King’s Speech

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak about Britain’s railways and in doing so remind the House of my interests as chair of the Great Western Railway stakeholder advisory board, president of the Heritage Railway Association and co-author of three books on railways and politics which attracted favourable reviews from Members of your Lordships’ House, two of whom I am happy to see in their place this evening.

It is now well over five years and four Secretaries of State since Keith Williams was asked by the Government to conduct a rail review. He came up with a set of practical proposals which formed the basis of a White Paper in May 2021. It had the makings of a cross-party consensus which could survive a change of government. A transition team was set up and much work was done and expense incurred in preparing for fundamental changes on the railways, which were necessary because the franchising model was broken.

We were repeatedly promised legislation “when parliamentary time permits” to give statutory backing to the central proposal to establish a new body—Great British Railways—to provide a guiding mind over the railways’ various operations. Given how light on legislation is the gracious Speech, there would have been ample opportunity to introduce a short and largely uncontentious Bill in this final Session; or to pick up the suggestion I put to the Government on 12 July that the powers given by the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994 would have allowed the Secretary of State, by means of a statutory instrument, to delegate some or all of his franchising powers and get Great British Railways up and running. But these opportunities have been lost, and all we are promised is a draft Bill. Failure to get GBR running means that the costs of operating the railway will continue to be higher than they need be, and the Treasury will go on strangling revenue growth, with the DfT micro-managing virtually every operational decision taken by the train operators.

Despite their best intentions, the civil servants struggling to cope with this situation frankly do not have the capability or capacity for this work. The management of the railways must return to the professional railway men and railway women whose hands have been tied by the present arrangements of annual contracts and whose expertise has been ignored for far too long.

Despite this negative background, growth and passenger demand is back. While business travel and commuting numbers are still down compared with those before Covid, leisure travel is booming and trains are full again, particularly on routes such as the east coast main line and Great Western. New figures from Hull Trains published last week showed a very strong recovery in journey levels, with 28% more people now travelling with that operator than before the pandemic.

This is good news, of course, as it is helping to reduce the need for car travel and flying, and thus is reducing the carbon footprint of these travellers. But please can we hear no more of the “war on motorists”, which I was surprised to hear the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, mention in opening the debate, and on which the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, poured scorn in her speech. We should remember that from May 1999 to July 2022, the cost of motoring fell by 19% compared with inflation, as measured by the RPI. Rail fares over the same period rose by 31%, and bus and coach fares by 102%.

Getting juggernauts off the roads should be a major priority. A reduction in lorry miles through the transfer of trunk haul to rail is necessary if our 2050 net-zero targets are to be met. Capacity is the constraint, and the abandonment of HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester is a huge setback, as it would have released train paths on the classic railway for the increase in rail freight which is required if these targets are to be met. The HS2 decision and the lack of ambition in attracting new business reminds me that we are in danger of returning to the days of the 1970s and 1980s, when the railways were told to plan for managed decline. The biggest opportunity for rail to play its full part as a sustainable part of the national transport network is therefore at risk of being delayed for many years or even lost altogether.

There is still much good will and affection towards our railways—although, sadly, not in all parts of the Government. Shortly, we will hear about the plans for the celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the first passenger railway, between Stockton and Darlington, which are being led by the noble Lord, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill. This will help rekindle a national sense of pride, but it is deeply disappointing that rail did not rate a higher priority in the gracious Speech.

Financial Services and Markets Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 8th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, I fear that the Minister has stolen my clothes. In speaking to Amendments 25, 29, 31, 36 and 38, which are in my name, and in looking at the government amendments, including Amendment 30, I find myself saying that the government amendments are far more effective and do a better job. They achieve the same purpose, so I say a big thank you to the Minister for having taken this on board. But, just reflecting on the debate we have had, I say that this will work only if very substantial resources are made available to any committee, whether that is a committee of this House or a Joint Committee.

I entirely understand the autonomy of this House, and the Government are to be commended in respecting it. It is up to this House and the other place to decide what committees they will establish, but here we have a statutory opportunity for us to set up a Joint Committee of both Houses, which my noble friend Lord Trenchard has made strong representations for, or indeed another committee of this House. But be in no doubt that any committee, whether joint or single, is going to have to look at the entire financial regulatory structure that has been taken from the European Union and given to the regulators. That is an enormous task. Although in this House we have many able people with expertise in this area, they have a finite amount of time and will absolutely need to be supported by people with technical expertise and knowledge, of the kind which the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, would have been quite used to when she was in the European Parliament, so ably chairing a committee with similar responsibilities.

I very much support the government amendments and certainly do not feel the need to press any of mine to the vote in this House. I thank the Minister for having listened so carefully, and for the time that she and her officials have given to considering the arguments and points, which have been made pretty well with a degree of consensus across the Committee and the House. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

I must advise the House—this will not surprise the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—that, if this amendment is agreed to, I will be unable to call Amendment 26.

[Lord Eatwell (Lab)]

My Lords, I will comment briefly on the proposal which has emerged and is contained in Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn. It refers to the possibility of parliamentary committees being

“the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons … the Committee of the House of Lords”

or a Joint Committee. It says “and” but I presume that they would be mutually exclusive.

What is extraordinary about this amendment is that it contains a seriously bad idea which might lead to an extremely good outcome. The seriously bad idea is that the two committees, one in the other place and one here in the Lords, would be sitting at the same time and looking at the same material, requiring the same levels of expertise to advise them and the same commitment of time by the regulators—and, perhaps, producing divergent opinions which would lead to regulatory uncertainty. That is a very bad outcome. Why I fully support these amendments, however, is that the seriously bad idea will lead to an extremely good outcome, because people will see that the possibility of having a committee in the other place and a committee here doing the same thing, with all the negative connotations that I have just discussed, will lead to the rational outcome of a Joint Committee of both Houses.

Financial Services and Markets Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 6th February 2023 Grand Committee

Amendments 74 and 75 not moved.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

At this point, it might be convenient if the Committee were to adjourn for 10 minutes.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

I must advise the Committee that if Amendment 4 is agreed, I shall be unable to call Amendments 7 to 11 for reasons of pre-emption.

Amendment 4

Moved by

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

I must advise the Committee that if Amendment 5 is agreed to, it is not possible to call Amendments 7 to 11 for reason of pre-emption.

Amendment 6 (to Amendment 5)

Moved by

Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

I must advise the House that if Amendment 84 is agreed to, I shall be unable to call Amendments 85 to 87 for reasons of pre-emption.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on the 18 amendments in this group and I am the sole signatory on eight of them. I endorse entirely what the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, said. He speaks from great experience, which is of great help to the House.

One of the scandals—I think one can fairly use that word—of the past five years in terms of financial failings has been the extreme paucity of prosecutions for some of the greatest criminal failings, to use a neutral word, in the history of our or any country. It is rather staggering to think that over the past five years you can count on the fingers of your two hands the number of City malefactors who have been prosecuted, when during that time probably 20,000 or 30,000 people have been prosecuted for shoplifting at an average of £25 a time.

I tabled these amendments not in any spirit of vindictiveness—one can also say that, I am sure, of the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, and the other signatories—but to try to give real teeth to a very important clause, Clause 27, which is designed and put forward on the basis that it will be a significant deterrent to conduct arising in the future which is comparable to the conduct that has occurred in the past five or six years. The wording of Clause 27(1) in particular seems to those of us who have tabled these amendments to be so narrow—to cite the word used by the noble Lord, Lord Brennan—that the prospects of getting a conviction before a jury, or, indeed, starting to prosecute at all, will be remote. To give a simple, direct example of that point, Clause 27(1)(b) makes plain that a conviction can be secured only if the implementation of a single decision—“the decision”—causes,

“the failure of the group bank”.

When, except in the rarest of circumstances, did a single decision cause the failure of a bank? Life is much more complicated. Very often a series of decisions is involved and even then you cannot say that the decision or decisions cause the failure but rather that they,

“contribute directly and significantly to”,

the failure of a group bank, as I have put it in my amendment.

We have tabled these amendments to give practical effect to Clause 27 and other clauses. They are important clauses and we must not shackle them with such a narrow set of requirements that they will not serve their purpose. We should never forget that British criminal law is rightly strictly construed, and construed against the prosecution. If you think of that and you think of the wording in the clause, you will realise that it is not fit for purpose. I hope that if my noble friend the Minister does not accept the wording of these amendments—they could be drafted differently—he will at least undertake to come back at Third Reading with wording that the Government find acceptable and which will serve the purpose that we seek to serve in putting these amendments forward.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, in my speech this afternoon I intend to concentrate on transport, with particular reference to the gracious Speech’s very welcome confirmation that the Government are proceeding with a paving Bill to allow work to proceed on plans for the construction of High Speed 2. I wish them well with that and with the hybrid Bill, which I hope may pass before the end of this Parliament.

I should remind the House of my relevant interests. I serve as an unpaid member of First Great Western’s stakeholder advisory board. I am president of the Cotswold Line Promotion Group and the Heritage Railway Association. I am also the co-author of a recently published book called Holding The Line: How Britain’s Railways Were Saved, which contains a political and social history of the railways, particularly since the publication of the Beeching report 50 years ago.

Perhaps I may start by picking up a theme that runs through that book. It is sometimes hard to recall how massive the turnaround in the public’s attitude to rail travel and the fortunes of the industry has been. In the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, the railways appeared to be in terminal decline. The process of retrenchment and cost-cutting, which had started at the time of Beeching, appeared remorseless and inexorable. Numerous plans were hatched to reduce the size of the network further by line closures, cuts in services and fare increases.

Governments of both parties encouraged plans to substitute buses for rail services, particularly in rural areas. Weird enthusiasts for the Railway Conversion League were listened to as they put forward plans to concrete over the railways and turn them into busways. Thirty years ago, it looked as though the lobbyists for the road industry, road haulage and motorway construction might achieve their final victory. Back in 1960, the Road Haulage Association felt able to say in its journal, The World’s Carriers:

“We should build more roads, and we should have fewer railways … We must exchange the ‘permanent way’ of life for the ‘motorway’ of life ... road transport is the future, the railways are the past”.

Happily, it did not get its way because the public decided that they liked their railways and did not want them closed. By 2001, the distinguished City correspondent, Christopher Fildes, who served on the Railway Heritage Committee with me and was a journalistic colleague of the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, was able to write in the Spectator:

“Railways are a growth industry. Their most sustained attempts to drive away their customers have not succeeded”.

Twelve years on, the growth continues. In 2012, the total number of rail passengers exceeded 1.5 billion, compared with 630 million in 1982. Numbers grew by 5.5% in 2012, 7.2% in 2011 and 7.9% in 2010. The number of those travelling in the last quarter of 2012 was the highest for any quarter since the 1920s. It will not have escaped the attention of your Lordships that much of this has been achieved at a time of recession and in the face of fare increases above the rate of inflation, as my noble friend Lady Hayter pointed out. On 11 March, Sir David Higgins, chief executive of Network Rail, said in a speech at the Campaign for Better Transport conference in the Science Museum that,

“utilities such as airports and power have seen annual compound growth rates of no more than 1 per cent on average, yet rail has grown by 5 per cent compound every year”.

As people’s experiences of travelling by rail and the reliability of services improve, this growth is likely to continue. The West Midlands Regional Rail Forum says that Network Rail’s growth forecast for 2021-22 has already been achieved eight years early and it is a similar story elsewhere. Both the west coast main line and the east coast main line will reach capacity before the end of this decade. In the case of the west coast main line, that will be less than 15 years after the completion of one of the most disruptive and expensive upgrades of all time.

I do not understand how anyone can seriously argue that spending another £20 billion-plus on upgrading these two Victorian railways and disrupting services for years at a time, and in the end producing infrastructure that cannot support line speeds that are commonplace throughout Europe and the Far East, stands any sort of comparison with the benefits that will flow from building High Speed 2. To argue, as the HS2 opponents do, that the new line is only about reductions in journey time between London and Birmingham is completely wrong and misses the point. It is about revitalising the economies of towns and cities in the Midlands and the north of England, and narrowing the north-south divide. It is about giving the railway the opportunity to satisfy the ever-growing demand for passenger travel. It is about reducing the number of car journeys and short-haul air passenger flights, both of which will have significant environmental benefits.

Perhaps equally important, High Speed 2 will—according to the WSP engineering consultancy—lead to 500,000 fewer heavy goods vehicle journeys on the M1, the M40 and the M6, which is the equivalent of 65,000 tonnes of CO₂. The new railway will produce environmental benefits worth £1.3 billion over 60 years. For all those reasons, I am happy to reaffirm my unqualified support for High Speed 2, which is a rare example of a brilliant idea conceived by one Administration—thanks to my noble friend Lord Adonis—and then picked up and developed by their successor.

Before I conclude, there is one other matter that I wish to bring to the attention of the Minister. I have already given her notice of my intention to raise it in this debate. This is also a non-party issue in the sense that the previous Government took the initial decision and this one are sticking with it. I am talking about the western terminus of Crossrail, which is a hugely important and valuable project capable of transforming the travel-to-work experience of hundreds of thousands of commuters, as the noble Lord, Lord Deighton, said in his opening speech.

On 5 March, a number of Members of the other place and of this House, including the noble Earl, Lord Attlee—who I am very pleased to see in his place—and I visited the site of the new Crossrail station at Bond Street. The following week, I was taken by First Great Western on a tour of the new station at Reading. I was particularly interested to see included in the new arrangements a platform designed to accommodate four Crossrail trains an hour, should it be decided at some stage that Reading should be the western terminus, rather than Maidenhead. To me, and to almost everyone in the industry and outside it who understands these issues, it is intuitively self-evident that, following the Government’s welcome decision to authorise electrification of the Great Western main line, it is to Reading that the Crossrail trains should run.

I also learnt that we are within days of starting work in Maidenhead to construct the turnback facilities, taking around 18 months and costing as much as £35 million. I wrote to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, on 18 March, making the point that if the decision was to be taken later to extend Crossrail to Reading, much of the new infrastructure at Maidenhead would not be needed and the Government and Transport for London would be criticised for wasting money. The Minister replied to me last week and I thank him for his letter. It contained the sentence:

“Officials will continue to work with Network Rail and the train operators on the timetabling issues presented by the introduction of Crossrail services on the Great Western Mainline”.

It did not, unfortunately, state that there would be any pause in the work at Maidenhead.

I raise this issue today because we are at the point where a decision must be made to prevent money being wasted at Maidenhead and to deliver a far better arrangement in its place. I understand that various discussions are going on behind the scenes involving Transport for London, Network Rail, the train operators and the Crossrail team. I ask that DfT Ministers get directly involved and help deliver a solution that makes best sense all round. I hope the noble Baroness will have an answer to that when she replies.

Coins

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I am not sure what we can do about that, but I can assure the noble Lord that, based on the experience with the 1p and 2p coins, there will be many cupronickel 5p and 10p coins still in existence for many years to come.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on issuing a new set of coins to popularise the Olympic Games and the fact that a number of coins represent particular sports. Can I regret the fact that the new 50p coin, which defines the football off-side law, is incorrect?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I think that we are straying a bit from the Question. I must say that my knowledge of the twists and turns of the off-side law has never been completely up to date.