International Maritime Organization: Net-Zero Framework

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The simple answer to the noble Lord is yes. Adopting the IMO net-zero framework is vital for climate action and giving industry the certainty it needs to make net-zero shipping a reality. The UK will, as he suggests, maximise our effort to maintain momentum so that the framework can be adopted next year. We are committed to working with others at the IMO, which we are honoured to host here in London, and industry generally, to progress the necessary intersessional work to shape the framework’s technicalities.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, while I welcome the IMO decision—as other noble Lords have said, it is a shame that it has been delayed—when it actually comes into effect, who is going to police the enforcement of lower emissions from ships on a worldwide basis? It sounds a pretty horrendous task.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The purpose of the IMO, of course, is to have an international way of policing things, because shipping is necessarily carried out at sea, so policing in the sense of communities does not work. The way it works is that IMO resolves as a whole to have binding regulations and that is what is being discussed at the moment. We desperately need to give some certainty to people who invest large sums of money for the long term in this. This Government are determined to drive this forward in order to give that certainty, both for decarbonisation and for a healthy shipping market.

Great British Railways: Rolling Stock

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, EUROFIMA is a long-established, supranational financial institution, established as a joint stock company by an international treaty, the convention, signed by 25 European member states. It is dedicated to financing public passenger railway rolling stock and related infrastructure, as well as the modernisation and renewing of related equipment. As part of developing the rolling stock and infrastructure strategy, my department is exploring a range of financing structures to support investment in partnership with private finance. This includes active engagement with EUROFIMA to assess how its financing mechanisms could support future investment in the UK rolling stock market. If, following due diligence, EUROFIMA is considered an appropriate avenue to go down, then we would aim to accede by the end of 2026.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, now that the Government own South Western Railway, they have inherited about 4,000 trains that were manufactured four years ago and have not carried any passengers at all. Can my noble friend the Minister tell the House when these trains are likely to enter service?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My noble friend is accurate: 90 trains were procured; some of them were delivered five years ago. At the time that the South Western Railway operation reverted to public ownership, six out of the 90 were in service; as of today, 23 are now in service. The new management is doing what the old one did not, which is to put the new trains in service and have the old ones taken out of service and scrapped. The rest of them will be introduced as fast as the drivers can be trained, which will take a little time because that had not been done either.

National Policy Statement for Ports

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly in the gap. Unlike many noble Lords, I very much welcome this document. The Government have done pretty well in getting this far, because it is incredibly complicated, but I have a few questions, which I hope my noble friend the Minister will be able to answer.

The first issue—it is pretty obvious, I suppose—is how far this policy applies to Scotland and Wales. My noble friend the Minister mentioned Scotland briefly but, as we all know, there are some very big ports in Scotland. Wales has a large number of ports as well; some of them are pretty large and some of them think that they will get even bigger when the new offshore wind farms are built somewhere in the Celtic Sea. It would be nice to know about the scope of this document in those two countries.

Along with that, I would be interested to know who will be in charge. This week, I was a bit surprised to see a press release saying that the lower Thames tideway tunnel is going to be built not by the Department for Transport, because it is not capable, but by the Government. I thought that the Department for Transport was government. It is a good department, but this is an odd way of saying who will be in charge of the budget, or who will be in charge when things do or do not go well.

On my other worry, most of the discussion in this debate has been about energy; the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, started it. Energy is a terribly important element of input/output, et cetera. I am involved in a hydro scheme—or whatever it is—for passenger services between the Isles of Scilly and the mainland, which is entirely electric. It is charged at each end, and it has enough power to get across the 25 miles of rough sea in the middle. There are many other ones that could continue like this, and I hope that the Government will continue to encourage them.

My worry is that the document does not appear to include many energy projects; as I understand it, those have been left to the energy NPS. For ports, they cover everything, as noble Lords have said. However, it is difficult to get things through the so-called planning approval process for ports. You have all kinds of people saying, “You can’t do this because of that, and you cannot do that because of the other”. We had this off the coast of Penzance last year, when somebody said that you could not run a ferry over the sea because there was eel grass underneath it. It was 10 metres down—how serious can the grass get? Years ago, the Environment Agency told me that one could not run new services into the Isles of Scilly because they were entirely covered by a local environmental protection order. I asked, “Are people going to starve, then?” The agency said, “No, it’s just difficult”. I said, “Well, it works on the continent. It is in European legislation”. We really have to sort all this out.

My last point is on forecasts, because the Government say that they would like to take keep control of all the forecasts themselves, but that is wrong. The ports should be given a major role to play in telling everyone what their forecast is, and if the Government do not like it, there can be a debate. But it is important that that is done by the private sector, which is, after all, in charge of all the different cargoes that go in and out of ports. I wish this project well and congratulate the Government on producing it.

Rail Fares

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord was not an absolute failure in the job; he was brilliant, and he of course appointed a very competent chair of Network Rail in his time—for which I am grateful, but my wife is not. My noble friend Lord Livermore is sat next to me, and he deals with Treasury matters; for the moment, at least, I deal with transport and the railways. The truth is that the railways are in a very bad financial position. They are taking twice the subsidy that they did pre-Covid, and they do not run very well—the noble Lord is right about that. We have a huge amount of work to do. Matters such as the balance between fares and subsidy and the performance of the railway need to be addressed, which is why the Government are addressing them through the public ownership Act and the Railways Act. It will take time—the system has taken 200 years to create—but we are determined to make a real difference in the course of this Parliament.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the present system of passenger compensation for when the train is late seems to work well, in my experience. Will that change with the new, wonderful structure that the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, outlined? Who will pay the compensation to passengers?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. It is right that there is compensation. The rates vary and the system of paying it is complex; for example, if you have bought your ticket from a third-party ticket retailer, it is sometimes not easy to get your money back through Delay Repay. We know that we need to address all those things. In the end, GBR will be operating the public sector railway, and therefore the system for people to make claims will inevitably be simplified.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. My interest in animal welfare and good-quality meat comes from the south-west and talking over many years with the butchers who supply good meat. The two problems which noble Lords have identified are: the distance of travel, which is a very serious animal welfare issue; and the fact that over the last 20 or 30 years the supermarkets have put pressure on government to close as many small abattoirs as possible, so that they can get a greater share of the market. Also, as we have discussed in your Lordships’ House before, you must have a vet to witness the abattoir’s work, yet there is a shortage in the competitive supply of vets. One company appears to have a very large share of the market. I wonder whether Ministers should not go a little further and look at the whole question of competition in this field and, most importantly, the distance of travel.

I live on the Isles of Scilly. We have some very nice farmers there and some very nice cattle—which taste extremely good too—but they have to go to the mainland. On a small ship going up and down in the waves, these animals are pretty unhappy. For years, the farmers there have been lobbying to have an abattoir on the islands. Finally, after years, the new Duke of Cornwall has agreed to provide some land on St Mary’s where an abattoir can be built. It will therefore be a much shorter journey from the off islands to the abattoir. All the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has mentioned are still there, but it is a much shorter distance. I hope that that the Government will look at all these things and make sure that we have a competitive market for this which is also very animal friendly.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, there are 100 million animals killed for meat in the UK every month, which is quite a statistic. There are 75,000 people who work in abattoirs and associated institutions. The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord, Lucas, raises an important issue. Whether this is the right way to address it I am not quite sure because, as other speakers have said, we are talking about a systemic issue here. I often speak about our broken food system. At the heart of that broken food system is factory farming and the giant chicken and pig institutions which are associated with giant abattoirs, logically enough. We are approaching a land use framework, to be coming from the Government. Many noble Lords think that this does not get mentioned enough. If we think about land use and abattoirs, this all needs to fit together in a systemic way, whatever model you think should apply. Obviously, I have views on that.

I want to cross-reference what I was doing in your Lordships’ House about 12 hours ago. I was talking about the climate emergency and the impact of rising temperatures. I note that in 2022, the Government produced guidance that animals should not be transported except in temperature-controlled environments when the temperature—or the perceived temperature, taking account of humidity—is higher than 30 degrees Celsius. That might not historically have been much of an issue in the UK, but it is only going to continue and become a larger issue if you are moving animals. The longer the distance, the more you are unable to do it in the cool hours of the day.

We need a much more localised food system, which means small independent farmers and small independent abattoirs. Five small abattoirs closed in 2024 alone, and the figure is down to 49 from 64 in 2019. There is a real issue here, but it must be looked at systemically in the round, not just as abattoirs on their own. We have a huge animal welfare issue here. We also need to think about workforce. I found some statistics suggesting that the average age of a slaughterer is 63.

Train Operators’ Revenue Protection Practices Review

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right to describe it as a mess. We are not waiting for Great British Railways. LNER’s changes to long-distance fares, which have been introduced progressively, have resulted in considerably greater passenger satisfaction with the way in which the fares are arranged now compared with before. I am expecting to see similar arrangements on the west coast main line and on Great Western in due course. I think the noble Baroness knows that we are rolling out pay-as-you-go in urban areas, as well as in London and the south-east. It is a long and complex job, and it is not helped by the fact that, fundamentally, the fares system has not changed since the railways were privatised. We are on it, and we are working hard at it.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

On the west coast main line and on other routes, when Great British Railways actually happens, will it have control over the fares issued by open-access operators, or will they still be able to charge what they like for their own services?

Road and Rail Projects

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 14th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I am sure the noble Baroness will know the answer to that. As I said at Questions, taxation is a matter for His Majesty’s Treasury. The Chancellor will determine taxation policy from time to time.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Secretary of State and my noble friend on producing a comprehensive list of railway and road schemes they intend to go ahead with. This is the first time that we have seen such a list for years. In her introduction, the Secretary of State says that she is green-lighting over 50 rail and road projects. I am not sure whether green-lighting is all right, because occasionally greens go to orange and red, but I hope that is wrong. Within the text, there is quite a lot of uncertainty about which schemes are going ahead and which are what Ministers call “paused”. Pausing could happen for just a week or for a year. It would be useful, the next time Ministers do this, to spell out what pausing means.

One of the schemes paused is the Dawlish scheme mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. I have an interest as I live down the other end. I am not suggesting the work should start now but, as my noble friend said, monitoring should continue because, if the cliff does come down—it could happen quite quickly if it does—it will put the south-west in a very difficult position.

Could my noble friend, over the next week or two, publish a short paper giving the criteria used for going ahead with or pausing different schemes? It can apply to roads as well as to rail. We have had so much stop-start over the last few years, for reasons we need not go into. It would be nice to know what the reasons are. What are the criteria? Is it that there is a good business case, is it because the local MP knows the Minister very well, or is there some other good reason? I am sure there are good reasons for the decisions, but it would be helpful if Ministers could come up with that in the next few weeks. Otherwise, I congratulate the Minister on a good, comprehensive document.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his compliments. Of course, the real significance of this list is that it is a funded list, rather than one that is not funded—a list of aspiration and hope. I am not too sure about the phrase “green-lighting”; I am not too that it is in the dictionary and, if it is, it is a shame. What it means is that these are funded schemes to go ahead. One or two still need development consent orders, which is a process that has to be taken to a conclusion. Therefore, the start dates will be different across the huge list, but many are ready and have been waiting for funding for quite a long time.

On the pausing at Dawlish that I referred to in the discussion with the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, monitoring will take place. It is not that it “should” take place. The monitoring of those cliffs needs to continue. My understanding of the situation, which I have to say is from the last job I did rather than this one, is that monitoring those cliffs is essential. The work needed to remedy all this is, at least partially, about what we see in the monitoring process, so it is sensible to look now and do something when agreed.

Will we publish a paper on the criteria that have been used? There are two things here. One is that the Government have decided to do these schemes and have taken a view, from the wreckage they inherited, to prioritise things that need to be done that will contribute to a better local economy. We will get on with doing that first. In the longer term, there is an intention to have both a 10-year infrastructure strategy and a long-term railway plan. In conjunction with the revision of the Green Book that the Chancellor talked about in the spending review—to look at aspects that allow projects in parts of the country with lower rates of economic activity to benefit—I think there will be a case to publish a long-term railway plan and talk about the criteria used. For now, we will get on with what has been announced.

European Union Entry/Exit System

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Government still require incoming freight vehicles to call at a place called Ashford Sevington to be checked, or will that be removed? At the moment, all incoming vehicles are supposed to be checked at Sevington but, of course, half of them just drive by up the motorway and are never seen again.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. I will have to take some advice on how that works; it is not immediately apparent that it is connected with the EES, but I will go away and answer his question in writing.

HS2 Reset

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s Statement on HS2 yesterday. It has good detail and a lot of the plans that the Government intend to do. I was also pleased that the latest cost estimate of about £100 billion to get it to Birmingham, is much closer to the one that Michael Byng and I have been peddling for some years. I also welcome the new chief executive and chair of HS2 and, of course, the Ministers, who are both relatively new.

The worry I put to my noble friend is that the four new people at the top, excellent though they will be, have an incredibly difficult job ahead of them. One of the biggest problems is to unpick or change the mouthwatering contracts that most of the contractors have been given by the previous Administration, which means it will be very difficult to know what the future output costs will be and how they will be monitored. So, can one or two people—very good people, with two Ministers in charge—plan this without a much greater root-and-branch change in the Department of Transport and HS2? I hope I am wrong, but I think there is a lot of work to be done there as well.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that. There is no latest cost estimate. One of the things we are absolutely resolved to do is not to have such a cost estimate until Mark Wild and the people he is bringing in have been through this project in such detail that an estimate can be reliable. It is not at all satisfactory to have contractors working on such huge contracts without a full understanding by a decent sponsor of what they have delivered as they deliver it, how much it has cost, and what the remaining work is. That is also a feature, because the contracts were let too early and the design was not certain, so all that work needs to be done.

My noble friend is right that four new people by themselves cannot do all this—not by a long chalk. But noble Lords will, I hope, have read Mark Wild’s letter in detail, in which he sets out that, fundamentally, HS2 is unfit for purpose and he will have to restructure that company, alongside getting proper estimates of cost and timescale. He will need some help doing it and much of my and the Secretary of State’s discussion with him in the last weeks and months has been about how many people he needs to do that, who they are, whether we can trust them and how quickly we can get them in. Those elements are all important.

One of the really important things in this is that, I think for the first time for a long time, we will have a chair and a chief executive of HS2 who are communicative, collaborative, straight and honest, and we can have a discussion with them about where this is going and what it is doing. One of the characteristics of this company so far and of the Crossrail company for most of its life is that they were both arrogant enough to believe that they knew what they were doing without any supervision and without telling anybody what was really going on. In both cases, it went badly wrong. Mark knows that he has to change the culture of the company. There clearly are some good people there, but they need to be led and directed properly.

European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Berkeley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they intend to apply to reinstate the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to introduce this short debate. I have an interest to declare in that I live in the Isles of Scilly much of the time, to which the only passenger access in the winter is by air. There are a few problems there, which I shall come on to. In my short speech, I shall cover the many safety benefits of EGNOS, the benefits for pilots, the history of it and what happened before and after Brexit. I still see the cancellation of EGNOS at the time of Brexit as a very unwise and, frankly, stupid decision, but I shall come on to that.

I will first introduce what EGNOS is, because it may be that not all noble Lords understand what it is. It is a geostationary navigation overlay service, which enhances the standard GPS signal and provides accuracy, integrity and other improvements. In simple terms, it is a way of being able to land your plane at and take off from a small airport without all the very expensive, but very good, equipment that major airports have around the country and the world. If you do not have EGNOS, you cannot fly. It is not unique; it is used all the way across Europe. I think there are 700 airports using EGNOS-enabled LPV, and in the United States there is a great deal more of it.

Just before Brexit, the UK introduced EGNOS at a handful of airports, including Guernsey, Alderney, Cambridge and others, and many airlines had installed the equipment in planes that would enable it to work. The estimated cost for installation then and, I think, now is about £35 million a year to cover the whole country.

In my many discussions with Ministers—including with some colleagues here—we have always been told that the Civil Aviation Authority was dead against this. It was unsafe, it would not work and it would like to see something else. Last week, I had a very useful meeting with the CAA to hear from the horse’s mouth, if one can call it that, what its view was, which I shall try to summarise. It is a technical necessity, not a political concession. All it needs, I am told, for us to rejoin is a service agreement with the European Commission.

During those discussions, we had many chats about alternatives. Ministers in the previous Government said that we ought to go for something else: a sovereign UK satellite-based augmentation system, or SBAS. We went to see it, and the only problem was that it would require a £1 billion investment over 10 years—assuming that the Government would commit to 10 years’ funding, which is probably rather unlikely—and the operational costs would be even higher than EGNOS. Many people have asked why we should introduce a new system when we can get the whole EGNOS system for £30 million, which is one-third or more of the price of the other one. It is a complete waste of taxpayers’ money. Maybe the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be interested in that after her announcements yesterday.

To summarise the benefits, it is not just a “nice to have”; it is an essential safety and commercial add-on to safe flying. I fly as a passenger to the Isles of Scilly. Other noble Lords have much more experience in this. It is quite clear from talking to many pilots that they cannot fly in unpredictable weather because they cannot navigate properly. There are regional airports on coasts in many places, but if you cannot land and take off safely, your businesses are not going to enjoy it very much. Then we have to think about local communities. We have air ambulances around many parts of the country, including Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, and I know of many cases where they have not been able to fly because there has been no EGNOS. All in all, there are really good reasons for reinstating it.

I shall try to summarise where I think the CAA has got to, which was extremely helpful. It said that it is working closely with the Department for Transport and the UK Space Agency on the operational benefits, airspace modernisation, resilience and future readiness. Basically, from a regulatory point of view, it ticks all the boxes. We all know how good the CAA is at organising safe flights and everything.

It really surprised me that, although it had done all this work in the last two or three years—the reports are available on the website—at the end of 2024 it will hand over responsibility for the next phase of the SBAS initiative, which is EGNOS, from the Department for Transport to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the UK Space Agency. It is jolly nice to have the Minister from the Department for Transport here answering questions, but is that the right department?

I have put down several Written Questions in the last few months, and they were all answered by my noble friend Lord Vallance of Balham. It is worth reading one out: what is the cost of reinstating our membership of EGNOS? The response from my noble friend was:

“The Government is considering options for UK access to a satellite-based augmentation system, following our withdrawal from the EU’s European Geostationary Navigation Overlay (EGNOS) system. This work is ongoing and no decision has yet been made. The Government engages with the European Commission and European Space Agency on space programmes but has not specifically discussed access to EGNOS”.


My question to the Minister is: why have they not discussed this and when will they? People are just sitting there while businesses and transport are suffering. We just seem to be getting nowhere.

A very interesting comment came from one of my colleagues in the other place, the Labour MP Stella Creasy. She said that it made no sense to separate the EU and the UK from an aviation perspective. She is right because, if you look at a map of the different aviation systems around the world—there are all kinds—one for just the UK would very much be the smallest.

Are we prepared to sign agreements of 12 years for fish and four years for produce, just taking EU rules without any challenge? Why do not we not sign one for aviation? I do not know whether it would be for four years or 10, but I suspect that it would be much longer, because once people have got used to having EGNOS again, they would struggle to change it.

I hope that, when my noble friend responds, he will say that we are about to start proper negotiations on EGNOS with the European Commission and other agencies in order to produce a service agreement. A service agreement is not a political agreement; it would get us back into the fold and help a large number of people who rely on short-haul or small planes to get around their business in a very sensible way, with minimal delays. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. Rather than filibustering for a few minutes while I refer to the knowledgeable officials behind me, I think I had better write to him about that. I can see an answer coming: it says, “Not sure. We’d need to check”. That is very wise.

I turn to the constant developments in technologies, particularly in drones and uncrewed aircraft. This is an important, evolving area, and the full range of requirements are still being mapped out. There may well be applications where SBAS and EGNOS could be useful. As the Government have ambitious plans for the UK to be a global leader in creating a future-of-flight ecosystem fit for the future, ensuring that we can fully realise the social and economic benefits of new and emerging aviation technologies, we must continue to think about this work. It could be said that I am saying that we are just not doing anything, but we are doing something. These rapid developments, particularly in drones used beyond the line of sight, may well provide an increasing case for this technology and for EGNOS in future.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend has given us a very interesting progress report on any discussions taking place with the European Union, the CAA and others, but no decisions have been made. Can he give us any estimate about when the next decision might be achieved?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that question. It is a good question because developments in drones, particularly drones beyond line of sight, uncrewed aircraft and flying taxis have been much in the news recently. There are many applications way beyond traditional air applications. There is activity for drones beyond line of sight not only on the railway but in better policing. Those things would affect a judgment about an investment in this and whether the continuing cost of it is worth investing in. I urge my noble friend not to ask us to be too peremptory in making a once-and-for-all decision when technology is changing as, because of that, the justification for doing this might increase and we might get to the answer that my noble friend wants.

I am grateful to all noble Lords for their thoughtful and constructive contributions, which reflect the strong interest in maintaining the UK’s continued leadership in aviation safety and innovation. We remain committed to ensuring safety and efficiency. We recognise the real value of systems such as EGNOS, but we must also consider the financial implications and seek solutions that offer the best value for money.

On the contributions of noble Lords about the cost of it, or the cost when it was around £35 million—I cannot confirm whether that might be the current cost or not—if the previous Government could not justify it, in these difficult financial circumstances we have a duty to justify public expenditure. However, noble Lords will have heard me say that we are considering it not only for the benefits from EGNOS for the purposes described in the discussion today but because the future of drone and uncrewed aircraft technology is rapidly developing. I hope noble Lords will appreciate that we are strongly considering it. I am grateful for all that they have said.