Shapps may raise ballot threshold to sink unions

Business Secretary looking at changing laws to ban services from striking unless 50pc in favour

NURSES, teachers and train drivers could be banned from striking unless half of all members of their union vote for the move. Grant Shapps, the Business Secretary, is looking at raising the strike ballot support threshold from 40 per cent to 50 per cent for important public services.

If the legal change was in place today it would make it harder for unions to take industrial action and potentially could have stopped some of the current strikes, government insiders believe.

Not all trade unions have published the voting figures from their strike ballots. The Royal College of Nurses, for example, has not revealed full vote breakdowns.

Decisions on tightening strike laws are expected to be taken in the New Year, once the scale of industrial action over the winter has become apparent.

Last night, over a third of Rail, Maritime and Transport workers union (RMT) members voted in favour of accepting a 9 per cent pay rise from Network Rail – despite being urged by their general secretary Mick Lynch to reject the offer. The union has already rejected a separate pay deal from the Rail Delivery Group, which represents train operators, meaning a series of crippling strikes over the next few weeks will go ahead as planned.

It came as Unite, which represents electrical control room operators, accepted a similar offer from Network Rail and called off their strikes scheduled for December and January.

Leaders of a third union, the TSSA which represents station staff and onboard train crews, have already called off their industrial action and recommended that their members accept the pay deal.

On Monday night the RMT became the last rail union to hold out against

‘It shows that there is a significant proportion of members that want to accept the deal’

accepting any pay deals, even though thousands of their members defied their leadership by backing the offer.

Just 63.6 per cent of the union’s roughly 20,000 members voted against Network Rail’s pay deal. This compares to 91.7 per cent of members voting in favour of industrial action at their most recent ballot last month. Mr Lynch said this is a “huge rejection of Network Rail’s substandard offer” and shows that our members are “determined to take further strike action in pursuit of a negotiated settlement”.

But rail industry sources last night said the referendum results indicate that support among the membership for strike action is waning. “Despite the loud words of Mick Lynch’s statement, this is far from an overwhelming rejection of the deal – it is anything but,” a source told The Daily Telegraph.

“This is a massive drop off in support – considering their leaders very strongly told them to reject it, pulled in a three line whip and had all their area reps out misrepresenting it.

“It shows that actually there is a significant proportion of members that want to accept the deal that is on the table and end the dispute.” Yesterday Oliver Dowden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, led a Cobra meeting which included fellow Cabinet ministers and government officials to discuss strikes disruption and the cold snap.

Speaking after the meeting, Mr Dowden admitted the Government could not eliminate all the risks to the public caused by the disruption and issued a last minute plea to unions to cancel imminent strikes.

Mr Dowden said: “The single best thing that could be done to minimise those risks – we can’t eliminate them all together – is for the strikes to be called off and for those unions to once again engage with the employers.”