Rolling Stock (North of England)
Debate between Lord Walney and Tom Harris(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow South) (Lab)
I hope that colleagues will forgive this cuckoo in the nest—a Scottish MP intruding on the debate. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) for securing the debate. Continuing my animal analogy, I want to address the elephant in the sitting room. Hon. Members, who are rightly angry on behalf of their constituents at decisions about rolling stock and franchises, will be disappointed if they believe that chastising a Minister, of whatever party, for the decisions of civil servants at the Department for Transport can be the equivalent of a magic wand, and make everything right. The structure and nature of the industry simply will not allow train operating companies to make their own decisions about which rolling stock is most appropriate for their passengers.
I have never been an advocate of the wholesale nationalisation of the railway industry and I am not about to follow in the footsteps of the late lamented Bob Crow by doing a 180° turn on that policy. However, I draw the attention of the House to my early-day motion 954, which points out that under the present Government the railway industry is about to be nationalised. The largest part of the railway industry is Network Rail. From September, it will be recategorised as a central Government body. It will therefore come under the remit of central Government: Whitehall—civil servants. It will no longer be a private company without shareholders, as it is today. May I therefore congratulate the present Conservative Government on nationalising the British railway industry?
John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)
Like many of my hon. Friends I am very much in favour of genuinely free markets. However, is not the point the fact that the market is mangled? It is not delivering for the customers—businesses and passengers—who are investing a lot of money, and for whom a properly functioning railway in the north of England is vital, just as it is in the south.