THE EC Commissioner for Employment, Mr Padraig Flynn, yesterday
threatened tough action against the Scottish Office for advising
Ayrshire and Arran Health Board how to dodge a Community regulation.
The Irish commissioner told three Scottish Labour Euro-MPs: ''If
anyone is seeking to do violence to the regulation, then I will come
down on them very heavily.''
Mr Hugh McMahon, Labour Euro MP for Strathclyde West, asked for the
meeting with Mr Flynn to discuss revelations in The Herald that the
Scottish Office was privately advising the board how to circumvent and
minimise a Community regulation which protects the rights and conditions
of workers. Mr McMahon was accompanied by Mr Alex Smith (South of
Scotland) and Mr Henry McCubbin (North-East Scotland).
A leaked letter showed the Scottish Office was assisting the
management of the board to by-pass the Transfer of Undertakings
Regulation -- which is now part of UK law -- so that the pay and
conditions of board workers could be reduced when the operation opts out
of the health service and becomes a self-governing trust. EC law is
designed to prevent such moves.
Mr Flynn, who is Irish, has already been critical of the British
Government's hostile attitude to the Social Chapter of the Maastricht
Treaty and the controversial transfer of Digital jobs from Galway to
Ayr. He said that it was wrong for one EC member state ''to beggar
another''.
He told the three Scots yesterday that he was to have a meeting with
Mrs Gillian Shephard, the Employment Secretary, who is known to favour
scrapping the regulation although this would require a unanimous vote in
the Council of Ministers -- a distant prospect given the unpopularity of
the UK's social policy these days in Europe.
The Scottish Euro MPs said that they had encouraged Mr Flynn to take
legal action against the Government if the Scottish Office continued to
try to defy EC law.
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