Great British Railways

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I would like to ask the Minister a few questions as my contribution. First, will he confirm that the regulator has objectives, but, in fact, all holders of the post have concentrated on the one about promoting competition to the exclusion of other duties?

The regulator costs the taxpayer £30 million a year and has 350 staff—in fact, it gives rise to much greater costs, as illustrated in the Williams review of the costs of running a railway. Because its decisions have the force of law, they compromise constructing a properly integrated railway timetable with an emphasis on connections, reliability and economic use of railway infrastructure. Is it true that the regulator allocates open access paths regardless of their impact on other trains on the network? Can the Minister confirm that this has delayed improvements to the timetable on the east coast main line for three years, costing the taxpayer a very large sum of money—hundreds of millions of pounds?

Are the regulator’s assumptions about revenue forgone and the generation of additional revenue sound? Have these been tested independently and properly verified? I believe that this is not the case and that, in fact, they are underpaying for access and exaggerating the revenue that they are generating for the system. I am not seeking to deny that there should be access from destinations not previously served by franchise operators, or to strike anybody off the railway map. I am particularly concerned that freight should have proper, guaranteed access to the network.

Railway regulation has not been a good thing for the railways. Indeed, regulation generally, as carried out by previous Conservative Governments, has been shown to be defective in almost all cases and for all utilities. We have to look only at the feeble responses of Ofcom and the power utilities to underline that case.