L

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 11 March 2025

Debate

East Coast Main Line

Contribution

The increase in pay given to both train drivers and other railway staff last summer was not very different from the offer made by the previous Government, which was not sufficient to settle the dispute. The additional 2% that was paid last July stopped the dispute, which had cost the nation nearly £1 billion-worth of lost revenue on the railways. The result is that passenger numbers are steadily growing. The productivity of train drivers is, of course, a function of the timetable. The more services you run, the more likely it is that they will be more productive. That is a matter for their current employers, whether they are publicly owned or not. It is interesting that, even if it had been decided by the Government last summer that they wanted to see productivity improvements for train drivers, in fact there were no extant proposals to allow that to happen, because many of the employers had withheld them pending the resolution of a dispute not about what the benefits of their productivity were but about who made the money out of the productivity, whether it was them or the Government.

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