Contribution
My Lords, the question of the workforce is absolutely crucial to passengers. The Bill has very little to say about it. Indeed, the Government have been very quiet on the subject. My Amendment 96 would require the long-term rail strategy to include a workforce pay and productivity policy, under which general pay increases for GBR employees must be
“accompanied by material and measurable improvements in productivity or operating efficiency”.
Perhaps I might draw an analogy. In the late 18th century, agricultural yields in Britain and Russia were roughly equal. The remarkable fact is that, at the beginning of the 20th century, agricultural yields in Britain had increased by 110%, whereas agricultural yields in Russia were absolutely static, the same as at the end of the 18th century.
Now, where would we put the railway industry on that spectrum? Is it Britain over that period, with huge leaps forward in productivity, as we have seen in so much of the private sector in this country, or is it equivalent to the Russians still producing the same amount of potatoes per acre as they were 150 years before? That is where the railway industry is in this country: almost no productivity improvement over much of my lifetime. Indeed, in many respects, the industry is getting worse and getting higher pay for it. This cannot be allowed to continue. The Government have to have a policy for addressing it and it is right that noble Lords should call for a mandatory policy that the Government are required by the Bill to produce.
Amendment 324, also in my name, goes to the question of how GBR should engage with recognised trade unions on pay, hours and holidays. Unions should be consulted: nobody has any doubt that they should be consulted on matters affecting their members. I entirely agree with that. But recent events on the London Underground demonstrate why there is a real distinction between consultation and a statutory requirement to negotiate. The Bill creates statutory requirements to negotiate. We have seen the RMT take strike action over TfL’s proposal for a four-day working week, although the arrangement was entirely voluntary and ASLEF described the RMT’s attitude as “bizarre”. Why should there be a statutory obligation to negotiate, going beyond consultation, when trade unions take positions such as that? What is there indeed to negotiate about?
It becomes even more important when we consider Amendments 315 and 316, tabled by my noble friend Lord Harper, to which I have added my name. The Government have removed important industrial action thresholds through the Employment Rights Act. My noble friend’s amendment seeks to restore safeguards around turnout and support for strike action in respect of railway industrial action, and to prevent industrial action in one part of GBR automatically spilling across the wider group of companies. If those protections are being weakened, it is even more important that GBR is not simultaneously placed under an unnecessarily rigid duty to negotiate on pay, hours and holidays. Consultation is more appropriate than creating a structure in which management’s ability to reform working practices, improve productivity or control costs can become dependent on securing agreement through negotiation.
My noble friend’s Amendment 316 addresses a very real risk. If GBR is allowed to become, in effect, a single employer across the railway—that is, across the 75% of the railway that it is in charge of, so to speak, obviously not including freight and so forth—as opposed to the multiple employers that currently exist in passenger railway services, where separate companies are responsible for different parts of the network, the Government risk creating the conditions for national industrial action in response to even quite localised disputes. This could have a devastating effect on passengers. If this is what the Government are, in effect, introducing in the Bill, popular support for railway nationalisation will dissipate very quickly indeed.
In areas where there are two services available—for example, in Oxford, Cambridge and other such places—currently a strike might occur on one of the services but leave the other operating freely. If the Government are creating circumstances where the whole network can be closed down over, as I say, what is almost certainly going to be a localised dispute, because most disputes are, that would be extremely bad and the Government need to say clearly whether they are willing to run that risk and what their policy is on this.
Amendment 327 in the name of my noble friend Lord Harper is a very important amendment. Disabled passengers are often among those who are most severely affected by industrial action, particularly where alternative transport options are limited or inaccessible. The idea is that those of us who need to travel might take the bus, go by car or walk, but these options may simply not be accessible to disabled people. I do not see any reason at all why trade unions proposing such action should not be specifically required to discuss it with disability groups before doing so. I beg to move.