Railways Bill

Second Reading

16:14:00

Moved by

Lord Hendy of Richmond HillThat the Bill be now read a second time. Scottish and Welsh legislative consent sought .

The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab): My Lords, it is a pleasure to present the Railways Bill for Second Reading today. Before turning to the substance of the Bill, I would like to acknowledge that today marks the 21st anniversary of the 2005 attacks on London's transport network. As a former commissioner of Transport for London, my thoughts are with those who were, and continue to be, affected by that day. I also pay tribute to the extraordinary courage and resilience of Londoners, including those in emergency services, transport staff and members of the public who responded in the face of events which were completely shocking.

This Bill has been a long time coming and it is my absolute privilege to speak to it today. I look forward to the debates to come on the detail but, for now, I will speak to the Bill in general terms. The need for reform of our railways is clear. Parliament, including noble Lords in this Chamber, regularly draws attention to service shortfalls, poor and inconsistent customer service and very substantial costs for the taxpayer—all realities that I and this Government accept and which stem from the fragmented system that has been in place for decades which leaves no one but the Secretary of State ultimately responsible. No one takes responsibility when things go wrong. Indeed, it was the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, who first commissioned the independent review by Keith Williams that would lead to the recommendation to create GBR—Great British Railways —after the timetable fiasco in 2018.

The issues are myriad. Passengers are consistently faced with a confusing ticketing system, where seeking the fairest price and a valid ticket are often a trial. The timetable, and performance against it, is also a source of disagreement and chaos, meaning that disruption and cancellations are far more frequent than they should be. Thanks to reforms that this Government have already made via the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act, which your Lordships’ House passed in 2024, we are already beginning to see progress.

Nine passenger train operators are now in public hands and performance among public operators is outstripping those still in private hands. More operators are continuing to move into public ownership regularly. Once all these services are in house, the taxpayer will save up to £150 million a year in fees that would otherwise have been paid to private franchise owners. Passengers will also find more money in their pockets, due to the first rail fares freeze in 30 years. But these measures are not enough; much more work still needs to be done. There is only one solution to fix these problems—fix the railways, put the customer first and restore the industry to a place of national pride—and it is this Bill.

The Bill builds on and replaces the public ownership Act. That Act was a vital step that allowed us to bring passenger services into public ownership and proceed with some degree of integration. This Bill goes further and will give the Secretary of State the powers to create Great British Railways, one public body that will act as the directing mind for the railway. GBR will bring together 17 different organisations involved in the day-to-day running of the railway, harmonising track and train and seizing opportunities that would not be possible under the current system.

The Bill does far more than just establish GBR. One essential element is a powerful voice for passengers, in the form of the passenger watchdog. The watchdog will set consumer standards for the railways, investigate poor service and provide an independent ombudsman service to resolve disputes between passengers and operators, including GBR and its subsidiaries. It will have a specific duty to consider the interests of disabled passengers, and it will have tools to act where there are repeated issues affecting passenger experience. The watchdog will be a champion for passenger interests, ensuring that the reformed railways deliver on the promises to passengers that we make here today.

I would like to speak about accessibility, and I underline that it will be at the heart of what GBR is and does. I know that passengers with accessibility needs often find railway travel challenging, frustrating and distressing. I know that, all too frequently, facilities and assistance do not meet expectations, so accessibility will be part of GBR’s DNA. For the first time, an accessibility duty will apply directly to a body responsible for both the operation of passenger services and the management of railway infrastructure.

Information, fares and ticketing have in many ways become the face of the industry’s problems, with many different websites offering conflicting information and fares. The Bill enables GBR to simplify the customer offer. A new GBR ticketing app and website will make it easier to plan journeys, purchase tickets and access a range of support consistently in one place. GBR’s online retailer will charge no booking fees and will enable disabled passengers to book passenger assist in the same place as their ticket. This means that, in the future, passengers can better understand the fares system and be confident that what they are getting is correct and good value.

The railway has not had the ability to plan ahead for many years, leading to much less than optimal spend on railway enhancements and higher project costs. That is why the Bill also requires the Secretary of State to publish a long-term railway strategy. The strategy will be the first of its kind. It will give GBR clear direction on the Government’s priorities for the railway over the next 30 years. It will guide the long-term choices that GBR makes, ensuring that the railway is aligned with wider government goals, such as economic growth, jobs and homes, and the environment. The railway undoubtedly faces challenges, ranging from climate change to technological change, and from demographic shifts to financial sustainability. That is exactly what the long-term strategy will examine and consider. The Bill gives GBR and its stakeholders the tools to solve these challenges, placing them on the front foot from the very beginning, and obliges GBR to consult on and publish a business plan setting out how it will meet the strategy.

I turn to network access. The existing process of allowing access to the track—the valuable infrastructure owned by the nation—does not work. Currently, Network Rail designs the timetable but the Office of Rail and Road takes access decisions, and both organisations suffer from not having sight of the wider context of the network. Applications to run trains on the network are, in effect, considered on a first come, first served basis, rather than by reference to any long-term plan for how to make the best overall use of the network, and no one is considering which services are best for the public. That is bad for passengers, bad for freight users, bad for taxpayers and bad for the economy. A single directing mind is the only answer to this problem. In future, GBR will be able to strategically plan access to the network and implement a reliable, achievable timetable to make best use of our limited capacity. This improved co-ordination will reduce delays and costs and improve reliability. It will stop nonsenses such as the ORR prohibiting the 0700 Manchester Piccadilly to Euston from carrying passengers, and me, as rail Minister, having to authorise the east coast main line timetable. Crucially, the ORR will hold GBR to account for taking fair and even-handed decisions on access, ensuring that it acts lawfully, fairly and reasonably. I am sure we will discuss this at length during the debates on the Bill.

On devolution, the Bill is not about centralising power; in fact, quite the opposite. It brings a whole host of benefits to the devolved nations and regional governments across the country. In Scotland and Wales, the Bill enables further collaboration with the Scottish and Welsh Governments, through Transport Scotland and Transport for Wales, and includes further potential for the integration of both operations and infrastructure, which could lead to improved services and co-ordination within and across our shared borders.

In England, the Bill empowers GBR to work locally in a more integrated and accountable way, and to address the place-making and economic and spatial development plans of strategic authority mayors. This means a statutory basis for structured partnerships with mayoral strategic authorities, and a duty for GBR to have regard to their local plans. The approach enables a full range of partnership options, ensuring that GBR can reach agreements that are suitable for the ambitions of mayors. This includes the ability for mayoral strategic authorities to directly fund GBR activity. There will be clear expectations for GBR to meaningfully engage with all local authorities, including those with and without mayors. In any case, GBR will be more locally focused, with its local business units directly involved with the areas they serve, and with local management engaged with local people and their elected representatives, meaning that the needs of the community are never ignored.

I highlight and underline the benefits the Bill will bring to rail freight, which is, and will remain, a commercial activity critical to improving economic growth and meeting our net-zero targets. GBR will have two statutory duties regarding freight. The first is to promote rail freight, and the second is to have regard to the statutory rail freight target set by the Secretary of State and any freight target set by Scottish Ministers. As the single strategic body, GBR will be well placed to fulfil our ambitions for freight, and it will have the levers to drive progress towards our targets. Before I close, I would like to say that I am looking forward to hearing the valedictory words of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, later. He has dedicated his life to public service, and I am pleased that the Bill’s Second Reading provides the opportunity to hear his remarks.

The Bill is a major step forward. While a detailed scrutiny of its contents—something I am looking forward to taking on—will undoubtedly be required, I know I have the support of the general public in sponsoring it. Public ownership of our railway continues to be popular, with over three-quarters of the public consistently supporting public ownership since this Government were elected. As I open the debate to the Floor, I will leave noble Lords with a final thought. The fragmented nature of the railway industry is plain to see and needs to change. That fragmentation began with the last major railway legislation in 1993, which resulted in over 100 companies being formed. This Bill establishes just one: a single directing mind that can get to grips with the mess, mismanagement and misery that so many rail users have experienced for years. Together, we can rebuild the railway so that the public can finally have a railway they can be proud of. I beg to move.

16:25:00

Baroness May of Maidenhead (Con)My Lords, first, I declare my interest as a member of the GWR stakeholder advisory board, ably and knowledgeably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester. I add my voice to the Minister’s remarks on the 21st anniversary of those terrible attacks on our transport system. I also reference the fact that this is the debate in which the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, will be making his valedictory speech. He and I have not overlapped for long in this Chamber and did not overlap in government, but I know that he brought to this House his experience as a distinguished public servant, and he will be missed.

When I became a Member of Parliament, I did not expect to spend so much time dealing with trains. I did so not just as shadow Secretary of State for Transport for a period, but also because a lot of my constituents were commuters and the train service mattered to them. But I had the advantage of dealing with those issues in an era of privatisation. I remember British Rail. I always used to say that British Rail was run for the interests of those who enjoyed playing trains, rather than the interests of passengers. Privatisation changed that because, for the companies, the service to passengers mattered. As a local Member of Parliament, I was able to work with the train operating companies—first, Thames Trains then GWR—to ensure that services were improved, timetables were changed and new trains were put on in the interests of local people. That ability is going to be wiped away by this Bill and by the creation of Great British Railways.

It is an issue I argued with Keith Williams when he was producing his report, and I recognise that on this side of the House, our hands are not entirely clean in relation to the concept of Great British Railways, albeit with differences from the Bill that this Government are introducing. But what is being created here is not something that puts the customer first; it is a centralised bureaucracy that will determine all the issues that matter to passengers—fares, train times, and the timetable. I say to the Minister that it is not putting the customer first; I fear that it is, in fact, putting the passenger last.

That relates to my second concern with the Bill, which is about accountability and interference. First, I worry that the Bill is removing yet further the powers of the Office of Rail and Road to hold the railways and Great British Railways to account. I remember when Tom Winsor was the Rail Regulator, and a rather determined Rail Regulator he was too, but after him, things got a little mushy. The teeth were drawn from the Office of Rail and Road, as it became, and I fear that the teeth are going to be further drawn in this Bill. That matters, particularly because of an aspect to which attention has been drawn by the Transport Select Committee in the other place, which fears micromanagement of the railways by the Secretary of State. The Bill gives considerable opportunities for the Secretary of State to interfere with Great British Railways and to make determinations which otherwise should be being made in the interests of passengers.

My third concern is this. Last week, the new Member of Parliament for Makerfield, who it is widely assumed will soon be our Prime Minister, made a speech in which he applauded and spoke up for the interests of place, of locality, of that sense of belonging to an area, of local identity. This Bill sweeps away the idea of local identity in our railways, because it centralises those decisions. It sweeps away the traditional historical names, regional concepts and structures from our railways. The Minister will not be surprised to hear me say this, because I have said it to him on a number of occasions and obviously, I am concerned about this issue.

The symbolism of this is perhaps best seen in the fact that suddenly, all the trains are going to be repainted in the colours of the Union Jack, and the traditional liveries will go. Not only will that cost the taxpayer money, completely unnecessarily; it is as if somebody in the Department for Transport—maybe the Minister, maybe a civil servant, or perhaps a special adviser—has suggested, “Actually if we’re going to make a change, people need to see there’s a change, so let’s repaint all the trains”. People will know there is a change when their services are no longer as good as they should be. They will know there is a change when they can no longer raise their local voice, and their MP and others can no longer take that up and work with the companies to bring about a change and an improvement in their services.

So, what does this Bill do? Far from prioritising passengers, it prioritises government. Far from increasing accountability, it reduces it. Far from creating independence, it creates dependence. Far from localising, it centralises; and far from respecting local identity, it destroys it. In this Bill, the passenger interest is given less priority, the regulator’s ability to challenge is reduced, and the Government’s ability to interfere is increased. That bodes ill for the future of our railways.

16:31:00

Lord Bradshaw (LD)It will perhaps not surprise the last speaker that I find her remarks so far from the truth about what is really happening on our railway. Before and since the Bill was published, I have been approached by a number of lobbyists and companies seeking to inhibit Great British Railways organising a railway which works for the majority of users.

The aim is for a railway that operates express services to and from the capital; fast inter-regional services; local services planned together with regional mayors; better connections; an ambitious freight growth target; and some elbow room in the timetable to cater for the occasional aberrations, together with some engineering work. All this can be achieved and still leave room for open-access operators which are able to pay a fair price for access, and that abstraction of revenue from other operators must be compensated for. Paths in any timetable, particularly on our congested network, are a scarce commodity, and running short trains on busy routes gives rise to opportunity costs, which means, for example, that running two short trains coupled together over the busiest sections may commend itself.

I hope the Minister will underline the fact that this does not give the regulator power to determine the basic structure of the railway, as that was what nearly caused the crisis in compiling the 2025 timetable, to which he has referred, and was resolved only by executive action, leaving many loose ends behind it. The regulator may hear claims of unfairness which are clearly demonstrated and recommend that these be corrected. It will be for Great British Railways to demonstrate that it has been fair, bearing in mind the pressure on a constrained network.

Great British Railways will have many other aims, and among these is to keep one major route open between important hubs so as to avoid, as far as possible, the need for bus substitution. People prefer to stay on a train on a diversionary route, provided that they are informed in advance of a longer journey. We want to see faster Anglo-Scottish journeys and internal journeys by air and freight reduced, in the interests of reducing congestion and improving air quality. If we add desirable features, such as a passenger growth target and incentives to use rail more, this will require faster, larger and more frequent trains and better freight facilities and depots.

All this can be achieved by the early 2040s, which, in railway terms, is where we should be aiming. We need vision to achieve this, not a lawyer-driven nightmare overseen by a legalistic regulator.

There is one issue on which I shall press the Minister to provide an answer. As I understand it, the future Great British Railways will have a five-yearly allocation of funds. This will be contained in a statement of funds available set by the rail regulator after considering the proposed expenditure submitted by Great British Railways. My question concerns the words which permit the Secretary of State to reduce the amount of money set aside for the railways.

Railways and their supply chain are a long-term industry that needs some certainty about future levels of investment. If the Secretary of State interferes with the process, he should refer the matter back to the regulator so that he may be advised how the industry will be affected, particularly the operation and maintenance of the railway and the likely effect on the agreed business plan.

I remind the House that the two major developments which have affected the railways in recent years concern HS2 and the intercity express programme. Neither of these were carried out by railway professionals but were dictated by government and have proved costly and have vastly outrun their timescales. Great British Railways needs to start with a clean sheet and be able to make its own decisions about how the money is spent.

16:37:00

Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)My Lords, I start by drawing the House’s attention to my registered interests. I am chair of the Accessible Transport Policy Commission and a board member of Active Travel England.

The Disability Discrimination Act was passed in 1995. It was the bare minimum of what it was possible to get through Parliament at the time. I sat on the National Disability Council, which oversaw the implementation of the DDA. That said that all trains would be step-free by 1 Jan 2020. In 2020 we were told it would be 100 years before I could get on the majority of trains in the UK without the permission or support of a member of staff. I need to live only another 94 years.

I look forward to working with the Minister, who has extensive knowledge in this space, but all Governments for the past 30 years have allowed derogations. Basically, they have kicked the can down the road, and a very simple question is: are we as a Parliament going to keep doing that?

We should acknowledge the transport gap for disabled people. Some 2.8 million people are locked out of the workforce because of inaccessible transport. Making it accessible could boost the economy by £176 billion. IMechE has said that investment of between £20 billion and £24 billion could generate another £10 billion to £34 billion in revenue. So this is just a political choice.

The disability tax—the extra time for planning, lifts not working, et cetera—for me is a personal cost of two to three hours every single week. The Transport Select Committee in its Access D enied report has highlighted many of the issues. Getting on and off a train in a timely manner is not exceptional; it should be the norm. I have had some great experiences and many that were not. I have been asked many times, “Tanni, what is it that you want?” Most people were expecting a technical answer, but it is simple: I just want the same miserable experience of commuting as everyone else. I do not have that; I aspire to that. At one mainline train station I am known as “the woman who tweets”.

However, I am optimistic, because there is a chance that this Government can make a change that will have a significant impact. Passenger and disability rights need to be strongly established through the Bill, and rights enforcement should be given greater weight than duties for cost-cutting and competition. This means that legal rights such as in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and data protection legislation should be the basis for all standards. The accessible travel charter needs a defined review point and legislative force behind it. We must ensure that the Equality Act 2010 duties are strictly adhered to by transport providers, requiring them to anticipate accessibility needs rather than waiting for formal complaints.

Change comes in different ways and collaboration works. I thank Tony Jennings, who led on the work to change the discriminatory scooter policy in Scotland. Mobility scooter users do not automatically have the same legal rights as wheelchair users on public transport. While wheelchair spaces are guaranteed by law under the Equality Act 2010, bus, train and tram operators can set their own specific policies for mobility scooters. Further enforcement of the wheelchair space—for example, not filling it with luggage—should not be left to disabled people to police.

I welcome the DfT’s consultation on micromobility—I have an attachment and it has revolutionised my travel—but recently a staff member, who did not know their own accessible transport policy, tried to stop me taking it on board. As a disabled person, you have to be an expert in all aspects of policy, procedure, ticketing and access. Multimode assistance failures cannot keep being passed between train companies as part of a blame game. No one would design a system the way that we have it. Years ago, my photo was sent to all members of staff at a particular train station; they were told to get me off the platform as soon as possible. That was great for me—it worked for a while—but that is simply not possible to do at scale.

Level boarding should be a priority. It should be mandatory that all procurement for passenger trains touching any Network Rail track is low floor. One company that did that—well done—did not design the inside of the carriage to be accessible. We were told, “Don’t worry, you will be in sight of the café bar”. In all my years of campaigning, being in sight of a café bar was not on my list. Being able to see it but not buy anything from it was not what we really wanted.

I try to book assistance, but it is exhausting to negotiate. I cannot remember the number of times I have to say, “Turn up and go is a legal right”. When assistance fails, the question is, “Did you book?” Well, if I am on a train, someone put me there; I did not magically teleport on to the carriage. Every time I book, I receive at least five emails per journey, with questionnaires about the process—but often I am asked about the actual journey only weeks or months later. When I book, I get an email telling me that the booking is unconfirmed and then another saying it has been confirmed. I then get various emails from the train company. However, I have had assistance confirmed with stations that are completely inaccessible. It is essential that we have up-to-date information on lift and toilet availability, or on where lifts that are turned off because stations are not staffed. Disabled people have been told to return to their home station before 6 pm because the lifts are turned off when no staff are there. Disabled people should not have a curfew. An example of a horrendous experience of lifts is at St Pancras station, which has seemingly been out of service for months. People have been told that the mitigation is to go to Farringdon, but last week all the lifts were out there too.

I will give a recent experience to illustrate the reality of my week. I was a “turn up and go” passenger at a station. The assistance desk could not check whether the wheelchair space was free. I was told to go to the ticket office, where usually they can check that, but they were not able to do so at the time. They could sell me a ticket, except the train was technically sold out, so they could sell me only an open ticket, which is much more expensive. The wheelchair space is not even on the ticketing system, so I could buy a ticket for a train on which I did not know whether there was space nor whether someone could help me on it. This system just has to change.

The complaint process is too hard. Train companies often try to bat people away and make them believe that it is a one-off. The only time some companies wake up is when you mention Vento. We should not have to raise compensation to get a complaint sorted. Some disabled people decide to sue, but it does change as much as it should. Some disabled people who sue successfully are often derided and mocked in the industry. But we should look at this in a different way: the industry should quite simply do its job and stop making it possible for the courts—not some random friends—to make judgments in favour of disabled people who are failed on the network.

I welcome the words from the Minister on the app, where we will be able to buy tickets and get assistance at the same time; that is another issue that has been kicked down the road for a little while. I have at least seven apps, and six of them show different prices for every single journey. Ticket vending machines need to be accessible. I can use most of them only if I put my hand in the air and turn my thumb upside down, because they are not designed for people who are sitting down. We also need better understanding of the ramps on the network. I have heard that there are 56 different ramp types on the network. I am not sure whether that is the right number, but the rail delivery universal ramp project seems to have stalled. We should have ramp-trained staff on every platform, or staff absolutely should do a walk-through of a train.

What do we really need? We need legislative deadlines for level boarding and step-free stations. We need an accessibility charter, which should be the floor, not the ceiling, of our aspirations. We need to promote and protect the rights and interests of disabled passengers. I go back to a simple question: will this Government be different from every other Government since 1995 and commit to accessible transport, or are they going to keep kicking the can down the road?

16:45:00

Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, I am going to start with a personal anecdote, but it will not be either as moving or as consequential as the ones we have heard from her today. I pay tribute to her campaigning work on this issue; I am sure that sentiment is shared by other Members of the House.

On a Friday, when I get to Euston and am heading north, I yearn for the toilets to work, effective wifi and a quiet coach. By the time I get back to London on a Monday, as a commuter, I am looking at “Am I going to get a seat? Is it reliable? Is the price fair?” Of course, a top-class railway that is spending £22 billion annually—with more than half of that taxpayer subsidy—arguably can and should provide all these things and more, and I have not even mentioned the other neglected priorities of electrification, extreme weather resilience, modal shift, new services, safety, speed, fresh sandwiches and so on.

All these competing ambitions make a wider point in that they concern the choice of priorities, yet the essence of the claim in the Bill is that the delivery of future policy priorities can follow only from getting the basic underlying structure right. The Bill is a fresh start. It legislates for an outcome that the Conservatives recognised the case for but did not act on: the need to end the fragmentation and to bring track and train together. The noble Baroness, Lady May, graciously hinted at the value of bringing track and train together. I share her concern for passenger voice as a live issue and regional influence, but I am mindful that I am to be followed by the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, who I anticipate having a slightly more ideological engagement about the merits of privatisation versus nationalisation; I promise to say a word on that later.

I think that the public’s first concern is simply a service that works. The Bill builds around an evidence case that fragmentation is holding our railways back. The Minister noted that we have 17 different bodies, so unifying track and train under a single organisation is designed to work for passengers, freight and the taxpayers. For the first time in a generation, we will have a single arm’s-length body that is unambiguously accountable for making the railways work. Of course, a new structure could potentially drive out the very large existing inefficiencies, and it is the prerequisite for dealing with the prevailing culture, which is one of blame, then negotiation and then compensation.

Despite those vital changes, the trade-offs between affordability and reliability, and between subsidy reduction and network upgrades, will remain, so I welcome that, when it comes to setting priorities, the Government have given us a flavour. They are about to publish a long-term rail strategy that will have five core objectives, two of which will deal with long-term economic growth and reducing regional inequality.

We need to reorientate our railways to our long-term ambitions for the nation. Two hundred years ago, railways were the new general-purpose technology of their day. Today’s general-purpose technology is AI, and quantum will follow. Again, we face as a country the creative destruction that is changing our economic geography in the same way as railways first shaped our economy, our geography, our leisure and our landscape.

Great British Railways should be tasked with supporting a faster-growing economy. This is a time of profound change. We need it to break down barriers of opportunity, reduce journey times, improve connectivity and stimulate regeneration and housebuilding next to stations.

Let me come beyond the rhetoric, to the relief of the other side, to the challenges that come with establishing a single organisation. Great British Railways, when it is fully established, will employ 100,000 people. It will be the country’s largest arm’s-length body. The stakes are high. On the plus side, public ownership avoids the siphoning off if dividends and profiteering. However, we must also mitigate the known risks. Monolithic organisations can be deaf to key interests, captured by other interests, slow to innovate and risk averse. These are not insuperable challenges. Many nations manage to have fast, reliable, successful railway systems, and so should the nation where it all began. The structural changes will need to be coupled with political and organisational leadership. To meet public expectations, we will need better regulation rather than more regulation. To encourage the self-sufficiency of the system and manage the burden on the taxpayer, the House of Commons Transport Select Committee suggested that we should be setting a passenger growth target to incentivise commercially minded improvements.

When it comes to nurturing innovation, the Minister will be aware of the ongoing anxieties, notably from the open access operators. They account for only 1% of services but they are responsible for 19% of the new train orders in recent years, so we need to make sure that they find their place. They have been successful in securing modal shift on the Edinburgh to London route and elsewhere.

In my few remaining minutes I come to the issue of devolution of decision-making, clear accountability and speed of decision-making. This touches on some of the anxieties that the noble Baroness, Lady May, raised about regional input. Britain’s devolution landscape is complex, highly varied and very fast evolving. Others have referenced the new Member for Makerfield. I welcome that the Bill provides for the devolved Governments in Wales and Scotland and the combined mayoral authorities to have a statutory role in the rail network, but I would welcome reassurance on how this will work in practice. Can we expect to see any of the mechanisms for clear accountability, locally and nationally, during Committee? As a signal of intent of their commitment to working with the devolved Governments and mayoral authorities, will the Government look at developing shared evidence bases that will allow for the stronger business cases that will allow us to move over time to local commissioning? Finally, on ticketing, I will say only that it must be right to consolidate 55 million different ticket types that are allegedly available and make it easier for the passenger to find the most affordable fare.

In conclusion, I say that this Bill is a bold statement. That is important. It is not always that Members on this side can stand and say, “This is a bold statement about the way forward”. We as a Government have been accused of timidity. This is a bold statement to fix a problem that has frustrated passengers, railway staff and the railway industry for too long. It begins a process of evolution from today’s semi-privatised rail network to a nationalised railway, but the essence is to bring track and train together and end 30 years of experimentation, unlocking growth and delivering efficiency in the network. I commend the Bill and look forward to Committee.

16:54:00

Lord Redwood (Con)I agree with the Minister’s three main aims for railway improvement. He is right that punctuality is insufficient. Last year, under 85% of trains arrived within three minutes of timetable and over 4% of services were cancelled altogether. He is right that we need to improve the quality of the passenger experience. That will require innovation, new services geared to people’s lives and their travel demands, and delivering them a travel offer at an affordable price, an acceptable fare. The railway is too detached and is running far too many nearly empty trains around to fill a timetable. This is interspersed with, at popular times, too few popular trains, with 169,000 people standing in very cramped and unsafe conditions on a typical day. A lot of work needs to go into getting into the modern world and understanding travel patterns.

Above all, the Minister is right that there needs to be a revolution in value for money. We are paying far too much as taxpayers, in some cases far too much as fare payers, and in other cases travelling on heavily subsidised fares, in relation to the amount of work that the railway is able to do. Last year, taxpayers had to put in £21.6 billion to this railway system, and fare payers were persuaded to put in only £11.5 billion. So limited was the offer that was made available on this vast network that taxpayers were paying twice as much as fare payers—general taxpayers twice as much as the more limited number of people who were actually using the railway.

So we do need a revolution. I share some of my noble friend Lady May’s scepticism about whether the right revolution can come from nationalisation itself. The Government need to describe more accurately to the public the nature of the railway that they took responsibility for some two years ago. I am the first to confess that the Governments I supported did not get it all right and that there were many failings that needed to be corrected. But the Minister should be honest with the public and remind them that all the track, all the signals, all the structures and all the stations were taken into public ownership by a previous Labour Government in 2002. He should also point out that many of the problems, delays and interruptions of service have, in recent years, been created by failings in the nationalised part of the system, as well as some of them, as he will rightly point out, being created by the train operating companies which the predecessor Government were gradually getting rid of—and it is also his policy to complete that task.

However, this great, controlling mind they are going to find—I trust that this lady or gentleman exists—is going to need a lot of vision and drive to get value out of this extraordinary network. All these thousands of miles of track that go into the very hearts of our cities and towns are not being used properly and nearly enough. They are far too empty. If you see a bird’s eye view from a camera, or a plane with a camera, of our country at morning peak—there still is a bit of a morning peak on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, although Covid has made a bit of a difference on Monday and Friday—you see inadequate roads, increasingly reduced in scale and size by Liberal Democrat councils, with huge traffic jams and queues, making it very difficult for people to drive to work or to the shops or do what they want to do. You see largely empty, fabulous, straight trackways into the centres of our cities, with trains spaced out at two-mile intervals, or whatever it is, because the signalling is pretty primitive and for safety reasons they are very worried about running more trains on the same track, even though they are all going in the same direction on that bit of track. You would have thought that, with modern digital signalling, if we are going to get it, you could actually run more trains safely on that track to take more of the strain of travel.

The travel opportunity for the railway is enormous because its market share has sunk so far. If you look at trips in the last year, you see that only 2% of people’s trips were by train and 59% of their trips were by car, and then there was walking and cycling and so forth. Even if you take miles, where the railway does rather better because people tend to go on trains for rather longer journeys, people are still travelling seven times as much in a car as they are on a train. This is the business opportunity. So my suggestion to the Minister is that this piece of legislation needs some quite big tweaks in order to make it more likely that a controlling mind can come up with a way of selling all that empty rail and track space to enough people and organisations that can run trains to service the true travel needs of the public.

The first thing this controlling mind is going to need is access to private capital. If nationalisation means no more private capital then the railway is going to be even shorter of capital than it has been to date. I urge the Minister to allow for private capital, which must mean allowing challenger companies to offer services and facilities on the properties or the tracks to bring in the innovation and extra capital capacity that will be needed. Given that we are going to need a lot of innovation, a vital part of that package is open access. Once the Minister has completed his great train set under nationalised control, he must allow others to say, “I can do it better”, “I can do it differently”, or “I can make proper use of this track which the nationalised industry is not using properly”, in order to bring in the innovation and extra service quality that we will need.

I hope that a nationalised industry will want to take more pride in the railway than Network Rail has taken to date. When I go on a rail journey, I am often absolutely horrified when I look out of the window and see the rusty old rolling stock in the siding just wasting away, the old sleepers piled up as if nobody owns them, the brambles and the weeds growing out of the parallel track that is not used very much, and the uncared-for look of the whole place, with peeling paint on the stations and rusting iron on some of the very old stations. It is a mess, with graffiti over everything. I say innovate, allow contestability, bring in new services and clean the place up. Let us be proud of it, then the public might want to use it.

17:02:00

Baroness Leaman (LD)My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing this Bill. I start by acknowledging his deep knowledge of our railways. Few in either House are better placed to steward legislation of this kind. I hope that expertise will make him receptive to the constructive scrutiny that these Benches intend to offer.

It is an honour to speak in the same debate as the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead. I am sure she will not remember but, nearly 20 years ago, after speaking at an event to encourage more women to stand for elected office, she discovered that her train home from Temple Meads had been cancelled, so I had the pleasure of giving her a lift to Bristol Parkway that evening. She was kind and generous enough not to remark on the pile of leaflets on the back seat of my car, which let us just say were not entirely complimentary about the Conservative Party.

This Bill will be judged not by the structures it creates but by the difference it makes to passengers. For most people, railway reform is not about the machinery of government; it is about whether the train arrives when it should, whether disruption is explained clearly, and whether, when the service fails, passengers are treated fairly and swiftly, without having to fight for what they are owed. That should be our starting point.

Great British Railways is being created because fragmented accountability has failed passengers. If it is to command public confidence, GBR must do more than bring track and train together; it must rebalance the relationship between the railway and the passenger. Nowhere is that imbalance clearer than in Delay Repay. In principle, the scheme is sound—passengers delayed by 15 minutes or more are, in most cases, entitled to money back—but in practice, too many never receive it. The latest joint research from Transport Focus and the Department for Transport found that nearly 45% of passengers with an eligible delay actually claimed what they were owed—a figure that has fallen since 2023. Of those who did not claim, nearly half either did not know that they could or wrongly believed that they were not eligible. That is a remarkable failure.

The problem is not the absence of a right; it is that the right is hidden behind process. A passenger must know that they are eligible for Delay Repay and know which operator to claim from; find the correct form; find their reference number, their ticket type, the time they should have departed and arrived, and how late they were; and then upload images of their ticket, along with their bank details. Even if they manage all that, the passenger must submit it within a certain time limit. If they do not, the money simply stays with the railway.

If Sainsbury’s fails to deliver my milk, it automatically reimburses me. If a concert I have booked is cancelled, I receive an automatic refund. If I switch energy providers and the process falters, I am automatically compensated. Why must it require such a Herculean effort to get a partial refund from London Northwestern when the 7.47 am from Leighton Buzzard is delayed for the third time in a week?

This is not a passenger failing; it is a system failing. Compensation that depends on knowledge, persistence and administrative skill is not good enough for a modern railway. The creation of GBR gives us the chance to fix this. GBR will know when a train was late, which services were cancelled and which journeys were affected. Increasingly, through digital ticketing and online accounts, it should also know which passengers bought tickets for these services. The burden should no longer sit with the passenger; it should sit with the railway. Where GBR has the data to identify an eligible delay, compensation should be automatic—not advertised more clearly, not placed behind a better form, but automatic. If a passenger books online, the refund should go straight back on to their card or into their account. Where automatic payment is genuinely not possible, they should receive a proactive notification with a simple route to claim. The test should be this: if the railway knows it has failed, it should not wait for the passenger to complain.

There are of course practical questions. Paper tickets will still exist and not every journey will sit in a digital account. We must not design a system that excludes those who are less digitally confident. But these are reasons to design automatic compensation properly, not reasons to avoid it. GBR should provide one clear, universal and accessible compensation scheme, with one standard and trusted process, and a single route for claims, with the complexity of the industry resolved behind the scenes rather than left to the passenger to navigate.

This is not merely about money. The sums involved are often modest, but the principle matters enormously. When a passenger has had a bad journey, the compensation process is the railway’s opportunity to restore trust. If that process is slow or obscure, it compounds the original failure. It tells the passenger that not only were they delayed but now they must chase the railway for what they are owed. This is exactly the culture that this Bill should end.

Delay Repay should become one of the clearest tests of whether GBR is truly passenger-first. It is concrete, measurable, visible and goes directly to the question of accountability. I therefore ask the Minister to address four points. First, will the Government commit to automatic compensation as the clear direction of travel for GBR? Secondly, will the passenger watchdog have the power to monitor not just whether Delay Repay exists but whether passengers receive what they are owed? Thirdly, will GBR be required to publish regular data on eligible delays, claims made, compensation paid and rejected, and the proportion paid automatically? Finally, will the Government consider placing a duty on GBR to make the compensation process simple, proactive and passenger-centred from the outset? If we do not measure this properly, we will not fix it. The public should be able to see whether the new system pays passengers fairly or whether millions of eligible claims are still going unclaimed.

The railway asks a great deal of its passengers. They are asked to tolerate disruption, engineering works, cancellation, overcrowding and rising costs. When things go wrong, the least they should expect is to be treated with respect. Great British Railways has the potential to end the buck-passing and fragmentation that have made the current system so frustrating, but that potential will be realised only if passenger rights become real in practice. I hope this Bill will be strengthened to make automatic, simple, transparent compensation a central duty of the new railway. If GBR knows a passenger has been delayed, GBR should pay. That is fair, modern and the kind of railway that passengers deserve.

17:09:00

Lord Grayling (Con)My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, who made some very apposite points about passenger rights. I declare an interest as a member of the UK and Ireland leadership team of AtkinsRéalis and as an adviser to Hutchison Ports.

For me, this is somewhat of an endpoint, since, as the Minister rightly said, I started the process back in 2018 through the Williams review, which was intended to address the issue we will all touch upon tonight. I never believed that separating track and train was the right thing to do. It was right, in my view, to move away from a state-run monolith, and it distresses me enormously that we have ended up going back to a state-run monolith, but it was absolutely not right in the end to fragment the railways as much as happened. The reality is that, in the two decades post privatisation, the railway turned around. Under British Rail, it declined: lines were closed and passenger numbers fell. Under the privatised railway, passenger numbers grew, the number of trains expanded and we ended up carrying more passengers on the railway network today than travelled in Victorian times, when the railway was twice as big as it is now. Therein lies the problem. I do not believe that this Bill, and the route that the Government are taking, will get to the position that they want to get to. We all want to get to a position where the railway works well, delivers for passengers and delivers for freight. The problem is that this is not just about who owns it.

When the Williams review was set up, he and I sat and talked about different options. We agreed that there are basically four ways to run the railway. You continue with franchising, you go back to British Rail, you have the model that John Major advocated, which I believe was the right one—regional integrated companies that control both track and train—or you take the model that ought to be quite close to the Minister’s heart: the TfL model, whereby you have a guiding mind but it operates concessions for the different parts of its operation.

Funnily enough, that model is in use elsewhere in the country, in Manchester, by the immediate past mayor and his Bee Network. This was established by Conservatives; the powers were provided by Conservatives and he took rather a long time to take them up. He now talks lovingly about the state-owned, state-run bus network in Manchester. Actually, it is not: it is basically a TfL-style concession whereby the private sector operates the buses.

This is not what this Bill does. It will be quite interesting to see what happens, for the Minister—although perhaps less for him. With the changes that lie ahead of us in a few days’ time, I very much hope that the Minister will retain his position. He commands respect from all sides of this House, even if we may not totally agree on all matters in the Bill. It will be interesting to see whether this Bill survives in its current form the change of Prime Minister that lies ahead, because it is absolutely not consistent with the model that was followed in Manchester.

However, the real problem on our railway is not just who owns and runs it. It is about capacity. The reality is that today’s railway is not fit for the level of demand on it. As a country, we closed too many lines in the 1960s. Too many routes are congested. You cannot easily get 19 or 20 trains through Wimbledon at peak times. You could not easily get the number of services needed into Manchester Piccadilly, which is why, in the end, some degree of capacity enhancement is needed there. The Government should be focusing on how to break down the capacity constraints.

With all due respect to the Minister for his previous role as chair of Network Rail, I have to say that Network Rail has not done us well in that respect. We need to put extra capacity into the network. It needs to be done in the most cost-effective way. It needs to be done with a bit of vision: for example, with digital signalling, which increases capacity, not simply by replacing the stuff that is there already. Network Rail costs are far higher than they should be. Let us take the case of East West Rail, which I tried to get out of the Network Rail system; I admit to having failed. It has cost much too much. That was because it was done to standards set by Network Rail beyond those that are realistically needed today. It is an existing railway line. You can even operate, albeit at slow speeds, what was there before. Was it really necessary to ship millions and millions of tonnes of earth to make the embankments broader?

There needs to be a challenge to the engineering standards, not to create an unsafe railway but to ask: is everything that Network Rail does, whether in process, planning or engineering terms, absolutely necessary and consistent with our need to generate additional capacity?

That is the state-run bit of the railway. There is no evidence as yet that a state-run railway delivers a quantum better performance. Indeed, as I am sure the Minister himself knows, when it comes to South Western Railway, 14 months into the public sector, its performance has gone down. Why is that the case? Surely the opposite should be the case. As we go through this Bill process, the Minister will have a job to explain to us why a return to British Rail—it has a “Great” on the front of it, but it is basically a return to British Rail—is going to deliver the passenger improvements that we need.

I will also touch briefly on the issue of devolution. The model in the Bill is absolutely inconsistent. It is certainly inconsistent with the arrival of a new Prime Minister who believes in devolution. How can it, for example, be appropriate to have a system in London that is fine, the TfL-style concession system, but you cannot have it in Birmingham—even though it is perfectly possible, given the size of the West Midlands area, to have dedicated services such as the London Overground in Birmingham? I really do not understand the logic. If the Government believe in devolution, they should do it, and if they do not believe in devolution, they should not do it—but they should not create an odd hybrid.

I want to say something to the Minister about the system of consultation. Do not believe that always works, because in 2018, when we had all the issues with the timetable, the Northern franchise was equally the responsibility of Transport for the North and the Department for Transport. But, I have to say, Northern leaders hurled all the abuse at me and the Department for Transport and took no responsibility themselves for their own accountability and the performance of that franchise. Frankly, it was a disaster in every respect, but do not believe that consultation powers under the umbrella of devolution are actually going to be transformative in any way, because they are not. The Government are going to be blamed anyway if something goes wrong.

I also say to the Minister that I am looking for bold plans to expand the capacity of the network. I very much regret what has happened with HS2 sucking up all the budgets for control period 6 that I hoped could make a difference. I openly say that I personally believe that HS2 should have been scrapped in 2019 when it was clear that the costs were out of control, and that money should have been spent on capacity enhancement. I give the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, credit for that: he was right on that point. But we are where we are now. We have to focus on capacity enhancements. People and passengers have every right to expect better, but they should not believe that simply changing from private control to state control is what is going to make the difference. We have a rail network that is simply not big enough for the demand on it today, and until that is fixed—in a whole series of ways across the whole country, rather than simply with big projects—it will not make the difference that passengers deserve.

17:17:00

Lord Wilson of Dinton (CB) (Valedictory Speech)My Lords, I am most grateful for the opportunity to say a few valedictory words before I retire as an active Peer, and I am honoured to follow some very penetrating speeches from all sides of the House.

The date I have chosen to retire from active service in the House is 6 September. I chose it because it is the 60th anniversary of my joining the Civil Service as an assistant principal in the Board of Trade, at a salary of £900 a year.

I spent a lot of my early years in this House. I was private secretary to two Peers, and I spent much of the Swinging Sixties in the official Box. It has been a great pleasure to have been a Member as well, for the last 23 years, and a great privilege. My Cross-Bench colleagues are an impressive group, rich in talent, and I thank them warmly for their comradeship, particularly of course my former colleagues from the Civil Service and the Diplomatic Service.

I have also much enjoyed seeing my former ministerial bosses sitting quietly glittering on their Benches on both sides of the House. I occasionally see a complete Bench of people who I have worked for, and I call it a “full house”. I feel lucky in the Ministers I have served and I thank them most warmly. I can see several here today.

The world of government, over the 60 years that I have been a member of the Civil Service and of this House, has changed profoundly. That is not a complaint. The world keeps changing and Governments have to keep up with it. The Civil Service that I left in 2002 was not the Civil Service that I joined in 1966, and it is not the Civil Service that is now in operation in government. However, that change, although profound and important, does not change the world in which we work; under the surface of government, there are always the same issues that successive Ministers have in their short time in office to tackle.

The railways are a good example of that. Successive Governments have been debating the position of the railways in our economy and how to run them successfully for many decades—since the 19th century, I suspect, although I cannot swear to that, but certainly since the Beeching report. I recall that, in 1988, the Secretary of State for Transport, the late noble Lord, Cecil Parkinson, wrote to the Prime Minister proposing that the Government should privatise the railways. I was working in the Cabinet Office and I was asked to give her advice. I suggested that she should have an awayday at Chequers with all the interested parties to go over the options and to discuss what was the right way forward, as she had already done with electricity privatisation. She had a small meeting and we went through the options with her. She listened carefully, and at the end she shook her head and said, “No, privatisation of the railways is a bridge too far—it’s a privatisation too far”. Those remark, coming from an unexpected source, echo through my mind when I listen to the comments that we have had today.

Two or three years later, I was in the Treasury and we had an instruction from No. 10 asking us to put forward proposals for privatisation. There was a great debate. I remember that the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, contributed; I think he wanted to go back to regional railways, but that may be wrong. Some wanted a privatised monopoly. I was moved on before this concluded, but the argument came in favour of separating track and train, although I do not hear many people arguing for that now. The point I am making is that the issues we are discussing today are ones that have been with us for a long time, and the penetrating arguments that we have heard mean that we do not yet have the answer.

The issue that I want to spend a couple of minutes on is the difficulty and the burden that Ministers in high office carry. The change we have seen in the last 60 years is nothing compared with the change and the turmoil that will face Ministers in the next decade or two. Not only do we have war in Europe and war in the Middle East but we have the end of NATO as we knew it as the alliance is weakening. We also have the problems of climate change and the challenge of technology, which is changing the workplace very fast. Ministers’ jobs are almost impossible. I think the learning curve for a Minister in ministerial office is at least a year and sometimes more than that, while for a Prime Minister, if I may say so, I think it is two to three years. It is hard from outside to understand what the pressures and the range of issues are and the permanence of the problems that you have to deal with and try to solve.

The role of the Civil Service is crucial in supporting successive Governments. It provides corporate memory, experience and advice, as well as the ability to deliver results once decisions are taken. I want to say for the record that I believe the model we have is the best model we could find. The Northcote-Trevelyan reforms have stood the test of time and been a success. There is always a tension with patronage. Even at the time when the reforms were introduced, people wanted the ability to bring in their political friends, their allies or their stooges. Disraeli invented the post of First Civil Service Commissioner for a friend of his who needed a job, and that says it all. So it has always been tense, and there have been many changes in the way that we operate, and rightly so, but the basic model has proved itself over and over and must be safeguarded.

What is the model? It is selection on merit through fair and open competition: a Civil Service which is politically impartial but committed to giving the best service it can to the Government of the day with integrity and objectivity and honesty. It is a winning formula. I am very proud of the Civil Service we have and proud to have been its head. It has an outstanding new leader in the new Cabinet Secretary, Antonia Romeo, and I support her decision to conduct a review of performance and organisation to fit it for the future. I wish the Civil Service every success in going from strength to strength under her leadership in accordance with its best traditions of continuity and change.

I wish the House of Lords all success as its own reforms move forward. I thank the doorkeepers, the staff of the House of Lords and the police, because they keep the show on the road while we talk. Thank you very much.

17:25:00

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)My Lords, it is a privilege, though one tinged with sadness, to follow the valedictory speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, who has just reminded us of the great, gentle wisdom and huge experience that he has brought to your Lordships’ House and which we are set to lose in September when he retires.

Our association, our friendship, goes back not just over the seven years that we have overlapped in your Lordships’ House but nearly a quarter of a century, for it was in 2002 that he came to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where I was an undergraduate, as our 27th master, and a hugely popular one at that. Emma prides itself on being the friendliest college in Cambridge; it became friendlier still when the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, was our master. Within weeks of arriving, he seemed to know everybody by first name, a feat that he repeated over the 10 years of his stewardship of the college. He did that at the same time as we managed to top the Tompkins Table, the league table for the best degree results, in five of the 10 years that he was master—not, I should say, helped by my own meagre 2:1.

Behind his genuine, friendly exterior is, as we have just heard again, a forensic mind and a wealth of experience. My noble friends Lady Berridge and Lady Blackwood of North Oxford are among those in this House who know what it is like to stand at the Dispatch Box and worry about a probing question coming from their former master. My noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne is among those who look at a man who was Permanent Secretary in not one but two departments when he was in the Cabinet. Noble Lords from across the House, I am sure, feel the same about the man that they sat around the Cabinet table with during his time as Cabinet Secretary.

The noble Lord’s advice, as today, is always offered with great kindness, great tact and in a constructive spirit. If we fail to heed it, then the fault is ours. One particularly precocious undergraduate seeking a career in politics was sternly advised not to do it straight after graduation—noble Lords may think perhaps I should have listened a bit more carefully.

But even after that advice was disregarded, the noble Lord was very generous and has always been very supportive. He was master in the time when noble Lords could choose to receive Hansard in hard copy. I do not know if he remembers, but he very kindly offered a few volumes of it to go on the bookshelves in my rooms that probably should have been full of history books and lecture notes. I took him up on the offer. I turned up at the Master’s Lodge to find some 60 or 70 volumes, each the size of a telephone directory, waiting for me. I had to borrow a shopping trolley to bring them back to my room. My advice to any noble Lords who are helping him move out of his office here is to be very careful what they get into.

We shall miss him greatly, but I hope that he will not be a stranger here, as he is not to his former college. We look forward to breaking bread with him at the Long Table, just as at high table. After a lifetime of political service, we wish him and Caro and the family a long, well-deserved and happy retirement.

I turn to the Bill at hand and do so in my capacity as the chairman of the Heritage Railway Association. It is an unremunerated position, so it does not need declaring, but, as the Minister knows, it is a richly rewarding one, because he was my immediate predecessor —he had to give it up to become our Rail Minister. In that capacity and in his time at Network Rail, he did a huge amount to make sure that the celebrations last year for the 200th anniversary of the railways were so richly marked. And, of course, this year we celebrate the 75th anniversary of heritage railways with the celebrations at Talyllyn in Wales, the first of the preserved railways.

Across the United Kingdom, our heritage railways welcome more than 13 million visitors each year and generate upward of £600 million for our economy. They do so against great challenges. We have made great strides, not least with the Government’s support and the long-running campaign of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, to make it easier for young volunteers to help out on our heritage railways—that was clarified in the Employment Rights Act last year—but there are many challenges still.

The Government’s support this year through the Great British Summer Savings scheme, alas, does not help most heritage railways. As transport is zero-rated for VAT, they are unable to pass on any savings, because they do not get any from the scheme the Government have announced. If they are holding a static event, they often do so with an external provider and if that provider, often a large multinational, sells the ticket, it is the provider that accrues the benefits in VAT. I know that the Heritage Railway Association has written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on these matters but has not yet had an answer. I hope that the Minister can encourage his colleagues at the Treasury to do so on these detailed points.

I want to touch on three areas in looking at the Bill with a heritage lens. The first, I hope, is the easiest to deal with. It is in Clause 32, on the potential powers over rail assets. The wording at Clause 32(4) describes an “additional railway asset” as

“any network, station or light maintenance depot”.

I am not certain, nor are many in the heritage sector, whether that also covers assets which are not part of the main line. If the Minister is able to clarify that, whether today at Second Reading or in later stages of the Bill, it would be a helpful reassurance.

The second area concerns mainline access. Most heritage railways operate on preserved stretches of line, but a large number do so also on the mainline network, including Vintage Trains, LSL and West Coast Railways. The Minister will know of the “Polar Express”, the “Jacobite” and many more. He will be aware of the potential implications for those such as the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, the North Norfolk Railway and the Swanage Railway. The granting of licences is covered in the Bill, but the onus is now placed on the Secretary of State rather than on the Office of Rail and Road. A number of mainline steam operators therefore worry that this removes the certainty that they have enjoyed regarding access for heritage operations.

In particular, they look at Clause 59, which means that GBR will be in the intolerable position of having to decide on the allocation of capacity while being a major operator itself. The architecture of the Bill sets up a tension that is different from the situation we have under the 1993 Act. There are no checks and balances written in. In the later stages of the Bill, Parliament should look at how it might give guidance on how these priorities should be applied. I hope, whether within the Bill or in the discussions we have, that we will be able to talk about the importance of leisure travel and heritage operations to our visitor economy and to inspiring the rail employees of the future and that we will be able to give some certainty to those who run those operations.

The third issue was touched on in another place at Second Reading by Liz Saville Roberts MP, who chairs the All-Party Group on Heritage Rail. It is the possibility of a heritage rail safety and standards board. The Minister will know that many examples of the progress we have made in driving up standards and safety on the railways have, sadly, followed tragic incidents. In June 2018, in the wake of the Croydon tram accident at Sandilands, the consequent Rail Accident Investigation Branch report led to a recommendation that there should be a safety and standards board dedicated to heritage rail. There is a Light Rail Safety and Standards Board, which was set up after that accident and is publicly funded. There is a Rail Safety and Standards Board for the national network, established following the public inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove disaster, which is also publicly funded. I hope to explore through the Bill whether we can make some progress on safety and standards for the heritage sector itself. The Heritage Railway Association at the moment fills that gap on a voluntary basis through the provision of volunteer-run safety and standards boards and consultation across the sector, but that is a burdensome and slow process for volunteers to run. The Bill, I hope, presents an opportunity to build on the work that they do to establish a professional and publicly funded safety and standards board for the heritage rail sector, and to follow up a recommendation that has been outstanding since 2018. I look forward to discussing all this and more with the Minister over the course of the Bill.

17:35:00

Lord Wigley (PC)My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, on his valedictory speech and wish him a very happy and long retirement.

This Bill has had a long gestation period but, if anything, that has made such legislation—or at least parts of it—all the more necessary. As far as Plaid Cymru is concerned, the Bill is very much a parson’s egg. There are parts we welcome, such as those elements which consolidate aspects of the service into public ownership. It is my party’s view that what is an essential public service, and in many cases a monopoly public service, should be in public ownership. There are also parts of the Bill about which we have reservations, such as the failure to involve the Government of Wales in decision-making on key rail issues. This was highlighted by Plaid Cymru MP Ann Davies in the Commons on 9 December. As she said, Wales does not seek a token consultation which delivers nothing, and that is very often what we have had. Wales wants and needs control over rail services in Wales; this was demanded also by Labour Senedd members on a number of occasions.

Then there is the strong feeling in Wales, and not just in Plaid Cymru, that the Bill misses an opportunity to put right a long-running sore about the totally cynical manner in which railway services in Wales are funded. The financial settlement between the Treasury and Wales, based on the Barnett formula, which has been tweaked a couple of times, is based on providing Wales with a tranche of cash to counterbalance railway expenditure on rail services meant for England. That is usually about 6% of the sum total, which in itself is a reasonable sum.

However, if projects are deemed to serve rail users in both Wales and England, that funding formula does not apply. So that gives an easy escape hatch for the Treasury to avoid providing rail funding for Wales; it just designates railway investment in England as being there to serve Wales. This is quite outrageous and was a factor in the recent election result in Wales, I have no doubt. It means that projects such as the Oxford to Cambridge rail upgrade are seen as ones which exist to serve Wales, so we get no Barnett consequential. Nor do we get a Barnett consequential for Northern Powerhouse Rail or for the huge HS2 project linking London and Birmingham. If Wales got its Barnett entitlement, we would be getting £6 billion more for railway investment in Wales.

Last year, Labour Senedd members pressed on this injustice with Prime Minister Starmer, but they were ignored. They, like Welsh Labour MPs, have zero clout with the present UK Labour Government. That is why, in part, they were swept out of office in May’s elections, and why they will lose most of their Commons seats in Wales in the next election.

It is little short of a tragedy that Labour has fiddled the Barnett formula to deny Wales the railway funding which it needs. At this stage, I just ask the Minister: will he ask the new Labour Government when they come into office—a Government who may have a strategy for fairer regional policy—to look again at this issue and so enable Wales to develop its railways in a manner which answers its social and economic needs? Wales’s population settlement pattern is ideal for railway services: 80% of the population live in linear communities along the coastlines or on the valley floors, where people are within reasonable walking distance of railway lines.

I readily acknowledge that rail services in Wales have improved since devolution in 1999. When I entered the Assembly, as it then was, there was only one through train between Cardiff and Holyhead each day. It was appallingly overcrowded, with filthy green carriages—the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, is nodding; she will well remember this—screeching brakes, broken toilets and totally uncomfortable seats. Transport for Wales has not only provided far better rolling stock and schedules to serve Wales but has also reopened services that had been abandoned, such as the Ebbw Vale to Cardiff link and the Conwy Valley line. Further, the Cardiff-valleys metro is moving ahead, although we need a north Wales coast, Deeside and Wrexham metro, which could also act as an upgrade on a cross-border basis.

Safety considerations are another important aspect that I shall seek to raise in Committee, where I shall table amendments if I have the opportunity. This stems out of the tragic fatal accident in mid-Wales in October 2024. The issue I wish to pursue involves what is known as “dynamic passing”. I shall seek assurances that that was not a factor in the tragic accident to which I referred. I ask the Minister to get briefed on that issue between now and Committee. Plaid Cymru will not oppose the Second Reading of this Bill, which has been backed by the elected House, but I appeal to the Minister to consider the issues that I have raised, particularly regarding Wales.

17:41:00

Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, on his outstanding valedictory speech. Not for the first time in this Chamber, I am left humbled by his 60 years of service, and I am privileged to have listened to his wisdom and humour in his last speech. We will miss the noble Lord.

I am also humbled, as I am not an expert in the railways—I am afraid I did not even have a train set—and I was not expecting to speak in this debate, but what has brought me here is not the physical railways but the retail ticketing of our travel. Before I get to that, I should say that I am also not a huge fan of creating a single, large state-owned monopoly, and that I wholeheartedly endorse the remarks of my noble friends Lady May of Maidenhead, Lord Redwood and Lord Grayling. However, I do not know much about that topic; I would like to focus on what I do know about, which is retail ticketing.

Retail ticketing might seem small and insignificant if you like playing trains, but, as passengers, our ticketing services are our first contact with our train journey, and, sadly, because of Delay Repay, they are often our last contact. Retail ticketing matters to us as passengers. It shapes our confidence in our railway network and therefore drives or harms demand. It is an area where private sector competition has delivered substantial improvements for passengers over the last decade.

I have considerable experience of the value of competition in retail services, and of the dangers of a vertically integrated monopolist using its control of the end-to-end value chain to stifle competition at the retail end—that was called British Telecom and Openreach. I declare an interest in that I spent eight years battling them when I ran TalkTalk. We have also seen this in other travel markets, such as when Google launched its “flights” tab and, at one stroke, attempted to remove all competition in flight retail ticketing. None of this was good for consumers. So, whatever your views on the value of state monopoly management of the physical network of the railways, I hope we can all agree that retail booking services do not need to be provided by a state monopoly. However, I am afraid there is a real risk that, as currently drafted, that is exactly what the Bill will do—not intentionally, but by mistake. We have one of the most dynamic retail rail markets in the world. Private sector investment in user-friendly apps, journey planners and real-time information over the past decade has been outstanding. This Government have recognised the significant value of the role that independent retailers play, because they help to innovate and drive-up standards for passengers.

In the other place, the Government relied heavily on a promised code of conduct to ensure that Great British Railways would not abuse its vertically integrated monopoly in ticketing. My experience in telecoms and digital markets is that a principle-based code of conduct or code of practice, without a clear enforcement regime and ex ante powers, will not deliver a competitive market. I am not alone in this—the CMA is very clear that this is a real risk. In April 2025, the CMA set out in writing its concerns that, as currently set out, the Bill could undermine incentives for third-party retailers to invest and compete. It said:

“the role envisaged for GBR as a ticket retailer gives rise to the risk (either actual or perceived) that GBR will self-preference its own retail operation, or otherwise have advantages over TPRs that are not based on merit (for example better access to relevant information). … It is therefore important to give the right signals from the outset that TPRs will be competing on a level playing field with GBR”.

I am afraid that the Bill does not give that reassurance from the outset.

International comparisons are very clear that integrated state monopolies will abuse this vertically integrated power. In both Germany and Spain, where there is no separation, the same basic approach to that proposed in this legislation has required competition authorities to intervene. Deutsche Bahn breached competition law because of restrictive marketing and pricing practices, and the Spanish monopolist had to agree specific behaviour changes with the European Commission because of competition concerns. By contrast, in France —I may get this all wrong, because I am not a rail person—SNCF Connect is a separate business. The ticketing business is completely separate, as it should be, to ensure that the vertically integrated monopolies cannot abuse their power.

Will the Minister confirm that all retailers will compete on equivalent economic terms and that GBR’s own retailer will not benefit from cross-subsidy? Without structural separation between GBR’s online retailer and the wider organisation, self-preferencing will be very difficult to detect, let alone remedy. Will the Minister confirm that GBR’s online retailer will be required to maintain separate governance and accounting arrangements so that the regulator has the transparency it needs to monitor and enforce compliance with its code of conduct?

Finally, will the ORR have ex ante powers under the code, rather than merely the ability to investigate after harm has already occurred—by which time the Government will have ensured that there is no investment from the private sector into this sector at all? I know these are very detailed issues, and they might seem unimportant if you are more interested in the big physical infrastructure of the rail network, but ticketing experience to passengers really matters. Creating an unwieldy public sector monopolist in a service sector where competition is thriving would be a very big mistake.

17:48:00

Lord Dixon of Jericho (LD)My Lords, I wish to join in the appreciation for the noble Lord, Lord Wilson. As a former civil servant, I want to say how much his observations rang true for me. As a new Member of this House, I want to say how much I hope to have learned from him in the short time that we have overlapped together.

I will speak on a similar issue to the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, although, as someone who spent a considerable period of time working for Citizens Advice, I will take a slightly different approach on the experience people have of things as they appear to consumers.

The Bill is welcome because, while, at their best, train journeys are a source of great pleasure, at their worst, they are a source of huge frustration. I spent last week writing parts of this speech on the floor of a carriage with inadequate air conditioning, trying to make myself as small as possible on a train that was scheduled to last 52 minutes and was half an hour late. Too many people have that experience as a rule rather than as the exception. However, I trust in the wide and deep experience of this House to solve those issues, so I do not propose to go into them. Instead, I want to focus on a small part of the Bill, on which I hope I can be both somewhat knowledgeable and constructive.

Within the last few months, it has become straightforward for anyone with access to a coding agent and a good idea to produce software that makes that idea happen with a minimum of effort and expertise and certainly much quicker than ever was the case before. Although I am not a trained software engineer, I have produced 10 applications in the last year that now work to do things. This should be a golden age for technology entrepreneurs in our country, and one choice we make here on this Bill will decide whether we have a flourishing ecosystem of world-class firms that provide a world-class experience for passengers or end up on the receiving end of technology that has fundamentally been owned and developed elsewhere.

The Bill currently proposes that Great British Railways should own its own ticketing system and provide the data and systems that third parties can use to offer competing products. I sincerely hope that Great British Railways produces a world-class, completely brilliant app—I am supportive of that and hope it works well —but we should not put all our eggs in that basket. As the noble Baroness mentioned, there are deep concerns about that from the industry and the Competition and Markets Authority. We should be wary of creating deliberately a public sector body that has both the power and the commercial incentive to stifle competition.

Having said that, I am sympathetic to the view that one particular company in the UK has a dominant market share. That is a problem, but limiting access to data and opaquely subsidising a public sector competitor will, in practice, result in bad experiences for customers, with less choice, especially for those with more complex needs, and no meaningful integration with other transport modes or the things that people want to do in their lives. The right solution is to make sure that Great British Railways has the right incentives to open up data, APIs and platforms, so that new and existing companies can compete on a level playing field, and, importantly, provide the best possible experience for customers.

We should want more British technology success stories. We should want them to start here, stay here, employ 1,000 people, more than half of whom are skilled engineers, and export products and services to many other countries. That is why the Bill needs to make it easier, not harder, for new start-ups to compete with Trainline, or to do things that Trainline would never consider.

In that, the current data architecture is a real problem. Fares, routing and availability data exists, but only in formats that reward companies that have spent millions of pounds interpreting the data and making it usable. The accreditation fees for the ticket issuing system, which is what you need to access to get the data about what is happening on our railways and what the fares are, start at £950 a day. It takes 12 months for a new provider to be accredited. You have to get bonds that are scaled to your turnover, estimated to be £400,000 for a new entrant to the market, meaning that you take on substantial financial risk and focus capital on meeting regulation, rather than on finding improving market fit, if you try to start up in this area. To make that real, a new start-up would need to sell the equivalent of 600,000 off-peak tickets from Oxford, which is where Jericho is, to London just to cover the initial regulatory costs in that market. That is a huge barrier to entry and, frankly, no small start-up is going to risk that.

We will end up with only Trainline and others—other apps are available—and the Great British Railways app, and that is before we consider the many features that would benefit passengers that are currently indefensibly locked within individual companies and not available to competitors, such as automatic delay repay, advanced passenger information, crowding information, passenger assistance, accessibility and electronic cycle booking.

To give just one example of this, on the rail data to marketplace, Avanti’s fleet accessibility data is an Excel file, LNER’s is a spreadsheet that is mislabelled as a CSV, Greater Anglia’s is a PDF, and there are, amazingly, separate differently formatted Excel files from all other operators. No two companies provide the data in a standard format, which is why no app can reliably tell a wheelchair user about their whole journey. This is not something that has to happen. Trainline has a competitive moat partly because the data is so hard to work with. The Government have made the regulatory barriers to entry too high. It is just too hard to scale and start companies in this market, let alone if you are a third sector or voluntary organisation that wants to make a good thing for a particular set of users.

I do not think this is a question of ministerial will or good faith—lots of people have tried to solve this over the years. It is a question of the economic incentives in the system. I am deeply concerned that Great British Railways has no meaningful incentive to make the data open, to be well-structured or to encourage competition. It probably has the reverse incentive. The House rightly has concerns about the threats posed by AI, but we have to ensure that we structure the fundamentals of our public services in ways that British firms and the public can use to realise the benefits of AI. Fundamentally, that means a modern and forward-looking approach to data.

I hope the Minister can confirm in his winding-up speech that the Bill will prevent unfair self-preferencing by Great British Railways in the relatively niche issue of ticketing and make sure that it is properly incentivised, and not just required, to increase the scope, consistency and openness of data and APIs in this area. That is how we will make ticketing, at least, a world-class experience for passengers. I look forward to working with him and experts across the House on this narrow, niche but in my view crucial issue.

17:55:00

Lord Blencathra (Con)My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton. He was the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office when I was the Minister of State there for four years. He was an excellent civil servant, diligently and neutrally delivering our policies. He was also kind and helpful to me personally. I have always remembered that and will not forget it. I can tell the House that, under his leadership, and under my noble friend Lord Howard and I, the Home Office was fit for purpose then. I wish him well in the future.

Before younger Members of your Lordships’ House wax lyrical about the brilliant opportunities of a new British Rail, or older Members look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles, let me tell the House what the Government-owned British Rail was really like. I travelled on British Rail trains 60 to 70 times a year, from Penrith to Euston, from 1983 when I was elected, and they were the absolute pits. Never mind the jokes about British Rail sandwiches—which were true—they were symptomatic of a nationalised state-run monopoly: “This is the food. It may be rubbish, but so what? You’ve not got any choice”. The trains were clapped out and the organisation was corrupt—not financially corrupt, except that the communist train drivers’ unions got whatever they wanted, but politically corrupt. I recall many occasions when the train made additional stops because the Minister’s office phoned the department and the train made an unscheduled stop to pick up or drop off a Minister on the west coast main line. That was merely doing what they did in the Soviet Union, and it was done in this country until privatisation.

Privatisation was absolutely brilliant. We got Virgin on the west coast and GNER on the east. GNER revolutionised east coast main line services by elevating customer services, introducing premium on-board catering, refurbishing carriages, rolling out wifi and operating some of the fastest scheduled passenger trains in Britain. Virgin was an absolute godsend on the west coast main line. It got rid of the Government’s slum trains. Virgin completely transformed the line by introducing the Pendolinos and the Super Voyager trains. It expanded train lengths, improved stations and provided a wide range of quality food, and it grew passenger numbers from 8 million to over 42 million annually. They were brilliant operators, but Virgin lost its franchise and GNER gave its up. Why? Basically, the Government got too greedy and demanded too much money from the companies. The common myth is that the shareholders of privatised train companies were making too much money, but it was the Government’s greed that brought them down. They demanded that GNER pay £1.3 billion for its franchise and achieve 10% growth—ludicrous demands from civil servants who had never run anything. They sacked Virgin because Virgin refused to accept long-term pension liabilities for railway workers. There are 350,000 retired railway workers on index-linked defined pension benefits. Who in their right mind would want to accept that liability? Avanti did, and provides a cheapskate service to cover the cost.

There was one big mistake made with privatisation and that was making the maintenance of the railway lines into a different company, rather than tying it to the train operators. Of course, the last Labour Government wound up Railtrack for bad financial management and said that the costs were out of control, with a massive £3.5 billion debt. Now that the costs for the rather slow-running HS2 are £30 billion, £40 billion, £50 billion or £60 billion—out of control—can we look forward to that company being put into administration also?

I have some questions for the Minister. Rather than throw more money at the rail unions, who have now got the Government over a barrel, will he actually invest in schemes to get level access on to our trains? I get it all the time in France, Germany and Switzerland, on many trains. In this country, the step up from the platform to the train is only about 12 inches—apart from Eurostar, where it is about three feet high, for some unknown reason. Will he look at three options? One is lowering the track bed, where it is possible to do so; the second, where the track bed cannot be lowered, as in Euston or St Pancras, is to look at raising platform heights; and the third is to do the research and buy two-tier trains, which they have on the continent. These trains are not any higher than ours overall but they have low-level access between the bogies. I am not demanding that at every station, but there are hundreds where lowering the track bed is possible at little cost.

I have used cripple assistance for about 15 years now. I pay tribute to the fantastic team at Penrith, who have never failed to get me on and off the trains, and the buggy drivers at Euston. Before anyone seeks a safe space from the use of my terminology, let me make it clear that I do not consider myself disabled, just a wee bit crippled. I hope that clarifies matters for everyone.

However, I ask the Minister to please make it simple if we phone in to get cripple assistance. Virgin had a dedicated number, but Avanti has one number for everything. After two and a half minutes of messages about the rail ombudsman, about strikes, about not travelling in hot weather or cold weather and why we should not be phoning in the first place, you have to press button 1, then button 3 and then button 1 again until you get through. Can the new British Rail have a simple online form and a direct phone line to book for assistance? I pick up my noble friend Lady May’s point. How much has it cost so far to repaint or redecorate the nationalised trains with the new British Rail logo? Why is it necessary to do it before the existing paintwork or decals are worn out or past it?

Let us look at other money that may be wasted. We have a demand from the London Underground tube drivers, surely the most overpaid and underworked people in London, that they and their partners get a 75% discount on all the new British Rail trains. That is another 8,000 people to add to the 350,000 railway pensioners and their partners, who also get the 75% discount. The 66,000 staff and partners working for the current train operating companies get free travel on their own lines and 75% discount on other lines. Not to be outdone, Network Rail has given all its 40,000 staff and partners the 75% discount also.

Of course, when all the train operating companies are nationalised, all 120,000 train staff and their partners will get either the 75% discount or, more likely, free travel anywhere in the UK at any time. We are heading to a situation where well over 1 million people connected to the railways will be getting free or 75% discounted travel to anywhere in the UK for the rest of their lives. Will the Minister confirm whether this perk will be extended to HQ staff for the new British Rail or to any DfT civil servants?

The current train operating companies supply food from businesses along the line, some better than others. I suspect we are heading to a government-approved, homogenised, healthy menu for all—no salt, no sugar, no calories, no flavour and no taste. That is a small point.

I conclude with my greatest concern of allthat there will be a drive to cut train running times. Well, I can save 30 minutes on the London to Glasgow run, if we do not stop at the smaller stations along the route, such as Wigan, Warrington, Lancaster, Oxenholme or Penrith, but just at Euston, Preston, Carlisle and Glasgow. That is not fanciful. We have already had some trains not stopping there in the last few years, and civil servants will force the new British Rail to extend it to more trains. They have done it with the privatised companies, and they will have a free hand with the nationalised ones to do even more of it.

I conclude that I have no great optimism that we will enter a brave new world of better rail travel in the UK once we have the dead and incompetent hand of the Government running it.

18:03:00

Lord Lansley (Con)My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Blencathra. I can remember British Rail, but I do not think any of us want to go back to British Rail, we want to go to something altogether better. We need the railways to succeed. We can see that when people feel that they have a reliable, punctual and enjoyable railway available to them, they will use it. Look at the rail passenger journeys on the Elizabeth line, which is seeing something like a million passengers a day. Where we create a railway that people can rely on and use, we can succeed. We need that to happen.

On our Benches, on this side of the House, we have already arrived in these fascinating speeches at something of a consensus view, which is that we ought to have recreated the vertically integrated regional companies, but we did not. John Major may have been in favour of it, but he was Prime Minister when that was not what was put into the Railways Act 1993. It should have happened. If I remember correctly, before the 1992 manifesto, we were arguing for exactly that and the manifesto more or less reflected that, but it did not happen.

That did not mean that privatisation did not succeed. My noble friend Lord Grayling was absolutely right. Passenger numbers doubled. Investment in infrastructure went up by three or four times. Train miles increased by 30%. So there was a dramatic increase, but what was that essentially about? It is what my noble friend Lord Redwood was saying: privatisation led to substantial investment of private capital. The first question we must examine during the passage of this legislation is: where is that capital going to come from in future? Are we going to be able to sustain the investment that we need in the railway network for the future? The Bill does not tell us that. It tells us the processes, but not the outcome.

I had my days as a civil servant, and I express my appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson. We will miss him here, but I am looking forward to seeing him in Cambridge. I hope that we will continue to have that pleasure. As a civil servant, I sat in a meeting where the investment programme of one potentially successful nationalised industry was rejected in order to provide an investment into a failing nationalised industry which had a political reason for investment.

Let us not kid ourselves. If this becomes a state-controlled industry, it will become subject to state control of investment, and that may mean state rationing of investment. The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, who introduced the Bill in an admirably concise but also very helpful way, will remember that when we examined the public ownership Bill, he very skilfully enabled the Government to reverse out of franchising into public ownership when the remaining franchises ended, but he did not tell us what the long-term structure was going to be. This Bill is about the long-term structure, who the single directing mind will be and how that single directing mind will be subject to checks, balances and challenges.

In my view, privatisation can work successfully in the long run only where it is subject to competition. In my experience, monopoly always offers short-term benefits, sometimes provides short-term benefits, but always leads to a lack of long-term investment, long-term innovation and long-term consumer benefit. So if, as my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead was stressing, quite rightly, we are going to get the consumer benefits, the innovation and the investment, we have to bring the private sector on board as well.

Some of the challenges to which I will devote my attention are, for example, in creating the regulatory structure that enables this to happen. First, the rail strategy at the moment is simply what the Secretary of State chooses it to be. There is no parliamentary scrutiny. There is not even any requirement for consultation, not even with the Office of Rail and Road, before the strategy is published. I think we are going to have to look very critically at this and look at the analogy of national policy statements, which in the energy sector, for example, are subject to examination in Parliament and to scrutiny, if not to a parliamentary veto.

Secondly, there is the rail freight target. There is a target: it is that it increase. The level of rail freight in this country has increased in the last decade but, lamentably, by only 1% per year, on average. If we are to reach the target of a 75% increase by 2050, it requires a 2.5% annual compound rate of rail freight growth. Perhaps that target should be set as not less than a 2% increase per annum; otherwise, how will the Government or, indeed, Great British Railways, be held to account?

Thirdly, on the Office of Rail and Road, I will not repeat what we heard from my noble friends Lady May and Lady Harding of Winscombe. My noble friend Lady Harding is right about ticketing. We need to press hard on that, but the issue of avoiding self-preferencing is not confined to ticketing. The Office of Rail and Road may have continued concurrent jurisdiction with the CMA in relation to the CMA’s own powers, but the Bill expressly removes the promotion of competition duty from the Office of Rail and Road in relation to such important things as access, infrastructure, timetabling and charging schemes. If we are going to avoid self-preferencing, we need to ensure that the competition duty is brought back on those as well.

Clearly, the open-access operators will not have confidence that they will be able to exploit the opportunities for private investment and private competition unless and until the Office of Rail and Road has those powers. The additional power it should have is that the appeal to the ORR should not be limited to judicial review grounds. There must be elements of those decisions made by GBR which should be appealed on their merits to the Office of Rail and Road. It will not surprise the Minister that I plan to test him on some of those competition-related issues—we have happily worked on that before.

My final point is on devolution. This carries forward the opportunity for services not to be designated and therefore to be available for the metro and passenger transport executives to be able to provide themselves. However, the relationship with local government in this Bill seems to be inadequate so far. Clause 85, for example, limits the relationship with local government to mayoral combined and strategic authorities, and clearly there are many more local authorities than those which are mayoral strategic authorities.

18:12:00

Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]My Lords, it is good to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, even if I think that processes have been somewhat neglected in the privatisation of recent years, often to the detriment of passengers. I want to echo the thanks that have been made to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, as he leaves this House. His distinguished experience has been of great value to the House over the years and I wish him well.

I thank the Minister and his officials for a meeting with disabled Peers prior to this Second Reading. For those of us who were involved in the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act, the paving bill for this one, which was in your Lordships’ house 18 months ago, this is a welcome day. Along with other noble Lords, my focus is to ensure that the strong promises from the Minister and the Labour Government to improve rail services for disabled passengers and others who need assistance become a reality. The Minister knows that we will hold him and his Government to account to ensure that the improvements that I know he wants actually happen. We need to ensure that the warm words spoken here turn into reality for every disabled person’s journey.

Clause 3 is vital to ensure that Great British Railways runs passenger services effectively for all passengers. For passengers who require assistance, whether with infrastructure or practical arrangements, far too often the service is not good, creating barriers for those who just want to get on a train to go from A to B.

I will start with infrastructure. In 2024, the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee, DPTAC, commissioned a survey with Omio which found that UK stations were the worst in Europe, having alarming accessibility inadequacies. A couple of years earlier, in 2021, the Department for Transport commissioned AtkinsRéalis to assess every station in the UK for accessibility. I note that it had completed over 1,000 by 2022, but I cannot find an overall publication of the findings, nor any further report on stations now fully accessible after improvements have been made. Can the Minister say whether such a report on the overall condition has been published and whether there will be updating as stations are improved?

It is not just older stations. In 2023, Thanet Parkway opened in Kent for the first time. The website Every Last Station quoted LordOrk, a disability campaigner, who said:

“Regrettably, NR have again cut costs by treating PRM”—

passengers with reduced mobility—

“compliance as a target rather than a minimum standard. Disappointingly disabled people have been treated as an afterthought at this new station and will suffer the consequences. For example, it is outrageous a new station has no accessible or changing places toilets, no EV chargers in the blue badge bays, platforms are narrow so wheelchair users and scooter users have reduced turning circles for boarding and their legal right to TUAG”,

or turn up and go,

“has been eroded at this unstaffed station”.

This Government have started to improve matters. I see it at my local station, Watford Junction, with BSL-interpreted videos alongside some key station announcements, for example, but these are now urgent everywhere and must be part of any new station. Can the Minister say that this Bill will ensure that, from now on, no new station will be built without lifts, level boarding and fully accessible features for those with mobility, visual and hearing impairments? I agree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, about solutions for level boarding.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, referred to the assistance app and I echo every single one of her points. I say the assistance app, but the reality is that a number of operating companies still run their own apps which do not always have access to book, say, wheelchair spaces on another line. That is my experience on a regular journey I do leaving Watford Junction on the west coast line to travel to York via King’s Cross. I have to use the LNER app or phone number, because, if I do not, no wheelchair space will be reserved for me on that leg of the journey. It was good to hear the Minister talk about just one app that will cover buying tickets and assistance. That was promised years ago but never appeared.

Can I check that passengers with a range of disabilities will be involved in the development of that app? Booking a wheelchair space on an app is useless unless the train staff ensure that the space is free of large suitcases. It is not too bad when you get on at King’s Cross, because wheelchairs are usually first on, but, at a station further up the line, assistance staff with the ramp often have to leave swiftly, leaving a wheelchair passenger to have to shout down the carriage to ask for cases to be moved. It is funny how deaf people get when that happens.

I turn now to a key element of support for all passengers, but essential for those with reduced mobility, and that is staff on a train and at the station. I will now do anything I can to avoid travelling on Southeastern trains because there are no staff, and most stations do not have staff either. This means that your journey time is in the lap of the gods. The journey time from Charing Cross to Lewisham could easily be doubled because there is nobody at Lewisham to provide help with a ramp. I have to get off at Hither Green and wait for staff at Hither Green to be free to take me on to the next convenient train for Lewisham. It is even longer in reverse, when you have to phone to ask Lewisham to find someone to get on a train from Hither Green to come and collect you.

Staff are needed on stations to help with ramps and to guide passengers who may not know how to get off the platform safely. They are needed, just as train staff are, for protecting and guiding all passengers, whether because of an emergency, as in the recent crash near Bedford, or, as I have seen, a crime with a dangerous weapon. I have also witnessed the enormous bravery of staff jumping down off the platform to rescue a passenger who jumped off a platform in great distress. That staff member did not think of his safety, only of the passenger. This bravery is extraordinary, but those stations and trains without staff can put passengers at risk.

I echo the frustration of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, with failed lifts. For six months at my local station, trains had to be brought into a different platform whenever there was a wheelchair on board because two lifts were out. That affected the elderly too, but they were not in a position to ask for a train to be rerouted. What was the problem? It was exactly the same as the current lift problem in the House of Lords: the lift companies do not keep spare parts at the factory in Italy and they have to be made each time. I find it extraordinary that Network Rail, which holds the contract for all station lifts, cannot insist on a better service. Under the old system, passengers had no voice on this. Will this change under GBR? I can tell you that six months without a platform lift affects everyone’s journey and morale. Finally, a while ago, when my train from Edinburgh came into King’s Cross two hours late after midnight on a Sunday, the train staff dashed off to hand out taxi vouchers at the exit gates to all passengers, not realising that no assistance staff were left on duty. I and another wheelchair user realised, when everything went quiet, what had happened: we could not get off. The assistance phone line at the station was not answered, nor was the station general number. What would noble Lords do in this situation? It clearly was not a 999 matter; the 111 line was not staffed that late and the other passenger was getting very anxious. Was it scary? It certainly was not much fun—but not unusual for wheelchair passengers when they get left on trains.

So I tweeted. The disabled community is always helpful with suggestions, but one person went even further. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, saw my tweet and passed it on to the chief executive at LNER at about 1 am—of course, she had his number. It was helpful that he knew how to find someone to come to our rescue. However, if the noble Baroness had not been so well connected, I think my fellow traveller and I would have greeted the early shift of cleaners—thank you, Lady Grey-Thompson. To the Minister, I say: the aspirations of GBR should mean that this sort of problem of abandoning disabled passengers is a thing of the past. That would be a good yardstick of accessibility.

18:21:00

Lord Young of Cookham (Con)My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has just told a very moving story, and I think everyone who listened to that will agree that that state of affairs is simply not acceptable.

I join others in paying tribute to the valedictory speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson. He was an excellent Permanent Secretary at the Department of the Environment in the 1990s, when I was Minister of Housing and Planning. He was a source of wise advice, and he kept me out of serious trouble for three or four years.

Speaking in this debate is a bit like attending one’s own funeral, because the Bill basically undoes the reforms I oversaw as Secretary of State between 1995 and 1997. It is worth reminding the House what those reforms achieved. As my noble friend Lord Lansley said, passenger numbers doubled; services improved by one-third; an operating deficit under British Rail was turned into an operating surplus; investment in rolling stock, electrification, signalling, and station modernisation improved, as the dead hand of the Treasury was removed from the capital programme; passenger safety improved; industrial relations improved; branch lines were reopened; and passenger fares were capped at RPI minus 1%, a reformed abandoned by the then incoming Labour Government, who kept everything else the same for about four years. It is worth making the point that many of those improvements and reforms, post privatisation, were driven by former employees of British Rail, who welcomed the challenges and freedoms that came with the policy. However, we are where we are. The Government have a mandate for what is in the Bill, which is basically to bring the system under one ownership. On that, I was struck by what the Minister said in response to a recent Oral Question:

“Virtually the whole of the world, in countries that run railways, is incredulous that this country managed to separate the infrastructure from the operations for more than 30 years ”.—[ Official Report , 20/4/26; col. 503.] That simply is not the case. Most European Union members have legally separated their rail infrastructure management from their train operations, as mandated by a European Union directive. In fact, we can do what is in the Bill only because of Brexit—something I am not sure the Minister mentioned. The countries that have done what he finds incredible include Sweden, which did it before we did, as well as France—where SNCF has two separate subsidiaries to promote competition—Spain, Italy, Denmark and Finland.

That brings me to the related argument that underpins the Government’s policy. According to the White Paper, A Railway Fit for Britain’s Future :

“This is a necessary first step towards ending fragmentation … That is why we will establish Great British Railways … a single ‘directing mind’”.

However, that is not the model used by successful companies throughout the world. What the Minister calls “fragmentation”, they call specialisation: the ability to secure the component goods and services needed from a variety of sources, ensuring innovation, competition and resilience. BAE Systems and AstraZeneca in this country—and Apple abroad—do not do everything themselves; they outsource, commission and buy in the marketplace. They have been successful because of what the Minister calls “fragmentation”.

The Minister may say that this does not apply to transport because it is different—but it is not. The safest and cheapest form of transport in this country is by air, but you could not find an industry that is more fragmented. The airlines do not own the aircraft; they do not own the terminals; they do not run the national air traffic system; and they do not do the security or the baggage handling. Some airlines do not even employ pilots; they hire qualified self-employed pilots. I challenge the assertion that an industry that is fragmented or specialised is less efficient than an integrated one. Nor incidentally does aviation have a single “directing mind”, which has Orwellian overtones.

My concern is that the three main benefits that came with privatisation will be lost under these reforms. Investment in rail was taken almost entirely off the public sector balance sheet in 1995; it created a market of train operators to replace a public monopoly, and the business model forced the industry to look outwards towards its customers not inwards to the sponsoring department.

On the first, I had the pleasure of negotiating the transport budget with the Treasury both before the railways were privatised and after. Before privatisation, I would go to Star Chamber and they would say, “George, we’re really pleased to see you. We’ve just had the Health Secretary, who wants more doctors and nurses; we’ve had the Education Secretary, who wants more teachers; and we’ve had the Secretary of State for Defence, who wants more soldiers. Priority is the language of politics, and politics is the language of priorities. We’re very sorry, George, you can’t have your new train set for Christmas”. After privatisation, that dialogue simply did not take place; the market responded to the business case that was made.

There is also a risk that the Office for National Statistics will put the rolling stock companies on to the Government’s balance sheet—as it did with housing associations—because of the degree of control over the investment that the Government propose. That would play havoc with their borrowing requirement.

The second advantage was to bring in other successful transport operatorspeople who ran buses, airlines, shipping or train services overseas. Their skills were applied to running the railway here and to breaking the British Rail monopoly. The Government are not even adopting the concessions—the management contracts with the private sector—that were so successful with the bus companies in London and Manchester, as my noble friend Lord Lansley said.

At a meeting with the Minister last week—he has been very generous with his time—he said that the franchise or concession model was not adopted for GBR because the train operators were not interested in the deal. That is strange, because those train operators are the very same companies that run the bus operators that have successfully run exactly those contract arrangements in Manchester and London. Perhaps they overplayed their hand. We are now back to a monopoly, with the risk of a national strike by train drivers, which was avoided by franchising or concessions.

The third innovation was the incentive to grow the market, to look outwards towards the customer. Under privatisation, once a company had won the franchise, the only way that it could increase turnover and profit was by winning more customers. However, when I was Transport Secretary before privatisation, it made little difference to British Rail whether it had more or fewer customers; it just meant that it got more or less subsidy from the Secretary of State. I was its real customer and not the passenger.

For me, the jury is out as to whether what is proposed will give the industry the secure, efficient and customer-focused future that it really needs.

18:29:00

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, on his valedictory speech. It was great fun. I do not think that we have ever met, but there is plenty of time before September, so perhaps we can get that in our diaries.

I do not say this often, but I welcome the Bill. The Green Party has long argued that our railways should be run as a public service and not for private profit. After decades of failed fragmentation, spiralling costs and confusing accountability, bringing the railway back under public leadership is important and overdue. The Bill is, therefore, a step in the right direction.

If we are creating Great British Railways, we must create a railway that is genuinely great: one that is affordable, accessible, integrated and capable of helping us meet the defining challenge of our age, which is the climate and nature crisis. At present, the Bill does not achieve that. It lacks ambition. For example, Great British Railways will have numerous duties, so why does the Bill not contain a clear duty to increase passenger numbers?

I welcome the target for shifting freight from lorries on to trains, but why is there no equivalent ambition to encourage more people out of their cars and on to trains? To do that, we must make train travel cheap and easy. For millions of people, the biggest barrier to travelling by rail is not whether a train exists but whether they can afford the ticket. Affordable fares are perhaps the single most effective tool available to increase passenger numbers, tackle inequality and reduce car dependence. Yet the Bill contains no explicit duty to promote affordable fares, and changes to the licensing arrangements of Great British Railways could see fares rising as there is less focus on public duties.

There seems to be even less ambition to create one system that covers the whole journey someone might take. As the Minister knows well, this works in Greater London, where TfL runs the London Overground under the mayor’s control. Manchester is moving that way, but what about democratic control over integrated transport for the rest of the cities and regions? People do not think in terms of operators or transport modes; they simply want one journey. Whether someone is connecting from a local bus, a tram, a cycle route or a ferry, the system should feel seamless. Integration should be one of the central purposes of Great British Railways, creating a public transport network where different modes work together rather than competing with one another. I hope that the Government will clarify how the railway will become genuinely integrated with other forms of public transport.

Rail is already one of the lowest-carbon forms of transport. We should be supporting every passenger to choose rail over driving or domestic flying. If we are to meet our legally binding climate targets, modal shift cannot simply be left in policy papers; it should be a statutory objective of the organisation that is responsible for running the railway. Staggeringly, environmental responsibilities appear only fleetingly in the Bill. There is little recognition that our railway must become climate resilient as extreme weather becomes more frequent or that it should contribute to restoring nature alongside the lines it manages. Some 10% of all train services were cancelled or severely delayed in the most recent heatwave in Britain. Last week, I spent six hours getting home instead of three, and I felt lucky to get home at all.

Great British Railways should have a clear public mission that recognises its contribution not only to transport but to our economy, our environment and our wider society. Passengers deserve the reassurance that a publicly owned railway will be judged not simply on financial performance but on whether it provides affordable access to work, education, leisure and family life. Profitable routes should be able to support socially essential services in rural and underserved communities, where success is measured not only in ticket revenue but in reducing isolation, supporting local economies and giving people a genuine alternative to cars. High ticket prices mean empty seats. Equally important is protecting the workforce that keeps our railways running. I welcome the reassurances that the Government have given regarding the future of the Railways Pension Scheme, providing valuable certainty for thousands of rail workers. The future of Great British Railways will depend as much on the people who run it as it will on the infrastructure they manage.

Of course, the Bill misses one of the biggest opportunities of allsetting Britain on the path towards a fully electrified railway. Britain has spent decades pursuing a stop-start approach to electrifying its rail network. Only 39% or thereabouts of our railway is electrified, which is is well behind many comparable countries. We know what needs to happen. The Climate Change Committee has made it clear that substantially more of the network will need to be electrified if we are to decarbonise rail and meet our climate obligations. Yet the Bill is silent on this.

Finally, I hope that the Government will look carefully at how passengers themselves are represented. A publicly owned railway that fails to listen to the public will have missed the point entirely. Public ownership should not simply change who owns the railway; it should change for whom the railway works. Passengers, disabled people, local communities, rail workers, devolved Governments and regional authorities should all have meaningful opportunities to shape services, investment priorities and future strategies. Improving accessibility will be a huge benefit for our ageing population.

We also need more clarity on how mayoral, local and combined authorities will be able to control investment plans and services. The Green Party has long argued that rail should be viewed not simply as a transport system but as essential national infrastructure for delivering economic opportunity, social justice and climate action. Public ownership is not the destination; it is the foundation. The Bill moves us away from the disastrous experiment of fragmented privatisation—for that, it deserves support —but we should not settle for a railway that merely functions better than before. We should build one that actively reduces carbon emissions, restores nature, connects communities, integrates public transport, makes travel affordable and expands opportunity across every part of the country. Those ambitions really must be written into the Bill itself.

I welcome the Bill’s Second Reading and hope that, during its passage through this House, we can strengthen it so that Great British Railways truly lives up to its name as a railway that is run in the public interest, serving people, communities and the planet for generations to come.

18:36:00

Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. I agree with a huge amount of what she said, and I welcome her support for the Bill.

As he is still in the Chamber, I want to pay my own tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, whom I first had the pleasure of meeting around 40 years ago when he was a senior civil servant and I was a desperate lobbyist for a particular interest that was affected by his department, the Home Office. He will be missed; that was a wonderful valedictory speech. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill for the way in which he introduced this debate. I endorse the compliments paid to him from the Benches opposite. He is an extraordinarily successful and popular Transport Minister in your Lordships’ House, and I hope that it will not blight his career if I say that I hope he will remain where he is when Mr Burnham forms his new Government in a couple of weeks’ time.

I have a number of railway interests to declare. The noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, referred to one of them: I chair the Great Western Rail advisory board. The noble Baroness is a most diligent and valued member of that board and I am delighted that she is on it. I am also the president of the Cotswold Line Promotion Group and the Heritage Railway Association. That was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay; I am sure that we will come to the issue of heritage railways, which he raised, in Committee. All of these organisations, along with numerous others that have written to me, have interests in the Bill, and we will consider issues that relate to them in Committee.

For me, the most important issue facing the railways is ensuring that they can rise to the challenge of constantly growing public demand from passengers and the freight industry in a cost-effective and well-managed way. An essential ingredient in this renaissance will be ensuring that Great British Railways is the industry’s directing mind, firmly in charge of the railway. Otherwise, capacity will not be enhanced and performance will not improve. It must have the power to decide how the network is best used, as is defined in Clause 50, and doing that is likely to produce more capacity than we have now.

The other great issue is that a long-term rail plan from the Secretary of State will give GBR the opportunity and the obligation to form a business plan to carry out the enhancements that will improve the network the most, as well as the right money to keep the network running reliably. Neither of these documents exists now and they have not for over 30 years. That is why the network is less than optimal and why the need for a future list of enhancements with business cases is so important. If we have this list, we can solicit third-party contributions through Section 106 and other agreements. We all know how landowners and developers benefit from railway improvements but are seldom asked to pay anything towards them.

I will take the Cotswold line between Oxford and Worcester as an example. The case for enhancing this route is overwhelming, but it has not made the cut as far as the Department for Transport is concerned over the last 15 years. Even though the line’s popularity has grown year by year and trains are regularly overcrowded, the service’s reliability is undermined by two stretches of single-line working. Developers have great plans for housebuilding, particularly at the western end of the line, including a new town on the edge of Worcester. They have the strongest possible incentive to contribute. It is an easy win, yet for some reason it seems to be very hard to persuade the department of the case.

I have no doubt that the principles behind the Bill are right and the only effective approach to simplifying and reducing the huge cost of our railways, which is required by the complex structure that was set up when BR was privatised. I do not share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, on the merits of the privatisation that he introduced, for reasons that I have explained to him. However, there are no credible alternatives being advanced to take the railways into their next stage of development other than those proposed in this Bill.

In 2023, I co-authored a book on railway power and politics, Signals Passed at Danger . Our conclusions on privatisation were that the policy was “a leap in the dark, a radical experiment where neither the Government nor the British Railways Board could predict the outcome”. This time around, we know the results of the privatisation experiment. That is why the principles of this Bill have widespread support from the public and throughout the industry. It would be wrong not to recognise that some good results were achieved over the last 25 years. I am happy to recognise them: notably, new trains, reopened lines, more services and a dramatic improvement in safety standards. However, the costs have been high, involving levels of financial support that British Rail in its day could only dream about. Too much has been spent on lawyers, consultants and administration to meet the plethora of new regulations. This Bill offers the chance of radically simplifying the structures and reducing unnecessary regulation and costs. Much of the debate has been about passenger services. On these, I encourage my noble friend the Minister to build on the brand strength and loyalties built by the TOCs.

Turning finally to rail freight, the Bill gives us the opportunity to see that it takes a much larger share of the nation’s transport needs than is currently the case. Here, I endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, has just said. The political view was always that “freight does not vote”. It is true that the financial targets set for BR on freight back in the 1980s and 1990s meant that much of the infrastructure had to be abandoned as it failed to meet the Government’s stringent financial criteria, despite the strong environmental advantages over heavy lorry traffic.

Some of this has been regained by rail, and efficiency has improved so much that more traffic has been won by the freight companies, particularly intermodal traffic. More can be done. With active government support for rail freight terminals, electrification and full-length freight loops, the growth can be even greater. The great underused asset is the Channel Tunnel. It is shocking that less rail freight currently passes through the Channel Tunnel than was carried by the train ferries before the tunnel opened. GBR will be able to help the development of international freight with gauge clearance work to carry the largest containers and provide wider access to the rail network. The inclusion of a requirement to set a rail freight growth strategy is welcome and a complete change from the framework of the 1970s, where rail freight was seen as a lost cause and not worthy of support.

There is much in this Bill to welcome. There are bits in it which we want to improve in Committee, but overwhelmingly I give it my support.

18:45:00

Baroness Humphreys (LD)My Lords, passengers should be the focal point of this Bill. Their needs and experiences should guide the developments and improvements to be implemented. The needs of passengers are clear: the ability to access stations, platforms and trains; lifts that work; comfortable conditions in which to travel; a regard for personal safety; and trains that arrive and depart on time. National Rail and the operating companies try to meet those needs, with varying degrees of success.

For example, mobility assistance at Euston, run by National Rail and the train operating companies, helps at least 1,600 people a week to board their trains. The service is run efficiently by a dedicated team who are helpful, professional and, above all, respectful and kind. This is reflected in the performance of staff at the various stations along the route. However, the Office of Rail and Road’s research report published this month shows that 10% of those who had booked a service had not been met at all. For those who have been abandoned on their trains late at night, the experience must be terrifying. The suspicion is that the system of notifying the arrival station of the passenger’s arrival time has broken down. Can the Minister foresee any way in which this system could be improved under GBR? I add here how pleased I was with the Minister’s emphasis on accessibility in his opening speech.

The Avanti West Coast service between London Euston and north Wales has seen much improvement since the days of Covid and the strikes. Its trains are newer, air conditioned and clean. The train managers keep passengers informed and are there to help if needed. I hope that there will be no further discussions about “managerless” trains on GBR. Their presence provides a sense of security, especially to female passengers. Many users of the west coast service hanker after the days of Virgin Rail and its two-hourly direct trains from Holyhead to Euston. Is it possible that this valuable service will be restored?

The most common cause of delays to journeys appears to be the perennial “signalling problems”. It is perhaps a cover-all excuse, but it points to a very real problem. Another of the Office of Rail and Road’s reports tells us that pockets of signalling systems from the 19th century remain active and that roughly half of the UK’s rail network relies on signalling infrastructure that is more than 30 years old: an age at which the infrastructure could be deemed to be obsolete. Running a modern-day Great British Railways on a signalling system which is 50% obsolete seems designed to fail, so what plans does the Minister have to upgrade the signalling system, and over what timescale?

As noble Lords will be aware, in Wales, responsibility for rail infrastructure is a reserved matter, with only responsibility for the rolling stock being devolved to the Welsh Government, which is responsible for the Wales & Borders passenger services that Transport for Wales operates as TfW Rail. It is a strange semi-devolution that is all the more bizarre when compared with Scotland, where the whole railway system is devolved.

There has been a history of underinvestment in Welsh rolling stock, with the Welsh Government having to take funding from other devolved areas to make up the shortfall. The boneshaker of a train that I travelled on from Chester to Llandudno Junction last Thursday was testament to this underinvestment. On the same day, services on the branch lines between Wrexham General and Chester and between Llandudno Junction and Blaenau Ffestiniog were reduced or cancelled as there were “more trains than usual needing repairs”—all symptoms of a system under stress. This Bill’s introduction of a long-term £14 billion investment plan for Wales is very welcome, particularly the approval of seven new railway stations, mainly in South Wales, to ease commuter pressure on the M4 corridor, and major infrastructure upgrades, including future plans to electrify the north Wales coast line.

The problem is that, beyond the £445 million committed to by this Bill, funding for future plans is not guaranteed. The rest of the programme is not legally mandated by this Bill and will remain entirely dependent on allocations in future UK Treasury spending reviews. The remaining £13.5 billion-plus is therefore currently unfunded.

We have been here before. Welsh railways have seen promises and disappointments over recent years. The Tories’ promise of the electrification of the north Wales line and the electrification of the Cardiff to Swansea line came to nothing, while the Tories’ cynical designation of HS2 as an England and Wales project, and this Labour Government’s equally cynical collusion with this and the subsequent outrageously cynical designation of the Oxford to Cambridge line as an England and Wales project have added insult to injury. This latter designation alone robbed Wales of some £360 million of consequential funding through the Barnett formula.

The investment plan is, in fact, the work of Transport for Wales. Its long-term master plan, Today, Tomorrow, Together , has been endorsed by the UK Government, which begs the question: if the plan has been created in Wales by Transport for Wales, why can it not be delivered in Wales by Welsh Ministers? The investment plan is underpinned by a memorandum of understanding between the UK and Welsh Governments and, of course, it maintains the current devolution settlement—instead of, as many people would wish, transferring full network ownership and funding powers to the Welsh Government. The MoU was signed by a Welsh Labour Transport Minister in the dying days of the last Welsh Labour Government, so, given Plaid Cymru’s commitment to the devolution of the rail network to Wales, what discussion has the Minister had with the new Administration about changes to the MoU?

18:52:00

Lord Harper (Con)My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness who resides on the other side of the Welsh border from me. I still live very close to it, in the constituency that I had the pleasure to represent for nearly 20 years. I mention that because I share the Minister’s sentiments about the work of those who helped all those affected by the terrorist attack on 7/7. It is particularly memorable for me, because it took place relatively shortly after the 2005 general election, when I first joined the House of Commons. It was my first experience of how, as a parliamentarian, you end up dealing with the impact of a terrorist incident. I remember it very clearly, and the impact on the transport system. I remember—it was a very small price to pay—walking all the way from here to Paddington and seeing the enormous numbers of people whose lives had been disrupted that day, sometimes permanently, by that terrorist attack. So I am pleased by what the Minister said.

I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Grayling said about the Minister’s capabilities in this particular area. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, added a cross-party aspect to that, because I was fearing that, if only a Conservative colleague had said nice things about the Minister, we might perhaps have been doing him a disservice. But I can add my support to what the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, said, and also note that it was supported from the other side of the House, which I hope means that, when there is a change of Prime Minister in a couple of weeks’ time, we will see the Minister still sitting in his place. I had the great pleasure to work with him very closely when I was Secretary of State and he was the chair of Network Rail, and in the capacity of the work that he did in chairing the Euston Partnership. We worked very well together and I have great respect for his knowledge and capabilities, particularly in the rail arena.

I was listening very carefully to what my noble friend Lady May said about the importance of putting passengers first—or rather customers first. It is important to remember that the rail network is not just about passengers, it also about freight customers, and both are equally important. That is where I have some broad welcome for GBR, but I have some concerns about the way the Government are going about doing it. I support bringing the operation of track and train together; we have already heard the arguments about why a regional model of keeping those together might well have been a better solution.

Of course, the Minister will know that this Bill is not necessary—I had this debate in the department—to bring track and train together. Something that has been very good, which started under us and has continued under the present Government, is joint appointments of individuals running the train operating companies and the network rail operations in that region to get rid of the buck passing and the shifting accountabilities, and having a single individual who is responsible for infrastructure and the train operations. That has actually been very successful. So, to the extent that the Bill is delivering bringing track and train together, I welcome it.

I do not support the removal of private sector operators—I know that is in another Bill. The Government will rue the day that they nationalised or continue to nationalise the passenger operating companies. We have heard that there are other models. The franchising system perhaps had reached an end and certainly had enormous damage caused to it by the pandemic. But there are other ways of doing it; several Members have talked about, for example, the way it happens in London. It is just worth recognising the enormous success of privatisation; I am not going to do it at length, because my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham did it admirably. I just want to focus on one aspect of it that is the clearest exposition of the passengers’ response to privatisation, which is the more than doubling of the number of rail journeys from privatisation to the peak before the pandemic.

I mention the pandemic again because it had a massive impact on the rail network. It drove away, literally overnight, 80% of passenger rail journeys. It caused us to spend £30,000 million of taxpayers’ money on just keeping the rail network going, which I note is a responsibility that we bear on the Conservative Benches. We did not get anything for that in terms of productivity improvements or reform of how the system was run. Even now, we still have not quite recovered the passenger volumes that we had before the pandemic. That is important, because it means that the system requires more subsidy.

I heard a number of Members talk about profits being extracted. The real problem post pandemic is that there have not been any profits. Before the pandemic, the passenger operating companies overall made profits and returned money to the Treasury for the benefit of the taxpayer. Post pandemic, overall, the passenger operating companies lost money and have been subsidised every year by the taxpayer. That is not sustainable, given that most people in the country either never use or very rarely use trains. For the vast majority of people outside London, the most common method of getting to and from work and doing your daily business is to get in your car—and if you do not use the car and you use public transport, you do not use a train, you use a bus. Buses are a much more popular form of public transport than trains and it is important to remember that.

I do not have time to go on at length now about the three areas I want to focus on in Committee. One is about the retail operations. The noble Baroness, Lady Harding of Winscombe, set that out extremely well, so I will not repeat what she said. When I was Secretary of State, officials were very keen on GBR having its own online retail operations—it was an official thing, not a Minister thing. I directed that to be removed. I thought it was a terrible idea. I thought the idea that the state could be nimble enough to run a fantastic digital operation when we already had some very good ones run by third-party retailers was completely pointless. I see that, upon the change of government, officials have snuck it back in again. I say to Ministers that they should challenge that. I do not think it will add anything. One area I will come back to is trying to reinsert competition in this area. I was very pleased to hear the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Dixon of Jericho; I hope that means, if we can craft some sensible amendments along those lines, that they will get support on these Benches, on his Benches and, I hope, from enough Cross-Benchers to encourage the Government to change their mind.

The other areas I want to look at are rail freight, to make sure we have a system where fair decisions are made about allocations, and open access.

My final point is on the tests that are important to judge the Bill. Does it drive up the volume of passengers? Does it reduce the cost to the taxpayer? Does it, as my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said, make sure that we can get private capital involved? If it all relies on investment from the taxpayer, it will be a failure. Will it deliver a better rail system for all rail customers, both passengers and freight? Those are the tests that we should use to judge the Bill and we look forward to doing so in its next stages in this House.

19:01:00

Baroness Whitaker (Lab)It is instructive to follow the noble Lord, Lord Harper, with his detailed knowledge of the subject, but I have rather more enthusiasm than he does for the Bill. I think this magnificent Bill is what the country has been waiting for. It is one of the key measures from this Government to restore public services to decent standards and sensible structures. The benefits of this comprehensive and simplified system have been well set out by my noble friends and some other speakers, so I will focus briefly on only four aspects.

I am particularly reassured by the Bill’s contribution to reaching net-zero carbon and its general impact on the economy, especially with regard to freight transport. Can my noble friend the Minister say a bit more about the impact that the very welcome targets for rail freight will have on the economy and what the plans for further electrification are? I hope he agrees with me that a rolling programme for electrification would be the cheapest way to achieve the maximum contribution to net zero.

The role of the Passengers’ Council is also very constructive. One of the defects of the pioneering British Rail of earlier times was the lack of a strong route to accountability, and I see this as a strength of the new structure. Much will depend on who is on the council. I can see that disability representation is guaranteed on the actual board of GBR, but can my noble friend say what categories will play a guaranteed part on the council? I make a plea in my own interest for somebody who understands the difficulty that old people have in minding the gap between the train and the platform—ever more perilous. I trust the council’s reports will be published.

Another issue with British Rail, and indeed with all the earlier quasi-monopoly nationalisations, was incentives for efficiency. Oversight of the strategy should encompass this, but how will it be built into the process?

Finally, my last professional involvement with railways, very many years ago, concerned the position of railway employees. The risks that many of them took were covered by the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, as were risks to the public from their activity. All employees’ rights still apply, of course, but I think it may be the transport inspectorate which sits within the Office of Rail and Road that enforces them now. What are the liaison arrangements with the Health and Safety Executive under the new regime? How would any prosecutions or enforcement work?

This Bill will steer our railways to the future we need for this essential part of our national life and I am delighted to commend it.

19:04:00

Lord Hampton (CB)My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. I associate myself with the chorus of praise for my noble friend Lord Wilson of Dinton. It was fascinating to hear his memories and his opinions. I am one of the rank of non-experts here. I am a train user—a frequent user of London Overground and the very wonderful Elizabeth line. One of my favourite activities is watching the world go by from a train, particularly if I am lucky enough to get a seat with a table. I have travelled some of the loveliest routes in the UK: Exeter to Newton Abbot; Shrewsbury to Barmouth; Gloucester to Paddington via Stroud; and Oxford to Great Malvern—I commend the work of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, on that one. I have even done the sleeper from Glasgow to London.

Whereas the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, sees dystopia out of his window, I am back in the world of PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and Flanders and Swann. Flying is a chore; a train journey, when it works, can be a pleasure. But I am old enough to remember British Rail ending unloving and unloved. This is why I welcome the Bill, because it is so important. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fix public transport infrastructure in this country.

The Bill has a lot of talk, in the duties, about railway infrastructure, but it lacks detail. Will new or reopened branch lines be planned to get people on the railways earlier in the journey? If we learned one thing from Beeching, it is that people who get in a car stay in a car. These need to be truly linked with buses. One of the recommendations of the House of Lords special committee on social mobility, which the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and I sat on, highlighted the need for joined-up transport in rural areas. There is little point running buses to stations if they are not linked to train times.

There has been very little talk about resilience. Last week, I was travelling on a train, and it was late. Other trains were late or cancelled, apparently because the rails are now much longer, so they expanded more. This was below 30 degrees centigrade. European rails are subject to much higher temperatures, and to contrasts, with cooler nights. How do they cope? Let us not even talk about snow.

Is there going to be a level playing field for non-GBR activities? The Minister talked about trying to grow rail freight but, for example, to quote Logistics UK:

“Clause 63 requires GBR to reserve capacity for its own services. As such, without amendment to that and other areas of the Bill to strengthen governance, accountability and regulatory balance, there is a risk that freight will be deprioritised in capacity allocation, planning, charging and investment decisions”.

I believe this is also a worry for other passenger rail companies.

What will happen to apps such as Trainline, when the aim is that GBR’s ticketing website will combine the existing 14 rail operator websites and apps into one? The noble Lord, Lord Harper, mentioned this. According to Trainline:

“This creates an unprecedented structural conflict of interest and risks GBR favouring its own retail channels over competitors”.

The Bill talks about upgrading stations but does not mention property. What will happen to Platform4, the merger of London & Continental Railways and Network Rail’s property business? I quote its website: “Over the next decade, Platform4 plans to unlock surplus railway land for up to 40,000 new homes and around 10 million sq ft of commercial space, including mixed use neighbourhoods with homes, green spaces, shops and hotels in locations such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cambridge”.

What is to happen to railway arches? At best, railway arches are an excellent community asset. Near to me there are arches containing a butcher, a carpet warehouse, a prop manufacturer, sheet metal fabricators and numerous panel beaters and car repair shops. The Lords and Commons cricket team nets weekly in two railway arches in Wandsworth—at this point I shout out for New Era Training which has improved my batting enormously, so I am now merely rubbish. The arches by me in Hackney are being redeveloped, so their occupants are being forced out by sharply rising rents. There must be a supersaturation of microbreweries and coffee shops. There is a real danger that the arches then lie empty.

What about complex developments such as Hampton Court station, which I coincidentally went through on Sunday? The station is held up by scaffolding. Linked to it is a site that has been derelict for more than 40 years, mired in planning issues, recently described by Andrew Roberts of the Hampton Court Rescue Campaign as a national disgrace. At the very least, it is a national embarrassment with all the tourists getting off to go to Hampton Court Palace.

Possibly the biggest opportunity for GBR is in the skills sector, and this does not seem to be mentioned in the impact report or the Bill. There is such an opportunity here for GBR. At the moment, the British Army is the biggest employer provider of apprenticeships in Britain. GBR should make beating that record its target. Will the Minister say whether GBR is talking to the DfT, the DWP and Skills England to provide all-levels apprenticeships, including the badly needed levels 2 to 4 across the board?

With the formation of Great British Railways, we have the opportunity to provide a longed-for, efficient national transport network, boost employment, apprenticeships and social mobility and grow the economy in a true renaissance of the nation’s public transport system. Let us not waste it.

19:12:00

Lord Berkeley (Lab)My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and hear his comments about, in particular, training on the railways, which, incidentally, has been, I think, modernised dramatically by HS2. But that is a separate issue.

I shall say a few words today questioning the point of this Bill. That may seem a bit dramatic, but I have been working on the railways for nearly 50 years, since I was building the Channel Tunnel, and I have noticed that the railway has effectively been controlled by the Government for at least 20 years, as many noble Lords have said, on timetabling, charges, ticketing, investment in the track and the rolling stock for many trains. They may have said that it is in the private sector, but in fact it is controlled behind the scenes in many instances, so I wonder whether we should be talking about ownership or control. We have control at the moment, and listening to many noble Lords speaking this evening, it occurred to me that most of the changes that they quite rightly recommend could be done without primary legislation. I spent several decades, if not more, working in the rail freight industry, in the European industry more lately and in ALLRAIL, which is an association of companies across Europe which believe in open access and competition in passenger services. I suppose I can claim some small input into the European Commission bringing liberalisation to the continent after it was seen by me in those days, and I still think it is, as an important element here. We were telling our friends on the continent, “Why don't you follow the Brits?”. Now it is the other way round, but we will see how that goes.

I do not know why the Government are trying to go the opposite way. In my book, in many instances, they are trying to stifle competition. Many noble Lords have talked about competition. It is an important issue, so I have questions for the Minister, and many more, I expect. Is GBR going to save money by bringing efficiencies beyond what we have at the moment, all effectively government controlled? Many noble Lords have said what is wrong with the railway, but it is already government controlled.

Will GBR bring an increase in passenger numbers and freight volumes? I know the Minister says it will, but where is the evidence? On many routes, open access operators have delivered significant passenger growth. It does not happen on all lines, where the operators have tried, failed and stopped because there was not enough revenue. I got the impression that part of the content of the Bill is to prevent open access passenger and freight operators and make life as difficult as possible.

The Bill appears to me to be an attempt by the Government to implement what is, frankly, a dogma of nationalisation without looking at the alternatives. There are many alternatives, such as open access with a proper regulator. We have a good regulator at the moment, but he is going to have his hands tied behind his back if we are not careful in the Bill. He is not able to regulate access to the tracks, because he cannot decide who gets the next access to the tracks or whether it is passenger or freight because that is done by GBR, which is also going to be the operator of the trains. It seems to me that, if we are not careful—obviously, we need to dig into this a bit more in later stages of this Bill—the extent of the monopoly being created by GBR should probably be referred to the CMA. But I suspect that is not for today.

There is also a lot of criticism about Network Rail—or not, since many of the comments made by noble Lords refer to Network Rail rather than any of the train operators. Will the Minister say what evidence there is that Network Rail’s performance will improve? Last week’s report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on Network Rail’s performance on the Northern Powerhouse Rail project is hardly reassuring. Northern Powerhouse Rail is a much smaller version of HS2, which we have talked about ad nauseam. It is a very important project, and my noble friend the Minister has spoken about it in your Lordships’ House on many occasions. The PAC is

“not confident the Department for Transport … has learned all the lessons from past failures”

in its management of other rail projects. It carries on to say that there are clear risks that the full programme and its benefits cannot be delivered within the £45 billion funding cap. HS2 was a disaster, and we are all hoping that Northern Powerhouse Rail will be done properly, but the PAC’s conclusions are worrying.

Another couple of issues are the charging and compensation scheme in the Bill, which seems to suggest that operators, and therefore passengers, are not compensated for delays outside their control, which might be weather or whatever. They are compensated at the moment. Is that a good thing to change? We can debate that.

So we have a lot of work to do to talk about the future of the competition issues and the Rail Regulator. The concluding aim must be that GBR should act fairly and non-discriminatorily. Network access should remain impartial and independently challengeable—and I mean independently. Capacity should not be reserved indefinitely for unspecified future GBR services. Charging should be neutral and predictable. Existing rights should be protected. Public money should be subject to genuine value-for-money tests. We have a lot to debate, but I hope that my noble friend will be able to convince your Lordships’ House that the Bill is necessary and that most of the issues raised by noble Lords cannot be addressed without legislation.

19:20:00

Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)My Lords, before turning to the substance of the Bill, I wish to begin by paying tribute to those who lost their lives on 7/7 21 years ago. Our thoughts and prayers are still with those families that were affected—and similarly with those who lost their lives or were injured in the more recent train accident on the East Midlands Railway line near Bedford. It is a line that I regularly use to come here every week and go home. In particular I pay tribute to the emergency services and the railway staff who responded in a very professional manner. An incident such as the recent Bedford train crash is a solemn reminder that safety must always remain the first duty of our railway. I declare an interest in that my eldest son works for one of the railway companies in the north of England.

This Bill presents an opportunity to reshape Britain’s railways for a new generation. It is therefore right that we approach it not through the lens of ideology but through the experience of millions of passengers who rely on the railways every day. Much of the political debate surrounding this legislation will inevitably focus on the question of ownership and structure. Others will argue over the merits of nationalisation versus privatisation. From these Benches, we take a different view. We are not interested in fighting yesterday’s arguments. The real test is whether the railway delivers a service that is affordable, reliable, accessible and worthy of public confidence.

Passengers must be at the heart of Great British Railways. That is why we will seek to strengthen this Bill by ensuring that Great British Railways has not only a freight growth target but a statutory passenger growth target. This will be necessary if we are to hit our climate change targets as well as ensuring that people have choice in terms of how they get about. If freight deserves clear objectives, and it does, surely passengers deserve the same ambition. Success should be measured not simply by trains running but by more people choosing rail because it is the most attractive option. That matters nowhere more than in the north of England. For far too long, passengers across Yorkshire—and particularly those travelling to and from Sheffield, where I am from—have endured unreliable services, overcrowding, ageing rolling stock and delays that have become too familiar. The pace of trains that many noble Lords might remember from decades ago is sometimes still a reality in the north. People are just amazed that these things are sometimes still ongoing.

Too often, journeys that should be straightforward become an exercise in frustration. Some of my colleagues on the Front Bench will probably be smiling at the moment, knowing that I have often missed Oral Questions because either the train has never left Sheffield station or, if it has left Sheffield station, it has on occasion stopped at Chesterfield, or Derby, or Leicester, where we have had to get off.

Often, those trains are also severely overcrowded. In the upbringing I had from both my parents, we were told simply, “If people need those seats, you need to get up”—and we had to sit on the floor. That is the experience that some of us have had. Members of the public will be shocked to learn that that is the reality. It does not matter what class of ticket you buy. Sometimes it has been first class and you have still not had a seat. So there is clearly work to be done here.

We might compare that with the rail systems of many our European neighbours. These are punctual, frequent, integrated and regarded not as a luxury but as a basic expectation. Even within our own country, passengers in London—I am mindful now of my colleague and noble friend Lady Pidgeon—benefit from far greater frequency, investment and connectivity, at levels that many communities in Yorkshire can only dream of. A truly national railway must not entrench those inequalities; it must help eliminate them. If we are serious about encouraging people out of their cars and on to trains, we must also address the passenger experience.

We believe that this Bill should include a comprehensive passenger charter setting out clear and enforceable rights for those who use our railways. Passengers deserve certainty about standards of service, compensation, accessibility and information when things go wrong. Affordability is equally important. Britain’s fares system has become bewilderingly complex. Too many passengers still find themselves asking whether they have bought the right ticket or whether a cheaper option existed. Simplicity builds confidence.

We will therefore advocate for greater innovation in ticketing, giving passengers clearer and more flexible choice alongside the introduction of a national “rail miles” scheme that rewards loyalty and encourages more people to choose rail for both work and leisure.

Innovation, however, must not be confined to Great British Railways itself. I welcome the Bill’s recognition that independent ticket retailers should continue to operate in a fair and open market. That commitment must now be translated into reality. Independent retailers have driven innovation that has benefited passengers through better journey planning, smarter ticketing and increased competition.

Organisations representing ticket retailers, transport technology companies and online travel businesses have all argued that Great British Railways must adopt an open-by-default approach to data and ensuring genuine competition across ticket retailing. That means a genuinely level playing field. GBR should not be the regulator, the operator and the competitor simultaneously.

Independent retailers must enjoy fair access to data, transparent commercial arrangements and equal opportunities to innovate. The Office of Rail and Road’s code of practice must provide meaningful safeguards to ensure that passengers continue to benefit from choice, innovation and value for money, rather than drifting towards a state monopoly in ticket retailing.

There are, however, wider concerns about this Bill. We are troubled by the concentration of power in the hands of the Secretary of State. There is a real danger that Ministers become judge, jury and executioner of significant parts of the railway system. Operational decisions should not be subject to day-to-day political intervention. Railways require long-term planning, professional expertise and operational independence. We will therefore scrutinise carefully the responsibilities of Great British Railways, the Office of Rail and Road and the Passenger Council, to ensure that there is clarity rather than duplication.

Likewise, we remain concerned about the extensive reliance on secondary legislation throughout the Bill. Parliament should not be asked to sign a blank cheque on matters of considerable significance that deserve full parliamentary scrutiny, through primary legislation wherever possible.

This Bill has the potential to lay the foundations for a railway fit for the 21st century, but that will happen only if passengers—not institutions, not ideology and not Whitehall—remain at its centre. If we can create a railway that is reliable, affordable, innovative, accountable and genuinely passenger-focused, Great British Railways can become not simply a new organisation but a catalyst for restoring confidence in one of our nation’s greatest public services. I look forward to working constructively across the House to ensure that this legislation fulfils that ambition.

19:28:00

Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this Second Reading debate. In doing so, I declare my technology interests as an adviser variously to the Crown Estate and to Simmons & Simmons LLP.

Like other noble Lords, my thoughts are with all those who were affected on 7/7. I remember that day so clearly. It was less than 24 hours after we had won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In that 24-hour period we saw the best of humanity in the bid, we saw the worst of humanity in those terrorist atrocities, and, instantaneously, we saw the best of humanity in all the first responders and members of the public, who ran towards danger to help all those affected on the transport network and beyond. I congratulate the Minister on the way in which he introduced this Second Reading debate. I would introduce a slight note of discord into our Second Reading proceedings, in that I hope the Minister does not keep his job when the new Prime Minister comes in, because his experience, expertise and enthusiasm for transport need to be recognised. I hope he can come back to your Lordships’ House as Secretary of State for Transport—I know he shares that political ambition.

I was delighted to listen to the valedictory speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton. I had the good fortune to work with him many years ago when he was doing excellent work on inclusion and accessibility as Cabinet Secretary. It was an honour and a pleasure to work with him, though, having heard some of the other contributions in this debate this afternoon, I feel somewhat slighted that at no point did he ever try to shove into my hand a bound copy of Hansard —again demonstrating his wisdom, in that he obviously understood it would have been of absolutely no use to me whatever.

We are in the midst of a transport legislation movie. We have had the civil aviation Bill, we are now on the Railways Bill, and later down the track we have a roads Bill. It really is “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”. In my Second Reading contribution, I would like to consider that we are also in the midst of an AI revolution. Rail was the white heat technology of its time, and there are lessons we can learn from the revolution in rail, for both rail and the Bill, and for our approach to artificial intelligence.

Be in no doubt that rail was extraordinary. Steam literally changed time. What did we learn about safety and security? Brunel’s brilliant bells and whistles system is, in reality, still an extraordinarily effective way to do signalling. As for how we need to communicate the benefits and possibilities of rail, at the time when rail emerged it was often thought that you would get mortally injured and probably not reach the end of your journey on these horror machines from hell. What did Brunel do? He did not build stations but built cathedrals to the railway, at London Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads. What an extraordinary demonstration of the innovation of technology from both Brunel and the extraordinary Daniel Gooch.

That innovation needs to be brought right up to date with our approach to the railways and to artificial intelligence. What we saw with rail is that, when you have such innovation and you connect it through communicating it to the public, a glamour emerges. Look at how we were nostalgic about the railway so early in its operation. The Railway Children was published in 1905, and later we had Auden’s “Night Mail”, “crossing the Border”, and Philip Larkin coming down late one term from Cambridge in a button-studded leather carriage, witnessing all of those wonderful “Whitsun Weddings”.

Why do we have this glamour around rail and its technology and innovation? Because it is a human-connecting, social experience. It does not just connect us geographically; it connects us socially. That is what Richard Branson fundamentally understood when he took over the franchise, which I had the great pleasure to discuss with him many years ago. He understood that he could not control the track, the signals or the stations, but, for everything he could control and for the staff he trained, he understood that it was about service and the passenger experience.

I suggest that the golden thread to run through the Bill should be passenger experience and how we deliver, from the first touchpoint of considering buying a ticket, that end-to-end service. If you get passenger experience right, you will get accessibility right, because accessibility is just delivering excellence in passenger experience and service. As we have already heard, not least from my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, we are some way off that, which cannot continue. How accessible and inclusive a service is—in this case, the railways—is as good a measure as any of success.

The growth agenda of this Government is critical. Rail can deliver on that. That is also tied to access. The Government have a desire to get more disabled people into work, but it is quite right for a disabled person to ask how they are to get a job when they cannot even get on to a train. How enabling and empowering rail could be. The Bill needs to speak far more to that.

I move beyond passengers, to freight. What has happened to all of the work around digital rail? Where are all the principles from that project? The ambition then was for a 40% increase in freight through digitising the signals. That would be transformational for rail and for our economy. There is so much work being done with autonomous vehicles at the moment, to have a truck that can lead a convoy of 20, 30, 40 or 50 trucks. That sounds very much to me like a train. We need to get freight back on to the rails. It is more effective, more efficient and more able to drive economic activity.

Finally, I ask the Minister about an anomaly. He quite correctly suggests that we have track and train connected, which makes sense from an integration perspective. But what happens in a situation, particularly in London, where we have shared track use between London Underground and rail? It is often the case that, in such instances, things fall between the cracks. Who is responsible when a signal goes down? Does it get fixed in hours or, as is often the case, days? That cannot be acceptable. What does the Bill do to deliver on that currently anomalous situation?

Rail matters, thus the Bill matters extraordinarily. Rail enables us to get about and to get on. Will the Bill succeed? As any prophet has to say to any sceptic, time will tell. There is plenty for us to discuss in Committee across all of these issues. At this stage, perhaps it can be seen as probably the greatest real-time experiment in “railpolitik”.

19:38:00

Lord Doyle (Non-Afl)My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, who made a typically thoughtful contribution to the debate. I fully associate myself with his remarks on the anniversary of 7/7, which was a time when I was working in government and certainly will never forget.

I also associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, on the recent rail crash near Bedford. Like him, I use that line regularly to travel home. Our thoughts are with all of those who are affected by it and our thanks go out to the emergency services who responded so heroically.

It is a source of real pleasure to be able to speak in this debate on the Railways Bill, which delivers a crucial manifesto commitment for the Government. There can be no doubt that taking back control of our railways and ending one of the most disastrous Conservative privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s was one of our most popular policies at the last election —I would argue for good reason. We know that that privatisation was flawed from day one because of the split between track and train. The Bill will bring the management of those back together to improve performance, with Great British Railways managing day-to-day operations and taking long-term decisions in the public interest. This means that we will have a more reliable and accessible railway, with better value journeys.

On that word “accessible”, I want to mention the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. Any of us who follow her on Twitter will know the stories she regularly tells of just how much the railways are failing at the moment and how much we need the Bill to succeed. That is one example of how the structure of the railways at the moment is a mess, with passengers at the mercy of a myriad organisations. From buying a ticket to finding out who is responsible for a delay, there is a Kafkaesque process of opaque rules and shifting blame. That is the reality of the current fractured system.

Let us take the example of Network Rail and the train operating companies employing hundreds of full-time staff simply to establish who should cover the costs of delays. Given the pessimism we have seen about the Bill from some of those on the Benches opposite, I will stress some of the reasons why these changes are so welcome. Great British Railways will create a single organisation to operate, maintain and improve our railways, to ensure smarter decision-making around interchanges and reliability, and to align incentives ensuring that action is taken against the common causes of delay, providing access and accountability to passengers and taxpayers alike.

Taking back control of our railways under Great British Railways will have the potential to deliver the improvements that customers and taxpayers rightly expect to see. That will need hard work and hard thinking and, yes, hard choices. Great British Railways is a great opportunity but it is incumbent on all the industry stakeholders to grab it. Costs across the railway are too high, rightly infuriating taxpayers and farepayers, who see their bucks deliver far too little bang, as the cost of building a mile of rail in Britain is the highest in the world. Let us be frank, industrial relations are not where they need to be. All sides must embrace the new era of Great British Railways if we are to have the truly new start that our railways need.

Fortunately, this is all in the capable hands, as we have heard, of my noble friend the Minister, who I have no doubt will resolve these issues. Having paid him that compliment, I want to use this debate to ask a few questions about a project that is close to my heart and which is crucial to delivering the Government’s growth ambitions, and one that I hope will benefit from the new strategic co-ordination through Great British Railways: East West Rail. The line will transport people from Oxford to Cambridge as the core of that growth corridor as we replace the much-missed Varsity line.

First, can my noble friend the Minister give an update on the Oxford to Milton Keynes section, where construction has finished but operating contracts are apparently still being negotiated? What is his latest estimate of when we will see services running? Secondly, on the Bedford to Cambridge section, this is a wonderful and much-needed opportunity to reopen a line that was closed back in the 1960s, but I hope my noble friend will not mind me again pushing on delivery timetables and plans, given the centrality of this project to so much of Bedfordshire’s ambitions.

It is welcome that the Government have pledged £1.3 billion towards transport infrastructure for the new Universal United Kingdom resort, especially the much-needed station at Wixams. Of course, that station is supposed to be not just a simple addition to the current north-south line but an east-west junction. Given that the development consent order for East West Rail will not be submitted until 2027, what is my noble friend’s level of confidence that both lines will be operating at Wixams when the Universal UK resort opens in 2031?

There is a second government ambition for which East West Rail is crucialthe new town at Tempsford. The feasibility studies for that new town have focused on the great potential of Tempsford as the junction point between the London to Edinburgh east coast main line and East West Rail, so the early development of the station is crucial, not just as a station but as the anchor project for the development of Tempsford new town, which the Government have said they want to be under way by the time of the next general election. Can my noble friend the Minister express confidence that that timeline will be sufficient to deliver these two crucial projects?

I touch briefly on the issue of open-access train operators, which has been mentioned by a number of speakers. We have seen the success of open-access operators such as Grand Central and Lumo within the current railways landscape. Can my noble friend the Minister reassure us that the new set-up will ensure that there is a fair basis for open-access operators to come into the system and that they will be able to provide a form of competition and choice for customers in the new service? I ask this as someone who likes taking railway journeys for fun: can my noble friend reassure us what the capacity will be for heritage operators within the new system, that those will not get squeezed out and that there will still be a chance for us to have those routes that benefit tourism and travel around the country?

The railways have long suffered from misaligned incentives—thanks to this Labour Government, no more. Passengers will benefit, waste will be cut, fares will be lower, the new Great British Railways app will simplify booking, and the passenger watchdog will give travellers recourse. This can truly be a new golden age for our railways and our country.

19:46:00

Lord Sentamu (CB)My Lords, we all say to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, on his valedictory speech: thank you for lifting our spirits. We will miss you. It is good to follow the noble Lord, Lord Doyle, and all 26 noble Lords who have spoken. Some of them have stolen my words so it is no good me repeating them.

In my contribution to the Second Reading of this very important Bill, I begin by recalling an event at York station on 23 April 2017. It involved four generations of trains on the same track—the east coast main line—at the same time, travelling in the same direction, celebrating the past, the future and the present. A total of five trains took part in the historic Four Trains event. The occasion was also a celebration of the east coast main line, where four of the trains travelled side by side.

The four trains featured in the line-up included the “Flying Scotsman”, the iconic steam locomotive; the Virgin Trains East Coast Class 43 HST—that is, high speed train; the InterCity 125, nicknamed the 125 because of its top operational speed of 125 mph; and the InterCity 225 Class 91, designed for a maximum speed of 140 mph but, due to British railway signalling regulations, its operational top speed is restricted to 125 mph in regular service. Still, during testing it achieved a record speed of 162 mph—what a pity. Then there was the Hitachi Azuma Class 800, which had yet to come into service but was to do so in 12 months. Its operating speed is 125 mph. On sections equipped with in-cab European train control systems signalling, it is capable of reaching 140 mph.

Having arrived early, we saw the Class 55 Deltic D9002 “King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry” being used to haul the “Flying Scotsman” into position before all four trains were lined up alongside each other. I suggest that that historic event should remind us, as we consider this Bill, to celebrate the past, present and future of our railways. To move forward demands that we know where we are coming from but not to be enslaved by the past. There should not just be grumbles; there must be some elements of celebration of the amazing engineering that created trains in this country.

The passengers, customers and workers held a clear and firm view that the best period for the east coast main line was when it was under GNER, Great North Eastern Railway, between 1996 and 2007. The leadership and management of its chief executive, Christopher Garnett, brother of the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, was head and shoulders above that of anyone before or since. As with all enterprises, if we have the right leader at the top, all is possible, and that is not linked to ownership. As the noble Baroness, Lady Leaman, ably reminded us, success will not be purely the structures we have created by this Bill but the results in terms of the satisfaction of passengers and customers. As a Yorkshire farmer said to me, “I plant grass for my dairy cattle, and I only know that the grass is good when I see the smile on the face of a cow”. May we in what we are doing create a similar reality.

I wholeheartedly endorse Clause 3 in Chapter 1 of Part 1, which sets out the seven functions of Great British Railways. I declare an interest as a regular user of trains in London and on the east coast main line, even when on one occasion the train I was on was delayed by 666 minutes. Yes, they could do better. All our trains could do better. That is what this Bill is about.

May this Bill do what Christopher Garnett did. I know that British passengers and customers have the capacity to put up with what is intolerable. Let us improve the Bill to become a clarion call to our trains, saying, “Enough is enough. We want you to be the change we want to see”, but this will depend largely on finding leaders whose actions will inspire others to dream more, to learn more, to do more and to become more—nudging everyone towards that horizon of hope.

Will the Minister assure your Lordships’ House that this Bill will give him the tools he needs to bring about the change he knows in his heart must happen? I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, “You have what it takes. Please do it.” Politicians may not want to go all the way to where they should go, but they can pave the way to do it and be like the English football team. I want to say, “Come on, Lord Hendy!”

It is a delight to speak in this debate, and I wish it great success. There is no holding back, because this is a critical time for us to be the greatest people who run trains, unlike those who have just followed us.

19:54:00

Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)My Lords, I must confess I had mixed feelings when I saw that I had been drawn 30th out of 31 contributors to the debate this afternoon, but, in fact, it has been a huge pleasure. It has been an excellent and very well-informed debate, and it is a privilege to take part. I was particularly taken with the valedictory speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton. I thank the noble Lord for his service. I can tell, even as a relatively new Member, that he will be missed by the House.

It has also been a privilege to take part in a debate which has included contributions from a number of former Secretaries of State for Transport. They made the case for privatisation very well, using hard numbers: increased numbers of passengers, increased projects, improving reliability on the railways, and savings made, whereas, the proponents of this Bill, I fear, are relying largely on nostalgia. The reputation of British Rail, back as it was in the 1970s, appears to have undergone something of a renaissance in recent years. I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Blencathra managed to puncture that particular balloon and remind us all of exactly what it was like.

I had the privilege to work for the Royal Mail in the 1980s and the early 1990s. We had a lot of dealings with British Rail. I would come into the office—I was private secretary to the director of operations here in London—and I would be faced every morning with a tray full of telexes; noble Lords will recall telexes, I am sure. Every one of them was about some form of delay or disruption to the mail overnight, and a very large proportion of those was due to failings on the part of our partner, British Rail. I would have to assemble those into a file and present them to the rather sceptical director when he came in later during the day. I can remember well how incandescent he was when I had to tell him that British Rail had forgotten to put fuel in a train and it had ground to a halt just outside Birmingham with its load. I remember a particular day with some pride when we launched the mail train which ran from Euston station to Carlisle. We had a train full of bigwigs—directors from British Rail, directors from the Post Office; we had my noble friend Lord Jopling, who was the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry at the time, and Lord Clinton-Davis, who was his Labour opposite number. We set off from Euston with our hearts high, looking forward to reaching Carlisle. Unfortunately, something fell off the train at Nuneaton, and we ground to a halt and sat in a field for an hour, with nobody telling us what the reason for that was. Nobody on the train knew, least of all, of course, the senior British Rail operators who were panicking somewhat about the experience. It was a constant source of controversy and difficulty for us, because we knew, as a nationalised organisation, that if we wanted to please the Government, we would put all our letters on to the trains. If we wanted to help the environment, because we cared about that even in those days, we would put all our mail on to the trains. But if we wanted the letters to get there the next day, we would put them in a van and drive them ourselves, because that was the only way that we could guarantee the quality of service that people required from us.

I particularly enjoyed the early contribution from my noble friend Lady May. She raised the issue of devolution and the contradictions that that will raise. The Minister, having run Transport for London, will be only too aware, I am sure, of the contradictions and the challenges this puts in place for London and for other major cities around the country. When he was running Transport for London, he would have wanted the trains to stop at every single stop going into London, provide a metro service and pick up the maximum number of people possible, but when he becomes the one controlling mind that he presented to us, running the trains on behalf of the country, no doubt he will want them to run express services and stop in as few places as possible to keep to the timetable and connect the cities. That is before the contradictions and the challenges raised by increasing the amount of freight on the rails as well. Perhaps the Minister can explain to us how the concept of one controlling mind will meet what is known as the Makerfield test.

My noble friends Lord Lansley and Lord Young of Cookham raised the issue of investment. Again, this is a serious problem. Public money is paid by taxpayers by and large because they expect it to be spent on schools and hospitals, and those things will have the priority. This is why the old British Rail was always so badly underfunded. When we look forward to the situation facing us now in the UK, we are in a world where we need to boost our defence spending and there are all sorts of other demands on the budget. Great British Railways is going to be very fortunate if it gets much money out of a government settlement with all those other high priorities competing.

Furthermore, there is an issue of London versus the regions. I know that when I was deputy mayor for London, we could always make a good case for investing in London’s railways because, if nothing else, if you put the money into London, you know you are going to get it back eventually—there will be a return on that investment. That is how we got the Elizabeth line, although I am sure the Minister remembers that it was quite tough to get. It will be even harder to get investment in projects outside London, which will not cost in so easily because they will not meet Treasury rules.

From my point of view, I would perhaps give some advice to the Minister. Transport professionals should rely a bit less on putting in massive projects—big toys for boys, if you like—and look at breaking that money up and spending it on smaller projects, which may not get the headlines but which can be completed much more quickly. That will have a demonstrable effect in improving the reliability of the rail services.

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)Hear, hear!

Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)Thank you. He was heard in silence, almost.

We often hear in such debates—we have not heard it too much today—about how much better the rail services are in other countries. I just want to let the House know that that is not just a debate or an opinion which is voiced by people in the UK. I remember that quite a few years ago, and the Minister will recall this as well, we brought in a man called Bob Kiley from New York to run Transport for London. I was in a hotel in the West End talking to some New Yorkers at the bar, and I said to them, “We’ve got Mr Kiley coming over to run our services”. They said to me, “Well, he’s made a much better job of your Tube than he ever did with our rail services in New York”. I said, “The only problem is that he’s actually not arrived yet”. So it is a truth that, when we travel, we see the best of people’s rail services; when we live there, we do not quite get the sort of service that we would expect. If the Bill is to be successful, I hope that that situation will be corrected.

20:03:00

Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)My Lords, it is a privilege to be the last Back-Bench speaker. We all know that at least it is almost over.

I am totally in favour of the Bill. It will create a much better situation and a much better structure than the one we have at the moment. There is a wonderful myth going through this debate that privatisation was a great success. It was not quite said in so many words but somehow, by involving the private sector, things changed massively and those were wonderful days. Of course, what they really were was an opportunity for financial manoeuvring. Privatisation, essentially, was a financial and operational failure.

If we go back to when it started, there was a company called Railtrack looking after the track. It started operating in April 1994 and initially had very good results. It borrowed money and the Government gave it various guarantees. It was sort of a proper company, in its legal structure, but it eventually fell apart in 2002. Out of it, we created another company called Network Rail in 2002. I do not think anybody actually got to the bottom of what sort of company that was. It clearly was not a proper plc and we lost sight of worrying about that, for some reason. But we were still in the European Union at that point and part of an organisation which I believe was called Eurostat. On 1 November 2014, Eurostat said, “That’s a nationalised industry. All the money is guaranteed by government; all the subsidies come from government; all the rules and what it is supposed to do come from government. It’s a nationalised industry”. So we nationalised it and that was fascinating, because it was one of the biggest nationalisations ever. It cost the country £34 billion to transfer the guaranteed debt that Network Rail had at that point to the Treasury, and barely anybody noticed it. That is the sort of money the privatised railway consumed.

On the train operating companies—all those so-called wonderful companies—let us not lose sight of the fact that many of them failed. The state of play in May 2024 was that four of them were being operated by the Government through an organisation called the operator of last resort. I believe that one of the things this Bill will produce is much more clarity over money.

That may not be a happy experience, but I believe we will be in a much better place, because the best brains in the so-called privatised railways compete against each other to win the point on who is to blame or how to get the best paths—the debates on the timetable used to go on for 18 months or so. We will have a situation where the top people in Great British Railways will all be trying to achieve the same thing, and the top teams will share those objectives. I know, because I have done it: I spent 17 years in the railway business. You can have a publicly owned railway, and you can manage it. Obviously, you have to break it up into manageable chunks, but you can transmit a common objective throughout the organisation, and we did. Not only will the teams see the value of working together but workers will see the value of working together. My prediction is that everybody, particularly passengers, including disabled passengers—I am very sensitive to the case that has been made for a better handling of disabled passengers—will get a better deal, as well as the taxpayer.

I have two concerns. One is the level of consultation and involvement. If you go through the whole document from cover to cover, you will discover 34 clauses where the Secretary of State has decisive authority, 11 clauses where the Office of Rail and Road has decisive authority, and 10 where Great British Railways has decisive authority. There are six clauses where the Office of Rail and Road has consultative rights, and two where GBR has them. There are four clauses where GBR is expected to originate action, and at least one where ORR is similarly expected to do so. The whole consultation process is incredibly complex. It is possibly necessary, and perhaps inevitable, for it to be that complex, because of the multiple stakeholders, but it will create friction and noise. The most important set of skills that will be necessary in this new organisation will be for managing that diversity of consultation, and some of the best people in Great British Railways will be needed to manage those various relationships. Consultation is not a bad thing, but it needs to be very carefully managed.

Another problem with this organisation, which I put to the House, is that the money will become very clear. Operating railways is expensive. The only way for a railway to pay for itself is through very high volumes, and high volumes will work. Everything else, virtually everywhere in the world, has to be subsidised. We need to have a debate about what the railway does for us as a society, and we need to look at the real value it produces. We need to get away from the best speech and getting the best chunk of money out of the Treasury and get back to a consensus on the criteria that we need to measure that debate. With that hard financial reality on the one hand, and a unified organisation that can see the whole operation, with an absolute commitment in the top team to the passenger and to society, I believe this will be a success.

20:12:00

Baroness Pidgeon (LD)My Lords, this has been a very interesting and wide-ranging debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, for his valedictory speech and thoughtful words, and I wish him well in his retirement.

The focus from these Benches is on how we improve train services for passengers and freight. How do we ensure the passenger is at the centre of Great British Railways, and that it operates in a transparent and fair manner?

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansleywe need the railway to succeed. If we are to see more people using the railway to travel around our country, it needs to become a more attractive offer. That means reliable services, more carriages where needed, comfortable seats, easy storage for luggage and bikes, on-board catering for longer-distance journeys—I have raised this many times with the Minister—good-value fares that are easy to understand, and high speed wifi. We need the railway to be an attractive experience that rivals using the car, which, as we have heard, remains the go-to mode of transport for many people outside our cities. Having heard many noble Lords’ experiences today, I think the account from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, of a 666-minute delay feels like the record.

Stations also need to feel safethey need to be well-lit and staffed where possible. The accessibility of train stations and surrounding areas needs to be improved for those who are mobility impaired. It was very good to hear, in his opening words, the Minister’s commitment to this space. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, highlighted the impact of this on the economy, as well as on passengers.

A modern railway is going to need significant planning and investment, and a 30-year strategy at its core with measurable KPIs to assess progress. There is no point bringing the track and trains together if there is uncertainty over budgets to run the railway each day, budgets for investing in rolling stock and infrastructure and, dare I say it, even budgets to grow the railway or make improvements that allow greater access for freight and passenger trains, as highlighted by my noble friend Lord Bradshaw. We will be tabling amendments in Committee about funding for the railway. Ahead of that, I ask the Minister whether the rolling stock strategy will be published by September, so that noble Lords can see how it sits alongside this legislation and can provide certainty for the industry.

One glaring omission from the Bill is a passenger growth duty. Rail reform is not just about stabilising the system. We strongly support calls for passenger growth targets equivalent to the duty for freight in the Bill and believe that embedding growth for passengers would send a strong message that this is about expanding and growing the railway, rather than managing decline. As my noble friend Lord Mohammed of Tinsley mentioned, we want to see “rail miles” introduced on the railway, because a key part of a passenger-centred railway is the need to offer incentives for passengers to try the railway and a loyalty scheme for regular passengers. We believe that Great British Railways needs to look at how to get more people using the railway, rather than cutting trains to reduce costs. There are good initiatives in other European countries, such as the Netherlands. I hope that this is an area that the Minister will be sympathetic towards as we move to Committee.

My noble friend Lord Dixon highlighted the importance of a level playing field for apps and others who sell train tickets, and the wider opportunities in this area to improve services for passengers. We have seen such progress in recent years, centred around the consumer; we must not go backwards. Likewise, my noble friend Lady Leaman rightly described the importance of a quality passenger experience, issues around delay-repay and the need for automated refunds. My noble friend Lady Brinton talked passionately about the importance of GBR becoming a truly accessible railway in every sense and, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, described the daily realities for disabled passengers.

The noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, talked about the rail giving access to work for disabled people. I recently met a young accessibility campaigner from Manchester, Nathaniel Yates. Nathaniel has been campaigning for accessible stations across Manchester. He has been championing the concerns of many young people who attend specialist colleges and are prevented from using the railway, despite stations being nearby. This can be due to a lack of staffing or limited step-free access, and there was a mixed experience of using passenger assistance. Some felt that the accessibility challenges led to them using different rail stations or different, often more costly, modes of transport. We need to see an improvement in accessibility. We will return to this important topic in Committee, to ensure that our railway is fit for everyone.

Passenger safety is also critical. The latest passenger survey, published by Transport Focus last month, showed that personal safety and security on the train and at stations is an increasing priority for passengers. Some 12,000 rail passengers took part in the research and ranked various aspects of travelling by train. Safety concerns came second and third, behind only trains running on time and not being cancelled. For some, personal safety and security on trains topped their “what matters” list, including, in particular, women, disabled people and passengers from black and minority ethnic communities. Passengers say that they feel that increased staff visibility, including ticket checking and challenging low-level anti-social behaviour and the use of CCTV “in the moment” would really help. Great British Railways must ensure that stations are well lit and have CCTV and look at staffing levels across the network. Turning to other parts of the Bill, concerns remain over the scope of the clauses and the unintended consequences as drafted. We heard support for the growth of freight from the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Whitaker. For example, in the world of freight, ports and freight terminals often own and operate rail infrastructure that connects directly to the wider rail network but has been funded and developed privately. For the private sector to continue to invest in this rail-linked infrastructure, the language in the Bill has to be precise, and not allow for GBR to potentially intervene in private rail infrastructure and create legal uncertainty.

London St Pancras Highspeed also has concerns with the language in the Bill, which could unintentionally create uncertainty for specialist infrastructure that sits outside the new GBR access and charging framework. We will seek clarity in Committee. As the Government create this new organisation, it is important that it has the right culture from the start: open, transparent and accessible through all its business and to its core. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure the House of this at this stage.

We on these Benches have some concerns over the shift in power between the Secretary of State, the Office of Rail and Road and the Passengers’ Council. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, also raised concerns about the Office of Rail and Road and its reduced role. We are concerned that the Secretary of State is, in effect, judge and jury in some areas. We also want to see that the Passengers’ Council has the teeth it needs to do its job well and we want to see decisions published and evidence that has supported any decisions, as well as real engagement with passengers and representative bodies.

My noble friend Lady Humphreys and the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, highlighted the needs for Wales, with the semi-devolution there, and across the House we heard a number of different concerns—from the noble Baronesses, Lady May of Maidenhead and Lady Alexander, the noble Lords, Lord Grayling and Lord Lansley, and others—on the issue of devolution. My maiden speech in this House focused on rail devolution. The Minister said on Report of the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill on 6 November 2024 in responding to my amendment on rail devolution:

“I can reaffirm to your Lordships’ House that the railways Bill will include a statutory role for devolved Governments and mayoral combined authorities. They will be involved in governing, managing, planning and developing the railways ”.—[ Official Report , 6/11/24; col. 1543.] Yet, the Bill as currently drafted, in the view of a number of mayoral authorities, does not provide the statutory powers that mayoral strategic authorities require; rather, they are consultative. It is permissive rather than mandatory. GBR “may” enter into arrangements with local government bodies or it may not. It is consultation-based rather than commissioning-based. It does not provide a clear route for devolving rail funding. As this Government are moving towards establishing more mayoral strategic authorities, it is clear that we need statutory powers designed in from the start rather than bolted on afterwards. Transport for London and the Mayor of London are concerned that the Bill as drafted would give GBR extensive control over network access for both GBR and non-GBR operators without sufficient safeguarding for devolved or open-access services, as others noble Lords have mentioned. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, also flagged issues with the heritage railway sector, which is relevant here too. This could allow GBR to prioritise longer-distance services over metro-style services such as the Elizabeth line, potentially resulting in fewer passenger journeys in and around London, reduced service frequencies, and constraints on future growth. I flag to the noble Lord, Lord Evans, who talked about the Elizabeth line, that two-thirds of the investment in the Elizabeth line came from London businesses and development and borrowing from TfL, not national government. That is how you build a successful railway line.

I hope the Minister will reconsider the wording in the Bill around devolution, given his assurance to me previously in this House. We on these Benches want to see Great British Railways succeed and deliver improved train services for passengers and expanded freight, removing lorries from our roads. We look forward to working with the Minister to help improve the Bill and secure the transformation that passengers need and deserve.

20:23:00

Lord Moylan (Con)My Lords, I start by associating myself with the remarks made by noble Lords, particularly the Minister, concerning the doleful anniversary we are marking today of the attacks on London’s transport 21 years ago. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, on his valedictory speech and his service to your Lordships’ House over so many years as well as his broader public service. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this wide-ranging debate. I do not propose in this winding-up speech to respond to each of them individually, but it is worth saying that I was very touched, as I think all of us were, by the remarks made by our noble colleagues who have been affected by the very poor service that the railways often give to those who are in wheelchairs or disabled in other ways.

I thank the Minister for the way he introduced the Bill. Personally, I would be delighted—I am sure your Lordships’ House will understand my position—if Mr Burnham were to replace the Minister on the Front Bench in speaking for transport, but I entirely understand why that is not a widespread opinion across the House.

I will start with a point of agreement. The existing model of privatisation, despite having been profoundly successful and transformative over 20 or 30 years, is not fit for purpose currently, because it depended on very high volumes of passengers. During the pandemic, those volumes collapsed, and they have not recovered since. In current or indeed foreseeable circumstances, it is not possible to maintain the financial model on which privatisation was based. I will grant that point to the Minister from the outset, as I did when we discussed the previous railways Bill that he introduced. Under the existing privatisation scheme, the transfer of fares risk to train operating companies that are not able to bear it in a crisis was a flaw. Although it appeared to work for a very long time, that was, as I said, because the railways were doing very well in terms of passenger demand, but it is not capable of being sustained now.

A degree of reform is needed, and it is worth congratulating the previous Government and my noble friend Lord Grayling on recognising a need for reform and setting it in hand. So we had the Williams review, which recommended maintaining private sector involvement but having the operations conducted on what is often referred to as a concession basis. That is the basis used for the Docklands Light Railway, the Elizabeth line, the London Overground, and buses in London and Greater Manchester. On a concession basis, the fares risk is retained by the franchiser; otherwise, it operates in a very similar manner to what we have at the moment. Nobody recommended going back to British Rail, but that is what this Bill gives us.

At the heart of the Government’s argument is the claim that managing the track and train together is more efficient than any alternative. However, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham—I was not aware of his speech in advance—simply tore that argument to pieces, with complete forensic acuity, in explaining that what is regarded as fragmentation by the Minister is a specialisation that works in so many other areas of our lives. It is a completely ideological position—an unevidenced ideological bet—that the Government are taking on a particular model that has been tried in the past and failed, but they believe that this time somehow it will work again. The Minister needs to explain why the European Union has moved in the opposite direction. He needs to explain why train services are getting better with private competition on the European continent, not getting worse. He needs to tell us what would happen to this Bill if we rejoined the European Union. It would not simply be the detail that would need to change; the whole structure would collapse.

Let me move to the detail. The first question that comes up is devolution. These are the words of Andy Burnham in giving evidence to the Public Bill Committee in the other place:

“We want the right to specify timetables … Rather than a right to request, the onus should be the other way around; there should be the right to refuse ”.—[ Official Report , Commons, Public Bill Committee, 20/1/26; col. 78.] He also said:

“From our point of view, we would want … joint decision making ”.—[ Official Report , Commons, Public Bill Committee, 20/1/26; col. 86.] Do the Government still adhere to the principles in this Bill on devolution, given that that is what the incoming Prime Minister said just a little while ago?

And he is not alone. The Mayor of London—hardly a person I would expect to be quoting favourably—has said something very similar. He said that, as drafted, the Bill would give GBR extensive control over network access for both GBR and non-GBR operators; the difference between the Mayor of London and the Mayor of Greater Manchester, of course, is that the Mayor of London actually runs passenger rail services. He went on to say that there is no sufficient safeguard for devolved or open access services. So it is not simply a right-wing fantasy that express services might be given priority over local services. I ask the Minister plainly: will the Government now concede that Clause 5 must become a genuine right to devolution, or is the Minister going to come back to the Dispatch Box within months explaining why the Government have changed their position?

On the ORR, in effect, the Bill discards years of economic regulatory expertise that the ORR has built up on track access and charging decisions, handing that role instead to GBR for it to be judge and jury in its own operations. Where the ORR can still act under the Bill, its powers are illusory. It may quash a decision, but that appears to me no more than asking GBR to reconsider, with substitution of the ORR’s own judgment reserved for cases of legal error—a very high threshold and a very difficult bar to meet.

That brings us to understanding the policies that underlie the Bill. Five of the documents that are most central to how the Bill will work in practice have all, we are told, been pushed back to spring 2027. The rumour is that we are not going to have Committee on the Bill until October at the earliest—but even that is not good enough. It will not be spring 2027. We still will not have the documents we need. The ORR’s consultation on its own appeals function—the very process that freight and open access operators will depend on to challenge GBR—is not due until spring 2027. The retail code of practice, which was brought up by my noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe and the noble Lord, Lord Dixon of Jericho, among others, is not due to be published until spring 2027. GBR’s own access and use policy—the document that is meant to stop it favouring its own services over freight and other users—will not appear until spring 2027. The long-term rail strategy will also not be out until spring 2027. So I ask the Minister: how are we meant to give the Bill serious and detailed scrutiny when so many of the documents are still missing?

Let us turn to freight in that case. I am happy to accept the Minister’s personal commitment to the role of rail freight and to increasing it, but there is a clear risk that freight will be deprioritised within Great British Railways—particularly given the network capacity constraints and GBR’s control of both infrastructure and passenger services.

We come to open access. The passenger-focused, innovative railway that the Government promise from GBR already exists. Lumo and Hull Trains scored 90% and 94% respectively for overall satisfaction in Transport Focus’s most recent survey, outperforming most of the contracted network, and they have delivered it through competitive fares and genuine value for money, not through a single national monopoly. Yet this is the sector now being asked to withhold investment in the railways because a Bill built around GBR’s vertical integration signals precisely the animosity towards open access enterprise that these operators have warned against throughout its passage. Of course, access charges can be set as high as GBR decides. It is a matter for GBR; there is no cap. Has the Minister costed the cost to the country of the loss of private investment from open access that this uncertainty is already producing? That brings us to the passenger. Passenger numbers have gone up since privatisation, as journeys have roughly doubled over that time. The Government’s answer to any problems that passengers have is a new passenger watchdog expanded out of Transport Focus. It is going to cost a large amount of money to run, but what does the passenger get for this expense? It gets a watchdog with no enforcement powers of its own, because enforcement stays with the ORR on referral at the ORR’s discretion. What precisely is the watchdog for if it cannot make GBR do anything?

Turning to industrial relations, even the noble Lord, Lord Doyle, admitted that this is an area that needs proper attention. This Bill is a gift to the trades unions —one almost detects their hand in the drafting of it. The Government have removed in other legislation the 40% support threshold for strike ballots in important public services, including transport. They have scrapped the 50% turnout threshold as well, handing trades unions considerably greater latitude to shut down passenger services at will. But still there is no requirement that pay rises be linked to productivity. Indeed, the RMT’s own Network Rail settlement, which the union openly celebrated, secured a 3.8% RPI-linked rise with explicitly no efficiency or productivity conditions attached. The RMT has said that it now expects similar deals from the train operating companies. I have asked the Government twice at the Dispatch Box whether pay awards under GBR will be linked to productivity and twice received no answer. Will the Minister respond today? There is a further question that the Government cannot dodge indefinitely. The RMT has threatened national strikes, capable of shutting down the network entirely. Will GBR bring about the standardisation of terms and conditions as the sole employer? If it is going to do so, on what terms, at what cost and in exchange for what productivity benefits?

I come to the GBR website and app, mentioned by my noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe and the noble Lord, Lord Dixon of Jericho. This is a solution in search of a problem. We already have a range of innovative retailers, and passengers are perfectly well served by them. Competition has built Britain a world-class rail retail sector, with passengers the primary beneficiaries. I have asked the Minister several times now in Written Questions how much the Government are spending on the GBR website and app but have not been told. Can the Minister answer today?

GBR will compete in a retail market that it also controls, having simultaneously taken over the industry management functions that are currently held by the Rail Delivery Group, including licensing retailers and managing access to data—that is an unprecedented structural conflict of interest, with GBR’s own retailer embedded in its operational business. There is no requirement for independent governance or accounting separation, and no safeguard against public funding cross-subsidising it against competition. When the Minister was Commissioner of Transport for London, under the wise guidance of Boris Johnson, all the TfL journey and fares data became open free to app developers. That was of great benefit to passengers, and we see the apps on our phones. Is he willing to make all of GBR’s fares and journey data, without restriction, open to app developers? Is that something that he might be willing to consider?

I conclude as I started, by trying to find a point of agreement. I concede that there are certain aspects of the railway where a single controlling mind is beneficial—for example, the timetabling or, potentially, the management, improvement and expansion of the infrastructure. However, there is no logic in the single controlling mind also being the largest operator of passenger services. It is that decision to make the single controlling mind also the largest but not the sole operator of passenger services that sets up all the contradictions and conflicts in this Bill which will keep us so busy in Committee.

20:40:00

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this thorough and thoughtful debate. I would like to start by paying tribute to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson. His distinguished record of service in this place and the Civil Service is a beacon of dedication and commitment to public good. He has brought to our proceedings a deep experience in the heart of government and his contributions are always thoughtful, measured and influential. As always, he is well informed about the railways. Gladstone made provision for the nationalisation of railways in the 1844 Railway Regulation Act. It was not pursued, but it was an early indication that running the railway as one system might be a good idea. I know that the House will join me in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, for everything he has done and wishing him all the best for the future after he retires in September.

Turning to the debate at hand, we have heard that everyone across the House can agree that the railways require reform. The current system is clearly no longer working for passengers, operators or taxpayers. Services have been unreliable, customers have been unhappy and the system has provided poor value for money. We have begun taking services into public ownership, but that was never a long-term solution. The Railways Bill is the answer to the issues that have plagued our railways for far too long, providing new leadership, accountability and long-term thinking to the sector and better meeting the needs and expectations of those who rely on it. The Bill continues the great work of the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024, enabling us to finally reform the wider railway and provide a better service to taxpayers.

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have expressed support, with one exception, in my doing this job in the future. I am sure everything they have said will have no effect whatever on the new Prime Minister. I also will not tell my wife. The noble Lord, Lord Evans of Guisborough, referred to me as the “guiding mind”. I just say to him that the one thing that the Bill is designed to produce is to stop Ministers being the guiding mind of the railway. The purpose of the Bill is to have a body of people that can run the railway and who are professional and committed to it. This has been a varied debate. I am going to do my best to cover as many as possible of the topics that were raised. As ever, it is subject to my handwriting and the vagaries of my notes, and I may write to noble Lords in some cases.

I want to start with access reform because the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, said that the infrastructure was not used efficiently. He is right, actually. He talked about digital signalling, as did the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, and they are both right. One of the issues that we have had is that we have not had a long-term plan for the railway. We have not had a long-term strategy in which to decide where to put those investments and where the capacity that they would give would be best utilised. That is one of the reasons for the provisions in the Bill.

On open access, which was raised by the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Moylan, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley, and others, the truth is that open access has been severely constrained recently. Most of the applications that have been made to the ORR have been declined simply because the view of the ORR is that there is insufficient capacity on the main lines in Britain to accept more trains. I would contend that one of the reasons for that is that, without a whole system look at the use of the infrastructure, we will never create more paths.

Interestingly, that whole system view of the infrastructure on the east coast main line, which took place several years ago but was not implemented—it could not be implemented because there was nobody to authorise it until I did—did create more capacity. The chances are that, if GBR looks at the job that the Bill will give it, to correctly look at capacity across the railway, I think it is far more likely that there will be capacity on the main lines and that therefore open access will in fact have more chance in the future than it has had in the recent past.

On freight, I thank all those who have said that the freight target is welcome. As the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, said, it will drive the Government’s net-zero policies. The noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, was looking for clarity that there was no intention to interfere in private sector infrastructure. I am happy to give her that clarity: there is no intention to interfere in that. The private sector has invested in rail connections to warehouses and so forth, so I am happy to give that assurance.

The noble Baroness, Lady Leaman, referred to fares and in particular to Delay Repay. There is great inconsistency in the way that that is done currently. I welcome her support for some consistency, as we will talk about elsewhere in the Bill, because that is one of the things that is simply lacking in all the retail arrangements of the railway. It is one of the reasons to move forward with the Bill.

The noble Baroness, Lady Harding of Winscombe, talked about ticket retailing, as did the noble Lords, Lord Dixon of Jericho, Lord Harper and Lord Moylan. We have asked the Office of Rail and Road to provide an industry code of practice, which will also have a clear enforcement regime. We remain in discussion with independent ticket retailers, including the one dominant player, and there will be separation of decision-making between GBR’s retail and other functions. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is right: I am keen on open data. It is important that GBR will share open data. As the noble Lord, Lord Dixon of Jericho, said, open data is vital. I am very sympathetic to the development of alternative websites, but it is equally important that we rationalise the 14 that we already have, which either are in or will come into public ownership. If noble Lords listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, they will have heard about the inconsistency in approaches to ticketing, particularly for people who need help and are disabled. That is one of the things that we propose to remedy.

That subject of accessibility, as I said when I introduced the Bill, is a major issue. A number of noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson, Lady Brinton and Lady Humphreys, and the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Holmes of Richmond, all remarked on the need to make this better and to do more. I completely agree. It is really important. Again, the fragmentation of the railway has led to great inconsistency. It is one of the things that badly needs to be sorted out. We had several debates during the passage of the public ownership Act and I am sure we will have some more this time. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, that getting the passenger experience right will also get accessibility right. I know that we will come back to that subject; it is one on which the Government place great importance.

As for a passenger target, the implication that there is somehow no incentive to do that if it is not written in the Bill is wrong. The noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Pidgeon, and the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, all raised this. There will be a great incentive to grow passengers for GBR, as well as to reduce costs, because GBR will need growth and will need to treat passengers properly in order to reduce the cost to the taxpayer of running the railway. I think there are sufficient incentives in here, but I am sure that we will discuss them further.

Several noble Lords referred to the possibility of the Secretary of State micromanaging the railways. The first thing to say is that that is already the case. The present circumstances leave civil servants, reporting to me and the Secretary of State, deciding how long trains are, where they stop and what the timetable looks like at every station in Britain. You cannot get more micromanagement than that. The intention of the Bill is to turn that round; we do not want the Secretary of State to be deciding those sorts of things, we do not want the Rail Minister to decide them, and we do not want civil servants to decide them. We need a body that will take an overall view of the value of the provision of passenger services and freight on the railway and derive the best timetables with the best train service to achieve it. I am very clear that one of the intentions of this Bill is to stop that.

The Secretary of State will, of course, have significant powers, as one would expect, bearing in mind the amount of public money that goes into the railways, but these powers exist in other places in government. They are not commonly used. The Oil and Gas Authority has received only one ministerial direction in its 10-year history. That contrasts with the situation for several years now where the Secretary of State or the Rail Minister has been invited to approve detailed business plans every year, which more or less go down to the trains stopping at every station. That is something that we need to stop.

There are clearly different views about the powers of the regulator, the Office of Rail and Road. The noble Baroness, Lady May, deprecated the apparent reduction in its powers, as did other noble Lords. I always listen very carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, who has long experience in this. He has said to me, both outwith the discussions today and in the course of this debate, that the regulator should not be in charge; of course there is a role for regulation, but the regulator should not be in charge of the railway. The sad history of the fragmentation of decision-making on the timetable is good evidence that having the regulator deciding how the system is used is not the best way of doing it.

I turn to a long-term railway strategy, which we have not had for 30 years. My noble friend Lady Alexander of Cleveden is right that a long-term railway strategy makes it possible for GBR to drive economic growth in regional and local communities.

The noble Lord, Lord Grayling, raised the question of enhancements. I agree with him about the challenges to standards. I do not think the fragmentation of the railway between operations and infrastructure led to any significant challenge on standards—it was certainly difficult to achieve it in a railway infrastructure organisation. There is more likelihood of this challenge in the future where operators will be challenging the cost of running and enhancing the railway, and there is also far more chance of the right schemes being authorised because a long-term plan will set out the best things to do with the best returns on the railway, the best capacity increases, in a way that we have not seen for a very long time. We can discuss the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—

Lord Grayling (Con)I hate to disagree with the Minister, but he will know that the programme of enhancement set aside for CP6 was carefully discussed with him and the executive of Network Rail and represented a significant plan to do precisely the things that the industry said would make the most difference. The tragedy is that it did not happen, and even now under this Government, it is still not happening.

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)Recollections are a great thing. I recollect that not one of the of schemes that I was invited to by the predecessor of the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, had a business case attached to it. It was a list of schemes that was just a list of schemes. I think that we can do a lot better than that. A long-term railway strategy that invites the railway to list and make business cases for the right schemes is entirely right.

My noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester made the most important point, which is that if you do not have a list of schemes prioritised by business case, you have no chance of getting private sector contributions to railway enhancements which create growth and wealth. That is an important point and something that a long-term railway strategy and the resulting GBR business plan will deal with. On private sector involvement, the first thing to say is that this Government are not fundamentally opposed to it at all. At the end of this process, when this Bill becomes an Act, 60% of the expenditure by GBR, once established, will be spent in the private sector.

On the balance sheet implications raised by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, I say that the Railways Bill will not impact the way that the rolling stock leases will be classified by the ONS. I have previously discussed with him the confidence of the rolling stock leasing companies that this will not be the case. The story that the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, told about how Network Rail crept back into the public sector in 2014 is absolutely right. It did go back on the balance sheet. No fuss was made about it at all. It turned out to be—all the time—a nationalised industry.

The experience of the franchises in recent times is interesting. A number of noble Lords said that concessions could have been adopted. Of course, the last Government had the chance to do that. They already had four private sector operations in their control, but they did not choose to do anything with any of them; that is an interesting feature. One noble Lord—I am afraid I omitted to note the name—said that, in fact, the private sector operators before the last election were not enamoured at all of that model and, therefore, they were not very keen on it. The truth of it is that the railway had stagnated, and this Bill is the way of retrieving the situation.

In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, Platform4, which is a successful amalgamation of the Network Rail property function and London and Continental Railways, will undoubtedly continue. The railway has an important role in developing land on and around stations, and the rest of the railway land. It is very important that the railway plays its part in the economic development of the places that it serves.

The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, raised the question of funding certainty. Of course, the Bill continues the infrastructure funding in five-year periods, and it is shown through the provisions of the Bill to continue. The Bill also gives the opportunity to Ministers in due course to give longer funding periods for the operations, but I think that most Ministers would want to see GBR making a success of its job to do so.

As to passenger safety, the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, rightly draws the attention of noble Lords to the importance of passenger safety. GBR will have to face this subject directly; I think it will be more equipped to do so than the current railways. The noble Baroness is absolutely right that the safety of women and girls is crucial. This is true in relation to personal safety but also, frankly, for encouraging more travel by half the population.

The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, referred to staff safety. I am happy to confirm to her that the Office of Rail and Road will continue its function of managing safety on the railway and, indeed, prosecuting where that is the appropriate thing to do.

A number of noble Lords raised questions about the passenger watchdog and I know we will have a lot of discussion about this. The noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, raised the question of a passenger charter and the importance of passengers, which is of course right. I am sure that we will have some discussion about how much power the passenger watchdog should have. I disagree, as I generally do, sadly, with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. I think that enforcement of what the passenger watchdog wants to do in relation to the Office of Rail and Road is quite sufficient, and I do not see any problem in doing it.

On devolution issues, which the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, raised first, the limitations of some of this are the limitations of railway geography as opposed to political boundaries. As the still current Mayor of Greater Manchester has discovered, very few train services within mayoral boundaries are wholly within the boundary. The other point is that they run on lines which are part of a national network. That does not at all mean that devolution cannot be done with success, and it does not at all mean that mayors cannot have the passenger services they want. Look at the growth of the Overground network in London. In some cases, those services go outside the London boundary, as several noble Lords will recall from their history in London government.

The way that we achieve that is through intelligent discussion about the balance between the network and its local influence and the network and its national influence. The provisions in the Bill are currently quite sufficient and will allow for a discussion between mayors who have an aspiration for economic development in their part of the country and on the connections that their cities and towns need to have with other parts of the country. The Bill is drafted in precisely the way it is for that reason. My current belief is that the Bill allows that to happen and gives sufficient powers for them to influence how the railway is structured.

The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, raised several points about Wales. He will know, of course, that the Barnett formula and how it is applied are matters for His Majesty’s Treasury and the Chancellor. I am sure that the new First Minister of Wales will be asking any new Prime Minister shortly about not only that but fiscal devolution in general. All I can say is that the £445 million that this Government have provided for rail enhancements in Wales is far in excess of that of any previous Government. It includes the north Wales coast and Wrexham, and it is a very good start to the Transport for Wales investment plan, which the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, referred to. I am sure it will continue like that. I have already met the new Transport Minister for Wales and I am sure we will have some powerful discussions.

As to the design of GBR, I hope noble Lords will know that the Government’s firm intention is to devolve GBR to a route and regional basis. It is quite clear that it should not be some grand, centralised and distant organisation. There will have to be functions that are centralised—the access and use policies are one such example—but, in general, this Government want the railway run by people who are identifiable to elected politicians and the local communities they serve. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, is right that it is about leadership—not mine, but the leadership of people who can be appointed to run both operations and infrastructure and produce a better service. One thing that was lost in the previous 30 years is that franchisees changed quite regularly and so did their managements. Local communities and elected Members could never quite get used to who was in charge because it changed quite regularly. That is not right. I have told the people we are appointing now to integrated business units that they should behave as though they are there for the rest of their careers and that they should get on with it.

I am told my time is up, so there is a limit to what I can answer, other than—

Lord Grayling (Con)My Lords—

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)I will not take any more interventions.

Lord Grayling (Con)It is a procedural point. There has been a discussion about whether the Bill is going to be committed to the Moses Room or to the Chamber, and there is no Motion before us tonight. Could the Minister reassure us that the discussion now is with a view to having Committee stage in the Chamber?

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)I am sorry I gave way because I cannot answer that question—it is not for me to answer.

A large number of noble Lords talked about the history of the railway, whether good or bad—I meant to say more about this, and I am sorry I did not. It is part of British society and we need to run it properly. I will talk separately to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, about heritage railways. The railway has a glorious past and it could be better in future. The Bill is designed to make it better. It puts forward the tools with which we can shape the railway of the future, and I encourage all noble Lords to support it.

Bill read a second time.