Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Grayling

Report stage
Wednesday 6th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendment 16, which is in this group. I am, as ever, grateful to my noble friend for sparing the time to talk about this. My amendment is designed to be helpful. It is designed from experience of previous railway legislation, in which we got bogged down in massive detail, with hundreds of amendments; we may get somewhere, but it takes longer.

Given the discussion that we had on a large number of subjects in Committee, and will probably have today on Report, I thought it would be useful to probe the Minister’s view of how long it will be before what I call the definitive Bill is published. If that is going to take until spring, as some of us have been told, it might be useful to publish a draft Bill or a draft Command Paper that we could read several months before and have the opportunity to debate. That might help us resolve what the real problems are and how to deal with them, rather than on the Floor of the House for many days in Committee and on Report.

That is the purpose of my amendment, and I look forward to my noble friend’s response. I am not going to press this amendment, but it will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

[Lord Grayling (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on some of the themes that my noble friend Lord Gascoigne has been pursuing around reporting on performance. The Government seem to be a little reticent about being willing to accept amendments which increase reporting requirements. However, there is an important issue here: will public ownership do what the Government have promised it will and improve performance on the railways? I have my doubts about that. I think the challenges of the railways are much more complex and not about ownership but the complexity of our system.

I have a very simple question for the Minister. When you arrive in this House as a new Member, one thing that is very noticeable is the extraordinary level of expertise that exists on Benches on all sides. He brings a very considerable degree of expertise in this House after a long and distinguished career in the rail and transport sector. Can he set aside for a moment his ministerial hat and give us a professional judgment about the likely performance? To take a comparison, can he reassure us that the London Overground, for example, would perform better if run directly as a public body by Transport for London rather than being contracted out to a private operator as it is at the moment? Can he reassure us on that, for the precedents that will exist elsewhere?