Lord Moylan
To ask His Majesty’s Government what performance improvements have been delivered by nationalised passenger rail services since 28 November 2024.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)
My Lords, public ownership is a vital step towards reforming our railways and rebuilding trust and pride. On average, publicly owned train operators perform better on punctuality and cancellations than those yet to come under public ownership. They are already delivering improvements, with lower cancellations on the TransPennine Express and Northern, and South Western quadrupling the number of new trains entering service. I expect all operators, both public and private, to deliver good performance for passengers.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, when the figures were published a month ago, cancellations were reported to have risen by around 50% on South Western services in the months following nationalisation in May last year, alongside a marked increase in delay minutes and late arrivals. Clause 18 of the Railways Bill places a duty on the Secretary of State to promote high standards of railway service performance. Can the Minister explain how the Government intend to incentivise and enforce those standards in practice, given that the proposed passenger standards authority appears to have no direct enforcement powers and the Office of Rail and Road’s remit in this area is being restricted?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The discussion on the forthcoming Railways Bill will happen in this House in due course. Meanwhile, the Government are pursuing reliability very strongly. If a train company is left, by a combination of the previous Government and the previous operator, desperately short of drivers, with 83 of 90 new trains parked in sidings for nearly five years, it takes a bit of time to recover from that position. That position is being recovered from, in respect of South Western. More than 30 of the new trains are now in service, and two-thirds of the drivers have now been trained to drive them. That takes time. It should have been done before, but it is now being done by this Government.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, what progress has been made to address the poor Sunday levels of service and high levels of Sunday cancellations as part of train operator nationalisation? Can the Minister say when passengers can hope to see any improvements in Sunday services?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The Sunday position, particularly for drivers in a number of train companies, is very difficult. A number of them, after 30-odd years of the previous regime, have no contractual commitment to work on Sundays and volunteer. That is unsatisfactory. In several train companies, negotiations are taking place to incorporate Sundays into the working week.
In the case of Northern, where a dispute about guards has been going on for seven years, Sunday services have never been satisfactory because there are a number of guards in that company who have never been contractually obliged to work Sundays. We have worked extraordinarily hard with the management of Northern, and I hope that will come to a conclusion very shortly.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
Just to produce a cheerful note, I can tell the Minister that despite appalling South Western journeys, I travelled a fortnight ago and it was excellent.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
I travelled this morning and it was pretty good.
Lord Grayling (Con)
My Lords, I have asked the Minister a couple of times about transition payments made during the renationalisation process by the Government to the private operators, and the way that happened previously when franchises changed hands. Is he yet in a position to tell us—this is nearly 12 months later, so he really ought to be—how much money has actually been paid in transition payments to the private operators so far?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
I should have foreseen that the noble Lord would ask that question. I will have to write to him because I knew he would ask it, but I forgot to research the answer.
Lord Snape (Lab)
Does my noble friend acknowledge that the spokesperson for the Conservative Party has a pretty thick skin to ask this Question? After all, the last Conservative Government renationalised no fewer than four train operating companies during their period of office because of the incompetence of the operators at that time. Can the Minister assure the House that we will not return to those days and that the improvement we have seen in punctuality and service, so far as the nationalised companies are concerned, will continue in future?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
My noble friend is right. LNER, in particular, has demonstrated all the excellent characteristics that a public service train company can deliver. The previous Government did not attempt to put back into the private sector any of the other train companies that came into public ownership during their term of office. All those companies are now doing better under this Government’s supervision than they were.
Lord Beith (LD)
Has the Minister assessed the impact of the new timetable on east coast main line punctuality? There have been some very severe delays, which are mainly infrastructure-related and therefore the responsibility of Network Rail, a different nationalised company. It appears that the new timetable does not give space to deal with delays when they arise.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
I am sure that I have just written to the noble Lord on the same subject, but I have been monitoring the east coast main line timetable daily since December when it went in. There have been some very good days, but he is right that there have been some infrastructure failures. There have also been some train failures, one of them really rather catastrophic. On a good day it works quite well; on a bad day it recovers reasonably well. There are a whole host of people working really hard to make it work. It is tight, but it follows £4 billion of investment in both infrastructure and trains, and it is right that the railway should operate as many trains as it can and operate them well.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that it is ridiculous to expect, after the ruinous privatisation of our rail system and 13 years of neglect by the Tory Government, that we can fix something in 13 months that they took 13 years to wreck?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
One of the interesting things that has been going on since this Government took office is re-establishing some pretty basic rules about staff allocation—the numbers of drivers and guards and the way in which they are utilised—which in some of these companies was miles away from what ought to have been established. As my noble friend says, it takes a long time to put things right, but we are putting them right.
Lord Dobbs (Con)
If the Minister was travelling on a successful South Western train this morning, he was on a different train from the one I was on. I ask him to look back: the very first breath that this Labour Government took was to give a record-breaking, inflation-busting pay rise to train drivers. One would normally expect, in a public service, for that to bring about better punctuality and improvement of service, yet all those have gone backwards and there has been an increase in the number of complaints. I know some people suggested at the time that it was all to pay for the Government’s friends; we can dismiss that with a wave of our hands. But what is, and was, the point of an inflation-busting pay increase to train drivers if there is no improvement in public service?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
Let us reflect on the effect of the continuous dispute with train drivers, which cost £700 million or £800 million in revenue; on the fact that the pay increase was about 2% more than the previous Government intended to pay; and, particularly, on the fact that there were no productivity proposals on the table at the time it was paid, because the previous Government had wasted their time having a discussion with the owners about what percentage of those productivity benefits they took for themselves and, in consequence, there was nothing on the table to put forward. We have changed all those positions.
Lord Polak (Con)
My Lords, there is nothing more annoying than being on the platform early, trying to go to work, when it comes up saying, “Staff didn’t turn up. Train cancelled”. This is happening regularly on TfL, on the line from Elstree & Borehamwood to London. What can be done about that?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
I think the noble Lord will find that that goes via Thameslink, which will be taken into public ownership in four months. It is one of the operators whose management tries modestly hard, but it has a problem with a number of drivers. In due course, the Government will take steps to fix it.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, last time the trains were nationalised, they were dirty and late, and the sandwiches were so old that they were curling up at the corners. Why is it going to be different this time?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
That is a sort of music hall view of railway life, is it not? The truth is that the system this Government inherited had got to the end of its life—that is a polite way of putting it. You can prove that it did because the train companies that they took into public ownership stayed in public ownership. They chose to keep LNER, which had three failed operators, in public ownership because, frankly, it ran better. That is what we are trying to achieve. The growth in passenger numbers, which is greater in all the publicly owned train companies over the last year than it has been in privately owned operating companies, is testimony to that.