Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Blake on a brilliant opening speech and on her long-lost work in Leeds and elsewhere to get better transport services there, and I hope she will be able to continue to do that. It is also a pleasure to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, and my noble friend Lord Cryer to your Lordships’ House, and to speak among so many experts in transport. It just shows how much parliamentarians love their railways. They want to contribute the best to them and have a variety of different solutions to the present problems.

So I think it is worth starting and carrying on our discussion by reminding ourselves what the railways are there for: reliability, low fares, if possible, capacity, a reduction in delays, and of course investment. I was amused by the reference of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, to some of the “gnarled old people” in your Lordships’ House. I am one of them: I was here before her and I recall, as she will, the creation of the Strategic Rail Authority, which lasted for two or three years. Then it was abolished, because Ministers asked the SRA to do things that it did not want to do, and there was an argument. That was 25 or so years ago and we have got to reflect on the relationship between ministerial interference and how the structure of the railway keeps having to be changed to make better use of ministerial interference—or not.

How much ministerial interference should there be? Until recently, how many Questions have we had about ministerial involvement in buses or coaches? There have been very few, but we have railway questions very frequently, and in the other place it is the same. There is a serious problem with long-distance coaches in Cornwall, where I live. One of the providers, National Express, has withdrawn a London airport service to Cornwall, which stops people going to Heathrow to catch a plane without having to take a taxi into Exeter or something. But nobody is saying “National Express should keep doing this and do they need a subsidy?” So I think we have to keep it balanced and I hope that the new structure, when we see it properly, will actually do that without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

One of the things that has come up again and again in this debate has been what the priorities should be if there is a shortage of investment, which clearly there is. Is it local services or long-distance services? I will not mention HS2—we all know what has happened there—but there is a need for investment in many smaller railways. My noble friend Lord Faulkner mentioned one in Devon, but there are many others around the corner. It is also a question of how you judge the cost-benefit analysis of these things. As other noble Lords have said, it is extraordinary when the Department for Transport has to fund all the railway-related expenditure and the capital costs, and the Treasury gets the revenue. That needs to change very quickly and I hope my noble friend will say something about that. I doubt that needs legislation but, if it does, it needs to come quickly.

The other interesting and very important issue that we need to discuss is the role of the private sector. I hope it is not dogma that is driving the present Bill —I do not think it is. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said earlier, the private sector actually sometimes brings good value for money. In yesterday’s Sunday Times, it was interesting to note that, before Covid, the Southeastern franchise got a £231 million subsidy in 2021, up from £132 million while it was still privatised.

You can have different examples everywhere, but I hope that we can look at these things and at the benefit of investment not only in the franchises and open access but in getting some competition. I was in Germany a couple of weeks ago looking at some railway issues, and I observed the German railway company Deutsche Bahn, which is often held up as a role model of a vertically integrated rail body. Maybe the Government here think that we should follow the Germans’ role on this. But according to the press report a couple of days ago, two-thirds of the long-distance trains reached their destination on time, which was a new record low, and the company reported a loss of over €1.2 billion—I do not think that my noble friend will want to have a loss like that—coupled with a debt of €34 billion. What is interesting is that they are mainly the intercity services, whereas many of the local services in Germany are franchised out, some to UK operators. The general feeling is that they get much better services from them than we might expect.

Other issues need to be addressed sometime in the next six months, either before the new Bill or in this Bill. Ticketing is a disaster at the moment. There are various different ways round it that people have suggested, but there is a general feeling that it is too complicated and expensive and that it needs simplification. Maybe my noble friend will be able to tell us how much money will be saved when all the franchise operators become state-owned.

The other thing that the railways have suffered from dramatically in the last few years is strikes. People do not want to mention it, but it is interesting that the state-owned, or state-controlled, passenger franchises were unable—or not allowed, depending on what you think—to negotiate with the trade unions, whereas the open-access operators and the freight operators were able to do so, and I believe that there were no strikes there. Does that mean that the new government-controlled operator will do it better? I do not know, but it needs looking at. As a noble Lord said earlier, we need to, I hope, have some devolution of the passenger operators to give control over things such as remuneration, services and rest-day working, so they can negotiate without it all going back to Whitehall.

The last thing I will cover a little is freight. Other noble Lords have spoken about freight but, as they may know, I used to be chairman of the Rail Freight Group. First, investment is needed to get freight going. If you have Great British Railways deciding which trains go where—and if it is also in charge of capacity, which may be on the cards—where does freight come in? The answer is: it will come bottom of the pile.

Secondly, on some of the connecting lines that freight uses are not used by passenger trains, a very small amount of electrification would enable the freight trains to be electric hauled all the way. Apart from saving on greenhouse gases and everything else, that would make it much more efficient. I hope that the Government will look at that in the next few months and see how it can be done. The one that is spoken about all the time is Felixstowe to Nuneaton, but there are many others. A small amount of electrification is needed, and I hope that it could be done much more cheaply by a Network Rail that is maybe under different management and more efficient—we have heard nothing about Network Rail so far today, but we will see.

Finally, what really made me very happy, when I was in Berlin at that railway conference exhibition, was that there was a new freight locomotive owned and developed by GB Railfreight, one of our rail freight companies. It is a brand-new development, because it is tri-mode—electric, diesel and battery—which is exactly what everybody wants. Along with Beacon Rail, GB Railfreight has invested in this, took it to Berlin and showed it off to the world. That is good, but its needs a bit of support in the home territory, so that it can actually grow its business alongside the passenger trains.

In conclusion, I congratulate my noble friend on her opening remarks. I look forward to what she will say in response to the very many speeches she has heard. I look forward to the next stage of the Bill.