P&O Ferries must shape up or ship out of Hull following unlawful sacking of 800 seafarers – Dame Diana Johnson

With no notice, no consultation and redundancy money conditional on gagging clauses, their jobs were cancelled during a cost-of-living crisis.

Legality of P&O Ferries mass sackings questioned by Rishi Sunak as Archbishop of York says ships should remain in port until staffing scandal resolved

This was not ‘fire and rehire’, but fire and replace with lower paid, exploited overseas workers who waited in buses on the quayside – alongside handcuff-trained, balaclava-wearing security contractors ready to remove UK crews from ships. The replacement crew will be paid as little as £1.83 an hour – over £7 less than the UK’s minimum wage.

Long-serving P&O workers helped Britain through Covid. They are being betrayed by oligarchs with no loyalty to our country. P&O previously cut 1,100 UK staff in May 2020 and refuse to give guarantees for 2,200 who remain.

Dubai’s DP World became P&O’s parent company after paying £322m for P&O Ferries in February 2019. It is a lie that P&O must sack 800 workers – only British workers, it seems – to survive ‘unsustainable’ £100m losses. P&O pleads poverty when it suits them.

DP World’s profits soared by 52 per cent in the first half of 2021 – during Covid. They made £638m profit last year and paid £270m to shareholders, having taken £38m in support from UK taxpayers. DP World have meanwhile left the Merchant Navy Ratings Pension Fund for P&O retirees £146m in deficit – another potential cost to UK taxpayers – but can lavish £147m on the 2022 European Golf Tour.

What do we want from Ministers? More than just ‘disappointment’ and tough sounding deadlines for P&O to explain themselves. If P&O do not reinstate the 800 workers, they must have no future in our country.

DP World and P&O must lose all Government contracts and taxpayer subsidies – including for Freeports. Previous UK taxpayer support to P&O must be recovered.

It takes years to train a seafarer – not days. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency must act vigorously to ensure that no unsafe ship sails.

Apart from being immoral, it seems that P&O’s actions were unlawful in several areas of existing UK law. But even if P&O workers are eventually found to have been unfairly dismissed – their jobs clearly not being redundant – this would only top up their ‘enhanced’ severance payments.  They need their actual jobs back.

Moreover, if P&O’s actions prove to be in effect legal, they shouldn’t be. We need emergency legislation to close loopholes in UK employment law and ‘level up’ to EU standards where workers clearly have greater protection.

It is simply wrong if British workers can now be given no notice of dismissal, with Ministers only hearing of mass redundancies the day before, when trade unions must give 14 days’ notice before strikes – after a ballot.

Few want to see the industrial strife of the 1970s, but we also want no return to the 1980s culture of the worst predator employers engaging in a levelling down race to the bottom.

If ‘levelling up’ is going to be meaningful in places like Hull, Ministers need to do more than have workers “signposted to the most relevant support”. Seafarers need reinstatement –not benefits advice.

Contrary to what the Transport Secretary claims, events at P&O are 
more than just a “commercial decision” for one company. We also need to 
review UK industrial strategy in key sectors.

In energy we are ending reliance on Russia. In Hull, part of the answer for our future energy security is next door to P&O, where Siemens make offshore wind turbine blades. 

This also applies in the logistics 
sector. The UK cannot rely on Dubai. Not just because of human rights issues, including trade union rights, but for our economic self-sufficiency, resilience and security.

As a trading nation, we need to think beyond the immediate self-imposed disruption to P&O services and the need to assist the logistics industry’s post-Covid recovery.

We must act for the long term to ensure British-owned, British-controlled capacity for freight and passengers – even if it requires state intervention, as happens in other countries. Be it ferries, fishing or farming, the promise to 
‘take back control’ now needs to be delivered.

Dame Diana Johnson is Labour MP for Hull North and chair of Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee.

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