Lord Young of Cookham (Con)

My Lords, I will intervene briefly on this group and follow up what my noble friend Lord Harper said on Amendment 316, which specifically refers to separate companies under GBR employing staff. On privatisation, under TUPE, those who worked for British Rail were transferred over to the train operating companies under the franchises. Subsequently, each franchising company developed different terms and conditions and different salary levels. The position at the moment, as I understand it, is that, as the franchises expire, they fall into the lap of DFTO. Because the staff will be on different terms and conditions, at the moment I assume that DFTO keeps them in separate entities, be they companies or what have you. However, the trade unions want to move away from these separate bundles of contracts into GBR as one employer, with similar terms and conditions. Mick Whelan has said he wants to enter into discussions about equalising salaries, so that drivers get the same salary for the same job. He has pointed out that, at the moment, one train driver can earn £10,000 more than another train driver for doing basically the same thing. The RMT wants standardised rates of pay: basically, a 32-hour, four-day week. If we are going to move to GBR running the railways, it would be slightly illogical to have totally different terms and conditions throughout the network. So how does the Minister plan to proceed from where we are, with the franchises operating as they fall in under separate terms and conditions, to where I expect he wants to be—and certainly where the trade unions want to be—with one cohesive, standardised pay? Of course, the trade unions will want to level up, which will have implications for GBR and the subsidy it needs from the Treasury. So it would be helpful if the Minister could outline the map: how does he plan to get from where we are to where I think he wants to be? What is his negotiating position likely to be with the trade unions? They will say exactly what I have just said: we will have one nationalised industry, and it does not make sense to have totally different terms and conditions. I hope that, when the Minister winds up this debate, he can shed a little light on the way forward for what I see as one of the major problems facing GBR if it is to manage industrial relations sensibly and avoid what my noble friend Lord Harper referred to: the possibility of national strikes on a scale that we did not see immediately after privatisation and that I hope no one wants to see that again.