Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Committee (1st Day)

15:55:00

Amendment A1

Moved by

A1: Before Clause 1, insert the following new Clause— “Purpose: improvement of passenger railway services(1) The purpose of this Act is to improve the performance of passenger railway services in the United Kingdom.(2) The Secretary of State must, in taking any actions under the provisions of this Act, have regard to this purpose.”Member's explanatory statement This amendment requires the Secretary of State to have regard to the purpose of improving passenger railway services when taking any actions under the terms of this Act.

My Lords, in moving my Amendment A1 I will speak also to Amendment 48A in this group. First, with permission, as it is the first time that I have addressed the new Minister in the House, I congratulate him on his promotion—I think it is a promotion—in joining the Government. I have had the absolute pleasure of working closely with him and knowing him personally since 2008. I saw at first hand his sterling work when he ran Transport for London, alongside the equally impressive Mayor of London, Boris Johnson—something on which I know the whole Committee will agree with me. There are few people in the land more knowledgeable, so it is the country’s gain in having the Minister help tackle our many transport issues. I declare that I am a regular commuter, and have been for years, travelling in and out of London from home almost daily—not least today, when I had a 15-minute delay to a 25-minute journey. It is because of my time as a commuter, as well as my time in London City Hall, working alongside TfL and many others, and my time in Downing Street looking at rail reform, that I am speaking today. I turn first to Amendment A1. I do not intend to rehash the universal view that something has to change when it comes to our rail services, and I shall park temporarily whether I believe that the Government’s plan in this Bill is the right one. For now, I will take them at their word and do them a favour by setting out at the outset what this Government believe that the Bill will achieve. It is worth reminding ourselves that the Labour manifesto said that the Government will “put passengers at the heart of the service”. In April, the then shadow Secretary of State, who is the current Secretary of State, said in Labour’s Plan to Fix Britain’s Railways that: “Public ownership for our railways is about the practical need to deliver better services where they have failed”. My amendment tries to encapsulate that in something concise, setting out that the overall aim of these reforms is improving service. It does not set out every promise that the Government have made in trying to deliver these reforms, such as saving tens of millions of pounds and having more affordable tickets and even better mobile connectivity—more power to your elbow on that one. Amendment A1 is simple, short and streamlined. The Bill would open with what its purpose is and what the goal is, so that, in effect, like Ronseal, the Bill does what it says on the tin. Some have already quizzed me on whether this purpose clause is necessary in the light of the Bill’s tight scope and focus solely on the effect of nationalisation of passenger rail services. In answer to that, I draw the attention of the Committee to those clauses relating to the temporary extension of privately run franchises. In that part of the Bill, it is clear that the Secretary of State will have to make a judgment on whether it is practical for a service to be provided by a public sector operator. With the addition of the purpose clause and the connected duty, the Secretary of State will have to have due regard to the improvement of passenger services under the Bill when making these decisions. Turning to my second amendment in this group, Amendment 48A, as I have already said, and as was well covered at Second Reading, no one can deny that the current system is not working. It is fraught with endless delays and cancellations, yet year on year we have fare increases, so my amendments today are not done to halt reform of the railways and certainly not done from an ideological position, even if it has been said that the Government are driving this policy for ideological reasons. For me, it is quite the contrary.

16:00:00

When I worked in Downing Street, one of the factors driving me to be so keen for radical reform was that I always felt that I, along with my merry fellow travellers, could not actually do anything about train delays or cancellations. When I am standing on a platform, I often feel that I am echoing my long-lost cousins in Boston all those centuries ago. We pay taxes—our fares—yet have no representation, no ability to make change or express our views. We have no accountability when a train is delayed, no ability to make things happen, because it falls between so many people. There is no point protesting at the Government, even though I regularly would, and we cannot blame the helpful and courteous chaps and chapesses on the platforms, either, who are often as baffled and distressed as my fellow commuters. It would fall between some company and another, be the fault of congestion, a mysterious train ahead, signal failings or even the weather.

It has already been noted that, without the subsequent legislation, this is all piecemeal—yet, to be blunt, for the purposes of the Bill, are we not replacing one faceless entity in a crowded field with another? That is what I am driving at in this amendment. What is the purpose of going down the path of partial reform unless there is evidence to show that there will be an improvement to the services from a passenger point of view? The inclusion of my amendment would mean that, upon the passing of the Bill, the Secretary of State should produce a report effectively setting out the pros and cons of what would be the current franchising system versus the potential public-sector-only option proposed in the Bill.

Unlike my Amendment A1, there are four areas which I believe should be addressed: timeliness, likely cancellations, passenger numbers and ticket costs. If there are not predicted improvements made on these benchmark tests, I do not see what the overall purpose is, never mind the possible decrease in service and increase in costs that may follow. While the current franchising system is far from perfect, it allows the Government to intervene and break a contract when it fails, and competition does drive standards, while there is not much clarity as to what would happen under the proposed changes. This amendment will also provide the public with a transparent analysis of their railways and what they can expect. Both amendments combined put the public where they should be—at the heart of improving their railway network. I beg to move.

My Lords, I will be brief. As the focus of this is on passenger travel and the noble Lord’s desire to put that at the centre of the objective of the Bill—which is a laudable objective shared, I am sure, by the Government—I cannot help pointing out that one of the major decisions by the last Government, which will of course affect the capacity of the railway network to deliver first-class passenger transport, was their in my view crazy decision to truncate the HS2 programme. That programme was introduced by a Labour Government, supported by the coalition Government and by Conservative Governments over a period of about 15 years in total and at two strokes—first, getting rid of the Leeds link and, secondly, getting rid of the Manchester link—so much planning, expenditure and work was wasted. I am sure my noble friend the Minister will agree with a lot of this. It means that, among other things, the service to passengers, which is at the heart of the noble Lord’s amendment, is bound to be diminished from what it could have been. The network was there to provide passenger transport, freeing up space on the west coast mainline, which is close to, if not beyond, capacity, and helping freight as well, of course, which is a very important part of what the rail network delivers. It would have enabled that by freeing up the west coast mainline, the old mainline, if you like, built by the Victorians and still doing remarkable work, and improving the network overall. So, when he winds up, I really would like the noble Lord to take the opportunity to apologise on behalf of the Government he served for making those nihilistic decisions to scrap that section of the railway. Ironically, in an attempt to justify the action they took, they claimed that somehow several billion pounds would be saved and one of the ways the “saved” money would be spent—I think the figure was £9 billion—would be on filling potholes. Now I am strongly in favour of filling potholes, but it will not help passenger services on the railway—which the building of the two northern legs of HS2 would have done. So, as welcome, in many ways, as his emphasis is—I do not know whether it is on behalf of the Opposition or not—on supporting and improving passenger services, that has a long way to go to make up for the damage it did by the cancellation of HS2 north.

My Lords, I rise along with the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, as someone who has worked closely with the new Minister. I congratulate him on his appointment. He knows more than almost anyone about our railway network—the problems, issues and challenges—and, while he may find himself on the other side of the political fence to me, he will be a great asset in trying to sort the challenges of our rail network. He will know, very much more than anybody else, what the challenges are. He will also know, therefore, that sorting out our railways is not simply about changing the ownership structure. He knows full well, for example, that many of the issues that passengers have experienced in recent years have been laid at the foot of Network Rail—the company he chaired, although it was not his fault, of course—and rightly so. However, all of us involved bear the scars from the difficult times in 2018 with the timetable change. The noble Baroness, Lady Blake, knew well the challenges then, particularly in her role in the north. In the north, they were caused most immediately by Network Rail’s failure to deliver an electrification programme in the timetable that had been committed to, which had a dramatic knock-on effect on the rest of the railway. Therefore, I am not clear, and it is why I have a lot of sympathy with the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, why a move of ownership is going to deliver a transformation for the passenger. I hope that the Minister, with his experience, will be able to talk a bit about that as he responds to the debate. Fundamentally, on both sides of the House, we are all about improvement for the passenger, and simply transferring ownership from public to private and private to public does not solve the challenges. Ironically, I was reading at the weekend—and I am sure it is true—that the Government are looking at bringing the private sector in to run Euston station, at the same time it is planning to take the private sector out of the railway to run the trains that go into it. So I would be grateful if the Minister could set out why he thinks this change will deliver improvement for passengers and why, therefore, the amendment being proposed by my noble friend is wrong.

My Lords, I am in the slightly unusual position of speaking to Conservative amendments that have not been spoken to already. However, I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, will correct me if I interpret them wrongly. The noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, set out the failures of the current system. Prior to the laying of the noble Lord’s amendment, I had taken the theme of this group of Conservative amendments as displaying a welcome, if overdue, conversion on the road to Damascus. After more than a decade of increasing confusion on railway services, declining levels of passenger satisfaction and rocketing fare prices, the Conservatives are actually looking at improving public train services. Amendment 2 touches upon something with which I definitely agree: the inevitable winding-down effect of a four to five-year transition period. As I said at Second Reading, there is bound to be an impact on staff morale and the inevitable likelihood is that the best staff will move to other industries when faced with an uncertain future. There will also, of course, be cost pressures. For example, there is bound to be a tendency to level up across very different terms and conditions from one employer to another within the train operating companies. Last week, I was speaking to some train operating companies, all of which recognised the problems that will be faced as the Government try to bring together and harmonise terms and conditions without exposing the taxpayer and the passenger to higher costs. Of course, the most obvious problem is how to deal with rest day working. I know the Minister is fully aware of the problems to which I am referring, so I will be interested in his response. Amendment 26 refers to costs. At Second Reading, I asked questions about several issues, such as station ownership and operation, which were not really answered. I also asked about British Transport Police, which is encompassed in Amendment 40, put down by the Liberal Democrats. The Labour manifesto contained a supposedly cunning plan for low-cost nationalisation, but there are still bound to be significant costs for such obvious things as new livery and uniforms. We all look forward to an integrated fare structure; that, of course, will come with upfront costs. Amendment 22 refers to the establishment of an independent public body to assess performance, while Amendment 21 refers to an annual report from the Secretary of State. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, will explain exactly what he is aiming at in these amendments. One of them asks for the sort of close supervision by the Department for Transport that we have had since Covid, which clearly has not worked terribly well; the other refers to a more arms-length approach. Which of those approaches does the Conservative Party in this House believe will be better? Liberal Democrats would establish a railway agency —a nationwide public body to act as a guiding mind for the railways, putting commuters first, implementing wholesale reform of the fares system and holding train companies to account. We do not believe that the renationalisation of passenger rail will automatically deliver cheaper fares or better services. From speaking to members of the public, we have concluded that they really do not care who runs the railways; they just want cheap, efficient and reliable services. I do not doubt the Government’s good will or their wish to make this huge change, which we all want to happen. However, as a signal of their intent and an upfront signal to the public, I hope the Minister will speak with the Chancellor of the Exchequer to ensure that in next week’s Budget, we have a fare freeze and the public see from the start that there will be a difference under this Government.

My Lords, the amendments in this group are all designed to try to get some information from the Government about the effect of the changes in this Bill. Will it help the passenger—as well as, I hope, the rail freight customer—and will it help with the costs? Several noble Lords have referred to the issue of costs on the railway, which is very serious; I shall probably come back to that later.

16:15:00

The noble Lord, Lord Grayling, mentioned electrification—I think he said on the East Coast Main Line, but he may have meant the Midland Main Line or both. He said that it got delayed or cancelled because of rising costs. In discussions a few months ago with the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin—who I think was his successor—it was clear that Network Rail and the new Secretary of State were absolutely adamant that they were not going to exceed the costs that had been allocated to a particular project. Network Rail came back and said that, suddenly, the estimate of the costs had increased so much that it could no longer afford, within the budget, to do this electrification, which I think all noble Lords think is a very good thing if it can be done. The Network Rail chief executive said, “Well, I am going to have to stop it. I’m not going ahead with it”. He said that, although there will be a lot of fuss in Parliament and in the regions, if we cannot do it within the budget, we should not do it. This is half the trouble we have at the moment: we do not have a clue how much so many things cost. As my noble friend alluded to, HS2 is one prime example of that, and it is still going on today.

My noble friend the Minister is trying very hard to get this Bill through and give us some pretty decent answers to some of the questions we are posing. It is very important that, after the discussion on the amendments in this group, he should agree to a regular report, starting very soon, on the current costs and where they are likely to change—increase or decrease—because of this Bill and the changes to the franchises. We have a long way to go, but the costs are fundamental not just to the Chancellor but to the railways having credibility in delivering their projects for the amount of money agreed by government.

My Lords, I will briefly ask the Minister a question for when he comes to respond. I am very supportive of what my noble friend says in his Amendment A1—that we be clear about the purpose of this legislation—but the Minister will be aware that the Bill will substantially achieve that by amending the Railways Act 1993. Section 4 of that Act, as amended, sets out the general duties of the Secretary of State and the Office of Rail and Road. While they are listed in relation to the Office of Rail and Road, they are added as duties of the Secretary of State under Section 4(3)(a). Section 4(1)(zb) says that it shall be the duty of the Office of Rail and Road—and, by extension, the Secretary of State— “to promote improvements in railway service performance”. Will the Minister confirm that nothing in this Bill would change the continuing duty of the Secretary of State to promote improvements in railway service performance? Can the Minister also say that it will not change the duties of the Secretary of State and the Office of Rail and Road otherwise listed in that subsection, including “to promote competition in the provision of railway services for the benefit of users of railway services”. I am interested know precisely how the Minister and the Government propose to meet that general duty, which is not changed by this Bill.

My Lords, I am always fascinated when Members of the party opposite attack proposals from this side of the House on the grounds that they are ideological. What could be more ideological than the privatisation of the railway system back in 1994? In my view, Amendment A1, to which the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, spoke earlier, would create another bureaucracy—something the Conservative Party are normally against. No one would say, and I certainly would not, that a nationalised railway will be the answer to all our problems. Having worked in it, I know only too well it will not be. On the other hand, I think if you asked the average rail passenger for his or her view of the current system, they would say that anything would be better than what we have at the present time. When it comes to ideology, I followed with interest the words of the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, who talked about failings in the increased cost of electrification leading to the delay, and in some cases the cancellation, of various electrification projects. My noble friend the Minister, who will respond, has great experience of Network Rail, and he might comment on some of the costings—many of us would take an interest in those matters. I was surprised, to say the least, at some of the expensive projects that Network Rail has embarked upon and the failure of that organisation to work within the original estimates, as far as costs are concerned. I hope it will not upset the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, too much, but his sojourn as Secretary of State for Transport is not looked upon by the railway community with any great favour. His view that in some cases electrification was unnecessary and that what was needed was bi-mode trains did not particularly please passengers. I recently moved home, from the Birmingham area to Gloucestershire, where I now have the pleasure—doubtful pleasure that it is—of travelling on Great Western’s bi-mode trains. They are often subject to cancellation and, again, the usual view from my fellow passengers is that the sooner the railway is renationalised, the better. My noble friend Lord Berkeley is regarded as an expert on railway costings—he shakes his head, but he should not be so modest; he certainly played a major role with his views on HS2 and its finances. He mentioned the Office of Rail and Road. In the context of this amendment, can my noble friend the Minister tell me what role is envisaged for the ORR in future? I hope he will not be too offended if I say it is a misnomer: it is certainly an office for railways, given that it intervenes on various grounds—in my view, improperly, because there are proper roles for those responsible for railway safety in the industry—but appears to play no role at all as far as the road network is concerned. The fact that something approaching 2,000 people are killed on our roads on an annual basis is not something that detains the ORR. I hope my noble friend can tell me what role he envisages for the ORR in the newly nationalised railway system. Finally, just to hark back to 1994 and the privatisation Act, fundamentally it adversely affected the railway industry. In 1994—again, I apologise for the history lesson—the railway system in Britain was regarded as the most efficient and effective in western Europe; certainly the subsidies paid to the rail industry in those days were less than those paid in countries such as France and Germany. The sectionalisation of the railway industry in the 1990s, largely at the behest of a Conservative Government—I do not make any complaints about that, as Governments have opinions—led to a much more readily identifiable system of costings for the industry overall. For the first time, we saw exactly which parts of the railway were profitable, which were not and which needed perhaps more money spent on them in the future than had previously been envisaged. The relationship between Sir Bob Reid mark 1, the then chairman of the railways board, and Mr Nicholas Ridely, the Secretary of State at the time, was an extremely fruitful one. I am not here to announce any great fondness for Lord Ridley but I think that he appreciated what the railway industry was doing, largely at his behest at that time. I understand—although I do not wish to attribute words to him long after his death—that he was more than a little concerned about the mode of privatisation envisaged by the Government at the time, largely because of the success that he felt he had had in improving and defining the railway industry’s relationship with the Government of the day. I hope that, when my noble friend the Minister responds to this amendment, he will appreciate at least that, whether the railways are privatised or public, all too often railway passengers—or customers, as they are somewhat laughably known these days—do not feel that their views on the provision of the service are listened to or that there is a proper voice for them. It is some years since the transport users’ consultative committees were abolished. Can my noble friend say what plans he has for better passenger consultation in the future? In conclusion, I hope that my noble friend will not get too bogged down in the bureaucratic desires of the party opposite. Future amendments that we will come to, from the Conservative Party or its Front Bench, appear to believe that railway management has nothing better to do than put together various plans, which no doubt will be torn apart by those who feel that the railways are not delivering the service that they should. I await with interest my noble friend’s response to the amendment. I know that he will bear in mind that we ought to be concerned about the passengers of the future—the passengers of the past having been sadly neglected.

My Lords, trade moves by trains. Why do I bring that up? Some of your Lordships may remember that when Freightliner was put up for sale, P&O—the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, to give its full name—bid for it, and we were told by the competition authorities that, at that time, we already controlled 25% of transport movements for the whole of the UK and therefore we could not take it over. I went to see the Secretary of State for Transport and everybody involved with this—our own people—to say that it was ridiculous. In practice, what we really wanted was to have a fast line for container trains, at night as well as in the day, from Glasgow right the way through to Istanbul, non-stop, for 2,500 miles, moving trade backwards and forwards in a major way. We had only about 3% of the trade in Europe, and I thought that, at that stage, it would have made a huge amount of sense. With those double trains going right the way through and the movement of trade, we would now be in a much finer position for doing trade in a much more major way, 2,500 miles away and further. I thank your Lordships for listening to me.

16:30:00

My Lords, I would like to intervene because I frequently travel on the railways of France; my wife is French. The contrast between the railways in France—and, for that matter, in Italy—and those of this country is quite extraordinary. The railways were aptly referred to by my colleague on the Back Benches as a shambles and so they have been. It is therefore highly important that we have a properly integrated and effective service, which has been part of the tradition of infrastructure of this country for a very long time. I cite someone whose name will register on the other side of the House: Winston Churchill. He was, in his time, a strong supporter of the nationalisation of the railways, partly on efficiency and technical grounds, based on his experience in Lloyd George’s coalition Government of the First World War, and partly on grounds that, fortunately, we hear less about now—questions of labour and industrial relations; I think the railways were almost next to the miners in industrial conflict in that period. We suffer by comparison with our neighbouring country colleagues—and, I hope, shortly, allies—and therefore the social and economic rationale of this Bill is profoundly important.

My Lords, I start by apologising to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, if I caused any confusion; I will try to do better. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, back to his place from his excursion, no doubt by rail, in foreign parts. We missed him at Second Reading, but we had an excellent substitute in the shape of the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds. I will make a preliminary remark at this stage, which I intend to save me making it on future groups of amendments. It is that we are, essentially, at least as far as the amendments tabled by Members from the Conservative Party are concerned, seeking information from the Government in relation to this Bill. If the Government are candid with us and give us the information that we are looking for, we will have achieved our objective on behalf of the public, and that will be the end of the matter. I turn to the debate that has taken place so far. The part that has sparked me most, which I felt I had to answer, were the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Snape. First, I agree with him about what a degradation it is that passengers have become customers when, of course, they really ought to be passengers. But there is also the question of ideology, which I hope to take out of the debate that we will have in Committee today and on Wednesday. Of course there is always an element of ideology when one talks about privatisation and nationalisation. The railways, which, I think, are 200 years old next year, have been nationalised for only about a quarter of their entire existence. We must not think that nationalisation is the natural condition of railways in this country. They flourished and grew and were developed in private hands; we should always remember that. The truth is that in 1945-46, the railways were nationalised largely because, after six years of war, they were bankrupt. There had been no investment in them during the whole of that period, and they had deteriorated. Nor was there any prospect of their making sufficient profit that private capital could have been recruited to make up that deficiency. Whether the then Government believed in nationalisation as an ideological matter or not, if the railways were to continue running at all it was going to have to be in government hands. Parts of the system were privatised in the mid-1990s for equally practical reasons—we discussed some of them at Second Reading. One reason was to attempt to improve customer service through competition; one was to recruit private capital into the railways on a consistent basis, which the Government had never been able to provide during the whole of the time they owned the railways—not enough capital and never enough consistency because no budget went beyond 12 months—and another was to try, frankly, to break the grip of the rail unions on pay, so that the astonishing disparities that exist between, let us say, a train driver and bus driver, which are entirely due to the monopoly supply of labour by ASLEF, might be evened out. What we discussed at Second Reading, I am perfectly happy to admit, is that on some of these fronts privatisation has been successful, and on others less so. If the Government, who have won a majority on the basis of promising to nationalise the train operating companies, wish to give the other side of it a kick and see if they can make it work on that basis, I do not personally object—at least not on ideological grounds. But the House is perfectly entitled to have its practical questions about how this will work addressed. That is what the amendments in this group and many that will come before the Committee later intend to address. The Government claim that this is a very small Bill. On the other hand, when they talk to the public it is a huge Bill, “because we are nationalising the railways”. They are not really nationalising the railways, because to nationalise something you normally have to pay for it and this Bill is not something where they are paying out to shareholders. All they are doing is letting the franchises that exist expire and then tying their hands and preventing themselves from renewing them except in emergency circumstances. It is, as I would have said at Second Reading if I had had more time, less nationalisation and more like dismissing your chauffeur at the end of his contract and deciding to drive the car yourself. At least you knew the chauffeur had a driving licence and some experience and qualification in driving the car, but now we will have the Secretary of State—we were told at Second Reading that she prefers to be known as the passenger-in-chief—as, in effect, driver-in-chief as well. We will see how that works out. It is a big thing when the Government talk to the public—it is nationalisation of the railways—but when they talk to noble Lords it is a very little thing. All the big things, we are told, will happen in the next Bill— the train further down the line, expected in roughly a year or 18 months. That is the Bill in which many of our questions should be addressed, we are told—we should not ask those questions now. I think we should ask many of those questions now, for two very good reasons. The first is that the Bill presents us with a measure regarded by the Government as preliminary to that very large Bill, so it has long-term consequences. The second—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson—is that the Bill sets up a shadow structure that could persist in operation for four or five years or even longer because, first, it will take us a year or 18 months before we see the Bill that will make these great reforms; and, secondly, as anyone who has been involved in the railways or any other large organisation will know, implementing significant change as a result of that legislation is likely to take several further years. We will have to live with the shadow structures set up as a result of the Bill for many years, and their practical consequences deserve the most careful scrutiny.

Can I ask the Minister, sorry the shadow Minister—

I am not quite yet the Minister, but the way the Labour Party is going, who knows?

I asked for that one, I have to say. It is mistakes being made at both ends of the Corridor recently. Arising from what the noble Lord has just said, can I ask him to clarify two points? First, on the delay in moving on to the more detailed Bill, bearing in mind that it was 2016 when the Government he favours brought forward the proposals for Great British Railways, what were the Government doing in the eight years since then? Secondly, I have a simple question about the ideology of privatisation: if nationalisation is so bad, why was almost the first act of Governments in two world wars to nationalise the railway industry? What makes it so essential in wartime and yet it can be handed out piecemeal in peacetime?

If the noble Lord will forgive me, I am asking the questions in this scenario, and I do not feel I necessarily have an answer to his question about wartime. I might pass it on to the Minister, who once arranged for me to go and see deep in the bowels of Mayfair, under the former Down Street Underground station—I am sure that if the noble Lord, Lord Snape, has not been, it can be arranged for him to see it too—the wartime headquarters of the railway operations executive, including what is claimed to be, although I think with no historical foundation, a tin bath in which Churchill once took a bath. I will say no more about the war than that. On the former question, I do not know the answer, but I would like to know. Why was it that the then Government, having published what they called the Williams-Shapps review written by Keith Williams—I think he is correct in saying that it was in 2016—and having promised a transport Bill in the King’s Speech one but last, did not come forward with the measures they thought they could offer in that regard? I do not know the answer to that, but I am willing to have a guess and it is relevant to what the Government are embarking on now and to whether they are going to meet their 12 to 18-month deadline of delivering us with this massive Bill that is going to transform the railways. My guess is that the then Government found that grappling with the intense difficulties of reforming the railway on such a large scale meant that, try as they might, they found considerable difficulty in putting together that Bill. It may be that is exactly what the Minister finds as he comes to address these difficulties. This only adds further to my point that the shadow arrangements we are setting up today could be with us for a very long time. I come to the first amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. The Government say they have a purpose—they are not doing this for ideological reasons or at the behest of the trade unions—which is to improve passenger services. At Second Reading, I pointed out that in the final stage impact assessment produced by the Department for Transport, given the opportunity it had to say exactly that, it said something completely different. It said that the Bill had been “prepared to enable swift delivery of a Government manifesto commitment”— not to improve matters for passengers—and that was why it had not looked, as it normally would, at the alternative options that might be put forward to achieve a similar purpose. That is another reason why it is incumbent on us in this House to look in great detail at what the Government are putting before us. They are in effect asking us to buy into an article of faith. They are simply saying, “Well, it couldn’t be worse than it is at the moment”—that is simply untrue; there are problems with the railways, but they could be a great deal worse than they are at the moment—“so it is bound to be better if we take it over and run it ourselves as part of a national enterprise”. But they have not provided any evidence for that; they have simply stated, “This must be the case and you’ve got to believe us”. As I say, that is one of the reasons why our job is not to do so.

16:45:00

My noble friend Lord Gascoigne seeks in his amendment to make good the deficiency pointed out by the Department for Transport: that the Bill has no purpose other than the delivery of a government manifesto commitment and that no alternatives have been looked at to achieve that purpose. He has tried to clarify, and state on the face of the Bill, why we are doing this, and he has put this forward in words that the Government themselves have been using. When the Minister comes to reply, there really should be no problem at all on the part of the Government in stating, “Yes, this is our purpose and this should be on the face of the Bill, so that everyone who looks at this Bill”—I do not mean passengers but those involved in implementing it, from the Secretary of State down—“knows exactly what it is should be guiding them as a principle when they come to make their decisions about how to put it into effect”.

Can I try to help the noble Lord? My understanding is that the Government are committed to a comprehensive package of rail reform, and that the Bill for the comprehensive package will be introduced next spring. The purpose of this Bill is a relatively minor reform, in my view, in the context of the much bigger reform, which is to make sure that the franchises can transition to public ownership at minimum cost to the Exchequer. If we are going to do it at minimum cost to the Exchequer, we have to do it quickly; that is why this is one of the earliest Bills that the Government have put forward.

The noble Lord puts the Government’s case very well. How much the House has lost in not seeing him on the Front Bench as the Minister, given that he was the shadow Minister up until the general election. We are told by the noble Lord that the Government have a package of reforms. We all have a package of reforms. We know what the package of reforms looks like; it is in the Shapps-Williams review. Yet what we are seeing from the Government is a package of reforms that differs significantly from the Williams review; that is why it needs such careful scrutiny. Given the passage of time, I will be brief on the remaining amendments. All the amendments in my name seek to test the effects of this measure on the performance of the industry in the light of the nationalisation that the Government are proposing. Taken separately, the amendments deal with different types of performance. Some deal with the performance of the railways in so far as they engage with passengers; that is, on timeliness, efficiency, service quality and so forth. Some relate to the performance of the railways in relation to finances; we will come to finances in more detail later. The Government claim that this Bill has no financial consequences—there are those of us on this side of the House, including the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, who treat that approach with great scepticism. Other amendments seek to examine the measure’s effect in relation to the performance of the network as a whole. I hope that all these amendments will be accepted by the Government. If they are to make these changes, there needs to be transparency and the public need to be able to see metrics published, possibly by an independent body or possibly by the Department for Transport—we are open to persuasion on that—which show how the railway is performing. Having come to power committed to transparency, I know the Government would not want to resile from that. So, if they are not able to support the detailed amendments as tabled, I expect that the Minister will have no difficulty in saying that the Government will put forward amendments on Report showing how this Bill will be monitored in its implementation.

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, for his welcome; it is nice to see him again in different and more august circumstances—different, at least, from those that applied in the old City Hall. I thank him, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for their explanations of this group of amendments, most of which require some form of reporting or assessment of the impacts of public ownership or the performance of publicly owned operators. Like my noble friend Lord Snape, I am fascinated by the plethora of reports proposed at this stage of railway reform. Given that LNER has been in the public sector for six years, and Northern for four, it is strange that the measures now proposed for public sector train operators were never contemplated or enacted by the previous Government, who clearly never thought that they needed them. In simple terms, this Government do not either. I welcome the support of the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, for railway reform. His Amendment A1 does not call for any reports but requires the Secretary of State to have regard to a specific purpose —to improve the performance of passenger services—when exercising functions under the Bill. I entirely support that purpose, and it is at the heart of what we are doing, but there are also many other purposes: stripping out inefficiency and waste on behalf of the taxpayers who fund the railway, simplifying fares and increasing patronage, connecting communities, driving economic growth and promoting opportunity for all. It is not right that the Bill should suggest that it has only that one purpose, important though it is. Amendment 2, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would require the publication of two reports: the first outlining the anticipated impact of public ownership, and the second assessing its actual impact some years after the event. Regarding the first of these reports, the Government have already fulfilled the proposed obligation through the impact assessment published earlier in the year. Among other expected impacts, the taxpayer will no longer have to fund many tens of millions of pounds in fees currently payable to private sector operators each year, even when their performance is sub-standard. Furthermore, public sector operators will prioritise the interests of passengers and taxpayers, not the demands of their shareholders. A similar report is envisaged in Amendment 48A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, but focused specifically on the impact on performance. I can assure the noble Lord that the Government certainly expect public ownership, and our broader reform proposals, to unlock the significant improvement in the performance and efficiency of the railway which he is looking for; we do not need to publish a report to say that. Turning to the second proposed report envisaged in Amendment 2, there is no need to wait for three years before we start to consider whether train operators’ performance is improving. A wide variety of data is already routinely published about the performance of both public and private sector train operators. This includes reliability and punctuality, service quality, customer complaints, financial performance and efficiency, among other measures. This Bill does not change any of that, but as part of our wider reform plans, we will further improve access to data. This will be specific to individual routes and/or service groups, not just aggregated at the level of whole franchises, so that passengers can see at each station how services are performing on their local routes and, importantly, what is going to be done to improve them. The Government can and will monitor performance closely on a continuing basis. We will hold operators’ feet to the fire when their performance is inadequate, irrespective of whether they are privately or publicly owned. The Secretary of State and I have already demonstrated that we will not accept the poor standards that have been tolerated in the past. We have demonstrated that from our first days in office by holding meetings with the managing directors of several train operators alongside their Network Rail counterparts to address poor performance and demand immediate action to raise standards. In that respect, in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, we are not discriminating between the public and private sectors and will not do so, as indeed he did not in his time. He rightly gave me a hard time in 2018 in respect of electrification in the north-west of England; even if it was not Network Rail’s responsibility, it related to the failings of GTR as an operator. Amendment 26, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would require the publication of a further report—or perhaps 10 reports, one after each transfer—setting out the expected impact of the transfers on various aspects of train operators’ performance. Again, once transfers have taken place, it would be more instructive to consider the actual performance of train operators. Amendments 21 and 22, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would require the reporting and independent assessment of the performance of publicly owned train operators. That is unnecessary because, as I have set out, the Government will themselves be monitoring their performance closely and will work to ensure that as much performance data as possible is published for the benefit of the travelling public, in a form that is useful to them and that allows for effective scrutiny. My department is currently reviewing the standard terms of the service agreements that are entered into between the Secretary of State and public sector operators, in readiness for future transitions to public ownership. Public operators will be set targets in key areas such as punctuality and reliability and other aspects of the service. Work is under way to identify the right targets and measures for the period ahead in order to focus operators on delivering the best possible outcomes for passengers and taxpayers. As part of the service agreement review, we will consider the arrangements for publishing those targets and operators’ actual performance in comparison to them. Amendment 22 refers to performance improvement plans. I reassure the noble Lord that improvement plans are already a feature of the Government’s service agreements with each public sector operator. I confirm for noble Lords that similar mechanisms will continue to exist in future, both through contractual terms and through the controls that DOHL exerts over its operators on behalf of the Secretary of State. As I have said, where performance is falling short, we will not hesitate to demand that things are put right, regardless of whether the operator is privately or publicly owned. Amendment 45, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, requires the publication of an independent assessment of the performance and efficiency of the rail network five years after the enactment of this Bill. By that time, the Government will have established Great British Railways, which will have taken over responsibility for both track and train. New arrangements will need to be put in place to oversee and scrutinise the effectiveness and efficiency of GBR, so in due course we will set out our plans for holding it to account as part of our plans for the wider railways Bill. We should not pre-empt those future arrangements by seeking to legislate for them now. I hope we will deal with all the noble Lord’s other points during the rest of Committee, as we shall with the detailed comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, on staff morale and the British Transport Police. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, I confirm that there are no changes to Section 4 of the 1993 Act. In answer to my noble friend Lord Snape, in the present Bill there will be no change to the role of Office of Rail and Road; he needs to await the substantive railway Bill for that, at least with regard to the railway element of the ORR. There will be public consultation on the wider Bill before it comes, so there is no need to wait until the publication of the Bill itself. I also say to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that there is currently no meaningful private investment by train operating companies, so we are not losing anything in the Bill that is on the table today. Contrary to his assertion about the Williams report, its author, Keith Williams, envisaged public ownership as a necessary condition to rationalise a number of things on the railways, in particular fares, ticketing and information.

17:00:00

The Government are fully committed to openness and transparency in train operators’ performance; that is true whether they are in the public or private sector. There is no need to legislate for all these additional reports and reviews. In fact, nearly everybody in the transport industry has written either a report or a review on some aspect of the railways. I have written several and my noble friend Lady Blake is the joint author of another, all while the franchising model has gradually disintegrated before our eyes. What we need now is action to move fast and fix things, as opposed to the interminable wait for reform since 2018 that I and everybody else in the industry have endured. That is what this Bill is all about. I urge noble Lords not to press these amendments.

My Lords, I am clutching my copy of the Williams rail review in my hands. I think I am going to refer to page 55 at another stage—my eyesight is not good enough to give the quote straightaway —when I will have the opportunity to point out that Williams’s approach to nationalising the train operating companies was somewhat more subtle and differentiated than the Minister has just claimed. But I want to ask him about a different point. It is a genuine curiosity I have about what might be described as the theology of Great British Railways and the new system that the Government are putting in place. My understanding was that Great British Railways would be the single controlling brain operating the system and using a concession system to do that—let us say it is doing that itself now in the new system. It would be setting the goals of the railways through routes, service frequencies and so forth, and indeed running the fares and ticketing system. It would then be monitoring how these shadow or publicly owned companies were doing. We are now told by the Minister that all the monitoring functions he has referred to, which I would like to see set out transparently in advance through the Bill as being by independent bodies which we can trust, will be done by the Department for Transport. I ask him to be clear with us: in this system, who is responsible for monitoring and to whom is the system accountable? Is it to Great British Railways in its shadow form—now that it has been established and has a chairman, staff, a transition team and so forth—or is it the Department for Transport? The answer to that question has very significant consequences and it appears to be a moving target.

I should respond to the noble Lord on three or four points. First, whatever the Williams report said—and it was adequate in what it said at the time—I took the trouble, only a few days ago, to confirm with its author that he acknowledged we could not change the fares, ticketing and information systems without taking the train operating companies or their activities into public ownership. Secondly, the noble Lord knows perfectly well how a large public body can behave in monitoring activities, whether it carries them out itself or has contractors or concessionaires to do it, because he will be as familiar as I am with the experience of Transport for London. It monitored its own activities, published them and allowed others to scrutinise them. That principle is the one which should be adopted by Great British Railways.

So is it Great British Railways that will be doing it, like TfL, and not the Department for Transport? I am very confused.

Well, the noble Lord should not be, because it is quite clear to me that the Government intend to take a large amount of activity out of the Department for Transport and put it in a body that is responsible for the performance of the railways. That being the case, it would be extremely logical that monitoring performance is done by GBR but properly scrutinised by others. Lastly, I simply say to the noble Lord opposite that there has been a change of government. The policies that this Bill and the railways Bill will seek to enact are the policies that the Government were elected to carry out.

My Lords, I am grateful to everyone who spoke in what I thought was going to be a relatively brief debate, but I think we have clocked up over an hour and it has become far-reaching, showing the wealth of knowledge in your Lordships’ Committee. I will cover some of the points that were raised. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, raised HS2 and my own position. As a northerner, I have my own personal views, but I have to say that I was merely a Whip on the Government Front Bench and, as powerful as I may have been in controlling speaking times from the Dispatch Box, I did not have the power to control spending. It is something I will raise with the Opposition Chief Whip, my former boss, later. With respect, perhaps the noble Lord may want to speak to his own Front Bench about future spending plans. If I may say so, I think the Prime Minister’s own position on HS2 has been perhaps confused over the years. Turning back to the debate, I think this group was about the future plans covered by this Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, suggested that my Amendment A1 would create bureaucracy, and I think the Minister said that it would not; it is merely a purpose clause. I repeat what I said earlier: my only wish is to make it clear that services will improve. I am grateful for the Minister’s response, but I would have thought that the Government could have at least supported Amendment A1 as it is a purpose clause. It could demonstrate that the Government do not believe that the Bill will improve services. Although the Minister said at the Dispatch Box that it would improve services, he then listed a number of other things it would do. I do not know if I should take that as meaning that the Government will accept my amendment but also list all the other points they believe it will do as a purpose clause. That said, obviously this will be an ongoing conversation and for now I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment A1 withdrawn.

Clause 1: Prohibition on franchise extensions and new franchises

Amendment 1

Moved by

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 12, at end insert— “25B Termination of existing franchise agreements(1) The Secretary of State must terminate franchise agreements for default in accordance with the terms of the agreement as soon as it is possible to do so.(2) Subject to subsection (1), the Secretary of State must not terminate a franchise agreement pursuant to a break clause unless—(a) there are no other franchise agreements which are—(i) terminable for default or may be terminable in the next three months for default, or(ii) will come to the end of their term within the next three months, and(b) the Secretary of State is satisfied that provision of the services by a public sector company will improve existing service provision.(3) In this section, “break clause” means a contractual provision in a franchise agreement which entitles the Secretary of State to terminate the franchise agreement before the end of the franchise term by notice without reason.”Member's explanatory statement This amendment would require the Secretary of State to nationalise the worst performing operators first while enabling services that are currently working well to continue.

My Lords, I am sure that all of us want the same thing that the passengers want: a railway which is reliable, punctual and affordable. In too many parts of the country, they have been let down and this has not been delivered. Personally, I can understand why the Government have chosen this way of doing things and improving matters. But I do also think it is beholden on this House, particularly as we are now in Committee, to really focus on the way in which the Government intend to do this. It is in that spirit I move Amendment 1. I am arguing what I argued in my Second Reading speech—that, in order to make the transition to public ownership a success, the Government should first take on those operators which are demonstrably failing passengers. They should turn those services around to deliver tangible improvements for the travelling public. It follows that the management of currently high-performing operators—as I shall show noble Lords, they do exist—should be retained for as long as possible to ensure that passengers continue to receive good service while minimising costs to taxpayers. This amendment would require the Secretary of State to first nationalise the worst-performing operators to deliver immediate benefits to passengers and taxpayers, while enabling services that are currently working well to continue for the time being. Specifically, it places the Secretary of State under a duty to prioritise the termination of franchise agreements where the incumbent operator is in default of their agreements and gives them a duty not to terminate non-defaulting franchise agreements early unless there are no franchise agreements to be terminated due to default or because of their expiry. It would also require that terminating such an operator early would improve existing service provision. I will say a word or two about the railway I use. I have travelled between Suffolk and London several times a week for more than 25 years now, and I can tell noble Lords that my service has never been better. Greater Anglia has spent £1.4 billion upgrading its rolling stock. It returned £65 million to the Treasury in the year ending in March and is predicted to return £100 million next year. It has a 94.8% public performance measure; I think Avanti is currently at 62.2%. Greater Anglia’s cancellations are at 1.4% and Avanti’s at 10.2%, but Greater Anglia’s full term expires in September 2026 and will therefore be one of the first to go. It is genuinely difficult to see how that performance could be bettered. Indeed, with new management operating and a whole new set of structures it could conceivably get worse, initially at least. On the other hand, the poorly performing franchises have the potential for significant improvement—indeed, that is why the Government are doing this—so by using a strictly chronological approach they risk losing the confidence of the public right at the start of this process. Current national rail contracts give the Secretary of State powers to act against failing train operators, both in general and where remedial measures are in place, and she has broad rights to information provision about possible contraventions, so could the Minister outline how the Secretary of State has used these rights in relation to CrossCountry and Avanti contracts? The grounds for default under the national rail conditions are passenger service performance, non-compliance with remedial agreements and contravention of other obligations, so has the Minister sought advice on CrossCountry’s and Avanti’s performance in relation to those provisions? Is either TOC in breach of any other provision? With Greater Anglia, West Midlands Trains and East Midlands Railway all performing well, can the Minister say whether they will be allowed to run their full course? Regardless of where your Lordships stand on the question of renationalisation, in the end, as members of the travelling public, we all want it to work. By taking a strictly chronological approach, which leaves poor performers in place, the Government risk seriously undermining their own flagship policy. I beg to move.

My Lords, I have an amendment in this group that is closely aligned with the noble Baroness’s, on which she has spoken very eloquently. It would reaffirm the Secretary of State’s powers to, if necessary, withdraw franchises from operators. I tabled my amendment because I am a strong supporter of the Government’s policies and it would be tragic if we could not complete the transfer of companies to public ownership with remarkably quick speed. Yet, when we had the Second Reading debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, pointed out to us that, unless there was a basis for withdrawing the Avanti franchise, it would run for another couple of years. It would be tragic if the worst-performing franchise, along with CrossCountry, was allowed to continue for this extended period and thereby to delay the Government’s ability to introduce the kind of rail reform that a unified railway under a guiding mind would make possible. To tell you the truth, on the basis of what I have heard, I think our Ministers are being a bit feeble. They could stand up to Avanti with much greater determination than they have.

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The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, referred to some of these things—but, as I understand it, the Secretary of State has the power to end a franchise on the basis of passenger service performance. As far as I am aware, every indicator puts Avanti at the bottom of the league. Why, therefore, can she not exercise this power more quickly in relation to Avanti? Secondly, she has the power to require Avanti, under a remedial agreement, to meet certain performance standards. Is this happening and, if it is not happening, why is it not happening? What are those improved standards and how often will they be monitored? We need clear answers on this. If Avanti and CrossCountry are allowed to stay there as poorly performing private sector companies, it will undermine what the Government are trying to do in these proposals to create a more efficient and passenger-focused railway.

These are questions. I think that we were told about legal advice and various other things, but the truth is that legal advice is always cautious on any of those questions. What politicians have to do is to decide whether they are prepared to take a risk, and what might be the consequences of that risk. Therefore, I urge the Minister to explain to us how we can speed up this process and get it done in the interests of the public.

My Lords, I shall raise a question with the Minister, as we are on the subject of the termination of franchises. I should say to the noble Baroness and the noble Lord that I have been there and wanted to terminate franchises. I have never had a problem with a mixed economy, but I have an issue with a uniform economy, because I cannot understand the logic of terminating a very good private sector provider, any more than the Mayor of London believes in terminating his private provider of the London overground—and I suspect, if we see more devolution in future, other parts of the country may want to see a mixed economy as well. Clearly, the Government are very happy to see that in stations, as we learned at the weekend. However, it is more difficult than one might wish, and as a Minister you have to take a judgment about how much legal and therefore financial risk you are willing to take, and also about the disruption that the termination brings. Nobody should be under any illusion that making a transition between two operators has to be managed extremely carefully and, done at gunpoint, can actually lead to a deterioration of services. I come to my question to the Minister. This set of amendments discusses the process of termination of franchises and when and how they happen—the order in which they happen. My memory is that, in a private system, at the end of a franchise, there is a payment to be made by the successor franchise operator to the franchise operator handing over control of that franchise. There are various capital costs and other costs incurred. If the public sector is coming in and saying, “Right, we’re taking over the franchise”, what can the Minister tell us about that equivalent process? Will payments be made to the companies that are being phased out, as there were between private operators? What will those payments be and what will be the total cost incurred by the Government in making those payments? After all, the private operators will have invested in capital aspects, on the stations or elsewhere. Therefore, logically, the Government will also have a legal obligation to go through the kind of process that happened in the past when a franchise simply moved between two private operators. Can the Minister address that specific point in his closing remarks?

My Lords, I honestly believe that the amendment so ably moved by the noble Baroness opposite is extremely sensible. Like her, I can see no reason why we have a chronological system for dispatching the current franchisees based on the run-out date of their particular franchise. Like the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, I am in favour of a mixed economy. There are certain aspects of privatisation, heresy though it might sound to some of my colleagues, that were successful. The fact that some of the railway system—rail freight, for example, which rarely gets a mention in these debates—remains in the private sector is indicative of the success of those who took what was, under British Rail, a very much declining sector of the railway industry. I do not wish to do an “all our yesterdays” speech, but my recollection of the freight sector in those days is ancient wagons clanking around the system, being shunted from one marshalling yard to the next, and with an average journey speed between loading and destination of around 12 miles an hour. Since privatisation, the rail freight side has improved greatly. To return to the very valid point made by the noble Baroness, Greater Anglia is not just a success so far as its operations are concerned; it is a financial success as well. Because of this unfortunate coincidence of the run-out date of franchises, Greater Anglia is forecast to repay to His Majesty’s Treasury around £100 million in the current financial year. As my noble friend Lord Liddle said, presumably—unless my noble friend the Minister can reassure us otherwise— we are going to dispatch Greater Anglia to the railway knacker’s yard while pursuing with Avanti Trains, as he and the noble Baroness said, a franchise operator that, quite frankly, should not be there. The previous Government, in the run-up to the election, were stupid enough—or ideological enough, perhaps—to give Avanti an extra nine-year franchise, on the grounds that it was showing some improvement. Those of us who travelled on Avanti regularly—thankfully, it is an experience that is now behind me since I moved home—could not find any improvement whatever. Indeed, it seemed to me that the service was deteriorating on an annual basis. Again, it might be heretical for some of my colleagues to hear this, but aspects of the passenger railway that were privatised were successful. At Second Reading, I mentioned Chiltern Railways. Thanks to the financial constraints that British Rail had to operate under as a nationalised industry, Marylebone station was proposed to be a coach station by Sir Alfred Sherman, if I remember rightly, Mrs Thatcher’s transport guru at the time. The existing railway management, again through no fault of their own but because of financial constraints, had to run the service from Marylebone down, single much of the line and reduce the overall train service. Under the able leadership of the late Adrian Shooter, and with a long-term franchise of 20 years, with various break-off points, my noble friend Lord Prescott and the then chief executive of the Strategic Rail Authority came up with this 20-year franchise, but insisted that not only had the service to be improved but some of the infrastructure had to be restored. Under Chiltern Railways, lines that had become single were redoubled, and a pretty poor commuter rail service now has two trains an hour as far as Birmingham—with a price, incidentally, as my noble friend Lord Liddle might be interested to know, which considerably undercuts the fare of Avanti trains. There are aspects of the future of the railway industry where a mixed economy would make some sense. I hope that, in those circumstances, my noble friend the Minister will look with some degree of favour on the noble Baroness’s amendment.

My Lords, the noble Baroness makes some very good points. The Greater Anglia service is awfully good: my two noble friends who have spoken about it have confirmed that, and I have been on it recently myself. However, following the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, could somebody from the Conservative Party—maybe the noble Lord, or one of his predecessors or successors—explain the basis on which it chose Avanti and CrossCountry, which are two of the worst performing operators, to be given such very long contracts? I remember at the time there was a big debate between Virgin and Avanti as to which should get the contract. Whatever one thinks about Virgin, it has had some good services in the past, but Avanti is absolutely awful—as is CrossCountry, though for different reasons. Why did the then Government do it? It is fine to say that we have given it to a private sector operator, but if we end up in a situation where the Government are effectively going to make similar awards to people—not companies, but people—we should know on what basis it is done. I hope my noble friend the Minister can explain what the criteria will be to make sure that we get some decent new franchises and how he is going to get rid of the two existing pretty bad ones as soon as possible.

My Lords, as a Great Western passenger, I wish I could speak as glowingly as my noble friend Lady Scott has done about Greater Anglia. GWR is known fondly to its passengers as “Great Western Roulette”. Will it or will it not turn up? How late will it be? Will it have five, eight, nine or 10 carriages? I can see people for whom that rings a bell. The Liberal Democrat Amendment 1 turns on its head the Government’s proposed time-served system, which noble Lords have been discussing. In some ways, Amendment 48, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, addresses the same issues. This is really about natural justice. Why should a poorly performing franchise be allowed to continue while an excellent one is terminated? Bear in mind that we are not bothered about the franchise owners; we are bothered about the passengers who have to suffer the service it provides. Why should passengers be denied reliable services? There are two serious problems with the Government’s scheme. By chance, as has been said by several noble Lords, Greater Anglia, a profitable and very good operator, will have its contract terminated at the start of the process, while Avanti, whose performance is poor, will outlast almost all other train operators. That is topsy-turvy logic. The rail industry will lose the example set by Greater Anglia at a time when it, as a company, could be setting the new standards we all hope will be achieved by the new integrated public sector railway. By imposing this rigorous approach to nationalisation at all costs, and nationalising even those train operators that are performing very well, the Government’s attitude is really inconsistent. They are not applying the same logic to roscos or freight services, or even to open-access operators. It is simply illogical to insist on the upheaval and dismantling of Greater Anglia, for instance, while regarding an open-access operator such as Grand Central as quite acceptable.

17:30:00

On the one hand, the Government are saying that a mixed economy is fine, and with that we on these Benches would agree. On the other, they are saying that train operators must be public sector, and in a particular order which has no logic other than the luck of the date on the contract.

Later, in group 8, the Liberal Democrats have an amendment that talks about devolution. I will briefly refer to that here, simply because it is another area of confused logic by the Government. The Government appear to think that it is alright if it has already been devolved, but there will be no more devolution. I think the Government will rue their approach to nationalisation because, in the public mind, nationalisation will mean standardisation. By definition, train passengers get around a bit. They travel the country and are able to compare experiences. They will therefore ask, “Why are we getting a better service here than in my part of the country?”

People accept unwillingly the differences between companies, with trains that look different and staff who wear different uniforms. They may resent it, but they accept it. But they will not accept it when it all looks the same.

In conclusion, the Government have a flexible approach to certain elements of the private sector. But they have a hardline approach to other elements, such as train operators. Even at this stage, I urge them to reconsider this, to allow good private sector operators to extend their franchise while the Government concentrate their efforts on the worst-performing areas, because that will certainly take all of their capacity.

My Lords, I begin by speaking briefly to Amendment 30, standing in my name, which proposes the deletion of the word “reasonably” from Clause 2, line 29. At this point in the Bill, the prohibition on the Secretary of State from renewing franchises is alleviated by this clause in certain circumstances. One of them is where the Secretary of State is satisfied that it will not be reasonably practicable to provide or secure the provision of the franchise service, et cetera. This is a simple probing amendment, on which I do not want to spend a great deal of time, other than to simply ask what the Government mean by the word “reasonably” here. What is “reasonably” adding to “practicable”? It seems that it is creating potential difficulties for the Government. On one hand, if they were challenged in court about this—I hasten to add that I am not a lawyer—I think they would find that one of the tests they would be put to is whether they had acted reasonably, and that would be true whether the word was in the statute or not. Here, it seems to me that there is a double standard of “reasonably” being applied to them. What do they mean by “reasonably”? In what circumstances do they envisage having recourse to it, and would the Bill not actually be better without it? I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on those points. On the substance of the debate, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, on having secured universal approbation for her proposal from all speakers who have spoken today. She wants something that appears to be very common-sensical: that the poor franchises should be terminated and cleared out as soon as possible and before the well-operating franchises are cleared out, so that we do not have a situation where good operators are removed from service while poor operators are left in place. Yet, because of the rush with which the Government have come at the Bill, and because of their determination to be able to say, “We’ve achieved something in the manifesto as fast as we possibly can”, that is exactly the effect of the Bill as it is constructed. Operators that we know to be poor will continue for considerably longer than those that are in fact performing very satisfactorily. I suspect that the Government will say that this is because they have to terminate franchises at the time they fall due, because to terminate them any earlier would cost public money and they would need to pay compensation. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, that is of course the legal advice they would receive, though what exactly some of these poor performers would expect by way of compensation is a political question and one that could easily be put to the test, as the noble Lord said. The other matter here is that the Government already envisage that some franchise contracts, despite the prohibition in the Bill, may be renewed for practical reasons, reasonably or otherwise. It is possible to renew a franchise on a short-term basis. In fact, nearly all the franchises currently operating are operating on very short-term contracts. The financial liability carried with those short-term contracts is very small. So, even if a good performer were to have their franchise fall in very soon, if an appropriate exemption to the prohibition were inserted in the Bill, they could still be kept going on a short-term contract without creating a significant new liability to the Government, while the poor contracts fell in and were terminated without any risk to the Government. If the Government were not in such a terrible rush, all of this would create a logical structure for the termination of contracts which passengers would understand and which would not run the risks that were stated so clearly by the noble Baroness who moved the amendment. There is a great deal to be said for this. I hope the Minister, when he replies, will not take refuge in simply saying, “Oh, we’ve got no choice because this is what the public finances dictate and it is all driven by finances and contracts”. The management of these contracts—by a confident Government who know what they are doing and a Secretary of State who wants to achieve something and knows the direction in which she is heading—is essentially a political matter. It can be done and the Government should step up to the plate and do this for their own sake if they wish their reforms to get off to a good start.

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for explaining their amendments in this group, which consider some of the practical aspects of the Government’s plans to transfer services to public ownership. Amendments 1 and 48 focus on the contractual arrangements that allow the Secretary of State to terminate a franchise early, following a breach of contract or other sustained poor performance. I make it absolutely clear that this Government will not hesitate to act decisively where an operator’s unacceptable performance means that the contractual conditions for early termination are met. The Secretary of State has made this plain on a number of occasions and I am happy to reiterate it to your Lordships today. However, I am very much afraid that the terms of the contracts we have inherited from the previous Government do not make this easy. It is far easier for an operator to return the contract to the Government than it is for the Government to take back a contract for poor performance. It is deeply regrettable that in the past couple of years, some of the poorest performing operators have been awarded the longest contracts. Noble Lords will not be surprised to know that we have looked very hard at the form of the contract. We are closely monitoring train operators’ compliance with their contract, but at present we are not in a position—with any operator—where the Secretary of State has a contractual right to terminate for poor performance. Noble Lords might be amazed to know that Avanti has not yet triggered the need for a remedial plan, although it may well do so. While CrossCountry has triggered the need for a remedial plan, we need to let that work through, together with the timetable reduction that the Secretary of State was deeply reluctant to agree to, before we discover whether its performance then merits some further contractual remedy. Unless and until that contractual right arises, the only sensible approach is to transfer services to public ownership when the existing contracts expire. Any other approach would require taxpayers to foot the bill for compensation to operators in return for ending their contracts early, which the Government made clear in our manifesto that we would avoid, if only because of the state of the public finances we inherited. I have also heard representations on behalf of operators—or, rather, their owners—that, rather than transferring services as contracts expire, we should leave their services in private hands for as long as possible. All the owning groups knew of these dates and would have planned financially for them in any event. The concern seems to be that service quality will suddenly collapse, or that current plans for service improvements, or for the rollout of new train fleets, will suddenly grind to a halt. There is no basis for these claims. DOHL is experienced in transferring services into the public sector smoothly and without disruption, as it has proved in the difficult aftermath of past franchise failures. As services transfer, the same trains will be operated by the same staff as before, and no doubt often by the same management, as happened with LNER six years ago. The improvements that are already in train will continue. I have no reason to think that performance will deteriorate. Extending specific operators’ tenure will simply delay the process of bringing services back to public ownership, where they belong, and the financial savings that will result. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, while there have been transfer costs from franchise to franchise, he will of course recognise that the incoming franchisee would not pay that cost gratuitously; they would simply add it to the subsidy bill for the franchise they were inheriting. In the end, the public sector pays, as it has always done. In fact, since Covid, the operators have not funded anything at all, so the quantum in the future is likely to be extremely limited.

I would like some clarification from the Minister on that point. Has the department added up that liability? Does he have a total number for the transfer into the public sector of all the franchises?

The answer to the noble Lord is: not yet. He will recognise that those costs materialise only when the franchise transfers, so the department will never have had that total number in the past, and I do not expect it to have it now. As the franchises transfer, the number will become obvious.

Before my noble friend leaves that point, I will ask him about the question of performance that has been raised on both sides of the House. The public performance measure national average is 88.7%, but the Avanti West Coast performance measure is only 62.2%—some 25% less. What has to be done to remove a franchisee which has performed so badly, as in the case of Avanti, other than knocking down the buffers at Euston and heading a Pendolino down Eversholt Street?

In answer to my noble friend, and in recognition of some of what I have done in the past, it is sometimes a surprise when you read the performance requirements for contracts that you inherit. This is clearly one of those cases. I cannot defend the statistics that my noble friend cited, and I cannot defend a contract that allows that to happen without remedy. In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, we will come to devolution later in Committee.

17:45:00

Turning to the specifics of the amendments, I begin with Amendment 1 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott and Lady Randerson, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. As I have said, I agree entirely with the sentiment behind the amendment. We have made it clear that we will take decisive action where the contracts allow us to do so. However, I do not agree that it is necessary to impose a statutory obligation on the Secretary of State on how to exercise her contractual rights. She has already made her intentions very clear.

Amendment 1 also deals with contractual break clauses. I have explained the Government’s approach: where unacceptable performance triggers early termination rights, we will not hesitate to act decisively. Otherwise, we will bring services into public ownership as contracts expire, because this is the way to deliver public ownership as quickly as possible, while avoiding unnecessary cost to the taxpayer.

Amendment 1 would also require the Secretary of State to be satisfied that appointing a public sector operator would result in service improvements. The Government would not be pursuing public ownership if we did not expect it to drive improvements, decrease costs by integrated management and improve revenues. This condition would have only one practical effect: it would create a new opportunity for train operators and their owning groups to bring spurious legal challenges against the Secretary of State, again prolonging their tenure and delaying the benefits of public ownership.

Amendment 48, tabled by my noble friend Lord Liddle, seeks to confirm that the Bill does not interfere with any of the Secretary of State’s existing contractual rights to terminate franchises. I reassure my noble friend that the Bill does not interfere with those rights; I do not believe that anything in the Bill can be construed as doing so. In those circumstances, it would not be appropriate to include an express statement in the legislation. I am advised that it would be poor drafting practice to include provisions in legislation that are legally unnecessary. Doing so can cause difficulties in interpreting the meaning of legislation, because the courts will attempt to give legal significance to every provision of an Act.

Amendment 30, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, deals with the word “reasonably”. That word always brings him to mind whenever I hear it. The amendment would narrow the circumstances in which the Secretary of State could temporarily continue an existing franchise. Those circumstances are already very narrow: the power is available only where, in the Secretary of State’s opinion, it would not be “reasonably practicable” for the public sector operator to take over services when the existing franchise ends.

The omission of the word “reasonably”, as proposed in this amendment, would force the Secretary of State to press ahead with transferring services to a public sector company in circumstances where it is “practicable” to transfer services, but not reasonably so. For example, if it becomes clear that transferring services on the planned date would cause disruption to services, or require disproportionate cost to avoid that disruption, it might still be “practicable” to go ahead with the transfer, but it might also be in the public interest to delay the transfer by a short time. Under Amendment 30, the transfer would have to go ahead, and that does not appear to be in anybody’s interests.

In light of my explanations, I hope that the noble Baronesses and Lords can be persuaded not to press their amendments.

I will not pursue the question of “reasonably” at this stage, but I was struck by the Minister saying that the Bill should not trammel the Secretary of State’s power in relation to how she manages contracts and franchises. However, that is exactly what the Bill does in Clause 2. What he wants is the liberty, within reason, of the Secretary of State to terminate franchises. But Clause 2 specifically sets out, in very clear language, a prohibition on the Secretary of State to award a contract to anything that is not a public sector company. It says that she may do so only “by making a direct award of a public service contract to a public sector company”. Admittedly, further down the page, there are, as we have discussed and as the Minister said, one or two very narrow exceptions for practicality, or reasonable practicality. But why do the Government feel that the Secretary of State should have complete liberty when it comes to terminating franchises, but is so untrustworthy and unreliable, so enamoured of the private sector and so easily seduced into re-awarding them the contract that there has to be a legal prohibition on her doing it here? All Members of the Committee are asking for is some flexibility in Clause 2 about what the Secretary of State is allowed to do—why not? Can she not be trusted?

The answer is that it is the Government’s policy to take train operations into public ownership. The words the noble Lord mentions in Clause 2 just emphasise that intention.

I would like to raise another point about Avanti. As I understand the law, the Secretary of State has a clear right to withdraw contracts on the basis of passenger service performance. Is it the case that the present Secretary of State cannot make her own judgment of that and is bound by whatever was decided before the last election? Would a court really not accept that the present Secretary of State has the right to make that judgment and act on it?

Before the Minister responds, perhaps I could add something to my noble friend’s comments on Avanti and performance. My noble friend Lord Snape mentioned, I think, a 60-something per cent public performance measure. What we do not know is the difference between delays caused by Avanti itself and Network Rail, the infrastructure manager. GBR will be in charge of the infrastructure as well as the trains, and it is pretty important that we know the balance between the causes of the delay, and how this will improve. Maybe my noble friend the Minister could write to us and give us a breakdown of the performances of the existing services and Network Rail. I believe, at the moment, that Network Rail is responsible for something like 70% of the delays, but maybe I am wrong. I look forward to his comments.

On my noble friend Lord Liddle’s comment, I am sure the Secretary of State would like to make her own decision, but I am pretty confident that the work done in the department to assess whether Avanti is meeting its performance standards has taken into account what latitude there is. I suspect there is very little because of the contract terms. I will write to my noble friend Lord Berkeley, and make the letter available, about the causes of delay on the west coast main line and to Avanti’s services. It is, of course, as he knows, undoubtedly true that every set of delays on the railway is due to a combination of the train operator and the infrastructure, and the way in which those parties manage their interaction with each other. When the Secretary of State and I have seen train companies about their performance, we have insisted that they are always accompanied by the relevant route directors of Network Rail. One of the issues is the root cause of the delays; another is how well those parties interact to resolve them. One of the issues on the west coast main line is that Network Rail’s control point, not unreasonably, is at Rugby where the signalling system is, Avanti’s control is in Birmingham and its train crews are managed from Preston. I would not run a railway like that myself.

Going back to the contracts that are performing well, what is the Minister’s view on emergency situations, such as the recurrence of Covid and lockdowns? Would an existing contract, as currently written, enable an extension if the Government felt they needed it, or would they have to come to an end, so that we have to go through a fresh bidding process, come what may?

It varies in accordance with the particular train company. Some of them are coming to a natural conclusion, others have break clauses that enable termination and, in a limited number of cases, there are some choices that could be made. To that extent, we will have to make them.

My Lords, I am very grateful for the support I have received from across the Committee for my amendment. I am not sure I can remember it happening to me before, and I was basking in the warm glow until the Minister stood up to reply. I am sure that all Members of the Committee will be disappointed because, at the bottom of this, we will be renationalising the Greater Anglia franchise with a performance rating in the 90 per cents, and leaving Avanti in place with its performance in the 60 per cents. Whatever the policy or legal niceties, people will be bewildered by that. I have every sympathy with the Minister; the Government inherited a contract that seems to have allowed extraordinary latitude to Avanti for poor performance. I also recognise the twin problem that it has an extraordinarily long franchise, but I am sure that he has heard very clearly what everyone is saying here. The message to him is: please be absolutely sure that there is not some extent to which political will can find a way through this. A failure to deal with this will leave the travelling public absolutely bewildered. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.

Amendment 2 not moved.

Clause 1 agreed.

Clause 2: Future provision of services

Amendment 3

Moved by

3: Clause 2, page 2, line 12, leave out “only”

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 3 and speak to Amendment 5 and a number of others in the group. We may find this naturally flows from the discussion we listened carefully to on the previous group. Some of the themes might well re-emerge, not least the question of the desirability or otherwise of a mixed economy in the provision of rail services. We have just approved, for these purposes, Clause 1. Under Clause 1, we have agreed that “section 23 (passenger services to be subject to franchise agreements)” is to cease and that, in future, securing the provision of services will be the responsibility of the Secretary of State under the new Section 30. Clause 2 revises Section 30 for these purposes. At the moment, it is a section about the duty and the absence of franchise agreements, but it would become, under Clause 2, the public sector provision of services. The other thing that is probably important to note is that under Clause 1 we have deleted the existing Section 25, so that there is now no longer a prohibition on public sector operators—all of which is naturally part of the process of implementing a policy, which, as the Minister has told us, is the narrow objective of the legislation. Why have I thought it appropriate to bring forward these amendments? They are probing amendments to try to examine whether the Bill, even from the Government’s own point of view, is future-proofed against the circumstances that may arise and the objectives that they may seek to achieve.

18:00:00

The Bill of course removes the presumption that services will be provided by private sector operators and creates a presumption that services will be provided by public sector operators—publicly owned companies. Clauses 1 and 2 provide for the temporary continuation of existing franchises, as indeed we just discussed. However, in this group there are very interesting amendments in the names of my noble friends Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Moylan. The purpose of Clause 2 is to take away the temporary nature of the extension of franchises, while Amendment 29 would change the basis on which the continuation of existing franchises is to shift from whether it is practicable for the Secretary of State to move to end the franchise services when it comes to an end, to look at the question of whether it provides a satisfactory service, and whether the franchise should be extended on that basis. I will leave my noble friends to talk to their amendments in detail, but in practice they would be a very positive way of deciding whether to continue existing franchises.

My argument stems from the question of whether competition in the provision of railway services serves any purpose at all. I get the impression from having listened to the debates at Second Reading and again today that many Members of your Lordships’ House think, as I do, that there are aspects of railway services that have not been amenable to competition and which have not therefore delivered the objectives that were sought at privatisation. There are, however, others which have been subject to competition, or indeed contestability—if I can extend the concept of competition in this case to contestability through the tender processes of competitive award—where it is clear that competition has in the past delivered these objectives and could form a part of a future policy towards the provision of railway services, and that a mixed economy is potentially desirable.

Certainly, from the Government’s point of view, I remember that during the course of the Second Reading debate very good points were made by my noble friend on the Front Bench about the pressures that the department may feel in trying to be the operator under all circumstances that may make it difficult for the Government to take control of all railway operations.

What would my Amendment 3 do? It takes out “only” so that, when the Secretary of State is in the position of having to secure the provision of railway services, the Secretary of State would not have to do so only by direct award to a public sector operator but, as Amendment 5 would add, would offer the option to do so by means of the provision of a contract to a person who won a competitive award following an invitation to tender. I freely admit that that is not the Government’s policy. My question to the Government by means of this amendment is: is it wise for them so to bind themselves that, when franchises end, under no circumstances could they contemplate that it would be in the interests of passengers and the various other duties to have competition? The Minister confirmed that a number of duties are placed upon the Secretary of State under Section 4 of the Railways Act 1993, including Section 4(1)(d) relating to the promotion of competition, which I think can sometimes be satisfied only by the potential use of competitive tendering in order to deliver private sector as well as public sector operators for aspects of the operation of the railways.

So, although the Government say, “This is not our policy and therefore we oppose it”, I want them just to consider in two respects in this group whether, first, there may be circumstances in the future where they do not want to be constrained to go only to a wholly owned public sector company for the purposes of the provision of railway services and they may want to go to other providers, and, secondly, that there may be circumstances where they want to continue franchises where a wholly satisfactory service is being provided and it would not be in the interests of passengers for them to bring those franchises to an end.

My question is therefore very straightforward. When writing legislation, it strikes me that the normal practice of Ministers and of government is not to write legislation so as to restrict their powers. It is normal to write it so as to give oneself the powers to act in ways that one might need in the future. Here we have a very odd situation where the Government are deliberately stopping the possibility of extending franchises that are being successfully operated and are writing the new Section 30 in a way that allows them to make a direct award of a contract only to a wholly owned public sector company, whereas it may be in the Government’s and indeed the passengers’ interest for them to do something different. So, I put it to the Government—that is my probing amendment for this purpose—that they should write the legislation in a way that gives them more powers in the future. I beg to move.

My Lords, I will add a footnote to the excellent speech from my noble friend Lord Lansley and note in passing that the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill is running late, with the likelihood of hitting the target of getting to Amendment 11 at a reasonable hour becoming vanishingly small. This group of amendments is to some extent the obverse of the group that we have just had. The focus of the previous group was on ending prematurely, before the Government would wish, services that were not running satisfactorily, whereas the thrust of this group is to enable the Government to extend beyond the date that they prefer a contract that is running satisfactorily. In a sense, this is all about ideology. There are two potential views. One was expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, who on Second Reading said: “I have an ideological commitment to a nationalised railway system”.—[Official Report, 7/10/24; col. 1883.] By contrast, in that same debate, his noble friend Lord Liddle—who, as we have heard, was formerly the opposition transport spokesman in your Lordships’ House, said: “I do not see any ideological objection to public/private partnerships in running the railway”. He then gave an example: “You might have a situation where a private company was prepared to commit to electrification plans for a particular line that would not be in the public sector investment plan. My view is that we should allow public/private partnerships on a net additionality rule. If they are going to bring more investment into the rail system, what on earth is the case for not allowing them to do so?”. —[Official Report, 7/10/24; col. 1840.] Again, in the debate today, the noble Lord, Lord Snape, said he was in favour of a mixed economy. I agree with that approach. If this amendment is opposed, it is because the Government have taken Lord Whitty’s view and they have an ideological commitment to nationalisation—which I thought had been abandoned some 30 years ago under Tony Blair’s leadership. There has been an argument for flexibility. I want to develop the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Snape, developed about Chiltern Railways and Marylebone station. In the 1980s, Marylebone station was almost moribund. There were a few services to the commuter villages of Aylesbury, Amersham and Chesham, but, in the decade before privatisation, there were proposals from British Rail to close Marylebone. There were also alternative plans to turn the railway into a road. That was before privatisation. Three years after privatisation, 18 miles of single track between Princes Risborough and Bicester North had been doubled. In 2000, the brand new £4.2 million Warwick Parkway station was opened, and, by the end of the first franchise, advance plans were made to double the single-track section between Bicester North and Aynho, at a cost of £53 million. Marylebone station was then extended by adding a further two platforms, and there was an increase in line speed to Beaconsfield. In 2011, Chiltern took over the operating services on the Oxford-Bicester line from First Great Western and opened two new stations, Oxford Parkway and Bicester Village, providing services between north Oxford and Marylebone. How confident is the Minister that all that would have happened if the line had remained with British Rail, which, 20 years earlier, was planning to close the station? Chiltern could do this because it had a 20-year franchise, which created the incentives for significant investment in rolling stock, major infrastructure and, as a result, timetable enhancements. It delivered its project on time and on budget, and self-financed nearly all the projects that I have just mentioned. When pressed on why they were doing this, the Minister relied on, “It is in the manifesto”. Well, I hope they can provide a better argument than simply saying that. To use the expression used by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, Chiltern is to be sent prematurely to the “knacker’s yard”. Our debate takes place against a background of a Budget in a few days’ time, with enormous pressure on public expenditure. What the Government are planning to do—we will reach this in a later group of amendments—is bring on to their balance sheet all the private sector investment that has previously been borne by the private sector. Freight was mentioned, and the fact that they want to leave freight and open access operations in private hands perhaps indicates some inconsistency in their view that the private sector cannot deliver good services. I will briefly mention two other reasons for these amendments. There is a question of the capacity of members of the Minister’s own department to manage all the new franchises that are going to come in. At the moment, they run four rail franchises; they have just two full-time staff and they rely on private consultants to manage these four franchises on a day-to-day basis. They are planning to absorb the remaining 10 franchises, which are now in private hands. They will have to grow significantly their own capacity to manage those departments and, as I understand it, they are in the process of growing their headcount from 21 to 90 by the end of the calendar year; all this at a time when there is pressure on departments to reduce their headcount. All these new people, all the external consultants, will need time to get up to speed with their new roles and build the necessary relationships to be effective, and I think that is a major constraint on their plans. There is one other reason, which may be a simply technical one. It is possible that the Government may wish to extend an incumbent operator’s franchise, for example due to the lack of internal capacity that I have just referred to; but it may also be that the operator may not be willing to agree to a contract extension. As I understand it, with the Bill as currently written, the Government would not be allowed to appoint an alternative operator on a temporary basis—again representing a significant risk. So these amendments indicate the need for flexibility, to allow the Government to retain high-performing private sector operators and to continue to give passengers an excellent service while minimising costs for taxpayers. I hope that, when the Minister replies, he will not say, “This is in the manifesto”, but will give some cogent reasons for ending the arrangement that provides, in the cases of Chiltern and Greater Anglia, the two lines that we have heard about, a high-quality service, possibly higher than the public sector would be able to provide.

18:15:00

My Lords, I will follow on from the interesting contributions from the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Young. I understood that Ministers had accepted that open access operators will be able to continue, or new ones may be able to come. So I have two questions. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said in her introduction to her amendment, Greater Anglia is contributing quite a lot of money each year to the Treasury. Presumably it could ask to convert that service into an open access service and keep the money, and that would presumably be all right and the Treasury would lose out. I would be interested to hear my noble friend’s view on that. If there is a new service, as one of the noble Lords said, that an operator of some description thought would be a useful one to introduce but which the new GBR thought was not appropriate, presumably there would be no reason why the new operator could not submit an application for open access, as happens at the moment. It does not have to be a long distance one from London to Blackpool; it could be a short distance one. How would that be seen by the Government. Would they welcome it?

My Lords, this has been a very interesting group of amendments to debate so far, and I am very taken by the latest thoughts from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, on playing around with the definition of open access operators and what will be accepted. I was interested, too, in Amendments 28 and 29 and the thoughts of the noble Lord, Lord Young, who is always very thought-provoking. His amendment, as he said, is very much the obverse of the ones put down from these Benches. I urge the Government to look at this and allow themselves the flexibility to change the order of nationalisation in order to allow good franchises to flourish and to give themselves time to unravel privatisation more slowly and more logically. It has to be more than just, “This was in the manifesto and therefore it will happen whether or not it is logical”. I am really sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is not in his place, because Amendment 35 is fascinating. It refers to a broader definition of what a public sector company should be, so that it includes public/private partnerships and co-operative ventures. I do not need to remind noble Lords opposite that some of them have been, or may still be, members of the Co-operative Party. As Liberal Democrats, we share an enthusiasm for co-operatives as a form of company and operation. I can envisage that a smaller rail line, perhaps in a rural area, would work very well on a co-operative or a public/private partnership basis. After all, it would bring in fresh investment without, in any way, undermining the Government’s commitment to a nationalised structure overall for the railways. Finally, I urge the Government to look again at their plans and the precise terms of the Bill through a post-Covid lens. Covid caused the collapse of the railway system, necessitating a whole new approach to franchising for the train operators. It could happen again, either for similar reasons or as a result of a financial crisis, and I urge the Government to look again at the terms of the Bill. Have they allowed themselves sufficient flexibility to cope with the unexpected, to allow rail services to continue to operate even if there is a series of unlikely events that have upset the market for those services?

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said that he thought that the Government’s determination to trammel itself in the way that Clause 2 does was ideologically driven—a commitment to a certain vision of the railways based essentially on a political ideology. I would not be so bold as to disagree—he may well be right—but there is another way of looking at this, which I referred to at Second Reading. What is really driving the Government’s approach to this is that they have absolutely convinced themselves that the only way in which the railways can operate is if there is a single controlling brain, so that every train run in this country for passenger service purposes is run by Great British Railways, and that this body will be the sole provider of railway services. This is a truly ideological obsession. It is almost a psychological fixation that appears to have gripped the Government, and it needs to be tested. Questions are being asked from every side of the House about its practical effects, and we are getting no answer except, “It’s in the manifesto”, which really is no answer to a passenger standing on a platform waiting for a train that was operating perfectly satisfactorily under private ownership and is now simply not arriving. I turn first to Amendments 4, 10, 14 and 15 in this group standing in my name. If I had written the explanatory statements rather better, Members would understand—perhaps they do—that these four operate as one. They are consequential on each other and have a single effect, which is to say that the Secretary of State in awarding new services must put them out to tender but on a “concession” basis. Amendment 14 defines a “concession” as “a contract under which the franchising authority specifies rail services to be provided by a private sector entity and retains the risk of fluctuations in the receipt of fares”. In other words, this amendment does something that Transport for London has done with great success in relation to buses, London Overground rail services, the Wimbledon tram and the Docklands Light Railway. They are all operated on this basis and although there might be complaints from customers about this, that or the other, there are no complaints about the basis on which the services are operated contractually. Of course, TfL has chosen to brand them all under its own branding, so members of the public and passengers are often not even aware that they are operated on this basis. We have a system that works and that we should consider very seriously by contrast to the determination of the Government that all these services are to be taken in-house and run by a single employer with a great, single, controlling brain. Amendment 14 does something else: it is in conformity with the Williams review, which I thought was the plan that there was, generally speaking, consensus that we should operate to. There is no other plan or document of any weight or substance that has been produced as a result of an independent review for the future of the railways. When I drew attention in our last debate to what is said on page 55 of the Williams review about the concession model being the pattern taken from TfL that should be used nationally, there was a slightly astonishing intervention from the Minister in which he said that Mr Williams no longer thought that, because he had rung him up and said that we need to have it nationalised. How much else in the Williams review has been vitiated by random phone calls made by the Minister to its author? How much is left of the Williams review, if it is capable of being rewritten by the Minister on the basis of claimed phone calls with Mr Williams? It happens that Mr Williams and I served together on the board of Transport for London when the Minister was its commissioner. I have to tell him that if I were to look into the contacts in my telephone I think I would find that Mr Williams’s telephone number was in my telephone as well. It is perfectly possible that we could pursue this debate on the basis of various individual and private phone calls that we had had with Mr Williams about what he actually meant, what he thinks now, and whether his view has changed —and then what will be left of this report? Without this report, there is no plan. The Government are, it turns out, now inviting us to take a step completely into the dark. It is not just an act of faith, as I said on an earlier group, that they can run the trains better. It is a belief that they are going to give us a better plan for the future, but that they cannot tell us what the plan is, whereas at least previously they had some basis for saying what it would be. The whole thing really is turning into the most dreadful shambles. I would like to know why concessions do not work, why something so successful in London will not be allowed, and why what was recommended by Williams is not allowed. I do not, I am sad to say, expect to hear the detailed explanation from the Minister that those questions deserve. The other amendments in this group have similar effect. My noble friend Lord Lansley would like the Government to have the power, where they choose to, to go out to tender and allow some of these wicked private entities to submit tenders. I may myself be wicked when I say that many of these private entities are not very private—some are the subsidiaries of our great European railway friends. They are state-owned bodies from Europe. Who knows whether the Prime Minister, as he creeps towards a great reset and love-in with the European Union, would not find it quite useful to be able to say that the Italian railways, Deutsche Bahn and Renfe could bid for services running on our railways—just as they can at the moment—and that they are not going to be kicked out of Britain? “Mrs von der Leyen, we are going to let them back in.” Would not that little bit of flexibility that my noble friend Lord Lansley would like to be able to give to the Government possibly be rather welcome in the future? My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham made a good case for his amendments. I echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, who said that it is a great pity that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is not here to speak to his very intriguing amendment. To a large extent, the argument for it was made very well by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. The possibilities of collaboration with the private sector—indeed, with community groups and, when we come to later amendments relating to devolution, local authorities and local government—are all worth exploring if we are going to reform our railway. All of these are being shut off and closed down now by the word “only”, which the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and others are effectively suggesting be deleted.

18:30:00

The Government are going to allow public service contracts to be awarded “only” to public sector companies. How much better things might be if they had the flexibility that would allow us to head towards a better railway and one for which we might have a plan. I now realise, having carried this weighty and valuable document around in recent weeks to prepare myself for this debate, that it is as nothing, it is as writ in water, a mere telephone call, and a ghostly intervention from outside the Chamber can rewrite it at any moment. We have no direction. We have no idea where we are going. The train is setting off and we are completely adrift.

The next time I see our mutual friend Keith Williams I shall tell him that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, said he was ghostly. I thank noble Lords for explaining their amendments in this group, which consider, as we have heard, various alternatives to public ownership. Amendments 3 and 5, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, would allow contracts to be awarded to private operators following a competitive process. Amendments 28 and 29, from the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Moylan, would allow franchises to be continued where the current operator is providing a satisfactory service. I do not support these amendments. The Government were elected on a manifesto commitment to return passenger services into public ownership—having published, for the avoidance of doubt, the detailed plan entitled Getting Britain Moving—and we have a clear democratic mandate to do so. Despite what has been heard this afternoon, public ownership is a change with clear public support. Last month, YouGov published a survey showing that 66% of people nationally agree that railway companies should be run in the public sector; only 12% favoured private operation. We are determined to return to a passenger railway which is run for the public, by the public, with passengers, not private shareholders, at the heart of the system. We will not leave the back door open to franchising, a model which has failed passengers and taxpayers. We are committed to public ownership because continuing with franchising would mean continuing to pay fees to private operators, ultimately for the benefit of their shareholders, when that money could be retained for the public good. Franchising would not allow us to integrate track and train in the way we propose to do under Great British Railways, which is the only way to put a stop to the fragmentation and waste of the franchising system, otherwise we will not be able to sweep away the outdated, complex and costly mechanisms that make the fares system impossible to understand for passengers, and even now prevent rational change because of “commercial confidentiality”, even though all the revenue risk is now taken by government. There is no benefit to continuing franchised operations on our railways. Contrary to views expressed by noble Lords previously, there is no meaningful private sector investment being funded by franchised operators at present, so we are losing nothing by moving to a public ownership model. The Government are already reimbursing the legitimate operating costs of private sector operators and receiving all their revenue. Even before Covid, the main private investment in our railways was in rolling stock, which was generally funded by the rolling stock market and not by train operators or their owning groups. I turn to Amendments 4, 14 and 15, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. These amendments require competitive awards to be made to private sector companies on the basis of a concession model, along the lines of Transport for London’s approach, rather than bringing them into public ownership. These amendments would remove the opportunity to deliver the benefits of public ownership, which, as I have said, a clear majority of the public support and which was a specific commitment in the manifesto on which this Government were elected. The Government’s first objection is that a concession model would mean the private sector continuing to earn substantial profits. Public ownership will put a stop to the flow of money that already sees in excess of £100 million paid out in fees to the private sector each year, even when operators are bearing no significant financial risk. A TfL-style concession model would expose operators to more financial risk than the current national rail contracts, which means that operators would want to earn significantly more in profits at the taxpayers’ expense and would price their bids accordingly. Not only would concessions be more expensive than this Government’s plans for public ownership but they would be even more costly to taxpayers than the current contracts. In addition, the TfL concession model involves a very closely defined and largely unchangeable service specification developed in detail by the public authority, with therefore little room for the operator to negotiate changes post tender award in circumstances where they would always have the upper hand on pricing. Our national railway system is much larger, flows alter over time, and one of the great benefits of GBR is that it will be able far more easily to adapt to changing and growing markets and to save costs without endless contract renegotiation with contractors which, except at the point of contract award, always have the upper hand. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to the TfL experience of contracting the London bus market. In two previous jobs I was responsible for that market for virtually 15 years. It is a different market because there are a large number of small contracts changing hands, so if a contractor is sufficiently unwise to suggest expensive changes when contracts need to be altered then there is the opportunity to at least counter that by the next award of contracts for other bus routes. That has not been the case in the railway market. It is never likely to be the case. It is a different circumstance. As a practical point, this amendment would abolish the option for the Secretary of State to appoint a public sector company to run services once a franchise agreement comes to an end. What does the noble Lord envisage would happen under this amendment if an operator went bust at short notice, or lost its licence to operate or its safety certificate? What if a competition failed to deliver a satisfactory outcome? Passengers could not wait a couple of years while the Government run a competition for a new concession. I would also ask whether it is the noble Lord’s intention to tie the hands of the Scottish and Welsh Governments, as this amendment would do, and whether they support these amendments. I think he knows that they certainly would not. Amendment 10, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, said, was to facilitate Amendments 4, 14 and 15, so I will pass over it. Amendment 35, tabled by my noble friend Lord Liddle, would allow the Secretary of State, and Scottish and Welsh Ministers to award contracts to either a public/private partnership or a co-operative venture involving staff and passengers. The Government’s approach to this is driven by pragmatism, not ideology, and we are certainly not seeking to close the door on private investment, as I will explain later in Committee when we come to discuss rolling stock. However, I point out that examples of private investment in our railway infrastructure have been fairly thin on the ground in the privatisation era. Nearly all the enhancements to the network have been publicly funded. The noble Lord, Lord Young, referred to electrification, but, as far as I can tell, there has been no electrification ever funded by any party except the Government. The Government are certainly open to hearing proposals for how private investment might be brought to bear to improve the railway in the future. If noble Lords and others have good ideas, I encourage them to bring them forward as we develop and engage on our plans and consult in due course for Great British Railways and the wider railway reforms. However, I do not think that involving private finance means that our plans for public ownership of train operations should change. It is fundamental to the Government’s plans for the railway that services should be run by the public, for the public. There are other ways of engaging private capital, short of ownership, and for the most part, even 100% private sector ownership of train operating companies under franchising has not resulted in large investments being funded by those companies. As for co-operative ventures, I am all in favour of giving passengers and communities a stronger say in the decisions that affect them, but the likelihood of any co-operative venture raising any significant amount of capital—let alone the current circumstances of the owning groups of the present train operators—is, frankly, very small. Our plans are designed to give passengers and communities a stronger say in the decisions that affect them, not least by establishing a new passenger standards authority and by providing a new statutory role for devolved and mayoral combined authorities. We will get to the question of devolution in due course. The Government have shown, through our approach to resolving long-running disputes left to us to resolve by the previous Government, that we are committed to working with the workforce to address the challenges facing our railways. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, raised a question about future flexibility. The last legislation for the railways has lasted 31 years, and I note that it had a specific prohibition of public operation of the railways system. That might have been reasonable then but it is certainly reasonable now in the present circumstances, given our policies and manifesto commitment, to replicate our belief that public ownership is the right way of going forward with passenger railway operation. In conclusion, the Government’s plans for the railways are founded on consolidating responsibility for track and train operations within a single entity, Great British Railways, particularly at a route and operating company level. Already, in my short period in this post, as I have said previously, we have had performance meetings with an operator and a Network Rail route. In one meeting, I enjoyed considerably one manager telling me how great collaboration was between the two parties, which were not owned by the same organisation, while the other simultaneously sat there shaking her head vigorously, demonstrating an absence of the very co-operation that I was being told would happen. My whole professional history tells me that the railway will run better with somebody in charge of both track and train together at a route and operating company level. That is the way that we will deliver better revenue, decreased costs and, particularly, better reliability. This is not consistent with seeking to preserve private sector operation, whether through franchises or concessions, or with awarding contracts to public/private partnerships or arm’s-length co-operative ventures. I am amused to see that Rail Partners has reversed its previous opposition to the concession model post the election, having spent several years previously explaining why it would not work on the national railway network. I rather agree with its previous analysis. I therefore urge noble Lords to withdraw and not press their amendments.

My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have participated in this not terrifically long but interesting debate—not least my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who admirably demonstrated the potential benefits of a mixed economy in the provision of rail services and referred to reasons why the Government might in the future need the flexibility that these amendments would offer. I go back as far as the mid-1980s, when I was a civil servant participating in a spending round not dissimilar to the present one in a Star Chamber, where different nationalised industries had their capital programmes traded off against each other. I have to say that cost-benefit analysis was not a significant part of that discussion; it was mostly a discussion of the political benefits or otherwise. I fear the same will be true in the future and that some investment projects that should be funded will not be. It will be a great pity if that turns out to be the case for rail services in future. I do not have the benefit of knowing Mr Keith Williams personally. I am tempted, as a former Leader of the House of Commons, to say that we instituted evidence sessions in committee. I wonder whether we could take an evidence session before a committee in this House as well; perhaps we will think about that for the future. I thank the Minister for at least laying it all out pretty straightforwardly. He may come to regret saying that, essentially, as the 1993 Act was an ideological determination that there should not be public sector operators on the railways, we must now have legislation that says there must be only public sector operators on the railways. I am with the many of those who take another view—not least the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, whose point on open access was about giving the private sector the opportunity under limited circumstances.

18:45:00

All my amendment would do is, in effect, give the Government the ability in the future, while pursuing the policy that is in their manifesto, to have the option to go elsewhere if they need to. The Minister has told us that, although we are debating this Bill, it cannot in his view be amended because of future legislation that the House has not even considered—legislation that establishes Great British Railways and says that Great British Railways will run all the railways, with track, trains and everything all in one place. That being the case, one wonders what the nature of the debate on these amendments can be. We are being told that future legislation will bind what is possible under this legislation. That is not a wise way to proceed. When they write legislation, Governments should try to build in flexibility for the future, because, precisely as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said, we do not know what the future holds and Governments do not know what the future holds.

However, notwithstanding all of those points, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 3.

Amendment 3 withdrawn.

Amendments 4 and 5 not moved.

Amendment 6

Moved by

6: Clause 2, page 2, line 15, at end insert— “(1AA) Before making a direct award of a public service contract to a public sector company under subsection (1A), the relevant franchising authority must publish a report on—(a) the possible impact on rail network capacity used by rail freight services,(b) the possible impact on the meeting of the rail freight growth target for at least 75% growth in freight carried by rail by 2050 on 2019 levels.”

My Lords, in moving Amendment 6 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, I will speak to two other amendments in this group, including Amendment 41, to which the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has added his name. It is so good to see him in his place again as one of our real rail experts in this House, and I look forward to his remarks. This amendment is about rail freight, largely. As noble Lords may know, I was chairman of the Rail Freight Group for some years. It is designed to put a requirement on the Government to report on the rail network capacity used by rail freight and to confirm a target of at least 75% growth in freight carried by rail by 2050 compared with 2019. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his quite long letter, which we received over the weekend, explaining different parts of this Bill. I welcome the letter; there are some good points in it and he answered my question, as he has not done so far today, about open access passenger services. The letter is there, so I do not need his answer again, and I am grateful to him. However, what we have here is a Government who, as the Minister states in his letter, are clear on open access passenger services and want to encourage rail freight. The letter says that “to enable the growth of rail freight … the Secretary of State will set an overall freight growth target to ensure that it remains a key priority”. That is good. My question is how this will be achieved. Within the Great British Railways envelope, we have GBR itself, freight operators and the freight sectors. We also have the Office of Rail and Road, with “rail” apparently to be defined in the next Bill, and we have open access operators. All these groups will be vying to get capacity on lines or tracks that, as many noble Lords have said, are congested at the moment. It is not just a question of how we get capacity on the track. I am told that, on the east coast main line, the current LNER service apparently wants to have five trains an hour running more-or-less non-stop from Edinburgh to London—I hope they find the passengers from somewhere. That is going to cause serious problems to the regional services which might want to cross that line at York or Doncaster or somewhere else. It puts into question the Government’s priorities: getting to Edinburgh every 10 minutes, or so, or getting across the main line from the Humber to Leeds, or similar places, on a service which may only run once an hour because there is no capacity. The capacity divide between the long-distance passenger services and local services is something that we will need to explore in the future, but capacity also affects freight. One of the issues with freight which we have heard for many months, if not years, is that it needs a different speed of train because it cannot accelerate that quickly, and therefore needs electrification—which I am not going to go into. Something that has come up in your Lordships’ House so often is the improvement of the railway at Ely on the route between Felixstowe and Nuneaton or the north. Improvements there would enable many more freight trains to use that route, saving them from trundling along the North London line and places like that. Such improvements would also enable the capacity for freight; it just needs electrification. Great British Railways will be in charge of the budget for railway investment and infrastructure, as well as the budget for keeping the passenger trains going. It will therefore effectively be in competition with the private sector operators and freight companies, and very careful work will be needed to ensure the allocation of capacity is fair and transparent. In my book, it is pretty unfair if one of the major operators, which will be GBR, in line with the infrastructure manager, which it will also own, will have control over how much capacity is available for freight—which is in the private sector—or open-access operators. I am making this point because, while I think that producing a report after the first year—which my amendment would mandate—and looking for targets is a good start, we will need from the Minister, now or in the future, much firmer commitments on how much capacity will be needed on the main intercity or congested routes, and how the Government will allocate it. I look forward to further discussions with the Minister on this at some stage, but for the moment I beg to move.

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 40, which is focused on the issue of policing and safety on the railways. I welcome the Minister to his new role; I look forward to working with him, asking him many questions and debating the issues, as we have done elsewhere over the last 16 years. As noble Lords have interrogated this legislation, safety has been a feature of our deliberations. However, safety is not just about the infrastructure and rolling stock; it is about the safety of passengers and staff on our railways. This amendment would require the Secretary of State to report to Parliament on the impact of this Act on the British Transport Police. The British Transport Police provides a policing service to Network Rail, rail and freight operators and their passengers and staff throughout England, Wales and Scotland. It is also responsible for policing other parts of our transport network including the London Underground, the Glasgow Subway, the Tyne and Wear Metro, the West Midlands Metro, the Docklands Light Railway, London trams and even the cable car in London. What is different about the British Transport Police is that it is primarily funded by the railway industry, not the public purse, and it sits within the Department for Transport, not the Home Office. The train operating companies, Network Rail, other operators and Transport for London, through either police service agreements or different funding agreements, pay for the British Transport Police—its latest budget shows annual funding of around £416 million. On these Benches, we are concerned about two specific areas. First, we are worried about the impact on policing the network, and the safety of staff and passengers as they use and work on our railways, as these changes to franchising take place. Secondly, we are deeply concerned about the potential significant funding gap, which had not previously been identified, as a result of taking public ownership of the railways. I hope the Minister will be able to provide assurance in this area and explain the Government’s thinking about the future funding of the British Transport Police. Furthermore, there is the issue of the British Transport Police Authority itself and how it is structured. It consists of 15 members, often with railway expertise from the train operating companies, who ensure value for money for the policing service they provide across the network. It is not clear how this will be structured going forward to ensure the right level of challenge and independence from the Department for Transport, given the department will now be effectively running the railway in public ownership. I hope the Minister can reassure noble Lords that the funding and oversight of the British Transport Police has been considered as part of this legislation, and that he will respond to our specific points. My noble friends will speak to our Amendments 41 and 6 regarding freight operators and the impact of this legislation on their operation.

My Lords, on the issue of freight, the intention should be that the freight service is given dedicated paths in the timetable. The timetable is the key to the whole issue. For freight to have a dedicated path, we need to use the paths that are available, or potentially available, to the best advantage. To take the east coast main line as an example, it is possible to run quite a lot more trains along that line if the open-access operations are run by 10-coach trains which are divided en route. If the investment in the east coast main line is carried through, and if, for example, the Newark flat crossing is removed, I am sure we can get at least three, possibly four, more paths in every hour. The removal of the Newark flat crossing would greatly enhance the ability of freight to run inland from Immingham. The Government have proposals before them to undertake very small pieces of electrification which would better connect freight services to the electrified network. They also have proposals, which the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has mentioned, to get the route between Felixstowe and Nuneaton working properly. That is an appalling railway—I have ridden across it on a locomotive—and it inflicts enormous delays on freight trains. If there is any money to spend, a good deal of virtue would come from spending on enhancing the freight network and creating more paths on the east coast main line, because they are scarce and very valuable.

19:00:00

My Lords, I support the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about the potential conflict of interest under the new scenario: we will have Great British Railways, with a single operating mind, carrying all the revenue risk for passenger train operations, while at the same time there will be open-access operators and freight operators bidding for a limited path on the railways. The former Secretary of State said: “I shouldn’t need to approve whether a passenger train ought to be removed from the timetable to allow a freight train to run instead, as I was doing earlier today”. The question is: who is going to make that decision in the future? If it is going to be GBR, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, there is a clear conflict of interest; the company would have an interest in the passenger train operator having precedence in order to secure the revenue. That may be in conflict with government policy, which is to promote the transfer of freight from road to rail. Surely it is important that at the moment, the train operator cannot insist that he has a particular path for his train: he has to bid either to Network Rail or to the ORR. Who is going to make that decision in the future? Will it be a domestic one within GBR? In which case, how will the conflict of interest raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, be resolved in a way that is satisfactory for both the open-access operator and the freight train operator, which may find that they do not have the paths they wanted?

My Lords, this small group of amendments addresses a number of issues that inevitably raise questions, because this very tightly drawn Bill provides no hint of how they are to be dealt with. I participate in this debate with some temerity following contributions by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and my noble friend Lord Bradshaw, who know so much detail about the freight industry. Liberal Democrat Amendments 40 and 41, to which I have added my name, are therefore probing amendments looking for details of government plans, which I hope the Minister can supply today. There are thousands of jobs and potentially billions of pounds of investment riding on the Government’s answers to these questions. Amendment 40 is about a very specific issue but, as my noble friend Lady Pidgeon has emphasised, the role of the British Transport Police is vital, providing the rule of law on our trains. It is important to remember that the rule of law provides consumer and passenger confidence. Those of us who are older, younger or weaker are particularly dependent on the good offices of the BTP because they provide the assurance that people need before they are prepared to travel on our trains. I emphasise that, as my noble friend said, British Transport Police funding has been provided virtually unseen from within the industry for a very long time. The total amount of money, at nearly £500 million a year, is not inconsiderable. It is therefore important that we have a clear answer now from the Government about they intend to deal with BTP in the future. In particular, how will it be overseen? Will that be with independence and at arm’s length from the Government? Which body will do that supervision? Amendment 41, on freight, deals with a much more substantial and complex issue, because the freight industry is so complex. As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, it is essential that the new system be set up to encourage rail freight to improve its efficiency. That will be difficult, as he emphasised, because a centralised, nationalised Great British Railways will be bound to feel pressure to prioritise passenger services. We have crowded tracks running at capacity. We have vocal passengers who want trains at a time and a frequency convenient to them. We have a Government who have sponsored a nationalisation project, and their reputation will be damaged if passengers’ interests suffer. We also have a Government who emphasise that they are facing a financial black hole. Will they be willing to invest in track and signal modernisation of the sort outlined by my noble friend Lord Bradshaw, to benefit freight rather than passengers? I fear that freight could rapidly become a poor relation, so I am keen to hear details and reassurance from the Minister. I thank him for his letter, but I point out that it says that next year’s railways Bill will “enable” the growth of freight. I emphasise that I would much prefer a duty to promote the growth of freight, rather than simply enabling it.

My Lords, I shall speak first to Amendment 40, concerning the British Transport Police, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. I associate myself with everything she has said about the importance of the British Transport Police in maintaining safety and law on the railway network and indeed in promoting a sense of safety, which is almost as important. That is particularly true, if I may say this, for women travelling on the railways, perhaps on their own. If they do not feel safe, they will not travel on the railways, it is as simple as that, and the British Transport Police have an important role to play in that regard. Fortunately, there is generally a good record of personal safety on the railways, but we want to see how the Bill will enhance that. My figures may be terribly out of date, but when I was last involved, half the funding that the British Transport Police received came from Transport for London for services in London, and the rest was spread throughout the rest of the country. I will not say that the railway companies were not procuring enough British Transport Police to do the job—the test of that, of course, is whether there is criminality on the system—but they were not procuring at the same rate of coverage that Transport for London was procuring at. This is an opportunity for the Government to say, as they take control of the companies, how they are going to ramp that up and what investment they are going to make in it. I hope to hear from the Minister on that point. A very interesting constitutional point was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, which I had not heard expressed in any way before: how is the British Transport Police Authority to be constituted? At the moment it is constituted in large measure through representatives of the train operating companies. If there is effectively only one train operating company, which is the Government, how is it going to be constituted? As the noble Baroness says, it operates out of the Department for Transport. Is it going to become the first government department in this country—I think this is correct—to have its own police force? Even the Home Office, out of which ordinary policing operates, does not have its own police force; they are all accountable to police authorities or, now, to elected police and crime commissioners in appropriate areas, or to the Mayor of London in his capacity in London, and so forth. Could we end up in a constitutional nightmare here, a car crash that the Government have not properly thought through, as a result of this proposal to nationalise all these railways? Again, I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say. Turning to freight, I share the concern of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about expressing too definite opinions on this topic, especially in the presence of the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Bradshaw, who have such considerable and long-term prior knowledge of it. I have some slight sympathy with the Government on the point because, while I may be wrong about this, I understand that there are freight companies that have rights to paths which they do not use but will not relinquish because they may be useful in the future—and why should they relinquish them?—while, at the same time, they might want to have access to other paths which they cannot get hold of. This is slightly a mess, so perhaps there is some work for the Government to do here to sort it out. The previous Government also had, as I understand it, a rail freight growth target: to increase rail freight by 75% by 2050. So far, that has not been mentioned and we have not heard yet whether the new Government wish to commit themselves to that target. Again, there is an opportunity for the Minister to say that that is his target when he gets to his feet. We would like to hear more about that. The Minister may want to say that some of those points can be addressed in the future Bill—the Bill we are promised that is further down the road—but he cannot say that of the points raised by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, both of whom made the point that the way in which this is now proceeding, by contrast with the Williams report, creates a fundamental and ineradicable conflict of interest in the role of Great British Railways. When it was the body—the great controlling brain, as I referred to it—that was going to establish who could run what railway services where and, where appropriate, award franchises or concessions for passenger railway services, while also allowing open access and allowing freight services to take place, it could do that from a disinterested position. It would be allocating resource presumably according to some sort of rational principle that could be explained and interrogated by interested members of the public and other parties with a stake in the matter. Now, of course, it is always going to be the case that Great British Railways will also be the operator of the passenger services—so what about the other services? What about open access and, most particularly as far as this group of amendments is concerned, where does freight get a look in? How does it make its case and to whom does it appeal if it feels it is unjustly done by? Is it to be allowed to appeal only to the courts or could there be a truly independent body outside Great British Railways—perhaps the Office of Rail and Road; I do not know—to which appeals could be made and which would decide and allocate these paths, where they are constrained, on a rational basis? We have no idea about this because the Bill, as I said earlier, is being rushed through for manifesto and publicity reasons—for headline reasons, fundamentally—without these crucial questions that it throws up being answered. They are not my questions; I did not table these amendments. They come from Benches on all sides of the House. These questions are being thrown up and the Government have no answer, except the tune we are getting accustomed to, which has as its first verse, “It’s in the manifesto” and as its second verse, “We’ll tell you when we get to it some time next year”. I hope we can do better than that when the Minister gets to his feet.

19:15:00

I will first say that I am delighted to see the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, in her place. I hope that her questions will be easier than the ones she has asked me for the last 16 years. I thank noble Lords for explaining their amendments in this group, which consider the impacts of public ownership on the freight sector and the British Transport Police. I shall speak first to Amendment 6, in the names of my noble friend Lord Berkeley and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and Amendment 41 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and the noble Lords, Lord Bradshaw and Lord Moylan. These amendments highlight the importance of the rail freight sector, which has a crucial role to play in supporting a productive economy and in helping to decarbonise transport on the way to net zero. The Bill in front of the House sets out with two very specific purposes: to enable franchised passenger services to be brought into public ownership as existing contracts expire, and then to enable the Government to keep them there in accordance with their manifesto commitment. As such, the Bill has no direct impact on freight operators or on the availability of network capacity to accommodate freight services. Indirectly, though, freight operators should benefit from public ownership of passenger services, for reasons I am happy to explain. In the old franchising model before the pandemic, a franchise operator’s commercial motivation was to maximise its own profit—evidently, the difference between its revenues and its costs. If that meant running additional services, it would seek to do so through the usual industry processes of bidding for access rights and then for a timetable that included the extra services. It would not matter, and has not mattered, to the franchise operators that this might deprive freight operators of the opportunity to serve new markets in the future. There are various examples of franchise bidders seeking to win contracts on the back of proposed service enhancements that risked crowding out, or actually have crowded out, potential future freight growth. Under public ownership, that unfortunate incentive will no longer exist. Publicly owned operators will instead be remitted to act in the interests of all users of the railway, including freight customers. We have made it clear that the forthcoming railways Bill will require Great British Railways to enable the growth of rail freight and that the Secretary of State will set an overall freight growth target to ensure that it remains a key priority. I am sure that we will debate these points further once the railways Bill is before your Lordships’ House. The noble Lords, Lord Bradshaw and Lord Young, my noble friend Lord Berkeley and others asked how capacity will be allocated. I can certainly tell them how it is done now, because we have had an immense struggle to obtain a timetable on the east coast main line which seeks to justify the £4 billion-worth of public investment to speed up services and provide more passenger capacity. One reason we have had that struggle is that, although there is an appeal mechanism to the Office of Rail and Road, there is in fact no current decision-making process to allow a timetable to be completed, except by agreement. I believe and hope that it is currently in its last stages, but I am not certain. One of the things that the Government have in mind is that Great British Railways ought to be the body that decides. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, will recall what was the case on the old railway: somebody had to decide which services were of greatest priority and which ones had to be fitted round them. Under the current Bill, however, there is no change to the existing role of the ORR in access decisions for passenger and freight services. Under the future railways Bill—and we will consult on this—there will be appropriate safeguards for both freight and open access operators. We will set out details on that in due course, before any changes to the current approach are made. There is no need to require the publication of a report on this matter. Commissioning a report after this Bill, when in fact there will be no change at this point, will not add benefit to the debate. I turn next to Amendment 40, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Pidgeon and Lady Randerson, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan.

Before we move on to the British Transport Police and while we are still considering freight paths, the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, for whom I have enormous respect because of his experience on the railway, made the point that investment decisions are very important to getting more freight on to the railway. Is not the real question about freight the priority it is given in the investment decision-making process? I know the Bill is not about that, but, since there is concern about this in the Committee, can the Minister give us any guidance as to how investment will be prioritised?

I thank my noble friend Lord Liddle for that intervention. All I can say at this point is that I would hope the rail network enhancement programme is published more frequently, and with more success in what it contains, than it has been for some years. We will have to wait and see what the fiscal situation allows.

Would that be a decision for the Secretary of State or for Great British Railways?

I think in due course we will have to come back in the substantive Bill with a proposition on how those decisions are made, who makes them, and for what period of time the plan is valid.

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his response to my amendment and other people’s. I have one or two questions that I hope will help the extended debate, because I do not believe we can leave the most important question of competition, which a number of noble Lords have mentioned.

Before the noble Lord sums up on his amendment, I think the Minister has yet to reply on the issue of the police.

I apologise to the Committee; it is my novice inexperience. I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. I turn to Amendment 40 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Pidgeon and Lady Randerson, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. Amendment 40 would require the Secretary of State to report to Parliament on the impact of the Bill on the British Transport Police 12 months after its enactment. The BTP is governed by the Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003, which is not affected by this Bill. Under the 2003 Act, the British Transport Police Authority is responsible for the efficient and effective policing of the railways and for maintaining the British Transport Police force. The authority sets annual budgets for the BTP and recovers the costs of the BTP from the rail industry—of course, now, notably, this is all paid for by government—by entering into police service agreements. The authority sets the funding contributions for each railway service provider via a cost allocation model to ensure that contributions reflect the services provided by BTP and cover its costs. Under the 2003 Act, the Secretary of State has made an order which requires railway service operators, as well as Network Rail, to enter into police services agreements. This obligation applies equally to public sector operators and private sector franchisees, and I can confirm that all four existing operators under DOHL have a police services agreement in place. In conclusion, there is no reason to believe that public ownership under this Bill would have any adverse impacts on the freight industry or the BTP, so I hope my noble friend will be persuaded to withdraw his amendment.

My Lords, I apologise for intervening earlier and preventing my noble friend responding on the British Transport Police issue, which is most important. I would like to ask him whether it applies to Scotland. About 10 years ago we had a debate here when the Scottish Government wished the Scottish police to take over British Transport Police activities in Scotland. My noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester and I tried to argue—I think the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, was there too—that this was a bad idea because policing the railways is fairly specialist work, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, has told us. We ended up trying to divide the House at about midnight, which my Chief Whip at that time did not think was a particularly good idea because I had not told him about it. I pointed out that he was probably in bed asleep by then. Anyway, we did not win that time, but we did manage to achieve BTP having responsibility for railways in Scotland. It would be nice if my noble friend the Minister could explain how that will work under the new GBR system. I will respond to my noble friend’s comments on the other issue, which is mainly about capacity and competition—whether it is freight, open-access operators or whatever. It was interesting that he said that the Government invested £4 billion in the east coast main line. That must have been in order to get an extra train per hour and a few other trains between Edinburgh and London. I am wondering who decided that it was a good thing to invest in the east coast main line to get more intercity services, rather than more freight or cross-country services. That it has not been delivered yet indicates that something else needs resolving, and we will have to see what that is. The other issue is straight competition. I was not working on the railways before privatisation. I am assuming that Great British Railways in its 1990s shape had a number of divisions, as a noble Lord told us, including a freight division. That obviously worked very well at that stage, but when those in the freight division wanted another pass or two on a main line, I would hazard a guess that they had quite a job persuading the passenger people to move over a bit and give them space. Great British Railways will be a monolith organisation. I am sure that underneath, it will have lots of subdivisions, which we will debate at some point. This will probably include the intercity services and regional services, and it will have to take into account open-access passenger and freight services. I cannot see how it will be able to demonstrate a fair allocation of paths when, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, mentioned, it will get all the extra revenue from an extra train if it is a GBR train, but no revenue apart from track access charges if it is an open-access train or a freight train. This is a really serious and financially challenging discussion that we will need to have. I hope my noble friend will be able to respond in part to what I have said. I hope he will be prepared to meet me and anybody else who is interested in this competition issue before Report. I would like to see some wording in the Bill that would give open access passenger and freight some comfort that what goes in the next Bill will not send them over the edge. Could my noble friend respond to those points? I do not know whether he is prepared to.

I will respond to my noble friend by either talking to him outside or writing to him.

I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 6 withdrawn.

House resumed. Committee to begin again not before 8.15 pm.