THE right of firefighters to bargain collectively is under very real threat, the director of the Institute of Employment Rights warned today.

Collective bargaining is about “organised workers having a seat at the table” and must be protected, Ben Sellers said.

The trade union think tank’s fringe event was a highlight of the second day of the Fire Brigades Union’s (FBU) 2022 conference in Brighton.

Both the union and the TUC warn that the government plans to scrap the National Joint Council for Local Authority Fire & Rescue Services and replace it with an “independent” pay review body, a move which “increases the power of central government and reduces those of workers,” FBU head Matt Wrack has charged.

His warning came after a March 2021 report from Tom Winsor, England’s former chief fire inspector, which questioned whether the “current pay negotiation machinery requires fundamental reform,” despite both workers and employers saying it had worked well for more than 70 years.

Addressing the fringe event, Daniel Blackburn, director of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights, criticised Mr Winsor, a former partner in a major City of London law firm, as a “serial deregulator.”

He said: “The attack came in soft words and innocuous terms [such as]: ‘Is change needed?’ This is a deliberate approach.

“These questions had not been asked. There were rhetorical devices wrapped around a predetermined agenda to deregulate the service.

“A serious inquiry would have begun by asking firefighters, the union and employers what they thought about the existing machine — which isn’t failing. There’s no support for change.”

FBU regional secretary Mark Chapman said: “The threat is quite severe.

“The agenda isn’t even masked: it’s a clear attempt at degrading our rights.”