Coastguards lose pay after winning in court
The MCA is stripping pay from 3,500 coastguard rescue officers after losing a court case it told MPs left it no choice.
Martin Groom spent 35 years pulling people out of the sea off Bembridge, on the Isle of Wight, for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. He is the reason the MCA is now, by its own admission, working through backdated tax bills and backdated pay for the officers who do that job today. From September, those same officers will stop being paid for it at all.
The MCA is ending hourly payments to its roughly 3,500 rescue officers and moving them onto a volunteer model, five months after the Court of Appeal ruled that officers doing paid duties are workers, not volunteers, in the case Groom brought after being denied a union representative at his own dismissal appeal. Officers currently earn around £11 an hour and respond to more than 39,000 incidents a year.
What MPs were told, and what the court actually said
Maritime minister Keir Mather told a Westminster Hall debate on 1 July that January’s ruling had “changed the legal status” of coastguard rescue officers. Joe Robertson, the Conservative MP for Isle of Wight East who represents Groom’s old station, told him to his face that this was not true. “All the court of appeal decided was that these heroes are workers,” Robertson said. “It is the MCA which has now decided to change the CROs’ worker status.”
The distinction is not academic. The court found that officers who are paid hourly for callouts, who get payslips, P60s and pay tax on their earnings, were already workers under employment law. That status carries entitlements to holiday pay and the National Minimum Wage. The MCA’s own move to sort out backdated tax and backdated pay is, as Robertson put it, an admission that officers have been workers “for some time” and that the agency was already in breach of its obligations to them. Rather than fund that entitlement going forward, it chose to stop paying officers by the hour at all.
The MCA’s own account of why has shifted. On 19 June it acknowledged that the court’s “ruling did not specify any specific model the MCA should use.” Five days later, chief executive Virginia McVea told MPs the ruling left the agency “with no choice” but to scrap hourly pay. Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland who chaired the debate, said McVea had tried to mislead MPs. Torcuil Crichton, the Labour MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, called it “a stormy meeting” in which “the MCA were defensive and the MPs were angry on behalf of their volunteers.” It is worth noting that Crichton sits on the same benches as the minister he was criticising. This is a Labour government stripping pay from its own rescue workers, and Labour MPs are among those saying so.
The survey behind the “93% support” claim
McVea also told MPs that a survey of coastguard rescue officers showed more than 90% backing the switch to volunteer status. Survey documents seen by the Guardian tell a different story. Officers were never asked whether they preferred the volunteer model or worker status. They were asked only how each model would affect their ability to respond to callouts. The MCA then counted officers who said the volunteer model would make them less available, along with those who answered “other,” among the supporters of the change it wanted to make. Applying the same counting method to the worker model, the model the officers already won in court, would have shown greater support. That comparison was never put to MPs. The MCA has declined to explain the discrepancy.
What this costs, and who is paying
Employment lawyer Nigel Mackay of Leigh Day says the MCA could have kept both worker status and operational flexibility. The real difference is cost: raising hourly pay to minimum-wage levels and adding holiday pay. “Effectively,” he said, “it is just slightly more expensive.” That is a fair rebuttal to pretend the ruling demanded a choice between a functioning rescue service and paying rescuers properly. The MCA is entitled to say formalising minimum-wage and holiday obligations across 3,500 people carries real administrative weight. It is not entitled to call that unavoidable and tell Parliament the courts left it no other option, when its own 19 June statement said otherwise.
GMB surveys give an early reading of what officers themselves expect to do. In the North West, 52% of coastguards said they would cut their hours or leave. In Wales, more than a third of over 350 respondents said the same. Nicola Savage, the GMB’s national officer, said: “These cruel cuts are going to rip the heart out of a life saving emergency service millions of people rely on.” Louise Gilmour, the union’s Scotland secretary, put it more plainly: the MCA “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The warning from the man who won the case
Groom, who brought the case that established these officers’ rights, has a specific warning about what happens next: “Someone who calls 999 and asks for a coastguard may find there is no one available to respond.” A serving Scottish officer with more than 20 years’ service wrote to the First Minister in similar terms, describing “considerable personal sacrifices in support of the communities we serve.”
The court told the MCA its rescue officers were workers. The MCA told Parliament the court gave it no choice but to stop paying them properly. Those two sentences cannot both be true, and the officers who go out at £11 an hour to answer the next 999 call are the ones left to find out which one Whitehall actually believes.
