Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)

I am keen not to be seen as a support act to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, although some of my remarks might echo points that he made in the previous group. Amendment 15 would place on Great British Railways a duty to act as a single employer for the staff transferring into it from Network Rail and the train operating companies, as they move into public ownership. The starting point is that the Bill is silent on this question. It creates Great British Railways and sets out its functions, and it deals in some detail with the machinery of transfer, but says nothing about who will employ the people who run the railway. There are well over 100,000 people involved: more than 40,000 are directly employed by Network Rail and there are more than 60,000 across the train operating companies. They are no clearer today about who their employer will be than they were before the Bill was published. This matters more than it might appear. The operators are coming into public ownership on a staggered basis, contract by contract, over several years. The uncertainty is therefore not settled by a single moment of transition; it is spread out and repeated. Staff in one company would inevitably draw conclusions from what happens in another. In the absence of a stated employment model, people will assume the least favourable one: that subsidiary companies will be retained, terms and conditions will diverge and the integrated railway will turn out to be a holding company with much of the same fragmentation underneath it. I hope that this is not what the Government plan. The founding document here is Getting Britain Moving. Those interested in the reason for putting the railways into public ownership would find their time well served by consulting that document, which addresses the issues in contention today. That document was explicit that Great British Railways would be “a new, single employer” and that the workforce would be treated “as an asset to be nurtured rather than a cost to be cut”. That was a clear commitment, and these amendments asked for it to be put in the Bill or, failing that, restated from the Dispatch Box.