HC Deb 09 May 1988 vol 133 cc22-3 3.35 pm
Mr. Dave Nellist (Coventry, South-East)

I beg to ask leave to move the Adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20, for the purpose of discussing a specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration, namely, the announcement at 11 am on Friday 6 May of 1,800 redundancies by GEC and Plessey through the new telecommunications company GPT. Of those 1,800 redundancies, 40 per cent. are due to take place in Coventry, 40 per cent. in Kirkcaldy and the rest in the constituencies of my hon. Friends the Members for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster) and for Liverpool, Broadgreen (Mr. Fields). The Spon street plant in Coventry is destined for virtual closure. This will affect not only hundreds of my constituents, but also those of my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-East (Mr. Hughes).

My constituents are bitter and upset. Many have given their lives to GEC. The GEC-Plessey merger of October last year, with the rationalisation and streamlining taking place now, is simply about profit—about increasing dividends to shareholders, while 800 of my constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North-East have to pay the price of being thrown on to the scrap heap. Hundreds more people in our city could be affected.

GEC is not a poor company. It is not for financial reasons that all these redundancies and closures have been announced. The company has hundreds of millions of pounds in liquid assets at the bank. In a letter to me the company speaks of senior management spending many months since the plans were first announced in order to endorse plans consistent with the objectives and needs of the merged Company. It says that there will be retraining and hope for redundant people finding other employment.

If there is really a cash flow problem, perhaps the Butcher of Bowden—Lord Weinstock—could sell a couple of racehorses. He spends half a million pounds a time buying them. There will not just be 800 redundancies. There will be several hundred more in ancillary sub-contractors, service companies, shops, and so on. Above and beyond that, in the city of Coventry, where already only 14 or 15 per cent. of school leavers get real jobs when they leave school, a further thousand school leavers will have no jobs to go to.

GPT is the biggest telecommunications firm in Britain and the tenth biggest in the world. If the limit of its social responsibility rests on profit margins, it is about time the House redebated the privatisation of British Telecom and the monopoly position of GPT within that supposedly expanding industry, and brought back into extended public ownership these crucial firms in the economy and put them into the hands of the workers instead of profit managers like Weinstock. If workers ran those companies, the horizon of their responsibilities would not be the bottom line of shareholders" dividends, but would be the families of those who have given their lives to GEC and Plessey for the past 34 years in Coventry, Warwickshire, Liverpool, Kirkcaldy, Beeston and Bishop Auckland.

I urge you to grant this debate, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker

The hon. Gentleman asks leave to move the Adjournment of the House for the purpose of discussing a specific and important matter that he believes should have urgent consideration, namely, the announcement by GEC Plessey of 1,800 redundancies in the telecommunications firm GPT. I have listened with care to what the hon. Gentleman has said, but I must repeat what I said to the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher). I regret that the matter that he has raised does not meet the criteria laid down under Standing Order No. 20. I hope that he will find other opportunities to bring the matter before the House.