Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)

If the noble Lord would really like to know, the previous Secretary of State who is not present in the Committee might want to explain why in 2022 we knew that the infrastructure was going to be finished in 2024, yet when the Government took office in July 2024 there was no contract in place for the operation of the service. We had to start that contract again and we are only now in the position that probably we should have been in two and a half years ago in terms of procuring a train service that actually works. I do not feel that it is very productive to talk about the first pay settlement, which solved the long-running issues which cost around £850 million in forgone revenue over 2022 to 2024. But it is probably worth saying that, at the time the Government took office, there was no productivity on the table. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Harper, might prefer to forget that one of the issues was that the owning groups were not prepared to release such proposals, because they did not have an agreement about how much their cut of those proposals would be. The solution to that issue did passengers a huge favour by resolving the industrial disputes and putting the railway back to some form of reliable operation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, said, people rely on the railway every day and need it to work every day, and the intermittent strikes that took place for two and a quarter years were hugely damaging in that respect. We know that the trade unions support the creation of GBR and recognise what making GBR a success will require. Of course, no one wants to see a return to industrial action that disrupts passengers and customers and which, as I said, was rather too commonplace in the recent past. In respect of Amendment 316 specifically, I reassure the noble Lord that secondary industrial action between GBR subsidiaries, which his amendment seeks to prohibit, is already prohibited under Section 224 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. All the rest that he and the noble Lord, Lord Young, postulate is conjecture. The noble Lord, Lord Young, is right: as rail operations transfer into the public sector currently, they will remain in their separate negotiating groups. In the history of the nationalised railway since 1948, there has never been a single rate of pay for any job. Drivers’ jobs were linked with very different earnings as a consequence of what the individuals did, and there are also some significant geographical differences. I will not talk in this forum about what negotiating position we would adopt with the trade unions. If there is a bargain to be had and they know there is a bargain to be had, it will be established through the normal arrangements between management and trade unions. In fact, the Rail Engagement Group is the forum in which we are engaging at a high level with trade unions to inform them and their members how this will progress and to establish between us what they might want out of such a deal, and what the Government might want, too.