Lord Harper (Con)

My Lords, I want to say a word or two about Amendment 96, which my noble friend just moved. I will then spend most of my time on the three amendments in my name. I will be very interested to hear what the Minister has to say on my noble friend’s key point about pay and productivity being linked, because I know that the Minister—or at least a previous incarnation of him—absolutely believed in this. Not only did he believe in it, he was actually rather good at delivering on it. When I was the Secretary of State, he and the then chief executive of Network Rail delivered a pay deal with the RMT. To use that terrible phrase, it stuck within the envelope that the Treasury and I had set, but it delivered a decent pay rise for the workforce but also productivity improvements, which meant that the taxpayer was not unduly burdened by the pay deal. Everybody was a winner: the workforce got a decent pay rise, the business ran more productively and efficiently, and the taxpayer was not done out of money unfairly. That is, I think, all that my noble friend Lord Moylan wants to achieve with his amendment. If the Minister does not support it, as I suspect, I would be interested to know how the Government propose, under the GBR model, to ensure that what the Minister delivered when he chaired Network Rail—pay improvements and the productivity increases that funded them, at least in part—happens in future. I look forward to hearing about that.