Tribunal rules '˜last miners' must get payout

Britain's last deep coal miners, at the former Kellingley colliery in Yorkshire, have won payouts after a tribunal ruled they were entitled to the same compensation as that paid to members of a rival union at another pit.

By The Newsroom Thursday, 3rd August 2017, 6:20 pm Updated Monday, 11th September 2017, 12:46 pm

Yvette Cooper MP

They will receive eight weeks’ pay - up to £3,800 each - for the loss of their jobs when the pit closed in December 2015.

But the decision prompted calls for the government to explain why it tried to challenge the “protective award” payments, while raising no objection to similar arrangements at the Thoresby pit, near Mansfield, which was owned by the same parent company and which closed six months earlier.

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The Kellingley workers were members of the Yorkshire-based National Union of Mineworkers, while those at Thoresby had joined the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers, which was formed during the bitter pit strike of the 1980s.

Last night, the NUM general secretary, Chris Kitchen, accused ministers of wasting taxpayers’ money in fighting the case.

He said: “We’re happy that we won but we’re disappointed that we had to fight for it, given that the UDM didn’t have to.”

Government letters released by the Labour MP Yvette Cooper reveal that ministers allowed the funding of the Kellingley case using money recovered during the liquidation of the pit’s owner, UK Coal.

Mr Kitchen said: “The irony is that Thoresby was losing money and Kellingley was making money. They used the money that the Kellingley men earned for them against those same workers.”

He added that the payouts they would now receive were “small change” compared to the redundancy packages of up to £30,000 handed to miners in the 1980s.

“The government wouldn’t support an aid package to support the enhanced redundancy that others had,” Mr Kitchen said.

Ms Cooper, whose Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford constituency includes Kellingley, said: “This tribunal judgement proves that the government’s decision to deny the Kellingley miners the same support as the Thoresby miners was an outrage - and a betrayal of the Yorkshire miners who kept working until the very end.

“The consultation by UK Coal and the government over the closure of the pits was a sham. But for ministers to accept that Thoresby miners should get a protective award, but deny the same for Kellingley miners was an outrageous and political act.”