Touring Hauliers: Arts Organisations

Debate between Earl of Kinnoull and Baroness Vere of Norbiton

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, I reassure all noble Lords that we have thought long and hard about this. We have engaged with the EU but, when we did so, the exemption for specialist hauliers was rejected. Our door remains open for discussing alternative exemptions. There is a limit to what we can do on a unilateral basis. This was the best idea that came up both from my officials working on this and from our consultation with industry—68% were in favour of this. When it comes to smaller operators and those operating on their own account, the other option would be for them to go into partnership with an EU haulier and thereby provide that continuity across the system.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I back up what the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, was saying about a good body of opinion among the MEPs that we met at the Parliamentary Partnership Assembly last week, which was very sympathetic to this problem. It is very much a problem designed to be discussed by the trade-specialised committees of the trade and co-operation agreement. Can the Minister tell us which specialised committee will be tackling it and when that committee will next meet?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

Unfortunately, I will have to write to the noble Earl; I do not have that with me today.

Britain’s Railways

Debate between Earl of Kinnoull and Baroness Vere of Norbiton

Monday 24th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for their generally—I think—fairly positive welcome for these proposals. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, had a long list of Great British XYZ, and perhaps I may say, as we come out of restrictions, I feel we have a Great British bounce back coming along. So, what are we going to do about our railways and Great British Railways, which will be one of the “Great Britishes” that will be so important to us as we go forward?

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, seemed to be a little bit muted on the subject of the changes we have proposed. I do believe that we are proposing a once-in-a-generation change. It will be a massive transformation of the current way our railways operate, and it will lead to very significant improvements in service to passengers. But the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, is absolutely right: it will not be easy. This is a national infrastructure with national services; it is hugely complicated now and will continue to be in the future. We know that. It will not be easy.

So the scale of transformation will have to be taken in bite-size pieces, and we will have to think about how the development of these phases will happen. Andrew Haines, who, as we all know, is the current chief executive of Network Rail and a well-respected industry leader, will be developing these interim arrangements for Great British Railways. It is important we do that. We could not have done it before because we had not announced the White Paper, and we will be establishing phases for the delivery of Great British Railways and all the phases that have to happen in between. We will be working collectively and collaboratively with the sector, and that is really important.

On the DfT side, I am well aware that there are an enormous number of very talented people in rail. We will continue to support Great British Railways as much as is needed in the short term. The DfT will establish the rail transformation programme, which will assist Andrew Haines and the wider sector as we make these changes.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, talked about how the blame for delays will not disappear. I agree. I asked exactly the same question about big birds and little birds, and whether you could be blamed for one and not the other. I am reassured that it will be vastly simplified and will not be as complicated and long-winded as it is now.

The noble Lord went on to mention the incentives regime. It is important that we have a really firm and accountable incentives regime, because we must lift the quality of services for the passenger. Therefore, we will incentivise high-quality, punctual services. We will ask operators to manage costs and to attract passengers. From a ministerial perspective, we will hold Great British Railways to account and it will hold the holders of the passenger service contracts to account via statutory powers and the ability to issue binding guidance—for example, on any of the elements the noble Lord mentioned.

We believe that there should continue to be private sector investment in rolling stock, but the noble Lord highlighted the slight tension that exists. We will ask Great British Railways to take a strategic approach to the overarching issue of rolling stock. It will look at supply chain sustainability, for example, and how to generate high-value jobs in the UK, but the TOCs will still be responsible for procuring value from the market and improving the passenger experience when the trains are running.

Devolution is a very important part of improving our transport system. I am speaking specifically about devolution to the local transport authorities. That would include the metro mayors. We are extremely keen to work with the metro mayors on devolution. The White Paper publication is a significant landmark as we start the process of these implementing reforms, but it is obvious that they cannot be devolved immediately. We will work together to think about how the structures with the metro mayors and the smaller local transport authorities will work and where they will be able to take a greater level of control of the services in their area.

Scotland and Wales are both extremely important in this regard. Both will exercise their existing powers and be accountable for them. The infrastructure is, of course, all owned by Great British Railways, with the exception of some of the valley lines in Wales, and we will work in partnership with Transport Scotland and Transport for Wales. We would expect a good relationship with them, because it is so important for the services to improve.

Great British Railways will have a five-year business plan, which will be drafted in the context of a 30-year strategy. It will set out the infrastructure funding settlement for that five years and the level of operational subsidy. This will give certainty and stability to the network as a whole.

The noble Baroness mentioned fare rises. I suspect that my Secretary of State would not rule them out, but we have to simplify the current mass of ticketing options and prices and the endless bits of paper that you have to carry around with you. We will look to introduce more pay-as-you-go, more contactless payment and more digital ticketing as soon as possible.

The noble Baroness mentioned some short-term incentives to get people back on to the trains. The Department for Transport has commissioned Network Rail to look at this. It has set up the rail revenue recovery group, which we will look to for advice on short-term and long-term interventions on fares. This links back into the recovery in demand, because we want people to come back to the trains and we hope that the number of passengers will grow further. Financial sustainability is linked to demand but not necessarily on a very firm basis, because it depends on how much passengers are paying.

Therefore, it is the case that we have to make sure that our railways are financially sustainable in the long term. On one side, we will look at how we can improve services to passengers, as well as at fares, and on the other side we have to look at how we will modernise the system with regard to some areas where there might be changes to the ways in which people work. We want to develop skills and perhaps use them more effectively within the system. That will be up to the industry, working with the unions, to develop the best and most highly-skilled workforce that we can for our industry.

I hope that I have been able to answer the questions asked by the noble Lord and the noble Baroness. I thank them genuinely for their positive engagement, and I am sure that there will be more questions to come. I look forward to comments and questions from all noble Lords, and I hope that they will consider joining me at the all-Peers briefing section with the Rail Minister on Wednesday.

[The Deputy Speaker (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)]

My Lords, we now come to the 20 minutes allocated for Back-Bench questions. I ask that both questions and answers be kept short.

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[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right: during privatisation, passenger numbers more than doubled, so the involvement of the private sector has had a transformational impact on the way that we run our railways today. This Government want to keep the best elements of the private sector. We want to keep its capacity for innovation and work with it to drive growth in the railways. We will do that by having these new contracts for passenger operators, with strong incentives to run very high-quality services.

[The Deputy Speaker (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw.

Ivory Bill

Debate between Earl of Kinnoull and Baroness Vere of Norbiton

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 10th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register of the House, in particular as a director or trustee of several museums and in respect of the insurance world.

This is a technical amendment to do with some insurance issues, so I hope to gallop through it, as I am sure not many of your Lordships would be that interested. I should like to add my own thoughts to the messages to the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, because I was going to start by citing something that he said in his Second Reading speech. He quoted a figure, which I have also seen, of there being somewhere between 2 million and 3 million objects that have an ivory content in the UK in personal collections and museum collections. He said that he felt that was an underestimate, and I agree with him that it probably is an underestimate. The UK is a heavy buyer of insurance. I can say with confidence that the majority of those objects are the subject of insurance, so I am talking about a large number of objects all round.

As I looked at the Bill, there were three areas where I felt there could be problems for the way in which the insurance world works today. The first was in simply paying a claim. I am sure that many of your Lordships have not made a claim and so may not realise this, but the point is that, when paying a claim, the insurer will pay out a sum of money, but the title of the object insured will transfer to the insurer. There would probably also be another agreement, a release agreement, between the insured and the insurer. Therefore, there is a tremendous amount of consideration moving and, certainly, the title of the object moving. That knowledge was with me as I read Clause 1(3), as I was very worried that the paying of the claim may be problematic under the way the Bill is currently drafted. For museums and private individuals, I thought that was regrettable.

Secondly, another thing that goes across to the successful claimant is a right of repurchase. Certainly all of the specialist insurance markets grant this right and I think all markets now in the UK grant it. This is a right whereby, if an object is stolen and comes back—quite a lot of stuff does come back, particularly the more valuable stuff, because if there are photographs of it, it is difficult for people to dispose of it—people have the opportunity to repurchase the object at the lower of the market value or the amount of money that was paid out in the insurance claim. For private individuals, that is often very attractive because many people are underinsured, so maybe they can buy something back that is worth more at a lower price. Certainly, for many private individuals, it is attractive because the sorts of things that are stolen are often things with great sentimental value to them. This is a very valuable right for private insurance. For the museum-insured area, which I am deeply involved with, it is important because often what is stolen is the key part of one or other of their collections, and it is very difficult to source replacement parts. I feel that this repurchase right is very difficult under Clause 1(3).

A third problem, which is much more technical, is to do with the way that insurance companies and Lloyd’s syndicates set themselves up, and that is that they move around the salvage rights within themselves. Naturally, this happens in a series of transactions that take place—most famously in the Lloyd’s syndicates, where there is a fresh syndicate every year—and so they move around these rights of repurchase further down. A Lloyd’s syndicate will need to be able to trade with a successor syndicate in order to preserve this right of repurchase. Of course, there are many latent rights of repurchase out there at the moment, which will all be covered, I assume, by this Bill. So this is not about fresh thefts but about stuff that comes back.

Those three issues were circulating in my mind, and I feel that there is a difficulty. I do not think it is the intention of the Bill to stop people from being able to rebuy their own stuff following an insurance loss. That can have nothing to do with the admirable intentions of this Bill, so I drafted a probing amendment, merely to just raise the debate, but not to settle on the precise language of how we deal with this problem that I have identified. I have limited it to providing some sort of route for just the 200 or so professional insurers in the UK. These are carriers who are all regulated by the FCA and who, I can assure your Lordships, if they saw any naughtiness, would be out with the fines book straightaway. I beg to move.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Earl’s amendment would insert a declaratory statement into the Bill confirming that prohibitions in the Bill would not apply to insurance and reinsurance transactions. I am very grateful to him for our helpful conversation over the weekend, and I confirm that it is indeed the Government’s intention that insurance and reinsurance activities will be able to continue as usual.

As the noble Earl has pointed out, this sector is very important with regard to items containing ivory. We are mindful of the types of transactions that may occur, and indeed we are further investigating other types of transactions and the associated transfers of ownership and the considerations paid and received in the ordinary course of these transactions. We are therefore considering ways of making it clear that financial transactions associated with the insurance and reinsurance of ivory items are not prohibited by the Bill, and we look forward to working with the noble Earl and other noble Lords to ensure that that is the case.

I hope that, in the light of what I have said the noble Earl feels able to withdraw his amendment.

[The Earl of Kinnoull]

I am very grateful to the Minister, with whom I had a number of amusing conversations over the weekend that involved lawn-mowing as well. I think this is a very constructive approach, and I hope we will be able to deal with the matters quickly when we get to meet. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.