Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Debate between Lord Snape and Lord Young of Cookham

Report stage
Wednesday 6th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad I let the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, speak before me, because I listened very carefully to what he said at Second Reading, when he made a powerful speech in favour of pragmatism. I think that was an expression that he used; I see him nodding in assent. Pragmatism is the reason behind Amendment 10. It is a question of whether we let ideology trump pragmatism. The amendment is very similar to one I proposed in Committee. It is less ambitious—the one I proposed in Committee would have allowed the franchise to be renewed for a longer period than 12 months—and therefore one that is it easier for the Minister to accept.

There is an additional reason that has not been mentioned so far, which is that there will be pressure within the Minister’s own department to absorb the franchises as they fall due. I think his department would welcome the flexibility under Amendment 10 to enable an existing franchise to be extended for a further 12 months, but no longer. The Minister will get his way: all the train operating companies will be nationalised and all the franchises will come to an end. What we are arguing about is some flexibility. If a franchise is being run perfectly competently, if the existing company would be happy to run on for another 12 months, and if the department is having to recruit more civil servants to absorb the existing ones, I honestly cannot see why the Minister has set his face against Amendment 10. If there is the word “resist” in his brief, perhaps he will reflect on whether a little bit of flexibility would be in order.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I expressed some sympathy with this amendment, or an amendment similar to it, in Committee. Without repeating anything I said in Committee, I put it to my noble friend the Minister again—having said one thing, I now contradict myself—that it does not really make any sense to terminate instantly or as soon as it runs out, which is pretty close to instantly, a franchise such as Greater Anglia, which has generated enormous public support for the efficient way that it has run its train services, or c2c, the line from Liverpool Street to Southend, which recently scored a 94% approval rate as far as its passengers were concerned, although I imagine they, like most other sensible people in this country, think the franchising system has been pretty disastrous for the railway as a whole. Coincidentally, those two franchises run out fairly quickly. Although the noble Lord who speaks for the Opposition would not mention specific franchises for some reason, I will. I have been tormented by Avanti since the last Government were unwise to give it the franchise around 2017 and take it off Virgin, for no apparent reason. The last Government then gave Avanti a nine-year extension, despite all the complaints from both sides of your Lordships’ House. Does it really make any sense to terminate franchises that have enormous support from the travelling public, two of which I have just mentioned, and not take any action for another few years—about seven years or so—for companies such as Avanti? Surely there is some flexibility here that my noble friend could press.

If there are good reasons to terminate franchises then surely those reasons, good or bad, have been realised as far as Avanti’s performance is concerned. Perhaps my noble friend can tell us exactly how much it would cost in public funds to dispose of Avanti’s services and how the contracts were drawn up and interpreted in the first place, when a company like that can get away with the shoddy service that it provides daily.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Debate between Lord Snape and Lord Young of Cookham

Committee stage
Monday 21st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 18 in my name, which proposes the creation of an independent body responsible for pay and terms and conditions of employment for employees of the public companies that are going to be set up under the Bill.

In the long term, I assume that GBR will be responsible for settling these particular issues, but, in the meantime, the question is: who is going to do that? By default, I believe and assume it will be Ministers. That is going to be a real challenge for Ministers, because the department will inherit from the current train operators a whole range of different terms and conditions for their employees, some of them anachronistic. There will then be a difficult process of harmonising all these different terms and conditions into one composite terms and conditions for the new public sector employees that are going to be created. I would have thought that the Government should welcome an independent pay review body to help them through this potential minefield, with the trade unions, understandably, arguing for everybody to be levelled up, with all the implications that will have for current subsidies of the railways.

Also, I think that an independent pay review body which would, of course, receive representations from the Government as to what they thought was affordable, should look at some of the practices that have grown up over the years that might be due for reform: for example, the refusal of trade unions to fit track sensors to trains in order to identify faults in the tracks. That has been held up because there is no agreement.

Likewise, information about changes to speed limits is now put on a board, but it is proposed that it should be put on an iPad; again, there has been resistance to that. Then there is a hangover from the 1980s. As I understand it, an employee who uses a microwave is entitled to paid leave to have a health check.

An independent pay review body could look at some of these practices and see whether they might be modernised. If the alternative is that we should leave all this to Ministers, I am afraid that what happened in the summer does not leave me full of confidence. I am sure that the trade unions, if they had been really pressed, could have set out their new relationship with the new Labour Government by conceding something by way of reform before the near 15% pay settlement. An independent pay review body could look at issues of productivity and management to see if the costs could be managed more effectively.

I turn briefly to Amendment 19, picking up the discussion we had at the end of the last group of amendments about the impact of private investment disappearing, a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. As I understand it, the Minister’s reply is basically this: the train operating companies have provided a minimum level of capital investment. I happen to challenge that. The examples I gave—Chiltern opening new railway stations, double-tracking, single-track lines—disprove it; nearly all the investment was self-financed by Chiltern.

Putting that on one side, the Minister’s argument is that the roscos—the rolling stock companies—will continue to buy the rolling stock and, therefore, there is no impact on the public purse. But he has left out a crucial element in the dialogue: the roscos then lease the rolling stock to the train operating companies by way of a franchise. At the moment, the fag end of those franchises, which the department has inherited, score as public expenditure, I believe. That is a liability of a public train operator to discharge the cost of a franchise.

When we move over to the new system, in which all the train operators are run by the Government, surely the franchise costs—the liabilities to pay the rolling stock companies—will score as public expenditure. That was left out of the Minister’s recent exchange. It was also glossed over in the letter that he kindly wrote to us over the weekend. Perhaps he can clarify what the view of the ONS will be on the franchise liabilities of GBR when it takes over the rolling stock from the train operating companies.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I express some degree of surprise that my noble friend Lord Berkeley has tabled this amendment. If you make rest-day working in the railway industry mandatory, it ceases to be rest-day working, does it not? The whole purpose of rest-day working is to see that people take a break from their work. While my noble friend outlined the difficulties that have arisen in various parts of the railway system because people have declined to work their rest days, that is not really the fault of the people themselves or their much-maligned trade unions.

The fact is that, particularly since privatisation—although it happened under British Rail as well—railway staffing has been reduced as much as possible. The first thing that Stagecoach did when it took over South West Trains was to make lots of train drivers redundant. Not surprisingly, the ones who were left declined to work their rest days; they declined to work overtime. The number of cancellations in the first two years of Stagecoach’s operation of South West Trains rose accordingly.

I recommend to my noble friend a book called Red for Danger, written by a man called Tom Rolt—LTC Rolt—who sets out railway accidents since the 19th century, many of which were caused by tiredness because of the number of hours worked by drivers and signalmen. I will give one example. In 1892, the Thirsk accident, which killed some 35 people, was caused by a signalman falling asleep. He fell asleep because his infant daughter had been ill, and he had spent two days trying to find a doctor for her, but she had died. He tried to get time off after her death—he was on nights at the time—but the stationmaster refused permission. He had been awake for 46 hours. Two express trains crashed as a result.

Following that tragic accident, in 1906 the House of Commons at least debated the question of railway hours and the fact that many railway workers worked excessively. Perhaps noble Lords will not be surprised to learn that the debate did not spread to this end of the Corridor—obviously, noble Lords at that time had other things on their minds. Coming reasonably up to date, my noble friend Lord Berkeley will remember the Clapham Junction accident in 1988, where a considerable number of people were killed. That was caused by an error by a signal lineman who had worked every single day for the previous three weeks.

Arising from accidents like those, rest days were introduced by the railway industry around the time of the First World War. If train services cannot be maintained at a particular depot without rest-day working, then that depot is undermanned—it is as simple as that. Whether my noble friend the Minister can promise that such circumstances will not happen under Great British Railways is something I will leave with him.

I hope I have made it quite plain that I am not one of those people who thinks that everything about privatisation was wicked, but one of the downsides of privatisation was at least the tendency to run railway operations with a minimum number of people. I hope my noble friend Lord Berkeley will reflect on, understand and accept the fact that rest days are there for a particular purpose, and that he will withdraw his amendment.