My Lords, it is a great honour for me to speak to this Motion. It marks my return to the Labour Front Bench, which I am delighted by.
Alas, I feel a very personal interest in this matter. My father was a Carlisle railway clerk and a long-standing member of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association. I was so steeped in Labour and trade union history when I was a student that my thesis was on railway industrial relations.
Growing up, one of the things that I learned about industrial relations, particularly on the railways, was that the right to strike was fundamental but should be used sparingly. Despite employers and employees sharing common interests, there will be conflicts of interest. Collective bargaining to resolve those conflicts will not work unless the unions have the power to strike, even if they rarely use it. That is of fundamental importance.
That power is not absolute. As my noble friend Lord Hendy said in an earlier debate, it is not untrammelled. There must be ballots and regulations on picketing and secondary action. Labour has accepted all that. Our objection to what is being proposed for the railways is that the practical effect of these minimum service levels is to eliminate the right to strike for vast numbers of railway workers—40% by some estimates.
That is correct—you have to think about it for only a second—because if you are to run any trains on the principal parts of the network, you have to keep all the staff in place necessary to keep the network safe and running. Anyone working in a signal box has to be on duty, or in a control room; station staff have to be there, because they play a vital role in ensuring passenger safety; and the permanent way teams have to be there to do their work on maintenance of the track. If that does not happen, you will be running an unsafe railway in an incredibly short time. As my noble friend Lord Coaker said in his remarks about the border staff, this is a wholly disproportionate measure in the case of the railways.
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I also think—one of the Cross-Benchers has said it—that the fundamental test of these sorts of regulations is whether they are likely to reduce industrial action and lead to better industrial relations. I do not believe that is the case. In fact, I think these compulsory work notices will lead to more tense and problematic industrial relations. They will encourage arbitrary behaviour by management in choosing who it should issue work notices to, and this is a serious problem. It will all be done by local managers who will think that if they choose someone they do not like for a work notice, they would lose the right to claim unfair dismissal, and that would be very serious indeed.
I also do not like the way in which the processes have been done on the regulations. Why have the Government suddenly introduced retrospective application? If that was going to be the case, it should have been on the face of the Bill. Where has all the new content about picketing come from? Why was that not on the face of the Bill? This is introducing major things by statutory instruments which have not had the proper opportunity for scrutiny and amendment. Then there is the Minister’s confession about the regulatory impact assessment: it has come late and there has been no opportunity for the House to review it.
Some people may think it ironic that we are making these speeches on the day when ASLEF has called a national rail strike. I do not think this legislation would have done anything to stop the strike. What has to stop these strikes is a better government policy towards rail transport. The Government do not have to be there when the unions and the rail employers are negotiating, twisting the arms of the rail employers, as they have been. The railway faces a very challenging situation. Financially, public subsidy has gone up—not as a result, by the way, of pay going up, because pay has actually fallen in real terms in the last year or two—but the financial position is more difficult. There is a change in travel patterns, with a collapse in season ticket revenue and commuter travel following the pandemic, and there is a huge technological advance that needs to be incorporated in the way services are run. The truth is that a big agenda of reform is needed which needs to be worked through via social partnership, not through this kind of counterproductive legislation. What the industry needs is a new start and I hope that the coming—and perhaps soon coming—Labour Government will be able to give it.
Amendment to the Motion