Home Secretary hasn’t met with civil servants union to discuss proposed safe routes policy for migrants

Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary, called for the government to engage rather than trying to ‘appease Reform’

The PCS union hasn’t been able to secure a meeting with Home Secretary to discuss a proposed safe routes policy for migration, its general secretary Fran Heathcote has claimed.

Heathcote revealed this in an interview with Left Foot Forward at this year’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Brighton.

Heathcote told Left Foot Forward: “What we always try and do in PCS is articulate not just want what we don’t want to see, but what would be a workable alternative. So, we’ve developed our safe routes policy and that is putting in place a system to speed up immigration claims, but also to treat asylum seekers with dignity and respect. Unfortunately, to date we haven’t been able to secure a meeting with the Home Secretary, even to discuss that.”

She went on to say: “We obviously represent members in the civil service and those members have come to us to say some of what they’ve been asked to do – certainly by the previous government and to extent a continuation by this government around immigration – has meant that they were uncomfortable with some of what they’ve been asked to do. So, the safe routes policy is a fair and decent system but it’s also a system our members can take pride in delivering.”

Heathcote later told Left Foot Forward that her union wanted engagement with the government on the issue, rather than what she described as Keir Starmer making ‘rivers of blood’ style speeches. The latter was a reference to a speech Starmer delivered earlier this year in which he referred to Britain as an ‘island of strangers’.

She said: “We want engagement with the government, instead of trying to appease Reform, instead of by making ‘rivers of blood’ speeches from Keir Starmer’.”

Left Foot Forward contacted the Home Office to respond on the claim that the Home Secretary had not met with PCS on the issue, but did not receive a reply by the time of publication.

Left Foot Forward also spoke to Heathcote about her union’s campaigns for pay restoration for civil servants and securing collective bargaining rights for her members. When we spoke to Heathcote at last year’s TUC Congress, she said these were her union’s biggest priorities under the new Labour government.

Heathcote told Left Foot Forward there had been “little” progress on either front.

On sectoral collective bargaining, she said that since Labour came into government, “we’ve had no development or progress on that at all”.

Meanwhile, on pay she said that PCS is “in talks with the Cabinet Office and with ministers about a more coherent and better civil service pay structure”. While she conceded that those talks are at a “fairly early stage”, she welcomed them, saying that the government is “at least willing to engage on that subject, something obviously the previous [Tory] government didn’t do.”

Heathcote went on to say: “It cannot be right that in the government’s own backyard, tens of thousands of [PCS] members earn less than the minimum wage”.

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

Image credit: StaticGirl – Creative Commons