Queen's Speech

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, I am going to speak about the bus and rail industries, in which I have no financial interest, although I have spent my whole professional career there. I want to talk about the financial problems facing the Government. First, I utter a word of caution about fares. The elasticity of demand in both transport industries is such that if you put up fares by 10 per cent you lose on average 13 per cent of the passengers, so you have less money in the till and fewer passengers—hardly a recipe for success.

Costs must be cut. I ask the Minister to say something about Network Rail, which is spending huge sums of taxpayers’ money and is inefficient, complacent and expensive. I believe that legislation is necessary to bring this organisation, which was created by the party opposite, under some sort of control. It is essential that it spends less money. Secondly, the train operating companies and rolling stock companies are quite ready to review straightaway the timetable and deployment of rolling stock, in the interests of greater efficiency and getting much more into the kitty.

It is necessary to delay the refranchising of three franchises—CTC, Greater Anglia and the East Coast. They are due to be refranchised soon, yet the Government have said, and we have supported the view of the Conservative Party, that we need a new franchising model, which will bring a lot more investment into the industry, because I cannot see that coming from the Government. I believe that the train operating companies and the rolling stock companies are quite capable of managing the fleet and the cascading of rolling stock within the fleet and might embark on a programme of life extension and refurbishment, which would create a lot of jobs in this country, rather than buying new trains from Japan, a process which the previous Government set up. They are unnecessary and unwanted and very expensive. We could make do with what we have, because it has a lot of life in it.

We should review the Thameslink and Crossrail service patterns. We need both, but do we need to run 12-coach trains through Thameslink at 24 trains an hour? That is a huge amount of capacity, and I am sure that it is too much; a rigorous appraisal needs to be made of the number of trains running and where they are going to. At the west end of Crossrail, people almost do not know what to do with the trains.

I welcome, of course, the work being done on high-speed trains. I believe that the electrification programme from the railways needs to be thoroughly reappraised. Although I live in the region of the Great Western and obviously speak in an audience of Cornishmen, I would say that say that electrifying the line west of Oxford is unnecessary, at least at the moment. We should concentrate our electrification on those lines where the cash flow is best, so that we buy the things that would give a return quickly, not spend money on things on which the return is problematic in future. We need to purge the rail division of the Department for Transport and almost forbid it to employ consultants. We should stop using the new approach to transport appraisal as a means of assessing transport schemes. It is inordinately expensive and complicated and, as an economist, I gave up reading the thing after page three. It gets so complicated that it is not an efficient guide as to where we should spend the money.

I agonised quite a lot over the question of buses. The concessionary fares scheme was never properly funded by the Labour Party and has been a constant source of trouble to both operators and local authorities. The age at which concession is available needs reviewing, and we might have to do the very unpopular thing of charging concessionaires 25 per cent of their fare in order to bring the system back into balance. Of course I would make exceptions for the disabled, the over-80s and various others, but the vast bulk of people would rather pay something towards the cost of their travel. A recent survey asked people how the scheme had affected their lives and one of the prime answers was, “We walk less”. I am sure that that was never in the minds of the people who designed the scheme.

Lastly, there is the issue of heavy lorries. Foreign lorries are using our roads and not paying, and we should do something about lorry-user charging to get more money in the kitty.

I hope that I have given the Minister a few ideas about how to save money in the areas that I know about. I am sure that other noble Lords could do the same.