Great British Railways

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young, for securing this debate. I have to agree with him, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and some of my colleagues that we are in grave danger of losing sight of what we are trying to achieve: a better deal for the passengers and freight customers.

There was a very good article in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, quoting people from freight—I shall mention that in a minute. It goes on to say that Great British Railways will do a good job in co-ordinating but more than one body is involved. There is the infrastructure manager, which will still be owned by the Government. There are the government-owned railway undertakings and open access railway undertakings, and there is freight. That is not a monopoly; it is four different groups of people who need some independent body, which at the moment is the Office of Rail Regulation, to determine who gets priority on the track.

It is very easy to say that there is no capacity on the track. I did not have much chance this morning to read the 30 pages that the Minister sent us yesterday, but access is very difficult in some places, as noble Lords have said. To cite the Daily Telegraph, Tim Shoveller, the chief executive of Freightliner, said that,

“giving a state-run passenger railway the responsibility to allocate routes would undermine its ability to compete with HGVs”.

He says that Great British Railways will

“inevitably favour route applications for its own passenger services”.

That is just a normal way of doing business—and this is why it is so important to have an independent regulator with statutory duties to be able to make decisions on behalf of the whole sector.

My noble friend the Minister’s latest suggestion was that the regulator would be able to recommend to Great British Railways. Recommending to government, as we all know from experience, sometimes works but not always. It is about sustaining investment in the private sector, which is still there in the rolling stock companies and in freight—all freight is in the private sector—and still there in the open access. The last thing about that is that government in this format does not have sole discretion as to which stations should be served and which trains should run where. This is a matter on which many people have different views, and I am sure that many noble Lords will keep on talking about it today.

The Minister needs to think again and retain the role of the Office of Rail Regulation as a statutory consultee in something that to most of us is a competition issue. It needs to be fair and seen to be fair—and I hope that my colleagues in the Department for Transport will look at this and not insist that they can trample over the Office of Rail Regulation and get what they want, because they would rather have an extra train to Edinburgh when, in fact, you could have cancelled one of LNER’s trains and allowed Lumo to go in. Who is to say which is better? It is for the regulator to decide. I look forward to my noble friend’s comments.