Opposition Day: P&O Ferries and Employment Rights

Proposed by Louise Haigh

I beg to move, That this House condemns the decision of P O Ferries to fire 800 staff without notice and demands their immediate reinstatement; notes that DP World, the owner of P O Ferries, received millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money during the coronavirus pandemic; calls on the Government to s… I beg to move, That this House condemns the decision of P O Ferries to fire 800 staff without notice and demands their immediate reinstatement; notes that DP World, the owner of P O Ferries, received millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money during the coronavirus pandemic; calls on the Government to suspend the contracts and licences of DP World and remove them from the Government’s Transport Advisory Group; and further calls on the Government to bring forward a Bill urgently to outlaw fire and rehire and strengthen workers’ rights. I know the whole House agrees that the action taken by P O Ferries was a national scandal: 800 British workers sacked with no notice. Today, we learnt that they have been replaced with people earning just £1.80 an hour. This was nothing short of a betrayal of the workers who protected this country’s supply chain during the pandemic. The personal cost to those workers has been profound—some of them have joined us in the Gallery today—and it is with those workers that we should begin. On Friday, like many colleagues, I stood side by side with sacked crew in Dover. There, I spoke to a married couple who had both been employees of P O Ferries for 14 years. They loved their jobs. They spoke movingly about how P O felt like a family: “It sounds clichéd,” she said, “but it really was—we lived together, ate together, worked in a small space together. It was our life and we gave it our all.” The reward for that loyalty? A summary dismissal via a pre-recorded video. Years of dedication ended with them being marched off the ships they lived and worked on by private security guards. They have a four-year-old child that they no longer know how they will feed and clothe. They told me with tears in their eyes that they felt they had been treated like criminals. This was not a grim Dickensian depiction belonging to another era; this was the United Kingdom in the 21st century. It is nothing short of a scandal that this Dubai-owned company, which received millions in taxpayers’ money during the pandemic, can tear up the rights of British workers, all while its profits soared by 52% last year. That cannot and must not stand. We cannot allow British workers and this country to be taken for a ride. The truth, however, is that P O Ferries and DP World did it precisely because they thought they could get away with it. They knew they could exploit the UK’s shamefully weak employment law. They knew the investments the Government have with them would be prized more highly than the livelihoods of 800 people. And they knew that when they did what they did, the Government would not stand in their way. The impotent response so far from Ministers shows that they were right to think that, because, I am afraid to say, when a loyal British workforce was threatened, Ministers completely failed to act.

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