Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Baroness Pidgeon Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 21st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 6 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, I will speak to two other amendments in this group, including Amendment 41, to which the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has added his name. It is so good to see him in his place again as one of our real rail experts in this House, and I look forward to his remarks.

This amendment is about rail freight, largely. As noble Lords may know, I was chairman of the Rail Freight Group for some years. It is designed to put a requirement on the Government to report on the rail network capacity used by rail freight and to confirm a target of at least 75% growth in freight carried by rail by 2050 compared with 2019.

I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his quite long letter, which we received over the weekend, explaining different parts of this Bill. I welcome the letter; there are some good points in it and he answered my question, as he has not done so far today, about open access passenger services. The letter is there, so I do not need his answer again, and I am grateful to him.

However, what we have here is a Government who, as the Minister states in his letter, are clear on open access passenger services and want to encourage rail freight. The letter says that

“to enable the growth of rail freight … the Secretary of State will set an overall freight growth target to ensure that it remains a key priority”.

That is good. My question is how this will be achieved. Within the Great British Railways envelope, we have GBR itself, freight operators and the freight sectors. We also have the Office of Rail and Road, with “rail” apparently to be defined in the next Bill, and we have open access operators. All these groups will be vying to get capacity on lines or tracks that, as many noble Lords have said, are congested at the moment.

It is not just a question of how we get capacity on the track. I am told that, on the east coast main line, the current LNER service apparently wants to have five trains an hour running more-or-less non-stop from Edinburgh to London—I hope they find the passengers from somewhere. That is going to cause serious problems to the regional services which might want to cross that line at York or Doncaster or somewhere else. It puts into question the Government’s priorities: getting to Edinburgh every 10 minutes, or so, or getting across the main line from the Humber to Leeds, or similar places, on a service which may only run once an hour because there is no capacity.

The capacity divide between the long-distance passenger services and local services is something that we will need to explore in the future, but capacity also affects freight. One of the issues with freight which we have heard for many months, if not years, is that it needs a different speed of train because it cannot accelerate that quickly, and therefore needs electrification—which I am not going to go into. Something that has come up in your Lordships’ House so often is the improvement of the railway at Ely on the route between Felixstowe and Nuneaton or the north. Improvements there would enable many more freight trains to use that route, saving them from trundling along the North London line and places like that. Such improvements would also enable the capacity for freight; it just needs electrification.

Great British Railways will be in charge of the budget for railway investment and infrastructure, as well as the budget for keeping the passenger trains going. It will therefore effectively be in competition with the private sector operators and freight companies, and very careful work will be needed to ensure the allocation of capacity is fair and transparent. In my book, it is pretty unfair if one of the major operators, which will be GBR, in line with the infrastructure manager, which it will also own, will have control over how much capacity is available for freight—which is in the private sector—or open-access operators.

I am making this point because, while I think that producing a report after the first year—which my amendment would mandate—and looking for targets is a good start, we will need from the Minister, now or in the future, much firmer commitments on how much capacity will be needed on the main intercity or congested routes, and how the Government will allocate it. I look forward to further discussions with the Minister on this at some stage, but for the moment I beg to move.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 40, which is focused on the issue of policing and safety on the railways. I welcome the Minister to his new role; I look forward to working with him, asking him many questions and debating the issues, as we have done elsewhere over the last 16 years.

As noble Lords have interrogated this legislation, safety has been a feature of our deliberations. However, safety is not just about the infrastructure and rolling stock; it is about the safety of passengers and staff on our railways. This amendment would require the Secretary of State to report to Parliament on the impact of this Act on the British Transport Police. The British Transport Police provides a policing service to Network Rail, rail and freight operators and their passengers and staff throughout England, Wales and Scotland. It is also responsible for policing other parts of our transport network including the London Underground, the Glasgow Subway, the Tyne and Wear Metro, the West Midlands Metro, the Docklands Light Railway, London trams and even the cable car in London.

What is different about the British Transport Police is that it is primarily funded by the railway industry, not the public purse, and it sits within the Department for Transport, not the Home Office. The train operating companies, Network Rail, other operators and Transport for London, through either police service agreements or different funding agreements, pay for the British Transport Police—its latest budget shows annual funding of around £416 million.

On these Benches, we are concerned about two specific areas. First, we are worried about the impact on policing the network, and the safety of staff and passengers as they use and work on our railways, as these changes to franchising take place. Secondly, we are deeply concerned about the potential significant funding gap, which had not previously been identified, as a result of taking public ownership of the railways. I hope the Minister will be able to provide assurance in this area and explain the Government’s thinking about the future funding of the British Transport Police.

Furthermore, there is the issue of the British Transport Police Authority itself and how it is structured. It consists of 15 members, often with railway expertise from the train operating companies, who ensure value for money for the policing service they provide across the network. It is not clear how this will be structured going forward to ensure the right level of challenge and independence from the Department for Transport, given the department will now be effectively running the railway in public ownership. I hope the Minister can reassure noble Lords that the funding and oversight of the British Transport Police has been considered as part of this legislation, and that he will respond to our specific points.

My noble friends will speak to our Amendments 41 and 6 regarding freight operators and the impact of this legislation on their operation.

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, on the issue of freight, the intention should be that the freight service is given dedicated paths in the timetable. The timetable is the key to the whole issue. For freight to have a dedicated path, we need to use the paths that are available, or potentially available, to the best advantage.

To take the east coast main line as an example, it is possible to run quite a lot more trains along that line if the open-access operations are run by 10-coach trains which are divided en route. If the investment in the east coast main line is carried through, and if, for example, the Newark flat crossing is removed, I am sure we can get at least three, possibly four, more paths in every hour. The removal of the Newark flat crossing would greatly enhance the ability of freight to run inland from Immingham.

The Government have proposals before them to undertake very small pieces of electrification which would better connect freight services to the electrified network. They also have proposals, which the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has mentioned, to get the route between Felixstowe and Nuneaton working properly. That is an appalling railway—I have ridden across it on a locomotive—and it inflicts enormous delays on freight trains. If there is any money to spend, a good deal of virtue would come from spending on enhancing the freight network and creating more paths on the east coast main line, because they are scarce and very valuable.