East Coast Main Line

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I have two points to make to the noble Earl. First, the improvements in journey time between London and Scotland—particularly between King’s Cross and Edinburgh—apply equally to LNER and to LUMO, which is the open-access operator. Of course, the Government have not rejected eight out of nine applications. They have analysed the effect of those applications both on the reliability of the railway and on the revenue of the railway, and hence the effect on taxpayers’ subsidy. Their recommendation to the ORR, which currently decides open-access applications, is that those should be refused; but it is the ORR’s independent decision and we await its decision on all those nine applications and others.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, since the train drivers were given a very substantial pay increase, what has happened to train drivers’ productivity and train punctuality?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The increase in pay given to both train drivers and other railway staff last summer was not very different from the offer made by the previous Government, which was not sufficient to settle the dispute. The additional 2% that was paid last July stopped the dispute, which had cost the nation nearly £1 billion-worth of lost revenue on the railways. The result is that passenger numbers are steadily growing. The productivity of train drivers is, of course, a function of the timetable. The more services you run, the more likely it is that they will be more productive. That is a matter for their current employers, whether they are publicly owned or not.

It is interesting that, even if it had been decided by the Government last summer that they wanted to see productivity improvements for train drivers, in fact there were no extant proposals to allow that to happen, because many of the employers had withheld them pending the resolution of a dispute not about what the benefits of their productivity were but about who made the money out of the productivity, whether it was them or the Government.