Andy McDonald

We are giving a lot of attention to the recognition of trade unions. As the Employment Rights Bill progresses, we will want to ensure that that gets proper attention. The people we are talking about are the ones who kept the country going through the covid pandemic. We have come out of that but they are still in dire straits. I want to mention the dispute involving G4S, as it has resulted in Department for Work and Pensions buildings, including jobcentres, closing for several days. The DWP has been asked to intervene in the dispute and to set out the sanctions it has issued to G4S for failing to deliver its contractual responsibilities. Not many months ago, I was on a picket line outside our jobcentre in Middlesbrough with G4S security guards who were expected to put food on the table at £11.40 per hour—their employer was not the DWP but G4S. We have to ask whether that is a legitimate and moral way to organise our public services. There are other disputes between the PCS and G4S, ISS and OCS in the Department for Business and Trade, the Department for Education, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Cabinet Office. The Government should intervene and ensure that the Government Property Agency meets PCS to help reach a conclusion with the outsourced firms. We need a hard stop to new outsourcing, because not only have the Government inherited poorly performing outsourced contracts, but there is concern that they might be about to re-let to private providers that have already failed in His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. In the halcyon days when I was a member of Select Committees, we made trips to other jurisdictions and we were met with horror by other parliamentarians who found it anathema that prisons were in private hands. They thought that it was contradictory and unacceptable for anybody other than the state to be involved in incarceration. There is a fundamental question we need to ask ourselves. The Government have the opportunity to put this right by insourcing facilities and estates management, rather than increasing the profits of private companies. If prisoners are living in squalor, those union members are working in squalor. Just as unions have argued that it is not too late to invite in-house tenders, it is now time to invest in existing prisons—not just new prisons—by ensuring that the Prison Service runs its own maintenance and facilities management. Prison maintenance in England and Wales was fully privatised in 2015, with Amey winning the contract for the north and Carillion the one for the south, later replaced by Gov Facilities Services Ltd—GFSL—which took over its contracts. A race to the bottom continued, and 10 years later there is widespread prison squalor and an estimated maintenance backlog of almost £2 billion. Amey and GFSL’s contracts were extended in 2020 and are up for renewal over the coming months. The prison unions are calling for maintenance to be brought back in-house—not with GFSL, but with a return to full works departments in every establishment. However, the Government have previously stated that the public sector will not be invited to bid for the new contracts, after a 2023 assessment apparently determined that a privatised solution was the preferred option for meeting prison maintenance service needs. It was welcome that the Prisons Minister, Lord Timpson, recently promised: “As future prison maintenance contracts approach expiry, we will conduct detailed assessments to inform decisions about whether to continue to outsource services”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 23 January 2025; Vol. 842, c. 1804.] I was pleased to hear the Prisons Minister tell the House yesterday that the Government still have an open mind on maintenance contracts. The private sector has completely failed to deliver on its promises around prison maintenance, with staff, inmates and the taxpayer all paying the price. Will the Minister explain why the Government seem to be following the last Government’s privatisation plans, despite the obvious failure of running key prison services for profit? The Minister set out to the House last autumn how the new national procurement policy framework would be a legal framework to deliver greater value for money and improve social value, which the previous policy statement did not do. Will the Minister give some indication as to whether the framework might be founded upon such a review? The task before the Government is twofold. First, in the civil service, the Government must intervene in industrial disputes and ensure that public services are not disrupted by contractors prioritising profit over public service and at the expense of public servants’ livelihoods. Secondly, I encourage the Government not to enter into any further outsourced contract arrangements in the civil service or elsewhere before a review into the costs and impact of the outsourcing is complete, and before a new strategy setting out the case for a new wave of insourcing has been published. I agree with the PCS proposal to “seek an agreement on a programme of civil service insourcing and rights for contractor staff. Whilst services remain outsourced” the PCS “seek an agreement on union recognition for all facilities management workers and selected outsourced staff. A key element of that agreement would be parity for private sector workers with civil servants in respect of pay and terms and conditions of employment.” Similarly, Unison has set out its concern: “Any decisions by public bodies to outsource any services should have to pass a key public interest test.” That test should consider: the quality of the service that would be delivered; value for money; the effects on workers’ job conditions, such as pay and holiday entitlements; the implications for other public services and their budgets; the impact on the local economy and its job market; and the ability of the contractor to meet climate targets and equality considerations. Unison has also said that “the test should be applied to contracts coming up for renewal whilst providing services in-house should become the default position.” I wholeheartedly agree with that notion. In her speech in 2021, the Chancellor said that “under Keir Starmer’s Labour government we will see the biggest wave of insourcing of public services for a generation.” It is now time to deliver just that.