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Fire Service industrial relations: an historical perspective |
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Former industrial relations negotiator Charles Nolda holds a unique position in the history of the British Fire Service – he is the only person on the employers’ side centrally involved in the big national disputes of 1977/8 and 2002/3.In this exclusive report Charles speaks out for the first time on the major disputes, providing a fascinating insight into the seismic events which shaped the Service of today
I WORKED FOR THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT employers from 1973 to 2004 and over that period negotiated with about 30 different trade unions and staff associations, getting to know about a hundred general secretaries and senior trade union officials in the process. Although most of my time was spent other than with the Fire Service, many of the most vivid experiences in my career were with the Fire NJC and I was the only person on the employers’ side to have been centrally involved in the big national disputes of 1977/8 and 2002/3. Now four years after leaving the UK scene for a completely different style of industrial relations in Europe, I think it is possible for me to look back dispassionately over my time with the Fire NJC and before. I am no longer a spokesman for the Fire employers and so this article is in my own name and represents only my own views.
What The Romans Did For Us
Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister between 1959 and 1963, used to say that there are three groups in British public life which the government of the day should avoid provoking: the British Medical Association, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers. Although the FBU did not feature in that list, it might have done so had Macmillan been Prime Minister during the nine week national strike that eventually took place within 15 years of his resignation. Fire Service employment is only about 2.5 per cent of total employment in local government, yet its share of industrial relations problems over the post-war period has been much, much higher than that. I am not sure that the reasons for that are easy to identify although plenty of people on the union side and on the employers’ side have always been very clear in their own minds about the reasons.
As an historical aside, it is difficult to resist mentioning the earliest known reference to employee relations in firefighting. It is nearly 2,000 years old and it comes in an exchange of letters between the governor of a Roman province in what is now north west Turkey and the emperor himself in Rome. There had been a serious fire in the principal city of this province and there had been extensive damage due to there being no fire brigade (unlike in Rome itself) and no public equipment for ordinary citizens to use to put fires out. So the governor asked the emperor’s permission to establish a local fire brigade of 150 members. But the emperor’s somewhat surprising reply was that elsewhere in the empire such groups of firefighters had been responsible for political disturbances. “If people assemble for a common purpose, whatever name we give them and for whatever reason, they soon turn into a political club.” Instead the emperor’s advice was that the governor should provide the citizens with equipment for dealing with fires and should instruct property owners to use it, calling on bystanders as necessary. Quite what had gone wrong in the Roman empire in relations with firefighters is not clear, but equally it is known that they took the fire risk very seriously and in Rome itself, a city with a population of a million, there was a brigade that has been estimated to be about 7,000 strong. Initially the firefighters were slaves but the antecedents of the FBU worked fast and their status was soon upgraded to that of freedmen.
So if modern Fire Service employers often feel that employee relations are not entirely straightforward they are not the first to feel that way. Nevertheless the work of the NJC has been typical of the work of other collective bargaining groups, focusing on issues such as:
• The search for mutually acceptable pay relativity with the rest of the economy
• Successive reductions in the hours of work down to near the industrial norm, without loss of earnings
• The employers’ attempts to promote greater economy and efficiency through conditions of service and their effect on the numbers of firefighters employed
• The development of procedures to stabilise industrial relations at local level.
Pay Formula Cometh
The upper quartile pay formula resolved the 1977/8 pay dispute and was supported in parliament both by the government of the day under Jim Callaghan and the shadow Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw. The political consensus after the nine-week national strike was “never again”, that there must be a mechanism to prevent another such strike. Indexation was a huge benefit for those in the Service, but those who had to pay the bills soon came to resent the ease with which the pay formula pre-empted public expenditure decisions. Managers too complained that Service changes became unduly difficult, without the leverage of being able to negotiate pay and conditions simultaneously.
There was a failed attempt by the employers in 1980/1 to set aside the pay formula on the grounds of affordability (government grant increases were six per cent but the formula demanded over 18 per cent). A different approach in 1981, linking application of the formula to changes in the Grey Book which would have reduced the number of firefighters needed, also failed. On the other hand, the FBU did have to accept an increase in employee pension contributions from seven per cent to 11 per cent in the early 1980s. And in some brigades establishments were reduced because of budget pressures, particularly in London where the establishment came down by nearly a sixth over several years.
There was a hiccup in 1993 when the FBU geared up for a national strike in the mistaken (but not unreasonable) belief that the pay formula would produce a figure above the government’s pay limit for the public sector (1.5 per cent). When the figure turned out to be 1.4 per cent the employers generously offered 1.5 per cent but the FBU steadfastly stuck to the lower figure, in order to protect the integrity of the pay formula. Otherwise, between 1979 when the working week was reduced from 48 to 42 hours and 2002 when the FBU overturned the 1978 formula, the Service remained more or less undisturbed by contemporary changes elsewhere in the labour market. However, this stability did not make the Service’s employee relations universally harmonious. As time went on local disputes increasingly arose. They were usually driven by the needs of fire authorities to make budget cuts. Sometimes, as in Essex, Derbyshire and Merseyside, they led to strikes. Increasingly one gained the impression that the underlying issue was about who ran the Service – the FBU or management and the fire authorities. In 1999 the employers made another attempt to modernise the Grey Book. The NJC came very close to agreement on some relatively minor, but politically significant, changes in talks at Bournemouth. But the mood within the FBU Executive changed overnight and the prospect of a deal drifted away.
That failure and a subsequent attempt by the employers to involve ACAS to bridge the gap led to the FBU’s decision at their 2002 conference to go for a new pay formula. That in itself sounds innocuous but the reality was that the £30k pay claim involved a 39 per cent pay rise at a time of low inflation, low unemployment and with the Service having the longest waiting list of job applicants anywhere in the public sector. (The employers reckoned that on average 80 people applied for each Fire Service vacancy.)
The FBU was now on a collision course with government. The fire authorities tried to avoid a strike by calling for an independent inquiry. We first asked ministers for an inquiry in May 2002 but by the time they eventually agreed to set up the Bain inquiry it was early September and the momentum within the FBU towards a strike was more or less unstoppable. The ins and outs over the next 12 months are too complex to summarise and readers of FIRE know the story all too well anyhow. But looking back now, what was the outcome?
Payback
The FBU gained a pay rise of about seven per cent over and above what they would probably have got under the old formula, but this rise was phased over three years. The new formula unlike the old one was time-limited; it linked the pay relativity to what the statisticians call “associate technical and professional” employees rather than the old manual upper quartile which had been chosen in 1978 as representing skilled craft employees. In return the FBU had to accept many measures of decentralisation (for instance in handling local disputes), deregulation (for instance the repeal of section 19 of the 1947 Act) and modernisation (for instance in relation to duty systems) that they had previously resisted. And, most importantly, by the end of the dispute in late 2003 the FBU had, I believe, lost some ground in the perception of the public, politicians and the media. The employers benefited from a package of useful reforms but some fire authorities found it difficult to fund the pay rises and they also had to cope with a much more centralising outlook in ODPM (now DCLG). And the real impact of the package still depends on the skill and persistence of managers in driving through reforms at local level. It would be interesting to review in a few years’ time how much has in fact changed at local level in relation, say, to shift patterns, stand-down time, and the deployment of appliances and crews.
The government appeared to be the main winner. They forced their will on a chaotic situation and imposed their agenda for change (although in reality it was the fire authorities’ agenda which had been largely accepted by Bain and then by government). Firm government was seen to prevail, perhaps at some cost to wider relations with the unions. Yet despite the blood and thunder of what was a major dispute by any standards and the media hype, truly radical approaches never surfaced in public debate. Part-privatisation, as in Denmark, was not mentioned. Nor was partmilitarisation, as in Paris and Marseille. The right to strike was not mentioned, although the status of firefighters in some European countries makes it either illegal or more or less inconceivable for them to refuse to attend emergencies. A point that comes across often when talking to continental counterparts about fire services is that sometimes their collective bargaining arrangements are embedded in those for the public sector as a whole. Although there may be independent unions to represent only firefighters, they have to negotiate alongside other unions and justify themselves to their peers if they wish to have a larger slice of the cake. That would make things easier for Fire Service employers, but it implies a completely different approach to public sector pay determination systems in the UK. All the eggs would be in one basket. There would be one main public service negotiation, which would be fine when things go well but could lead to something near a general strike when they go badly.
In the end, there are no easy ways of dealing with public sector pay. It is always a thorny issue. Assuming that the right to strike remains and that the Fire Service continues to negotiate separately, there is no substitute for the combination of patience and persistence. And, I learnt, being prepared to take things lightly helps: whether one is in Belfast trying to mediate in a dispute over who should pay for the cost of transporting a snooker table from a redundant to a new fire station (early 1980s); or in London being given a hard time by the deputy prime minister for not being able to guarantee that packages will be self-financing when the cost of their implementation depends entirely on local decisions yet to be made (2002)!
About the Author: Charles Nolda worked for the local government employers from 1973 to 2004, negotiating with over 30 different trade unions and staff associations in the process. He is the only person on the employers’ side to have been centrally involved in the big national disputes of 1977/8 and 2002/3. |
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