Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Gascoigne Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friends Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Moylan on their Amendment 42, which calls for an annual statement setting out the liabilities to the public purse.

As I said on day one, the whole rail system is duplicated, messy and costly. Given that this Bill is piecemeal and without the other substantive and necessary reforms, it runs the risk of not fixing the problem but making it worse and costing the taxpayer even more. As has already been noted, in the Labour Party’s Getting Britain Moving document, there is a section titled “Failure is increasing costs”, which talks about the savings to be made. The Government’s September press release hails the Secretary of State as having

“fired the starting gun on rail reform”,

and clearly notes that it will be

“saving taxpayers up to an estimated £150 million every year in fees alone in the process”.

So we will bank that—well, the Treasury will, rather than the taxpayer—but the indication from that is that there will be savings of at least £150 million every year. I am not disputing that figure, but what other savings will there be?

I was reading the other day that nationalisation could be costing the taxpayer £1 billion per year by the end of this Parliament. There is an argument that it is only because of privatisation that we can see what the system costs and what is profitable and what is not. There is a legitimate concern that the cost will once again become opaque, with the passing of this Bill and when it starts to take effect. In assessing the virtue of these reforms, not just from an ideological point of view, the country should know what else it is taking on, not least because it will effectively be the owner or shareholder, not just of the railways but now the liabilities of the companies which will be transferred on to the Government’s balance sheet.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, the amendment and the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Young, indicate the obvious advantages of nationalisation in terms of greater access to information and transparency; it has disadvantages, which the noble Lord set out, but it also has advantages. The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, was compelling: the evidence and information he gave us illustrated much better than I have heard before the issues that have been referred to—I referred to them on Second Reading and on Monday—regarding the imbalance between the attitude of the Government towards the speed of taking over the train operators and the fact that they are prepared to leave well alone the roscos, which can quite clearly be seen to be exploiting their situation and therefore getting excess profits as a result. I will be very interested to listen to the Minister’s explanation of why that is happening.