for resolving disputes between the POA and the Prison Service, including binding arbitration. Significantly, an equivalent agreement remains in place in Scotland.

It is true that the Prisons Minister stated in Hansard on 4 September 2006, long before the present dispute arose: “If the POA gives notice to terminate the agreement with no alternative arrangements being in place, the Secretary of State would ask Parliament to reintroduce statutory constraints such as existed prior to disapplication of section 127 (of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994).

The Government’s case is that the public’s safety has to be their primary consideration, and that it cannot be acceptable for prisoners to be locked in their cells for an indeterminate period, with great uncertainty about when they will next get a meal, exercise or medication, and with serious risks to their welfare.

What the Government is now seeking is a reserve statutory restriction on industrial action by prison officers. However, Jack Straw made it very clear that he was still hoping that in the 4 months till next May the Prison Service and POA can agree a new trade union dispute resolution and recognition agreement that would be binding on both parties, perhaps along the lines recommended by Ed Sweeney, a senior member of the TUC General Council and now chair of ACAS. That would obviously be the best solution.

The real problem however is the very poor state of industrial relations at national level which has poisoned trust. The Government complains that in a wildcat strike at the young offenders institution Lancaster Farms on 29 August last year the voluntary agreement banning industrial action, which was still then in force, was broken. The POA complains that they would accept a no-strike agreement if the Government agreed to binding arbitration, not arbitration that can be changed as over questions of pay.

The Government’s retort is that the JIRPA does not deal directly with pay which continues to be dealt with under the pay review arrangements, and that under those arrangements Government is always minded to accept the recommendations of pay review bodies, except where there are overriding economic considerations in the national interest.

This is where the whole relationship sours. It was the public sector pay policy of keeping awards below 2% that sparked the walkout last August, on the grounds that the Government reneged on binding arbitration. What is, basically, so damaging to the Government’s case is that imposing a less-than-2% pay policy for public sector workers in order to hold back inflation simply cannot be justified on the facts. The real causes of inflation are sharply rising oil and gas prices, fast-rising food prices, higher mortgage costs, higher chances for consumer credit debt, energy companies’ unregulated determination to maximise their profits from rising energy bills. Public sector pay isn’t in it.

There are two ways out of this atmosphere of distrust and mutual suspicion. One is for the Prison Service (ie Government) and the POA to use the next 4 months in genuine and positive negotiations to produce a new and improved JIRPA with a voluntary agreement by the POA not to undertake industrial action as a quid pro quo for a genuinely binding arbitration. Secondly, the Government should drop its untenable discriminatory public sector pay policy and concentrate on tackling the real causes of inflation.