PROVISIONS SUPPLEMENTARY TO S. 18 (Hansard, 12 June 1973)

§ Mr. Pavitt

I beg to move Amendment No. 124, in page 25, line 41, leave out ' taken as a whole'.

I understand that it will also be convenient to take with this amendment, Amendment No. 125, in page 26, line 9, leave out 'taken as a whole' and Amendment No. 126, in page 26, line 17, leave out 'taken as a whole'.

Clause 18 deals with many matters relating to the transfer of staff from one place to another. Clause 19, which the amendment seeks to adjust, tries to give the maximum amount of promotion to the staff who are transferred.

One of the major areas of concern relates to the decision by the Government to make a comprehensive service by bringing school health into the National Health Service. This will mean a considerable amount of transfer from the local authorities to the new set-up involving area health authorities, and so on. The amendment seeks to strengthen the safeguards which are already contained in the clause. If the words referred to in the amendment are left in, there will remain a number of technical problems in terms of the staff so transferred.

1433 The other terms involved include hours of work, overtime arrangements, arrangements for sick leave, special leave, disciplinary codes and so on. One vexed question which takes officers a long time to work out is the preparation of travel allowance and subsistence sheets. Staff who have managed to master the system in one area find that it completely changes when they move to another area where the rules and regulations are somewhat different. This also applies to the period of notice required if a person wishes to change his service. If the provision is left as it stands, instead of protection being given to those who are transferred they may find themselves worse off.

I looked into the situation of officers in the Inner London Education Authority who will be affected by the transfer and I found a disparity between the different grades. Some grades will be better off; some will be worse off. Since the Under-Secretary of State has said many times in the past that he favours uniformity throughout the service, it would be most helpful if there could be uniformity of the arrangements relating to transfer between the departments. The new departure, as the Clause stands, gives less protection to local government officers than they have at present under the London Government Act 1963, on the Committee on which I had the pleasure of serving with the Secretary of State, then holding another office.

2.45 a.m.

If, after the date of transfer, a change of conditions happens to be proposed, it may be necessary, as the clause stands, to have special negotiations and arbitration to compensate for deterioration.

So, to my four words, I have added a few more, in the hope of persuading the Under-Secretary that such a little amendment, so amiable and helpful to the staff he is anxious to keep sweet-tempered when he transfers them from one authority to the new authority, should be accepted.

§ Mr. Alison

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not think it presumptuous of me, even at this late hour, to congratulate him on speaking from the Front Bench on his own favoured and cherished subject of the National Health Service. I am sorry that he should have done so in moving an amendment to which I cannot 1434 respond in the way I should have wished to on this memorable, almost birthday, occasion.

I am advised that the effect of these amendments would be to introduce into the concept of protection of terms and conditions of services, other than remuneration, a wholly undesirable degree of inflexibility, in that it would not be open to employing authorities to adversely modify any single one of these terms and conditions no matter how slight the modification or how great the improvement offered in some other associated condition.

The phrase "taken as a whole" was used in the National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1972 and was accepted by the House then. It is particularly appropriate in the context of National Health Service reorganisation, as a result of which the new health authorities will have in their employ not only staff who have till now been employed on NHS terms and conditions but also staff from local authorities where the terms and conditions of employment may well have varied greatly in detail both from the NHS and from other local authorities.

The ability to modify terms and conditions of service within the overall degree of statutory protection proposed by the Bill will be a valuable aid to the assimilation into the new service of staff from these different backgrounds which the hon. Gentleman and others are seeking. In some cases, some adjustment may be necessary if the job is to be done properly. There would be cases, for example, where the terms and conditions of existing employment specified the actual hours of attendance, and it would be undesirable that a condition of this sort should be inflexibly preserved without regard to the interests of the service as a whole and of the patients it serves.

There is no intention of attempting any general worsening of conditions of service; nor is it intended to attempt to offset any individual condition of service that is more favourable against quite unrelated and less favourable condition of service. In any case in which staff feel that the provisions of the Bill have not been followed, they will be able to appeal against action which they believe worsens their terms and conditions of employment.

1435 The Bill affords a high degree of protection and, taken with the provisions for the determination of questions arising, seem adequately to recognise the interests of individuals. The phrase "taken as a whole" merely recognises the possible need for a degree of flexibility in the assimilation of staff from many different sources and, in spite of the uniqueness of the occasion on which the amendment was moved, I must ask the House to reject it.