Railways Bill

Baroness Leaman Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.