Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

12: Clause 2, page 2, line 21, at end insert—
“(1D) The relevant franchising authority must consult the Council of the Nations and Regions before making a direct award of a public sector contract to a public sector company for a rail service that serves destinations in two or more of England, Scotland and Wales.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment requires the relevant franchising authority to consult the Council of the Nations and Regions before making a direct award of a public sector contract to a public sector company for a rail service that serves destinations in two or more of England, Scotland and Wales.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we come now to one of the most important debates in our consideration of this Bill in Committee: a group of amendments on devolution and the powers of local authorities, devolved authorities and combined mayoral authorities in relation to the vision of passenger railway services. At this stage in the debate, I intend to speak only to the amendments in my name—Amendments 12, 13 and 50—although I will offer general support to the others in this group, many of which I have added my name to. I may have more particular comments about them later in the debate when their movers have had a chance to speak to them.

I shall dispose briefly of Amendments 12 and 13, which were intended to be helpful. Indeed, Amendment 12 is still intended to be helpful. It would require the relevant franchising authority to consult the newly established Council of the Nations and Regions, which the Prime Minister has set up, before awarding contracts to a public sector company. We on this side of the House thought that it might be useful for the new council to have something practical to do; I would have thought that considering the provision of railway services is something that would take up a considerable amount of its time and generate a great deal of interesting debate. I shall say no more about this amendment because I imagine that it will be happily accepted by the Minister.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I start with a brief apology to the noble Lord, Lord Snape, for not having signed his amendment and assure him that if he wishes to approach me in the corridors between now and Report, some sort of grubby deal can probably be done between us in that regard. My signature is readily available for the many wise things that he has said in this debate.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

If we are going to meet to discuss these future amendments, grubby deals or otherwise, better in one of the bars where the noble Lord can put his hand in his pocket.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

There is the basis of a grubby deal, I suppose, but I am sure it will be done on an equal, Dutch, shared basis.

The Minister has heard what the Committee has had to say from every corner, and he will know that his response will have left noble Lords on all sides bitterly disappointed. He has promised to combined mayoral authorities, to local authorities and to regional authorities every conceivable aspect of devolution except the right and the possibility to run their own trains, which has been done so successfully in London and, I understand although I have no personal experience of it, on Merseyside. That is now suspended; it is off the table, for a number of years at the very least, on no rational grounds at all. As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, so rightly said, we need to know the final outcome now.

For all the Minister’s talk of this being a narrow and technical Bill, its effect, in combination with his letter, is to put an end to the further devolution of rail services to local and regional authorities for the foreseeable future, and that is something the Committee is clearly not willing to accept. There is a fundamental difficulty at the heart of this Bill, and that is the commitment made so fulsomely to devolution, endorsed or otherwise by Mr Williams, whose views seem to be plastic and developing and to respond differently to every telephone call he gets from the noble Lord—it is possibly getting to the point of rent-a-quote from Mr Williams. Despite all the commitments made by Mr Williams and by the Labour Party in its pre-manifesto document on rail services, there is not going to be any meaningful devolution. Those commitments are not consistent with the Government’s other commitment to the single controlling brain. It is a contradiction at the heart of the legislation.

As for the ability of local authorities to commission services, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, so rightly said, it is all a question of money. We promise it for buses, but as we said when we discussed the Statement made on buses—on that occasion too the noble Lord, Lord Snape, was very helpful in supporting what I said —it is all very well telling local authorities they can commission new bus services, but they do not have a bean to do so. It is all very well telling regional authorities they can commission more rail services, but unless we understand, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, who is going to pay for it and who is going to get the fares revenue, it is all pretty meaningless.

It seems to me that the great single brain is already suffering a serious headache and that the paracetamol of devolution may be what it needs to dilute the effects and to take the pressure off that brain. I think this is a point on which the Government are going to have to give some ground, and I certainly think it is one we will debate again when we return to the Bill on Report. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 12 withdrawn.

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[Lord Ranger of Northwood (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly offer my support for my noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom’s Amendment 14A and echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about what services we are looking to deliver when we talk about driverless vehicles, trains, et cetera.

In referring to my register of interests, I recognise that I have spent my entire career with one foot in technology and the other in transport. The two have overlapped, and we have seen great innovation in technology in transport. This takes me back to what we achieved in London Underground and Transport for London: we looked at how bringing in gate-line technology and new systems such as the Oyster card would enable us to rely less heavily on ticket offices. Eventually we removed a lot of them. That was not just because we wanted to get the people out from behind those ticket office windows; we wanted those people, freed from sitting behind that thick piece of glass, to support passengers on the Underground system by providing assistance, information and other services. This is about innovation evolving the service and removing the need for one sedentary type of activity, enabling something else to happen.

When we think about our trains—again, I note the observations of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on the kind of support that can be required on a train, especially for long-distance journeys—safety and security are primary. It would also be good if we could have more services, if the food and beverage shop stayed open a bit longer because people are there, and even if somebody is there to help you connect to the wifi, which is always eternally promised but sometimes hard to achieve. Having a greater sense of the passenger experience, focusing on developing the passenger experience by freeing people from the role of sitting in the ticket office and allowing them to do other things, will be of great value.

The main point is that we need to leave space for the design of innovation. It is always hard to tell at the early stages what we will be able to do later with that innovation, but as long as we leave space in the Bill to consider it, we can, I hope, achieve our aim of really improving the passenger experience.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am not accustomed to making speeches on technological matters but, on this occasion, I feel I have some modest qualifications for doing so—although I must say in advance that I do so with a degree of trepidation, because nearly everything I know about driverless trains I have been taught by the Minister. I therefore sit in the uncomfortable position of being subject to not only his correction but his immediate correction the moment I sit down and he comes to respond.

It is possible to get oneself into a tizz about these things called driverless trains when what one is in fact discussing is signalling. When I first got involved in railways, I thought that signalling was a system where arms went up and down and red and green lights flashed, but that is all in the past. Modern signalling is, in effect, a huge computer brain that fundamentally drives the trains. It tells the trains when to go, when to stop and how fast to go in between. Its purpose is to maintain a safe distance between trains as they travel, taking account of the speed and the track’s condition and nature. It is specific to the track.

Although the noble Lord, Lord Snape, will find counterexamples—I am sure that he is right to do so—broadly speaking, it is safer to have the train driven by this great controlling brain than it is to have it driven by a human being. A large number of historical train accidents have been caused by driver inattentiveness. Indeed, in Committee on Monday, it was the noble Lord, Lord Snape, I think—it may have been another noble Lord—who drew attention to one cause of such accidents, driver tiredness, whereas the machine does not get tired. It knows what it is doing. It knows where every train is going and where it is in relation to every other.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, spoke of the person who remotely drives the train. There is not a person remotely driving the train; it is the great computer brain.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

From my experience on the then Automated Vehicles Bill, there is a person who watches various vehicles driving. If there is an issue, they will intervene. That is how reassurance was given, so it is not left only to the computer.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I was going to come to a point relating to that. I am sure that what the noble Baroness said is absolutely correct in relation to automated vehicles but, like automated planes, automated vehicles are very different from automated trains. An automated plane—indeed, any plane—must be 110% safe and known to be safe before it takes off, because if it develops a problem when it is in the air there is nothing you can do about it.

With an automated train, the approach to safety is totally different. Safety is based on fail-safe devices. If the computer brain sees that something is wrong—for example, if it loses a train on the system and does not know where it is—everything is brought to a stop. That is the solution. That is how you guarantee the safety of not only that train but the trains close to it. The trains further down the line are brought to a stop, which is of course not remotely possible when you try to apply a different technology to the air and to automated vehicles. That is the sort of system we are talking about. The level of automation that can be achieved is graded. Level 3 automation, as it is known, requires a driver to be present, although the driver is not actually driving the train.

My noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom referred to the Docklands Light Railway coming into operation in the 1990s. I think I am correct—here, I very much worry that I might have got this wrong and that the Minister will correct me—in saying that the Victoria line, which was introduced in the 1960s, was introduced with automated signalling at level 4. There was a driver in the cab, but they would arrive in stations reading the newspapers. This so disconcerted passengers that a stop had to be put to it and they were told that they could not read the newspaper while they were sitting in the cab, at least not while they were in or coming into a station.

So we know perfectly well that this can be done safely. We know that we can run trains much closer together and provide greater capacity if we have an automated system, because it is safer. That is why, if you go down to the Victoria line today—it benefits not from a 1960s signalling system but from a brand-new signalling system installed in the last few years—you will see the trains coming into the station so fast that the previous one hardly has time to get out before the next one arrives. If you had a driver driving that train, the headways between them would have to be much greater. By comparison, on the Piccadilly line, which, as I have mentioned on several occasions, has a signalling system so decrepit that it is hardly a signalling system at all, you can see how slowly the trains come into the stations. The driver has to conduct himself with great caution whereas, with automated signalling, they will come in faster and stop in exactly the right place. They do not have to make the human judgment that the driver has to make about stopping exactly on his mark; that is what he is meant to do, but it takes time.

I think that everybody who is involved in railways wants to head towards that; it is the direction we want to go in. The question then arises: if you have driverless trains with literally no driver in the cab, how are you going to handle the customers? First, as some people have said, there will be trepidation on the part of customers. I think that will be overcome. Even I have a degree of trepidation; I took some flights over the summer. Not many people realise that the pilot is already pretty redundant in most of the aeroplanes they are flying in. Conscious of this, I was thinking about it when I took off the other day, so trepidation is a factor.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, makes a much more serious point perhaps, which is that services are required for passengers in the train and in the event of an emergency. As I said, an emergency is likely to result in the train being stopped in the middle of nowhere, and possibly stopped long enough that passengers have to be disembarked. Who is going to do all that? Of course the train has to have people on it; it has to have staff on it. Although the Docklands Light Railway has no driver—which, as noble Lords probably know, allows children to sit up front and even adults to fulfil their childhood fantasies by sitting up front—even it has a member of staff on it to deal with the sort of eventualities referred to by the noble Baroness.

There is a sort of fantasy here. I depart slightly from remarks made by some of my Conservative colleagues—not here in your Lordships’ House but in other fora—that this will somehow free the railways from dependency on staff and, therefore, on the unions. It will not, of course, because those staff will have to be present even if they are not in the cab. They will probably be members of the RMT, too, which is not exactly freeing yourself from the trammels of the trades unions.

The general intention behind my noble friend Lord Hamilton’s amendment is an extremely good one. We should be moving, as far as we can, from level 3 to level 4. Over time, it is an inevitability, and the costs involved in doing so will have to be found. The increase in both capacity and safety that will arise from doing so will probably be worth 10 HS2s or HS3s or whatever we provide on the existing lines.

Knowing the Government’s intentions on this will be extremely helpful. Knowing how it will be afforded and prioritised in an entirely nationalised system is something that we would all like to know. I suspect, as on previous occasions, that the answer from the Minister will be that we will have to wait, that he is not going to tell us, that this is a very narrow, technical Bill, that all the goodies are coming down the track in 18 months’ time, and everything else. I hope he is taking account of the fact that the Committee is very concerned about this—that technological change has to be at the heart of the modernisation of the railways and that the Government are going to find the investment capacity to do so. It is a matter of priority and money. Can he tell us about it, please, when he stands up?

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The Government quite rightly want urgent improvement on the railways. There is no reason why a focus on passengers should not be a big step towards that improvement. I urge the Government to amend the Bill to specify legal obligations with respect to disability access. We on these Benches give notice that we may well return to this on Report.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we have heard some very powerful and moving speeches, based on their own personal experience, from the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson. I feel it would almost be impertinent of me to try to add to what they are saying, given how rich and deep their experience is of travelling on the railways as passengers who are confined to wheelchairs. They also spoke, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and others, of those with other forms of disability, including those affected in their sight and their hearing.

However, if I were to add anything of any great substance, it would probably be along the lines of the excellent speech made by my noble friend Lord Moynihan, who clearly set out a programme—a challenging and demanding programme, admittedly, but one that should be embraced by the Government and by Great British Railways—for improving the experience of disabled passengers on the railway. It is very important for us to hear what the Minister will have to say in response to that. I know that he personally is very sympathetic to the experience of disabled passengers and the difficulties they have. However, although I do not make this as a personal remark, Network Rail as an organisation has been making similar noises for a long time, yet the difficulties continue—perhaps not always the same difficulties, and there are some improvements from time to time, but none the less the difficulties continue, and here we are today, hearing these speeches. I look forward to what the Minister has to say.

I was interested in the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, in relation to the passenger standards authority. We have heard too little in our Committee debates so far about the role and purpose of that authority. It is promised in the document Getting Britain Moving, but what scope it will have as a strong voice for passengers—that is how it is described—and how it will be much in advance of the existing passenger representative bodies, we have yet to learn. It would be helpful if the Minister could explain his vision for the passenger standards authority. I hope we do not have to have that deferred until we hear about the next Bill coming down the line at us, because I think it is what people want to hear.

I have an amendment of my own in this group. It will not take me a great time to speak to it. It relates to something else that we all want to know about: discount fares. Perhaps I should declare that I am the holder of a senior railcard—I hear a certain hum around the Chamber that suggests, to my surprise, that I may not be alone in that—but there is a multiplicity of other railcards too. If you click the button on the website that says, “Apply a railcard discount to this fare”, you will find a drop-down box containing a whole list of the various railcards that are available. I think passengers want to know that those railcards are going to continue to be available to them in the new system.

One of the difficulties that the Government have—indeed, that we all have—is that we are told, “We’ll pass this Bill and then everything is, so to speak, frozen until we get the next Bill”. As I have said repeatedly, and perhaps I have bored the House by saying it, simply getting the next Bill does not change anything. Change has to follow the Bill, and change is itself very time-consuming to implement. So, even on a good timetable for the Government, we are talking about four or five years before we see change, yet we are getting the impression of life being frozen in the meantime. Hence, we get pleas from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for something to be done about ticketing in the meantime. We all want to know, not just on ticketing but on other matters, what is going to happen in the meantime when, in a sense, no one is in charge because shadow Great British Railways will have been set up but it will have no powers. We will be awaiting Great British Railways and things will not actually be happening.

To come back to my own amendment, that situation applies also to discounted fares. Are they to continue as they are? If they are to be changed—and there may be an argument for change; it may be that a new one has to be added or some have to be deleted, merged or changed in some other way—what would be the mechanism for doing that? I do not mean simply the legal mechanism, because that exists already and it is not being abolished, but who is the driving force behind that? What is the machine that is going to run that sort of thing and make the decisions? We would like to know about all those things. We want some assurance about their continuation but, more importantly, we would like an understanding about the change and the directing mind in this transition period, which could go on for several years.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for the remarks that he has just made. He talks of delay and nothing happening. One of the reasons why I personally am here is that I have been waiting six years for rail reform and, in the end, when I was asked, I volunteered to see whether I could move it forward, because it has taken a very long time. Not much has happened since the timetable crisis of 2018 and the report that Keith Williams wrote.

I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Randerson, for Amendment 17, which is supported also by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. I absolutely recognise the need to address the passenger experience, and I know that my noble friend Lady Blake, who took the Second Reading, recognises it too. Improving accessibility on the railways is a key priority for the Government and something that the Secretary of State and I are personally committed to. We know that the assistance that passengers receive too often falls short of what they deserve and what they have every right to expect.

I was going to list a range of areas where things need to change, but I am embarrassed to do so because so many speakers in this debate have listed them themselves. All I can do is acknowledge that I have heard the list quite clearly. We know that we need to do better, and it hurts me that the public service that I care about fails so regularly to look after people in the way that it ought to. I personally—and the Secretary of State is in the same position—will do my best to do differently in future.

Many of these issues are, frankly, best solved under public ownership, as the problems that have arisen are a direct result of the current fragmented system. For example, on the specification of new trains, which the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and others referred to, a guiding mind will take an approach to a greater consistency of design and improve the outcomes for disabled passengers.

In addition, it has been explained, more eloquently than I can do, how many apps there are, how weak they are and how they fail to work. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, took me through, and showed me a huge litany of things that are wrong with, a variety of apps, all of which she needs to make quite simple journeys. I am terribly embarrassed by that. Why should we need so many different electronic devices to deliver such a relatively poor service and outcome in such circumstances? That is an obvious case where consistency is desirable. I referred earlier today to not having a proliferation of train operators, and this is one of the reasons not to do so. We do not want everyone inventing their own process; we want one consistent process, designed with the people who use it, not done for them and not delivered to them after it is done. I have heard the experiences of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and others of getting something that they wanted but then discovering it did not do what they wanted.

I contend that one of the clearest reasons for the Bill, which seeks to take train operations back into public ownership progressively, is to make those sorts of improvements a great deal easier to deliver in future. Public ownership and control give us the best platform possible to do that. I appreciate the engagement that I have had to date, especially with the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson. I believe I have offered a meeting to both of them— I hope I have, but that is done for me—and we will have that before Report. That is not an explanation; it is more of an apology, but I hope that for now it will allow them to withdraw their amendment.