Lord Grayling (Con)

My Lords, I support what both my noble friends have said and, indeed, what my noble friend Lord Moylan said at the start. This matters because up to now we have seen no evidence that this Government are going to push through the modernisation of practices on the railways. In fact, we have seen just the opposite. When the first Secretary of State settled with the unions after taking office, there was no provision for improved productivity. This leads to one of two places, one of which is a national strike, which in the end the Government will almost certainly have to cave in to, to some degree. Crucially, going back to our conversation a moment ago when the Minister was talking about how we get to the freight strategy for 2040, how projects might come on stream and unlock extra capacity of freight and so forth, we already know that in this legislation the Government are taking the power to close down a control period spending package to allow the Secretary of State effectively to row back. I gather that that was pushed by the Treasury in the summer. I have no doubt about that, given the pressures on the Treasury, the pattern of public spending over the next two to three years until the next election and the fact that Rachel Reeves spent the money in the first two years. We know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has described the spending plans for the last two to three years of this Parliament as eye-wateringly tight and probably unsustainable, that the Treasury has changed the legislation to allow the Secretary of State to claw back planned spending in a control period that is otherwise supposed to be set for that period and that the Government have so far done nothing to enhance productivity on the railways. We also know that a substantial amount of money was spent by the previous Government on improving the rail service between Oxford and Cambridge—for the moment between Oxford and Milton Keynes—and it is sitting idly because the unions will not let Chiltern Railways operate in the same way as it does on its existing services. Of course, Chiltern Railways is now part of DFTO. Where on earth is the evidence that the Government are going to be capable of managing industrial relations, keeping all this under control and addressing the issues that my two noble friends mentioned? Where is the evidence that they will drive productivity on the railways and that the cost of failing on both those counts is not going to be cutbacks to planned spending and investment that will mean that targets such as the 2040 target for rail freight are even less likely to be met?