P&O Ferries has played with people’s lives – seemingly because they knew they could

The business world has a new pin-up after P&O Ferries boss Peter Hebblethwaite’s performance before a pair of parliamentary committees.

There’ll be posters of him being Blu-Tacked to the bedroom walls of every a***hole who has ever taken possession of a CEO’s office. There’ll probably be a professional photo session booked so they can get a fancier-looking pic to frame for the British boardroom hall of fame. Or rather, infamy.

“Rejoice! The heat’s off us! The business bad-boy band has a new lead singer,” they’ll say. “We can be as nasty as we want thanks to the shameless one at P&O, because whatever we do we’re not topping that! We’re not going to break the law when we decide to sack our people.”

Gerald Ratner should send him a bottle of fizz. For years, people have talked about “Ratner’s moments” when bosses screw up. But really, sneering at your own product in a speech at the Institute of Directors pales in comparison to – shall we call it the Hebblethwaite horror show, of getting rid of 800 people seemingly without the legally required notice period.

If you’re going to lay people off, you’re supposed to hold a 45-day consultation, just like you are supposed to obey the speed limit, pay your taxes, drive on the left.

Hebblethwaite told MPs, however, that P&O Ferries “took the decision” to flout this rule because no “union would have been willing to accept” what he and his team planned. As such, he said, the consultation would have been “a sham”. As if that somehow makes breaking the actual law of the land ok.

It’s an uncomfortable truth about the British labour market that companies put together plans that unions find unacceptable all the time. The consultations that take place in respect of them are very often frustrating exercises for all those involved. They are frequently deserving of the title “sham”. They are nonetheless held, because they are legally required.

But not by those such as Hebblethwaite, who had the gall to keep banging on about what a “hard decision” it had been to throw all those people out of work and hire a security company to turf them off the ships. But it was all done professionally!

The poor guy.

He also waxed lyrical about the compensation packages offered to staff. That’s where things get interesting, and not in a good way. P&O Ferries is spending, or so we are told, £36.5m on redundancy payments for the affected workers.

The uncapped package on offer includes two and a half weeks’ salary for each year of employment, as well as up to 13 weeks’ salary in lieu of notice, and a further 13 weeks’ salary because of the absence of a consultation period.

Now here’s where the problem comes in. Paul Scully, minister for labour markets, later said it would be up to the workers to take P&O to a tribunal over the lack of a consultation period. I’m told the maximum award is 90 days’ money. But to do that, a worker would have to pass on the redundancy settlement, which includes signing away their rights and agreeing to an NDA.

You’ve just lost your job. You perhaps have a mortgage, or a personal loan, or credit card bills. Do you want to put that money at risk for what might end up being less, or even nothing? No legal action is risk-free. That’s true even if it looks sure-fire on paper.

Questions have been raised about the company’s potential failure to give adequate notice to the countries whose flags were being flown on its ships – Cyprus, the Bahamas, Barbados – which could lead, in theory, to an unlimited fine. But I’ve spoken to the TUC’s labour law expert, and he told me that this is very much untested when it comes to shipping.

We don’t yet know what the government’s plans to “recalibrate” its relationship with P&O Ferries and owner DP World will look like in practice, or whether the decision to ask the Insolvency Service to look at the situation will yield anything. History tells us not to expect much.

From what I have seen, it looks as though the company war-gamed this and decided that the benefits of literally breaking the law outweighed any of the potential costs.

The chances of it facing much in the way of justice look slim, with the whole affair yet again serving to brutally expose the inadequacy of UK labour law. It also throws a harsh spotlight on the government’s repeated failure to bring forward its promised employment bill. You’ve guessed it: yet again.

Hebblethwaite – who makes £325,000 a year plus bonus, plus long-term incentive plan – and his colleagues clearly felt confident that they would face little more than a corporate parking ticket. They might well be proved right. Worryingly, others will have taken note.