Contribution
My Lords, I thank the Minister for setting out so clearly his succinct response to the issues raised by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. It is good to have those comments on the record. It also saves me the trouble of asking all the questions that it asked and pressing him to give answers in his wrap-up. That has considerably shortened the remarks I entered the Room with.
On my part and on behalf of the Conservative Party, we wholly welcome this statutory instrument and the development it contains. It was, in fact, a Conservative initiative, as the Minister mentioned in his opening remarks. It is always good to have new measures that help youth employment at a time when youth unemployment is rising so dramatically under the current Government.
However, while I welcome the regulations wholeheartedly and without reservation, and while I think they are a very good thing in principle, I have slight doubts about whether they are going to make an enormous difference in practice. First, as the Government say, there is already a strong demand for train driver roles. Lots of people want to be train drivers, yet the fact is that the workforce is very restrictive. The Minister mentioned the retirement profile that is approaching, and I do not need to repeat that, but as far as I am aware, the average age is 47. Less than 3% are under 30, and women make up less than 11%. I wonder what has brought that about. It is not the restriction from the age of 20 that is causing that, and moving it to 18 is unlikely to change it, especially given that these are well-paid roles for which there is a great deal of demand.
What is in the process of happening as a result of the Government’s policies is that the Government are becoming the employer. The Government might say that Great British Rail is becoming the employer, but that does not exist and will not exists for several years at the rate things are going. The Government themselves—the Department for Transport, through its subsidiary companies—are the employer. So trying to understand, trying to tackle the root explanations for this strange profile in the workforce with a view to opening up the demographic of our train drivers, is a responsibility that falls squarely on the Government. I have not heard the Minister say what, as an employer, the Government are going to do about that.
I welcome that he has explained, I think quite convincingly, what he is going to do to make it easier for 16 to 18 year-olds to get on track in this direction, but what are they going to do about the existing profile of the workforce? How are they going to get people of other ages, who might be in their mid-20s or who might have done some other role, to enter the workforce at that stage—urgently—and get involved, given the cliff edge that we are promoting?
There are serious issues. We know that the workforce has tended to be restrictive about how one can enter it, and that its general profile is not reflective of the population at large. While I am not encouraging diversity for the sake of diversity, some of the problems we have are because the pool has been very narrow and widening it from 20 to 18 is not the key issue that will resolve it.
The Government’s impact assessment states that they have looked at other countries, including France, Germany and the Netherlands. If the Government are looking to other countries, they might also look to other working practices that need changing. One example is Sunday working, which in many countries is built into the contracts of train drivers. That is not so here, and we are dependent on voluntary overtime for Sunday running of the trains. It would be useful to know what the Government are thinking of doing about this as part of their general workforce programme, now that they are the employer.
On the question of age, I come back to the issue of Transport for London. The Government said that the age limit of 18 already applied at Transport for London, which is true, yet, as far as I can see, there are very few young drivers at Transport for London. We have the problem that, according to a freedom of information request, Transport for London does not currently employ a single train operator under the age of 23, and that person is a bit of an outlier anyway. Similar problems exist at Transport for London regarding retirement cliff edges, even though they operate this lower age limit for entry.
The general verdict is that we are in favour of the lower age limit and we recognise the problem, but we do not think this is enough. The Government will have to go a great deal further to solve the problems that the Minister set out in his opening remarks.