I rise to move Amendment 11 and to speak to the other two amendments in this group. This is very much a probing amendment to explore where the new railway structure is going to improve waste, delays and costs, which many people have attributed to strikes, go-slows and all the other things that they blame the trade unions for.
I have three examples. The first is to do with rest-day working, which I suffered the other weekend—three trains from Cornwall cancelled in a row. Other noble Lords present tonight have mentioned the cancellations due to rest-day working failures. I will quote from an email from First Great Western in reply to my complaint about sitting around for hours. It says:
“As you will be aware, while all new drivers who have joined the business in recent years have a Sunday commitment, the majority of high-speed drivers still do not. Without a change in terms and conditions we will remain reliant on volunteer overtime to cover Sundays”.
So it looks as though, in 20 years’ time, we will still have the same problem. I ask my noble friend the Minister what the Government intend to do to deal with this and to reach agreement with the trade unions. Of course they need time off—on the other hand, the passengers would like to have a train going at the weekend sometimes.
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I am not just trying to bash ASLEF, because it is a much wider issue which the Government as the new owner of GBR will be responsible for dealing with. I hope they will come to better agreements than the Conservative Government did over the last 10 or 20 years, which has probably been the cause of most of these failures to negotiate.
There is another issue to do with trains. I am told that South Western Railway, which operates out of Waterloo, ordered 90 new trains on the permission of the Government. They are nicely air-conditioned and everything and still sitting in the sidings four years later. That is because, apparently, there is still a dispute between the guards and the drivers as to who should shut the doors at the stations. There was also a problem with windscreen wipers. Does it really take four years to deal with these things, given the will? At the moment, I imagine some of the passengers get a bit hot in the summer; it is the craziest solution.
It is not just the train operators, it is also Network Rail. There was a report published by Nichols Group in July 2022—two years ago—comparing how maintenance and renewal was carried out compared with the water, aviation, energy and roads industries. It was about the failure to introduce flexible rostering and multiskilling teams and to bring in new technology. All these matters could have been resolved and can be resolved. It is not much different from running a different type of transport service such as air or road, and I hope my noble friend will be able to comfort me that this is well on the agenda and that negotiations with the various trade unions involved and the Government will make sure that we end up very soon with a good lot of new agreements with the unions and the operatives concerned, and that that will result in a reduction in costs, which should be 20% or 30%, I am told, and a reduction in delays which, of course, is what the passengers want. I beg to move.