Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 21st October 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

7: Clause 2, page 2, line 15, at end insert—
“(1AA) Before making a direct award of a public service contract to a public sector company under subsection (1A), the relevant franchising authority must provide information to the Office of Rail and Road on the public sector company’s ability to become responsible for the provision of the relevant passenger railway services.(1AB) The information provided under subsection (1AA) must include an overview and analysis of the capacity of the public sector company to provide, maintain and improve the existing level of service. (1AC) Following the receipt of the information provided under subsection (1AA), the Office of Rail and Road must publish an opinion on whether it is reasonably practicable for the public sector company to provide, or secure the provision of, the relevant passenger railway services.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment requires that the relevant franchising authority provides information to the ORR on a public sector company’s capability to provide adequate railway services.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 7 and 9, which together constitute this group. Both are concerned with what the Government say they intend to be the effect of the Bill: the improvement of passenger services. Again, they are largely probing amendments, although we would expect the Bill to be amended, if not with a purpose clause, as proposed earlier by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne, then at least with measures of the character contained in these two amendments, which seek to set a safety net, in effect, in different ways, for the services being provided.

Amendment 7 would have the effect that the relevant franchising authority must give to the Office of Rail and Road—it could be to some other trustworthy and credible body, such as the Department for Transport, if it is not the franchising authority—an assessment that the company that will take over the franchise is capable of doing so. People might ask: what company? The company that will take over the franchise as proposed by this Bill will be a shell company—an off-the-shelf company purchased by the Department for Transport; a perfectly ordinary company under companies law such as anyone might buy off the shelf. That already starts to raise questions around why we would think that it had any competence to run a railway. People will say, “Don’t be silly, that is just a form”. The form is an empty-shell company constituted under companies law, but the sole shareholder of that company will be the Department for Transport. In effect, the Department for Transport will be running this service through the shell company that it has bought off the shelf in order for it to be the recipient of the public service contract, which is the only type of contract that the Secretary of State will be able to award.

But the Minister said a little earlier in the debate— I cannot pin it down exactly without looking at Hansard, but I do not think that he will deny that he said it—that one of the main purposes of the Bill was to take out of the Department for Transport a whole load of stuff that it was no good at doing and give it to Great British Railways, because it would be better at doing it than the Department for Transport. Here we have a system proposed by the Bill in which the responsibility for operating a service will be taken from a train operating company with decades of experience of providing the service—perhaps, in some cases, hundreds of years of experience if it is a foreign railway company putting its foot into the British market and providing services to us—given to a company bought off the shelf, which is owned and controlled by a department that the Minister himself said should have functions taken away from it and transferred to Great British Railways. What sort of a mess is this?

That is why, very simply, this amendment asks for an assessment in advance as to whether that company —the operator—is fit for purpose. We are looking not simply at the shell company but at its shareholders and controllers—the people making the decisions. Why should not the public have that level of assurance before a franchise is terminated and transferred to such an entity? That is what the amendment is calling for, and there is a very strong case that it should be done.

The second amendment, Amendment 9, is not the same, but it points in a similar direction. Nothing is said in this Bill about what level of service the new operator will offer compared to the old operator. It is presumably for the Department for Transport or shadow Great British Railways—we do not know—to decide the terms and conditions of the public service contract that it will award. If it is the Department for Transport, it will award the contract to itself or to its shell company; if it is shadow Great British Railways, it will award it to the Department for Transport. Somebody will have to sit down and decide what those terms and conditions are. All we are asking in this amendment is that the services offered to the public should not be of a lower standard than they are under the existing franchise.

That is not to say that there is not the possibility of some sort of public consultation. That is what we have inserted. We have said that you can lower the services but that you have to consult publicly in advance. At the moment, that would be true on a transfer of a franchise. We have had no assurance from the Government that there will be a public consultation on the termination of a franchise and the award of a public service contract directly to one of the Department for Transport shell companies.

This is one of those issues about which the Government may want to say, ah ha, this will all be dealt with by the great big Bill coming down the rails towards us. That would be a grave mistake, because these issues relate specifically to this Bill and to what will happen the moment it starts to be implemented. As we discussed earlier, this Bill could be the governing statute of the operation of the railways for as much as four or five years, even if the Government have a good headwind behind their new measures and they come forward in time and are implemented reasonably. The public will want to know that our service levels are protected. Will they be consulted? Will the people who run these trains be fit for it, given that we know from the Minister that he does not think that they are fit for much else on the railways? I beg to move.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his amendments.

Amendment 7 considers the capability of public sector companies to take over services and operate them to an appropriate standard. It is clearly a key priority for the Government that services should transfer to public ownership smoothly, without detriment to the quality of service during the transition. For this reason, the transfer of services will take place using established arrangements and processes which have previously fulfilled the Secretary of State’s operator of last resort duties. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that this has taken place under the previous Government and their predecessors four times with no obvious risk to the delivery of service.

DOHL is the publicly owned company that already oversees four existing publicly owned operators. It has had significant experience of managing the transition of services from private to public operation in recent years. These transfers have been completed successfully and smoothly despite challenging timescales and circumstances, which have included franchise financial failure and poor operator performance. DOHL is therefore well-placed to manage future transitions and is building its capacity to do so as we speak.

The Government have made it clear that we will transfer services on a phased basis as existing contracts expire. This measured, responsible approach will further de-risk the transfer process. As an additional safety net, the Bill includes provision at Clause 2 to allow for temporary continuation of an existing franchise where the Secretary of State is satisfied that it is not reasonably practicable to complete a transfer in the timescales originally planned. We do not plan to use this power other than in genuinely exceptional circumstances, but it is prudent that it should be available if necessary as a last resort, given that everybody would agree that disruption to passengers should be avoided.

Amendment 7 also seeks to provide a new role for the independent regulator, the Office of Rail and Road. The ORR is the regulatory authority responsible for granting operator licences and for assessing, approving and issuing operators’ safety certificates. This Bill does not change this. In its existing role, the ORR will assess carefully the suitability and readiness of any operator—public or private, passenger or freight—to take over services and to operate them safely, and is experienced in doing so. Considering DOHL’s previous experience and track record, the further safeguards I have described and the existing regulatory role of the ORR, the Government do not see any need to commission further analysis from the ORR as this amendment proposes.

Amendment 9 would require the Secretary of State, Scottish Ministers or Welsh Ministers to undertake a public consultation before specifying or allowing any reduction in service levels at all within a contract with a public sector operator.

I start by saying that the Government want to grow rail passenger demand and revenues; we are not starting out with an objective to cut services. When services transfer to public ownership, as now, we will expect operators to clearly communicate all changes to services. I agree that, if there were to be a plan for material reductions in service levels, this should be the subject of public consultation. However, I cannot support a statutory obligation to hold a public consultation in relation to every change to the timetable or to any other aspect of the service specification that somebody might consider to be to their disadvantage.

If a service is so poorly used that it is clearly unnecessary to carry on running it, and there is an alternative train available at a similar time of day, is it really sensible to expend time and public money on a consultation process? If there is a high-frequency service and a slight reduction at a quieter time of day would enable train and/or infrastructure maintenance to be carried out more efficiently and effectively, does this really merit a public consultation? If, God forbid, there were another global pandemic, or other immediate and extraordinary event that caused a serious reduction in passenger demand, I submit that it would be absurd to suppose that a public consultation would be necessary before reducing service levels.

There should of course be consultation on material reductions in services, but to require it regardless of the scale or impact of a proposed change would impose a disproportionate burden. I therefore urge the noble Lord not to press this amendment and to withdraw the amendment I spoke to first.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, will the Minister state at the Dispatch Box not that there should be a public consultation in the event of a material reduction of services on transfer of a contract but that there will be? If so, I would be very happy to leave the matter there. I would like to give him the opportunity to say that it is the Government’s policy that there will be a consultation if there is a material reduction in services on transfer.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

In response to the noble Lord, I do not see those circumstances arising. However, I will take the point away and consider it during the progress of the Bill.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I note that the Minister has not been able to give that commitment. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 7 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

8: Clause 2, page 2, line 15, at end insert—
“(1AA) Every contract made in accordance with subsection (1A) must place a duty on the public sector company to publish a plan for investment for innovation across all aspects of its operations, including but not limited to—(a) operational efficiency;(b) fares and ticketing;(c) stations and onboard services;(d) passenger information; and(e) digital transformation.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires all public sector companies awarded a contract to publish a plan for investment in every operational aspect of the railways.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I think we are getting to the point where every question has the same answer, which is essentially either, “It is in the manifesto”, or “We’re going to tell you about it in the future”, or “How dare you imagine for a moment that anything could go wrong on our watch?” I suspect that this is where I am going to end up with this amendment.

The amendment is very simply stated. It requires that, before there is a transfer to a public sector operator, an investment plan should be published so that we know what will happen on the railway. The proposition is so simple, so self-evident and so straightforward that it hardly requires argument, and it certainly does not require any great explication. With that, I beg to move.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I did not speak at Second Reading, but I often speak on issues around public investment. One of the things that concerns me greatly about this move, although generally I might be in favour of it, is that, internationally, public investment in this country tends to be extremely low. In fact, over the last 25 years, the average public sector investment is 1.8% of GDP, which most of the time is well below our equivalent G7 nations. However, if you look on it year to year, the graph is a rollercoaster that Alton Towers would probably be favourable to, because it goes up and down, up and down.

I was privileged—it was a great company—to work in the public sector for a short period of time in the transport sector, not on the railways but in another area. Certainly, one of the concerns we heard very regularly from organisations equivalent to us within the public sector—I was in the freight sector, which was so small that the Treasury did not worry about it—was that investment in the public sector operating companies tended to vary year by year depending on what the Treasury felt was possible in terms of public investment, which completely disrupted a regular, predictable and sensible investment programme in what were effectively commercial public enterprises. I would like to hear from the Minister how there will be effectively that barrier between what the Treasury wants to do year to year and the genuine needs of public sector railway companies to offer a consistent and improving service to the travelling public.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his Amendment 8, which would require public sector operators to publish plans for investment and innovation. I would dispute the proposition that a move to public ownership will produce a decrease in investment. As I have previously said, currently no meaningful private sector investment is being funded by franchising.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I have not said that a move to public operation would reduce investment, nor have I argued it either here or anywhere else. The question put by the amendment is quite different to that.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. I did not say that he had made the assertion; I was disputing the proposition that a move in that way would produce a decrease in investment.

As I said, no meaningful private sector investment is being funded by franchised operators at present, so we are losing nothing by moving to a public ownership model. The Government are already reimbursing the legitimate operating costs of private sector operators and receiving the revenue. Even before the Covid pandemic, the main private investment in our railways was in rolling stock, generally funded by the rolling stock market, not by train operators or their owning groups. Given that the rolling stock market is not impacted by the Bill, there is no reason to see that change.

The Government, of course, wish to see innovation and investment in areas such as those described in the amendment. In fact, the public sector is already demonstrating its commitment to innovation. We have committed to reviewing the overcomplicated fares system, with a view to simplifying it and introducing digital innovations. Change is already being delivered: for example, by the slightly delayed, extended pay-as-you-go in the south-east and fares reform on LNER. Public ownership is essential to progress these fares and ticketing innovations and other reforms. Unlike under franchising, with public ownership we will be able to get these sorts of reforms done without needing a commercial negotiation with up to 14 different operators, each seeking to boost their profit at the taxpayer’s expense in return for agreeing to implement those reforms.

However, the Government do not consider it appropriate to spell out detailed requirements such as these in the legislation. To do so would constrain future flexibility to adapt operators’ obligations to suit changing circumstances. It is not necessarily the case that constant investment and innovation across all these different aspects of the customer offer is the right approach. The focus of innovation should be on those areas where improvement is most needed at any point in time, and not those that are already working well. Moreover, it will not be coherent for passengers, nor efficient for the taxpayer, if up to 14 separate publicly owned operators in England, plus those in Scotland and Wales, are each pursuing their own separate innovation and investment strategies across all these different aspects of the passenger offer.

A key purpose of our wider reforms, starting with the establishment of shadow GBR, will be to drive a much more coherent, cross-industry approach in areas such as those described in the amendment. GBR will be the right body to consider investment across the railways, and I ask noble Lords to wait to consider the Government’s proposals on GBR in the coming months, though I feel very confident that a coherent guiding mind for the railways will produce a longer-term and more consistently argued approach for investment than has been true in the past.

In summary, I support the underlying sentiment that investment and innovation are needed to drive improvements in many aspects of the passenger offer, but the proposed amendment is not the right way to deliver it. I offer my reassurance that investment and innovation are critical to our plans to reform the railways, but I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

A coherent guiding mind is far more likely to produce a long-term business plan for the railway that justifies future investment than the previous fragmented system. Very few of the owning groups or train operating companies have ever made any significant investment. The principal investment that has been made in passenger services is with the rolling stock companies, whose position is unaltered in the proposition of this Bill.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I come away from each of the Minister’s responses slightly more baffled and frustrated than I was before. Let us try and get clear what I think he is saying. This in part is my attempt to frame at least a model answer to the question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson.

At the moment, the Minister would say that there are in principle three sources of investment in the railway. There is what is put in by the private sector—that happens to be a nil set, the number is zero, but in principle it is there. There is what is provided by the private sector for the purpose of acquiring trains for the purpose of leasing them out—that is unaffected by the Bill, so that is not going to change, and nor is there any suggestion, incidentally, although I may be wrong about this, of course, we wait to see, that that is going to change as part of the Great British Railways Bill coming down the track. Then there is the part that is put in directly by the Government and that is currently negotiated by Network Rail in a series of five-year control periods. I forget where we are in the current control period, but we are vaguely half way through a five-year control period.

So, in the future, what is the Minister holding out to us that is going to be different? The contribution from the train operating companies will continue to be zero, because they are now going to be simply shell companies or part of that. He is quite clear we are not losing or gaining anything on that particular front. There will be no change to the way in which the roscos are set up for the purpose of leasing trains. So everything is thrown back on the comparison with the Network Rail negotiations in relation to the current control periods. Somehow, because that is Great British Railways, it is going to be transformed.

We have just heard that it will be longer term, so it will not be a five-year control period, it will be a 10-year control period or a 15-year control period. That might be very desirable—but why? Why is the Treasury going to agree to a 10 or 15-year control period or whatever the number is beyond the five years that exist? And if it is not going to be a larger sum—he did not say a larger sum—it will at least be a more efficiently deployed sum, so that every pound will buy a little bit more than it would have bought under the current arrangement? Again, the question is: why?

The sort of answer we get is, “It is all going to be absolutely wonderful. It will be different and it will be wonderful, but it’s going to be the same and I can’t explain why”. That is where we seem to be left the whole time. Anyway, with that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 8 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

In speaking to these amendments, I say first that I thought the speech just made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, was extremely sensible and contained a great deal with which I agree. It asked a series of important questions of the Minister. I have been around just long enough to have realised that getting actual answers to questions in Committee in your Lordships’ House is a pretty remote prospect, but these questions are of such importance that the Minister might make a bit more than the normal effort to address them.

I draw attention to Amendment 49 in my name, which raises the question of minimum service levels, which the last Parliament enacted as means of ensuring continuity of some service on the railways if strike action were to take place. The Government have not said whether they intend to avail themselves of that legislation and in what circumstances, but nor have they said they are going to repeal it. Many passengers in the country at large, looking to this as a means of protecting them from the ravages of what is sometimes thought to be excessive and persistent industrial action, would expect the Government to have a clear view on when they are going to use these measures—or even if the answer to that is “never”. I hope we can get a straight answer from the Minister on that.

I turn to Amendment 18 in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, which relates to an independent pay review body. That amendment or something similar was discussed in the other place when the Bill was before that House, and the Minister in fact gave some encouragement, saying that the Government would at least look at it as part of the great reform Bill coming down the tracks towards us. I would like to hear whether government thinking has developed in any way since then and if there is anything the Minister can add to it.

On the face of it, the amendment deals primarily with agreeing and setting, in a semi-binding way, the pay rates and terms and conditions for railway staff analogously to those in other parts of the public sector. After all, it is the Government’s policy that these people should now be public employees. They should come under a single employer, a single brain and a single wallet, so it would be an independent pay review body along those lines. However, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham took the amendment in another direction as well and made an interesting point, one also made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon: how are the Government going to amalgamate, smooth out or harmonise the varying terms and conditions and rates of pay that exist among the different train operating companies as currently constituted, as they bring them under this great big umbrella? Is there going to be a levelling up all round?

Will there be a cost to the public purse? The Government have claimed that the Bill involves no cost to the public purse, but it is patent that, if you employ a large number of people and end up adjusting their pay scales on the grounds of equity, and if those pay scales tend on average to be higher than before, a cost has been incurred directly as a result of the Bill and the action being taken under it. How is that cost to be dealt with? Where is it to come from? Why are the Government not being honest about the Bill involving costs of that character? This is a point we will return to, I am sure, when we come to look at other liabilities being transferred to the Government as a result of proposals in the Bill, as we will do later in this Committee. I invite the Government to think about this seriously, because these are important issues and they should be looked carefully.

Finally, and taking account to some extent of the lateness of the hour, when we started debating this group it was my intention to rise to offer some level of support to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, relating to minimum rest days. But the comprehensive and unremitting demolition of his position advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, was so persuasive and irresistible that I have decided to abandon that effort.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his kind words. I would just refer him to the proposed new clause to be inserted by the amendment in the name of his noble friend Lord Young, which is headed “Independent body to advise on pay and terms and conditions of employment for employees of public sector companies”. I make it that, during this debate, the party opposite has proposed no fewer than seven different bodies, groups, organisations or committees—call them what you like. As the Opposition rails regularly against too much bureaucracy, I am astonished that they want to create yet another body. In the event of a pay dispute, does the noble Lord not agree that that is why, many years ago, we created the conciliation and arbitration service? Such matters are better referred to it—we are surely running out of lawyers to sit on all these bodies—rather than creating yet another bureaucratic organisation.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

In response, I say only that seven would be a fantastically tiny number compared to the number of internal boards, committees, liaison bodies and so forth that Great British Railways is likely to require to explain to itself what it is doing, before it even gets round to explaining to the public what it is up to. I regard seven as a very modest and economical number.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley for his Amendment 11, regarding rest-day working. Rest-day working provides resilience in response to spikes in leave, sickness and training, and it rewards the workforce when extra hours and days are worked. It can offer benefits to rail employees, as well as to passengers. It is likely that it will always be necessary, to some extent, to effectively deliver the timetable. However, rest-day working should be used where there is an operational benefit and employees are willing to volunteer, rather than trying to mandate in legislation how and where it is used. Our focus is instead on ensuring, as soon as possible, that the railway industry has enough staff to operate services reliably for the benefit of passengers and employees, without excessive rest-day working.

My noble friend Lord Berkeley referenced the new trains on South Western Railway. I say to him that they are now entering service and, further, that Network Rail in fact substantially changed terms and conditions two years ago for greater flexibility and in agreement with the workforce, and that is now reflected in greater efficiency. That deal demonstrates what can be achieved in the public sector.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, referred to uncertainty. There can be no greater uncertainty than has existed for the last 30 years on the railway, in which anybody of long service has changed their employer at least once, sometimes several times, while doing the same job. The people whom I meet going around the railway talk about it as “the railway”, many of them because their employer has changed so often that they cannot even remember the name of the company that they used to work for. Some stability in respect of the employers of staff on the railway, many of whom are deeply committed and have had long service, is overdue, and this Bill will move towards it.

Will there be a workforce plan? Yes. Is there one at the moment? No. As the train operating companies come into public ownership, they will have to have a workforce plan. Personally, I am absolutely committed to the maximum recruitment of drivers as early as possible, to the benefit of the drivers themselves and the service that the railway operates.

I also very much thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for Amendment 18, which suggests that an independent body should be established to advise the Government on the pay and terms and conditions for railway staff under public ownership. We are committed to delivering the biggest overhaul of our railways in a generation. It is right that, as part of that process, these matters are considered. Employment conditions are an important issue and one that we are determined to get right.

My officials are at the early stages of exploring a number of options, including a pay review body, so that we can consider the most appropriate approach to meet the needs of a transformed industry. A number of different approaches exist across the public sector, including pay review bodies and wider guidance, and, as my noble friend Lord Snape said, the use of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service. We need more time to reach an informed conclusion on the best approach for the rail sector. It would be inappropriate to commit to the introduction of an independent body before that work is completed. In particular, we do not need to do this now in relation to this Bill.

Amendment 49 is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. It seeks to require the Secretary of State to produce a report on how public ownership will impact the implementation of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023. The noble Lord must surely be aware, however, that the Government have already committed to repealing the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023. That is because this Government are committed to strengthening the rights of working people by empowering workers to organise collectively through trade unions.

No relevant employer, under the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels: Passenger Railway Services) Regulations, has chosen to implement minimum service levels under this legislation and, in fact, they will not work. Instead, we will work in partnership with trade unions, as we have done in recent weeks to bring an end to two years of disputes that have meant needless disruption and misery for passengers. So I must say to the noble Lord that the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act will not be implemented for publicly owned services, or indeed at all under this Government—as, in fact, it was not under the last one. The suggested report, therefore, would be redundant.

Finally, I will respond to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Young, on the classification of the costs of rolling stock for publicly owned train operating companies when I respond to Amendment 19 in group 10 in the resumed Committee stage on Wednesday. I note for now that, whatever the position is, it must already apply to the four publicly owned train companies. I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 21st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morgan (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to intervene because I frequently travel on the railways of France; my wife is French. The contrast between the railways in France—and, for that matter, in Italy—and those of this country is quite extraordinary. The railways were aptly referred to by my colleague on the Back Benches as a shambles and so they have been. It is therefore highly important that we have a properly integrated and effective service, which has been part of the tradition of infrastructure of this country for a very long time. I cite someone whose name will register on the other side of the House: Winston Churchill. He was, in his time, a strong supporter of the nationalisation of the railways, partly on efficiency and technical grounds, based on his experience in Lloyd George’s coalition Government of the First World War, and partly on grounds that, fortunately, we hear less about now—questions of labour and industrial relations; I think the railways were almost next to the miners in industrial conflict in that period. We suffer by comparison with our neighbouring country colleagues—and, I hope, shortly, allies—and therefore the social and economic rationale of this Bill is profoundly important.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I start by apologising to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, if I caused any confusion; I will try to do better. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, back to his place from his excursion, no doubt by rail, in foreign parts. We missed him at Second Reading, but we had an excellent substitute in the shape of the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds.

I will make a preliminary remark at this stage, which I intend to save me making it on future groups of amendments. It is that we are, essentially, at least as far as the amendments tabled by Members from the Conservative Party are concerned, seeking information from the Government in relation to this Bill. If the Government are candid with us and give us the information that we are looking for, we will have achieved our objective on behalf of the public, and that will be the end of the matter.

I turn to the debate that has taken place so far. The part that has sparked me most, which I felt I had to answer, were the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Snape. First, I agree with him about what a degradation it is that passengers have become customers when, of course, they really ought to be passengers. But there is also the question of ideology, which I hope to take out of the debate that we will have in Committee today and on Wednesday.

Of course there is always an element of ideology when one talks about privatisation and nationalisation. The railways, which, I think, are 200 years old next year, have been nationalised for only about a quarter of their entire existence. We must not think that nationalisation is the natural condition of railways in this country. They flourished and grew and were developed in private hands; we should always remember that. The truth is that in 1945-46, the railways were nationalised largely because, after six years of war, they were bankrupt. There had been no investment in them during the whole of that period, and they had deteriorated. Nor was there any prospect of their making sufficient profit that private capital could have been recruited to make up that deficiency.

Whether the then Government believed in nationalisation as an ideological matter or not, if the railways were to continue running at all it was going to have to be in government hands. Parts of the system were privatised in the mid-1990s for equally practical reasons—we discussed some of them at Second Reading. One reason was to attempt to improve customer service through competition; one was to recruit private capital into the railways on a consistent basis, which the Government had never been able to provide during the whole of the time they owned the railways—not enough capital and never enough consistency because no budget went beyond 12 months—and another was to try, frankly, to break the grip of the rail unions on pay, so that the astonishing disparities that exist between, let us say, a train driver and bus driver, which are entirely due to the monopoly supply of labour by ASLEF, might be evened out.

What we discussed at Second Reading, I am perfectly happy to admit, is that on some of these fronts privatisation has been successful, and on others less so. If the Government, who have won a majority on the basis of promising to nationalise the train operating companies, wish to give the other side of it a kick and see if they can make it work on that basis, I do not personally object—at least not on ideological grounds. But the House is perfectly entitled to have its practical questions about how this will work addressed. That is what the amendments in this group and many that will come before the Committee later intend to address.

The Government claim that this is a very small Bill. On the other hand, when they talk to the public it is a huge Bill, “because we are nationalising the railways”. They are not really nationalising the railways, because to nationalise something you normally have to pay for it and this Bill is not something where they are paying out to shareholders. All they are doing is letting the franchises that exist expire and then tying their hands and preventing themselves from renewing them except in emergency circumstances. It is, as I would have said at Second Reading if I had had more time, less nationalisation and more like dismissing your chauffeur at the end of his contract and deciding to drive the car yourself. At least you knew the chauffeur had a driving licence and some experience and qualification in driving the car, but now we will have the Secretary of State—we were told at Second Reading that she prefers to be known as the passenger-in-chief—as, in effect, driver-in-chief as well. We will see how that works out.

It is a big thing when the Government talk to the public—it is nationalisation of the railways—but when they talk to noble Lords it is a very little thing. All the big things, we are told, will happen in the next Bill— the train further down the line, expected in roughly a year or 18 months. That is the Bill in which many of our questions should be addressed, we are told—we should not ask those questions now. I think we should ask many of those questions now, for two very good reasons. The first is that the Bill presents us with a measure regarded by the Government as preliminary to that very large Bill, so it has long-term consequences. The second—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson—is that the Bill sets up a shadow structure that could persist in operation for four or five years or even longer because, first, it will take us a year or 18 months before we see the Bill that will make these great reforms; and, secondly, as anyone who has been involved in the railways or any other large organisation will know, implementing significant change as a result of that legislation is likely to take several further years. We will have to live with the shadow structures set up as a result of the Bill for many years, and their practical consequences deserve the most careful scrutiny.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

Can I ask the Minister, sorry the shadow Minister—

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am not quite yet the Minister, but the way the Labour Party is going, who knows?

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

I asked for that one, I have to say. It is mistakes being made at both ends of the Corridor recently.

Arising from what the noble Lord has just said, can I ask him to clarify two points? First, on the delay in moving on to the more detailed Bill, bearing in mind that it was 2016 when the Government he favours brought forward the proposals for Great British Railways, what were the Government doing in the eight years since then? Secondly, I have a simple question about the ideology of privatisation: if nationalisation is so bad, why was almost the first act of Governments in two world wars to nationalise the railway industry? What makes it so essential in wartime and yet it can be handed out piecemeal in peacetime?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

If the noble Lord will forgive me, I am asking the questions in this scenario, and I do not feel I necessarily have an answer to his question about wartime. I might pass it on to the Minister, who once arranged for me to go and see deep in the bowels of Mayfair, under the former Down Street Underground station—I am sure that if the noble Lord, Lord Snape, has not been, it can be arranged for him to see it too—the wartime headquarters of the railway operations executive, including what is claimed to be, although I think with no historical foundation, a tin bath in which Churchill once took a bath. I will say no more about the war than that.

On the former question, I do not know the answer, but I would like to know. Why was it that the then Government, having published what they called the Williams-Shapps review written by Keith Williams—I think he is correct in saying that it was in 2016—and having promised a transport Bill in the King’s Speech one but last, did not come forward with the measures they thought they could offer in that regard? I do not know the answer to that, but I am willing to have a guess and it is relevant to what the Government are embarking on now and to whether they are going to meet their 12 to 18-month deadline of delivering us with this massive Bill that is going to transform the railways. My guess is that the then Government found that grappling with the intense difficulties of reforming the railway on such a large scale meant that, try as they might, they found considerable difficulty in putting together that Bill. It may be that is exactly what the Minister finds as he comes to address these difficulties. This only adds further to my point that the shadow arrangements we are setting up today could be with us for a very long time.

I come to the first amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. The Government say they have a purpose—they are not doing this for ideological reasons or at the behest of the trade unions—which is to improve passenger services. At Second Reading, I pointed out that in the final stage impact assessment produced by the Department for Transport, given the opportunity it had to say exactly that, it said something completely different. It said that the Bill had been

“prepared to enable swift delivery of a Government manifesto commitment”—

not to improve matters for passengers—and that was why it had not looked, as it normally would, at the alternative options that might be put forward to achieve a similar purpose. That is another reason why it is incumbent on us in this House to look in great detail at what the Government are putting before us. They are in effect asking us to buy into an article of faith. They are simply saying, “Well, it couldn’t be worse than it is at the moment”—that is simply untrue; there are problems with the railways, but they could be a great deal worse than they are at the moment—“so it is bound to be better if we take it over and run it ourselves as part of a national enterprise”. But they have not provided any evidence for that; they have simply stated, “This must be the case and you’ve got to believe us”. As I say, that is one of the reasons why our job is not to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

Can I try to help the noble Lord? My understanding is that the Government are committed to a comprehensive package of rail reform, and that the Bill for the comprehensive package will be introduced next spring. The purpose of this Bill is a relatively minor reform, in my view, in the context of the much bigger reform, which is to make sure that the franchises can transition to public ownership at minimum cost to the Exchequer. If we are going to do it at minimum cost to the Exchequer, we have to do it quickly; that is why this is one of the earliest Bills that the Government have put forward.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

The noble Lord puts the Government’s case very well. How much the House has lost in not seeing him on the Front Bench as the Minister, given that he was the shadow Minister up until the general election.

We are told by the noble Lord that the Government have a package of reforms. We all have a package of reforms. We know what the package of reforms looks like; it is in the Shapps-Williams review. Yet what we are seeing from the Government is a package of reforms that differs significantly from the Williams review; that is why it needs such careful scrutiny.

Given the passage of time, I will be brief on the remaining amendments. All the amendments in my name seek to test the effects of this measure on the performance of the industry in the light of the nationalisation that the Government are proposing.

Taken separately, the amendments deal with different types of performance. Some deal with the performance of the railways in so far as they engage with passengers; that is, on timeliness, efficiency, service quality and so forth. Some relate to the performance of the railways in relation to finances; we will come to finances in more detail later. The Government claim that this Bill has no financial consequences—there are those of us on this side of the House, including the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, who treat that approach with great scepticism. Other amendments seek to examine the measure’s effect in relation to the performance of the network as a whole.

I hope that all these amendments will be accepted by the Government. If they are to make these changes, there needs to be transparency and the public need to be able to see metrics published, possibly by an independent body or possibly by the Department for Transport—we are open to persuasion on that—which show how the railway is performing.

Having come to power committed to transparency, I know the Government would not want to resile from that. So, if they are not able to support the detailed amendments as tabled, I expect that the Minister will have no difficulty in saying that the Government will put forward amendments on Report showing how this Bill will be monitored in its implementation.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, for his welcome; it is nice to see him again in different and more august circumstances—different, at least, from those that applied in the old City Hall. I thank him, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for their explanations of this group of amendments, most of which require some form of reporting or assessment of the impacts of public ownership or the performance of publicly owned operators.

Like my noble friend Lord Snape, I am fascinated by the plethora of reports proposed at this stage of railway reform. Given that LNER has been in the public sector for six years, and Northern for four, it is strange that the measures now proposed for public sector train operators were never contemplated or enacted by the previous Government, who clearly never thought that they needed them. In simple terms, this Government do not either.

I welcome the support of the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, for railway reform. His Amendment A1 does not call for any reports but requires the Secretary of State to have regard to a specific purpose —to improve the performance of passenger services—when exercising functions under the Bill. I entirely support that purpose, and it is at the heart of what we are doing, but there are also many other purposes: stripping out inefficiency and waste on behalf of the taxpayers who fund the railway, simplifying fares and increasing patronage, connecting communities, driving economic growth and promoting opportunity for all. It is not right that the Bill should suggest that it has only that one purpose, important though it is.

Amendment 2, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would require the publication of two reports: the first outlining the anticipated impact of public ownership, and the second assessing its actual impact some years after the event. Regarding the first of these reports, the Government have already fulfilled the proposed obligation through the impact assessment published earlier in the year. Among other expected impacts, the taxpayer will no longer have to fund many tens of millions of pounds in fees currently payable to private sector operators each year, even when their performance is sub-standard. Furthermore, public sector operators will prioritise the interests of passengers and taxpayers, not the demands of their shareholders.

A similar report is envisaged in Amendment 48A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, but focused specifically on the impact on performance. I can assure the noble Lord that the Government certainly expect public ownership, and our broader reform proposals, to unlock the significant improvement in the performance and efficiency of the railway which he is looking for; we do not need to publish a report to say that.

Turning to the second proposed report envisaged in Amendment 2, there is no need to wait for three years before we start to consider whether train operators’ performance is improving. A wide variety of data is already routinely published about the performance of both public and private sector train operators. This includes reliability and punctuality, service quality, customer complaints, financial performance and efficiency, among other measures. This Bill does not change any of that, but as part of our wider reform plans, we will further improve access to data. This will be specific to individual routes and/or service groups, not just aggregated at the level of whole franchises, so that passengers can see at each station how services are performing on their local routes and, importantly, what is going to be done to improve them.

The Government can and will monitor performance closely on a continuing basis. We will hold operators’ feet to the fire when their performance is inadequate, irrespective of whether they are privately or publicly owned. The Secretary of State and I have already demonstrated that we will not accept the poor standards that have been tolerated in the past. We have demonstrated that from our first days in office by holding meetings with the managing directors of several train operators alongside their Network Rail counterparts to address poor performance and demand immediate action to raise standards.

In that respect, in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, we are not discriminating between the public and private sectors and will not do so, as indeed he did not in his time. He rightly gave me a hard time in 2018 in respect of electrification in the north-west of England; even if it was not Network Rail’s responsibility, it related to the failings of GTR as an operator.

Amendment 26, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would require the publication of a further report—or perhaps 10 reports, one after each transfer—setting out the expected impact of the transfers on various aspects of train operators’ performance. Again, once transfers have taken place, it would be more instructive to consider the actual performance of train operators.

Amendments 21 and 22, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would require the reporting and independent assessment of the performance of publicly owned train operators. That is unnecessary because, as I have set out, the Government will themselves be monitoring their performance closely and will work to ensure that as much performance data as possible is published for the benefit of the travelling public, in a form that is useful to them and that allows for effective scrutiny.

My department is currently reviewing the standard terms of the service agreements that are entered into between the Secretary of State and public sector operators, in readiness for future transitions to public ownership. Public operators will be set targets in key areas such as punctuality and reliability and other aspects of the service. Work is under way to identify the right targets and measures for the period ahead in order to focus operators on delivering the best possible outcomes for passengers and taxpayers. As part of the service agreement review, we will consider the arrangements for publishing those targets and operators’ actual performance in comparison to them.

Amendment 22 refers to performance improvement plans. I reassure the noble Lord that improvement plans are already a feature of the Government’s service agreements with each public sector operator. I confirm for noble Lords that similar mechanisms will continue to exist in future, both through contractual terms and through the controls that DOHL exerts over its operators on behalf of the Secretary of State. As I have said, where performance is falling short, we will not hesitate to demand that things are put right, regardless of whether the operator is privately or publicly owned.

Amendment 45, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, requires the publication of an independent assessment of the performance and efficiency of the rail network five years after the enactment of this Bill. By that time, the Government will have established Great British Railways, which will have taken over responsibility for both track and train. New arrangements will need to be put in place to oversee and scrutinise the effectiveness and efficiency of GBR, so in due course we will set out our plans for holding it to account as part of our plans for the wider railways Bill. We should not pre-empt those future arrangements by seeking to legislate for them now.

I hope we will deal with all the noble Lord’s other points during the rest of Committee, as we shall with the detailed comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, on staff morale and the British Transport Police. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, I confirm that there are no changes to Section 4 of the 1993 Act.

In answer to my noble friend Lord Snape, in the present Bill there will be no change to the role of Office of Rail and Road; he needs to await the substantive railway Bill for that, at least with regard to the railway element of the ORR. There will be public consultation on the wider Bill before it comes, so there is no need to wait until the publication of the Bill itself.

I also say to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that there is currently no meaningful private investment by train operating companies, so we are not losing anything in the Bill that is on the table today. Contrary to his assertion about the Williams report, its author, Keith Williams, envisaged public ownership as a necessary condition to rationalise a number of things on the railways, in particular fares, ticketing and information.

The Government are fully committed to openness and transparency in train operators’ performance; that is true whether they are in the public or private sector. There is no need to legislate for all these additional reports and reviews. In fact, nearly everybody in the transport industry has written either a report or a review on some aspect of the railways. I have written several and my noble friend Lady Blake is the joint author of another, all while the franchising model has gradually disintegrated before our eyes. What we need now is action to move fast and fix things, as opposed to the interminable wait for reform since 2018 that I and everybody else in the industry have endured. That is what this Bill is all about. I urge noble Lords not to press these amendments.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am clutching my copy of the Williams rail review in my hands. I think I am going to refer to page 55 at another stage—my eyesight is not good enough to give the quote straightaway —when I will have the opportunity to point out that Williams’s approach to nationalising the train operating companies was somewhat more subtle and differentiated than the Minister has just claimed. But I want to ask him about a different point. It is a genuine curiosity I have about what might be described as the theology of Great British Railways and the new system that the Government are putting in place.

My understanding was that Great British Railways would be the single controlling brain operating the system and using a concession system to do that—let us say it is doing that itself now in the new system. It would be setting the goals of the railways through routes, service frequencies and so forth, and indeed running the fares and ticketing system. It would then be monitoring how these shadow or publicly owned companies were doing. We are now told by the Minister that all the monitoring functions he has referred to, which I would like to see set out transparently in advance through the Bill as being by independent bodies which we can trust, will be done by the Department for Transport. I ask him to be clear with us: in this system, who is responsible for monitoring and to whom is the system accountable? Is it to Great British Railways in its shadow form—now that it has been established and has a chairman, staff, a transition team and so forth—or is it the Department for Transport? The answer to that question has very significant consequences and it appears to be a moving target.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I should respond to the noble Lord on three or four points. First, whatever the Williams report said—and it was adequate in what it said at the time—I took the trouble, only a few days ago, to confirm with its author that he acknowledged we could not change the fares, ticketing and information systems without taking the train operating companies or their activities into public ownership.

Secondly, the noble Lord knows perfectly well how a large public body can behave in monitoring activities, whether it carries them out itself or has contractors or concessionaires to do it, because he will be as familiar as I am with the experience of Transport for London. It monitored its own activities, published them and allowed others to scrutinise them. That principle is the one which should be adopted by Great British Railways.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

So is it Great British Railways that will be doing it, like TfL, and not the Department for Transport? I am very confused.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Well, the noble Lord should not be, because it is quite clear to me that the Government intend to take a large amount of activity out of the Department for Transport and put it in a body that is responsible for the performance of the railways. That being the case, it would be extremely logical that monitoring performance is done by GBR but properly scrutinised by others.

Lastly, I simply say to the noble Lord opposite that there has been a change of government. The policies that this Bill and the railways Bill will seek to enact are the policies that the Government were elected to carry out.

--- Later in debate ---

In conclusion, the Government have a flexible approach to certain elements of the private sector. But they have a hardline approach to other elements, such as train operators. Even at this stage, I urge them to reconsider this, to allow good private sector operators to extend their franchise while the Government concentrate their efforts on the worst-performing areas, because that will certainly take all of their capacity.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by speaking briefly to Amendment 30, standing in my name, which proposes the deletion of the word “reasonably” from Clause 2, line 29. At this point in the Bill, the prohibition on the Secretary of State from renewing franchises is alleviated by this clause in certain circumstances. One of them is where the Secretary of State is satisfied that it will not be reasonably practicable to provide or secure the provision of the franchise service, et cetera.

This is a simple probing amendment, on which I do not want to spend a great deal of time, other than to simply ask what the Government mean by the word “reasonably” here. What is “reasonably” adding to “practicable”? It seems that it is creating potential difficulties for the Government. On one hand, if they were challenged in court about this—I hasten to add that I am not a lawyer—I think they would find that one of the tests they would be put to is whether they had acted reasonably, and that would be true whether the word was in the statute or not. Here, it seems to me that there is a double standard of “reasonably” being applied to them. What do they mean by “reasonably”? In what circumstances do they envisage having recourse to it, and would the Bill not actually be better without it? I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on those points.

On the substance of the debate, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, on having secured universal approbation for her proposal from all speakers who have spoken today. She wants something that appears to be very common-sensical: that the poor franchises should be terminated and cleared out as soon as possible and before the well-operating franchises are cleared out, so that we do not have a situation where good operators are removed from service while poor operators are left in place.

Yet, because of the rush with which the Government have come at the Bill, and because of their determination to be able to say, “We’ve achieved something in the manifesto as fast as we possibly can”, that is exactly the effect of the Bill as it is constructed. Operators that we know to be poor will continue for considerably longer than those that are in fact performing very satisfactorily. I suspect that the Government will say that this is because they have to terminate franchises at the time they fall due, because to terminate them any earlier would cost public money and they would need to pay compensation. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, that is of course the legal advice they would receive, though what exactly some of these poor performers would expect by way of compensation is a political question and one that could easily be put to the test, as the noble Lord said.

The other matter here is that the Government already envisage that some franchise contracts, despite the prohibition in the Bill, may be renewed for practical reasons, reasonably or otherwise. It is possible to renew a franchise on a short-term basis. In fact, nearly all the franchises currently operating are operating on very short-term contracts. The financial liability carried with those short-term contracts is very small. So, even if a good performer were to have their franchise fall in very soon, if an appropriate exemption to the prohibition were inserted in the Bill, they could still be kept going on a short-term contract without creating a significant new liability to the Government, while the poor contracts fell in and were terminated without any risk to the Government. If the Government were not in such a terrible rush, all of this would create a logical structure for the termination of contracts which passengers would understand and which would not run the risks that were stated so clearly by the noble Baroness who moved the amendment.

There is a great deal to be said for this. I hope the Minister, when he replies, will not take refuge in simply saying, “Oh, we’ve got no choice because this is what the public finances dictate and it is all driven by finances and contracts”. The management of these contracts—by a confident Government who know what they are doing and a Secretary of State who wants to achieve something and knows the direction in which she is heading—is essentially a political matter. It can be done and the Government should step up to the plate and do this for their own sake if they wish their reforms to get off to a good start.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for explaining their amendments in this group, which consider some of the practical aspects of the Government’s plans to transfer services to public ownership. Amendments 1 and 48 focus on the contractual arrangements that allow the Secretary of State to terminate a franchise early, following a breach of contract or other sustained poor performance. I make it absolutely clear that this Government will not hesitate to act decisively where an operator’s unacceptable performance means that the contractual conditions for early termination are met. The Secretary of State has made this plain on a number of occasions and I am happy to reiterate it to your Lordships today.

However, I am very much afraid that the terms of the contracts we have inherited from the previous Government do not make this easy. It is far easier for an operator to return the contract to the Government than it is for the Government to take back a contract for poor performance. It is deeply regrettable that in the past couple of years, some of the poorest performing operators have been awarded the longest contracts.

Noble Lords will not be surprised to know that we have looked very hard at the form of the contract. We are closely monitoring train operators’ compliance with their contract, but at present we are not in a position—with any operator—where the Secretary of State has a contractual right to terminate for poor performance. Noble Lords might be amazed to know that Avanti has not yet triggered the need for a remedial plan, although it may well do so. While CrossCountry has triggered the need for a remedial plan, we need to let that work through, together with the timetable reduction that the Secretary of State was deeply reluctant to agree to, before we discover whether its performance then merits some further contractual remedy.

Unless and until that contractual right arises, the only sensible approach is to transfer services to public ownership when the existing contracts expire. Any other approach would require taxpayers to foot the bill for compensation to operators in return for ending their contracts early, which the Government made clear in our manifesto that we would avoid, if only because of the state of the public finances we inherited.

I have also heard representations on behalf of operators—or, rather, their owners—that, rather than transferring services as contracts expire, we should leave their services in private hands for as long as possible. All the owning groups knew of these dates and would have planned financially for them in any event. The concern seems to be that service quality will suddenly collapse, or that current plans for service improvements, or for the rollout of new train fleets, will suddenly grind to a halt.

There is no basis for these claims. DOHL is experienced in transferring services into the public sector smoothly and without disruption, as it has proved in the difficult aftermath of past franchise failures. As services transfer, the same trains will be operated by the same staff as before, and no doubt often by the same management, as happened with LNER six years ago. The improvements that are already in train will continue. I have no reason to think that performance will deteriorate. Extending specific operators’ tenure will simply delay the process of bringing services back to public ownership, where they belong, and the financial savings that will result.

In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, while there have been transfer costs from franchise to franchise, he will of course recognise that the incoming franchisee would not pay that cost gratuitously; they would simply add it to the subsidy bill for the franchise they were inheriting. In the end, the public sector pays, as it has always done. In fact, since Covid, the operators have not funded anything at all, so the quantum in the future is likely to be extremely limited.

--- Later in debate ---

In light of my explanations, I hope that the noble Baronesses and Lords can be persuaded not to press their amendments.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I will not pursue the question of “reasonably” at this stage, but I was struck by the Minister saying that the Bill should not trammel the Secretary of State’s power in relation to how she manages contracts and franchises. However, that is exactly what the Bill does in Clause 2. What he wants is the liberty, within reason, of the Secretary of State to terminate franchises. But Clause 2 specifically sets out, in very clear language, a prohibition on the Secretary of State to award a contract to anything that is not a public sector company. It says that she may do so only

“by making a direct award of a public service contract to a public sector company”.

Admittedly, further down the page, there are, as we have discussed and as the Minister said, one or two very narrow exceptions for practicality, or reasonable practicality. But why do the Government feel that the Secretary of State should have complete liberty when it comes to terminating franchises, but is so untrustworthy and unreliable, so enamoured of the private sector and so easily seduced into re-awarding them the contract that there has to be a legal prohibition on her doing it here? All Members of the Committee are asking for is some flexibility in Clause 2 about what the Secretary of State is allowed to do—why not? Can she not be trusted?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The answer is that it is the Government’s policy to take train operations into public ownership. The words the noble Lord mentions in Clause 2 just emphasise that intention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting group of amendments to debate so far, and I am very taken by the latest thoughts from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, on playing around with the definition of open access operators and what will be accepted. I was interested, too, in Amendments 28 and 29 and the thoughts of the noble Lord, Lord Young, who is always very thought-provoking. His amendment, as he said, is very much the obverse of the ones put down from these Benches. I urge the Government to look at this and allow themselves the flexibility to change the order of nationalisation in order to allow good franchises to flourish and to give themselves time to unravel privatisation more slowly and more logically. It has to be more than just, “This was in the manifesto and therefore it will happen whether or not it is logical”.

I am really sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is not in his place, because Amendment 35 is fascinating. It refers to a broader definition of what a public sector company should be, so that it includes public/private partnerships and co-operative ventures. I do not need to remind noble Lords opposite that some of them have been, or may still be, members of the Co-operative Party. As Liberal Democrats, we share an enthusiasm for co-operatives as a form of company and operation. I can envisage that a smaller rail line, perhaps in a rural area, would work very well on a co-operative or a public/private partnership basis. After all, it would bring in fresh investment without, in any way, undermining the Government’s commitment to a nationalised structure overall for the railways.

Finally, I urge the Government to look again at their plans and the precise terms of the Bill through a post-Covid lens. Covid caused the collapse of the railway system, necessitating a whole new approach to franchising for the train operators. It could happen again, either for similar reasons or as a result of a financial crisis, and I urge the Government to look again at the terms of the Bill. Have they allowed themselves sufficient flexibility to cope with the unexpected, to allow rail services to continue to operate even if there is a series of unlikely events that have upset the market for those services?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said that he thought that the Government’s determination to trammel itself in the way that Clause 2 does was ideologically driven—a commitment to a certain vision of the railways based essentially on a political ideology. I would not be so bold as to disagree—he may well be right—but there is another way of looking at this, which I referred to at Second Reading. What is really driving the Government’s approach to this is that they have absolutely convinced themselves that the only way in which the railways can operate is if there is a single controlling brain, so that every train run in this country for passenger service purposes is run by Great British Railways, and that this body will be the sole provider of railway services.

This is a truly ideological obsession. It is almost a psychological fixation that appears to have gripped the Government, and it needs to be tested. Questions are being asked from every side of the House about its practical effects, and we are getting no answer except, “It’s in the manifesto”, which really is no answer to a passenger standing on a platform waiting for a train that was operating perfectly satisfactorily under private ownership and is now simply not arriving.

I turn first to Amendments 4, 10, 14 and 15 in this group standing in my name. If I had written the explanatory statements rather better, Members would understand—perhaps they do—that these four operate as one. They are consequential on each other and have a single effect, which is to say that the Secretary of State in awarding new services must put them out to tender but on a “concession” basis. Amendment 14 defines a “concession” as

“a contract under which the franchising authority specifies rail services to be provided by a private sector entity and retains the risk of fluctuations in the receipt of fares”.

In other words, this amendment does something that Transport for London has done with great success in relation to buses, London Overground rail services, the Wimbledon tram and the Docklands Light Railway. They are all operated on this basis and although there might be complaints from customers about this, that or the other, there are no complaints about the basis on which the services are operated contractually. Of course, TfL has chosen to brand them all under its own branding, so members of the public and passengers are often not even aware that they are operated on this basis. We have a system that works and that we should consider very seriously by contrast to the determination of the Government that all these services are to be taken in-house and run by a single employer with a great, single, controlling brain.

Amendment 14 does something else: it is in conformity with the Williams review, which I thought was the plan that there was, generally speaking, consensus that we should operate to. There is no other plan or document of any weight or substance that has been produced as a result of an independent review for the future of the railways. When I drew attention in our last debate to what is said on page 55 of the Williams review about the concession model being the pattern taken from TfL that should be used nationally, there was a slightly astonishing intervention from the Minister in which he said that Mr Williams no longer thought that, because he had rung him up and said that we need to have it nationalised. How much else in the Williams review has been vitiated by random phone calls made by the Minister to its author? How much is left of the Williams review, if it is capable of being rewritten by the Minister on the basis of claimed phone calls with Mr Williams?

It happens that Mr Williams and I served together on the board of Transport for London when the Minister was its commissioner. I have to tell him that if I were to look into the contacts in my telephone I think I would find that Mr Williams’s telephone number was in my telephone as well. It is perfectly possible that we could pursue this debate on the basis of various individual and private phone calls that we had had with Mr Williams about what he actually meant, what he thinks now, and whether his view has changed —and then what will be left of this report? Without this report, there is no plan. The Government are, it turns out, now inviting us to take a step completely into the dark. It is not just an act of faith, as I said on an earlier group, that they can run the trains better. It is a belief that they are going to give us a better plan for the future, but that they cannot tell us what the plan is, whereas at least previously they had some basis for saying what it would be. The whole thing really is turning into the most dreadful shambles.

I would like to know why concessions do not work, why something so successful in London will not be allowed, and why what was recommended by Williams is not allowed. I do not, I am sad to say, expect to hear the detailed explanation from the Minister that those questions deserve. The other amendments in this group have similar effect.

My noble friend Lord Lansley would like the Government to have the power, where they choose to, to go out to tender and allow some of these wicked private entities to submit tenders. I may myself be wicked when I say that many of these private entities are not very private—some are the subsidiaries of our great European railway friends. They are state-owned bodies from Europe. Who knows whether the Prime Minister, as he creeps towards a great reset and love-in with the European Union, would not find it quite useful to be able to say that the Italian railways, Deutsche Bahn and Renfe could bid for services running on our railways—just as they can at the moment—and that they are not going to be kicked out of Britain? “Mrs von der Leyen, we are going to let them back in.” Would not that little bit of flexibility that my noble friend Lord Lansley would like to be able to give to the Government possibly be rather welcome in the future?

My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham made a good case for his amendments. I echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, who said that it is a great pity that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is not here to speak to his very intriguing amendment. To a large extent, the argument for it was made very well by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham.

The possibilities of collaboration with the private sector—indeed, with community groups and, when we come to later amendments relating to devolution, local authorities and local government—are all worth exploring if we are going to reform our railway. All of these are being shut off and closed down now by the word “only”, which the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and others are effectively suggesting be deleted.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, this small group of amendments addresses a number of issues that inevitably raise questions, because this very tightly drawn Bill provides no hint of how they are to be dealt with. I participate in this debate with some temerity following contributions by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and my noble friend Lord Bradshaw, who know so much detail about the freight industry.

Liberal Democrat Amendments 40 and 41, to which I have added my name, are therefore probing amendments looking for details of government plans, which I hope the Minister can supply today. There are thousands of jobs and potentially billions of pounds of investment riding on the Government’s answers to these questions.

Amendment 40 is about a very specific issue but, as my noble friend Lady Pidgeon has emphasised, the role of the British Transport Police is vital, providing the rule of law on our trains. It is important to remember that the rule of law provides consumer and passenger confidence. Those of us who are older, younger or weaker are particularly dependent on the good offices of the BTP because they provide the assurance that people need before they are prepared to travel on our trains.

I emphasise that, as my noble friend said, British Transport Police funding has been provided virtually unseen from within the industry for a very long time. The total amount of money, at nearly £500 million a year, is not inconsiderable. It is therefore important that we have a clear answer now from the Government about they intend to deal with BTP in the future. In particular, how will it be overseen? Will that be with independence and at arm’s length from the Government? Which body will do that supervision?

Amendment 41, on freight, deals with a much more substantial and complex issue, because the freight industry is so complex. As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, it is essential that the new system be set up to encourage rail freight to improve its efficiency. That will be difficult, as he emphasised, because a centralised, nationalised Great British Railways will be bound to feel pressure to prioritise passenger services. We have crowded tracks running at capacity. We have vocal passengers who want trains at a time and a frequency convenient to them. We have a Government who have sponsored a nationalisation project, and their reputation will be damaged if passengers’ interests suffer. We also have a Government who emphasise that they are facing a financial black hole. Will they be willing to invest in track and signal modernisation of the sort outlined by my noble friend Lord Bradshaw, to benefit freight rather than passengers?

I fear that freight could rapidly become a poor relation, so I am keen to hear details and reassurance from the Minister. I thank him for his letter, but I point out that it says that next year’s railways Bill will “enable” the growth of freight. I emphasise that I would much prefer a duty to promote the growth of freight, rather than simply enabling it.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak first to Amendment 40, concerning the British Transport Police, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. I associate myself with everything she has said about the importance of the British Transport Police in maintaining safety and law on the railway network and indeed in promoting a sense of safety, which is almost as important. That is particularly true, if I may say this, for women travelling on the railways, perhaps on their own. If they do not feel safe, they will not travel on the railways, it is as simple as that, and the British Transport Police have an important role to play in that regard. Fortunately, there is generally a good record of personal safety on the railways, but we want to see how the Bill will enhance that.

My figures may be terribly out of date, but when I was last involved, half the funding that the British Transport Police received came from Transport for London for services in London, and the rest was spread throughout the rest of the country. I will not say that the railway companies were not procuring enough British Transport Police to do the job—the test of that, of course, is whether there is criminality on the system—but they were not procuring at the same rate of coverage that Transport for London was procuring at. This is an opportunity for the Government to say, as they take control of the companies, how they are going to ramp that up and what investment they are going to make in it. I hope to hear from the Minister on that point.

A very interesting constitutional point was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, which I had not heard expressed in any way before: how is the British Transport Police Authority to be constituted? At the moment it is constituted in large measure through representatives of the train operating companies. If there is effectively only one train operating company, which is the Government, how is it going to be constituted? As the noble Baroness says, it operates out of the Department for Transport. Is it going to become the first government department in this country—I think this is correct—to have its own police force? Even the Home Office, out of which ordinary policing operates, does not have its own police force; they are all accountable to police authorities or, now, to elected police and crime commissioners in appropriate areas, or to the Mayor of London in his capacity in London, and so forth. Could we end up in a constitutional nightmare here, a car crash that the Government have not properly thought through, as a result of this proposal to nationalise all these railways? Again, I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say.

Turning to freight, I share the concern of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about expressing too definite opinions on this topic, especially in the presence of the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Bradshaw, who have such considerable and long-term prior knowledge of it. I have some slight sympathy with the Government on the point because, while I may be wrong about this, I understand that there are freight companies that have rights to paths which they do not use but will not relinquish because they may be useful in the future—and why should they relinquish them?—while, at the same time, they might want to have access to other paths which they cannot get hold of. This is slightly a mess, so perhaps there is some work for the Government to do here to sort it out.

The previous Government also had, as I understand it, a rail freight growth target: to increase rail freight by 75% by 2050. So far, that has not been mentioned and we have not heard yet whether the new Government wish to commit themselves to that target. Again, there is an opportunity for the Minister to say that that is his target when he gets to his feet. We would like to hear more about that.

The Minister may want to say that some of those points can be addressed in the future Bill—the Bill we are promised that is further down the road—but he cannot say that of the points raised by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, both of whom made the point that the way in which this is now proceeding, by contrast with the Williams report, creates a fundamental and ineradicable conflict of interest in the role of Great British Railways. When it was the body—the great controlling brain, as I referred to it—that was going to establish who could run what railway services where and, where appropriate, award franchises or concessions for passenger railway services, while also allowing open access and allowing freight services to take place, it could do that from a disinterested position. It would be allocating resource presumably according to some sort of rational principle that could be explained and interrogated by interested members of the public and other parties with a stake in the matter.

Now, of course, it is always going to be the case that Great British Railways will also be the operator of the passenger services—so what about the other services? What about open access and, most particularly as far as this group of amendments is concerned, where does freight get a look in? How does it make its case and to whom does it appeal if it feels it is unjustly done by? Is it to be allowed to appeal only to the courts or could there be a truly independent body outside Great British Railways—perhaps the Office of Rail and Road; I do not know—to which appeals could be made and which would decide and allocate these paths, where they are constrained, on a rational basis?

We have no idea about this because the Bill, as I said earlier, is being rushed through for manifesto and publicity reasons—for headline reasons, fundamentally—without these crucial questions that it throws up being answered. They are not my questions; I did not table these amendments. They come from Benches on all sides of the House. These questions are being thrown up and the Government have no answer, except the tune we are getting accustomed to, which has as its first verse, “It’s in the manifesto” and as its second verse, “We’ll tell you when we get to it some time next year”. I hope we can do better than that when the Minister gets to his feet.

Bus Franchising

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement. The Official Opposition share the Government’s desire for high-quality public transport and we will hold the Government to account on this.

In government, the Conservatives prioritised buses, protecting our network during the pandemic and introducing the “Get Around for £2” scheme, saving millions of people money on their commute and, most importantly, incentivising them to travel by bus again quickly after the impact that the pandemic had on travel. We know that our public transport sector desperately needs increasing passenger numbers to make routes viable and this is an especially acute problem in rural areas. The previous Government’s policy, driven by the “Get Around for £2” scheme, was successful in driving up the number of passenger journeys in the year to March 2023 by almost 20%. While this is not yet at pre-pandemic levels, our scheme is supporting the return of passengers and boosting the bus sector. So, before addressing the specific issue of bus franchising, can the Minister say what the Government’s intention is for the “Get Around for £2” scheme and whether it is also at risk of means testing? Will the Minister rule that out?

I turn now to the subject of the Statement: the statutory instrument. It seeks to give to all local authorities the powers on bus franchising that are currently exercised in major conurbations such as London and Manchester. Broadly and generally, the Official Opposition welcome the granting and devolution of more powers to local authorities, but this statutory instrument, like a number of announcements from the Government to date, is fundamentally bogus, for two reasons. First, it is often argued that cities and towns outside London should have the sorts of public transport services that London has and the sort of system that provides those transport services. As noble Lords will no doubt be aware, the bus service in London is provided by private companies that operate under concessions that have been granted to them, competitively, by Transport for London in a way that ensures a degree of coherence and system in the operation of the bus service across the conurbation.

The fares risk, which is the crucial question in all this, is borne by Transport for London. The bus companies themselves simply supply the service for a fee. The truth is that this is not something that just happened overnight. TfL did not suddenly find a way to do something that nobody else had ever done. Transport for London, in various guises, has been operating transport services in London for over 150 years, and bus services going back at least to the foundation of the General Omnibus Company—a French company, actually—in the 1850s in London. It is the historical core of what we now call London Buses. The capacity of most local authorities to deliver these services is extremely limited. They do not have those roots or those abilities. Where, out of nowhere, are they to conjure the ability to set up a bus concession management system?

The second reason that this is a fundamentally bogus statutory instrument is the cost of doing it. Running bus services, on the sort of basis that local authorities wish to provide them, is very expensive and requires large subsidies. My figures might be slightly out of date, but when the last Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, left office, the subsidy to London Buses was of the order of £450 million a year. The last I heard, and it may not be totally up to date, was that under his successor the cost of London Buses is of the order of £700 million a year. That is in a very large city, of course, but £700 million a year is a huge amount to have to find to subsidise bus services.

Throughout the country, local authorities will have to subsidise buses if they are to provide the sorts of services that this statutory instrument and this Government are holding out as being possible. Where is the money going to come from? Without massive investment in capacity and the subsidisation of operations, this statutory instrument is fundamentally meaningless.

So do the Government intend to publish a full assessment of the expected impact of this policy on the quality, frequency and accessibility of bus services? Will the Minister commit to assessing the relative impact of this policy on rural communities in particular, as opposed to urban communities?

Finally, the Official Opposition, as I say, support the desire for improved public transport and we generally support the increase of powers to local authorities. But this policy appears to put showmanship ahead of practical improvements. The Government have yet again got their priorities wrong, focusing on who runs local bus services rather than on delivering the people’s priorities, which are the quality, frequency and reliability of our public transport network.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, the Liberal Democrats welcome this Statement. As it has emphasised, it is clear that buses are crucial to our economy and society. They provide services for many of the poorest groups—the young, the old, more women than men—and are crucial for access to education, jobs, health services and other aspects.

We welcome rapid action to deal with our rapidly declining bus network outside London and we are fundamentally in favour of devolution, believing that decisions made locally are generally more effective and efficient. If the Minister looks back to Hansard in 2017, he will see that I put down during debates on the Bus Services Bill amendments that did roughly what the Government’s proposed measures will do—allow all local authorities to franchise and set up their own bus services. The response from the then Minister was that it was all about issues of capacity. To be fair, that is still an issue. On its own, this will not be enough, so what are the Government going to do? Will they provide additional funding and funding changes in the Budget in order to ensure that franchising is enabled in those local authorities that are not generally as big as, for example, Manchester.

As with the rail Bill, our concern is that the key issues are not necessarily included in the Government’s proposals in order to be broad enough to solve the problems. I have a couple of associated questions. Reference has been made to government subsidies to support the £2 fare cap. That will run out in December, and another funding stream that is designed to support improved services will run out in April. Can the Minister give us a commitment that we will see the end of temporary funding and that it will be replaced with a multiyear, more encompassing set of funding that is less divided up? There are four sets of funding that go to local authorities. They need, as the bus industry needs, certainty and a long-term approach, so I hope the Government will do that.

Finally, can we have an assurance that the Government will look at badly needed incentives and assistance to encourage young people on to our buses? For years and years, we have had free fares for elderly people. Young people need a nationwide scheme of at least reduced fares in order to get them on the buses and encourage them to become the bus users of the future. Many rural areas in particular need additional bus services, and young people using the buses would be a great incentive to the establishment of new bus services in those areas.

Pedal Cycles

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for initiating this debate.

If noble Lords will indulge me, this is my first opportunity truly to welcome the Minister to his new role. Since he has brought it up, I thought it worth mentioning that I calculated that we first worked together 25 years ago, when I was a vice-chairman of the London Councils’ transport and environment committee, which I later chaired. At that time, he was managing director of surface transport at Transport for London. Later, he was the commissioner and I sat on the board. We overlapped for about seven years, and for much of that time I was deputy chairman. We worked together and we both had firm views that one of us was working for the other. I am not entirely sure they would be absolutely concurrent if names were slotted into those particular sentences, but we had a very effective partnership. Perhaps his greatest achievement during that time was the stunning contribution Transport for London made to the success of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. He went on from that, and spent the last nine years as chairman of Network Rail.

The Minister’s latest achievement, of course, is managing an almost balletically deft transition from the Cross Benches to the Labour Front Bench. Who noticed that happening at the time? I thought it was worth mentioning these things. He is knowledgeable and effective and, when I took on this role, I was rather hoping for somebody who would not be, but there we are—and there was a wide choice.

I turn to the substance of the debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, and my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering pointed out, Conservative Ministers commissioned the cycle safety review in 2017 and last year supported proposals to change the law, in the Criminal Justice Bill, to create a new offence of causing death by careless or inconsiderate cycling. The Bill fell at Dissolution earlier this year. So many questions have arisen in the course of this debate that few of mine are going to be original, but one question that I think the whole House is interested in is whether the Government intend to bring back that measure and so fill what is generally regarded as a lacuna in the range of sentences available in the admittedly rare event of death or serious injury caused by a cyclist.

When I first became a local government councillor, I had some advice from a very wise council officer that I should never allow myself to get in the middle of an argument between the pro-dog and anti-dog people. Similar sort of advice might apply, I discovered later in life, regarding the pro-cycling and anti-cycling people. There has been a slight flavour of that in this debate, although at a most distinguished and elevated level, of course. I shall try to avoid it as far as possible. However, I simply want to say—and it is incumbent on the Government to provide this—that we need a roads policy that delivers for all road users, keeps people safe and ensures that they go about their daily lives as freely and efficiently as possible. It is that test that the official Opposition will apply when we hold the Government to account on matters related to cycling, and so forth.

I add one point that is of importance to all of us, and which was illustrated by the amusing but terrifying speech made by my noble friend Lord Shinkwin, on the special responsibility we have to those who are disabled. I include in that those with less obvious disability: simply the disabilities of age, and those of us who are less able to dodge out of the way than we were some years ago—and maybe than we think we still are—who take more time to cross the road, and so forth. That has not been fully addressed, and the Government should make recognition of the vulnerability of the disabled a central feature of the management of their roads policy. How they do that is very much up to them.

There are two issues that I want to mention in relation to disability, in addition to the sort of moving traffic incident mentioned by my noble friend. The first is the litter of dockless bikes, which is very difficult to negotiate for pedestrians in general and in particular for those who are in wheelchairs or suffer from vision disabilities. The other is the increasing use of cycle lanes that go behind bus stops—between the pavement and the bus stop. These are frequently found in London and maybe elsewhere. Do the Government have a view on those, and are they going to develop them?

The previous Government concluded—and this remains our view on the Opposition Front Bench—that the cost and complexity of introducing a mandatory bicycle licensing system would outweigh the benefits of such a scheme. But it is now very much in the lap of the party opposite to decide whether that is still the view, and I think we would like to know about it. There was much discussion of the question of licensing, and we have to bear in mind that there are two separate schemes for licensing. One is licensing a vehicle and giving it a registration plate and the other is licensing a person to use that vehicle.

When it comes to licensing, we are suffering to some extent from the advance of technology and our difficulties in grappling with it. Back in the day, it was all very straightforward: you had a thing that in my father’s generation was known as a pushbike or a pedal cycle; then you had something called a motorbike, and it was perfectly clear what the difference between them was. Now we have electric cycles that comply with the electrically assisted pedal cycle rules, are limited to 15.5 mph hour and generally require some sort of pedalling to make them move. The last Government had a consultation on legitimising bicycles that would have double the wattage available but would also be twist and go: you turn a throttle and the bike starts, and you do not need to pedal the thing at all because it powers itself as it goes.

There comes a point, of course, where you are overlapping with mopeds. Mopeds do require licensing, both of the person and of the vehicle, but the distinction between the two is breaking down, in my view. I will just complete the picture beyond mopeds. They can be driven permanently on a provisional licence that is simply renewable; you can do anything on a moped with a provisional licence, except go on the motorway. The reason a lot of the people have L-plates, as was referred to, is that they never get a proper licence. That is true of large numbers of delivery drivers and so forth, but also others. Of course, for a full motor cycle, you need a proper licence.

The system has become incoherent and does not command respect any more. The outgoing Government—I accuse them—did not address this issue, but I think it will fall very firmly into the lap of the new Government. They will have to take a proper schematic view of what the licensing scheme should be for the whole range of two-wheelers, because that old distinction between the pushbike and the powered two-wheeler no longer exists in the way that it did.

I come, briefly, to illegal e-bikes. I do not understand why there are illegal e-bikes; are they imported or are they the result of illicit adaptation? Who is doing this adaptation? Is it being done on a commercial basis? If it is, why is that not being stopped? These are questions that I do not understand—there may or may not be answers to them. In March this year, police data showed that the number of illegal e-bikes confiscated by police doubled in 2023 compared with 2022. In the whole country, 260 were seized; there were 130 in 2022 and only 61 in 2021. Part of that increase in numbers from 2021 to 2023 is of course explicable by lockdown, but it is good to see the numbers going up. I suspect, however, that it is merely a drop in the ocean and I wonder what intentions the Government have when it comes to enforcing the existing rules.

Finally, we come to e-scooters. Here, I think the previous Conservative Government were totally wimpish. As noble Lords explained, they are illegal, but they are legal if you are riding them as part of a licence scheme. That scheme is a trial, and the trial has been extended perpetually, I fear because Ministers did not want to grapple with the decision of whether and in what circumstances to legalise them. As I say, I accuse my own colleagues, my own side, of not bringing that to a conclusion—but it cannot be escaped. This trial cannot be continued for ever. There will have to be a decision, and it would be very helpful if the Minister could tell us today what he thinks that decision might be.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, for initiating the debate, and I very much look forward to hearing from the Minister. There has been a great deal said today; I hope that he will listen to it all and present us with a properly synthesised policy in due course.

Road Investment Strategy

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The point about emissions and the environment will be covered by the capital spend portfolio review. I think potholes are a major part of what the noble Baroness referred to. The state of the roads is pretty disgraceful, and the Government are committed to doing far more on filling potholes and making roads safe than the previous Government. There will be no more smart motorways, and my understanding is that the programme to modify those already installed will be completed.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord’s admission that road transport contributes to growth, jobs and housing, but when one looks throughout the country, wherever the Labour Party is in power, be it in Wales, London or many local authorities, one sees increasing costs and restrictions being imposed on the motorist, many of them felt most deeply by working people who are struggling to make ends meet. Does his welcome statement today about the value of road transport mean that Labour’s war on the motorist is now at an end?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

If the objective is economic growth, jobs and housing—I am pleased that the noble Lord agrees—we should choose those transport projects that contribute the most to it in various parts of the country. I have a wry smile because he was the deputy chair of Transport for London when I was the commissioner, and between us we probably removed more road space from the streets of central London for a Conservative mayor, so I am not sure that this alleged war on motorists is quite as one-sided as he might suppose. It is very important that the highways are managed in the best way possible because transport is a facilitator of growth, jobs and housing. The projects that we are able to choose to fund in these difficult circumstances should always be the ones that deliver the most in those categories.

Local Bus Sector

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness will recognise the important ability of the Mayor of London to fund cheap and free fares for young people. The opportunity that the Government’s franchising proposals will give is that other local authority leaders and combined authority mayors will also have the ability to fund fare concessions for the purposes that she mentions.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister is right to emphasise the importance of bus services, particularly for the elderly. I speak as somebody who has reached pension age. In that light, and given the Government’s, shall we say, cavalier attitude to pensioners that we have seen on display, can he give an unshakeable commitment that the Government will maintain the national bus pass and the statutory freedom pass scheme in London? Or is there the possibility that they too could find themselves subject to means testing?

High-speed Rail Services: West Coast Main Line

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The performance of the Great Western main line has been the subject of a great deal of discussion and a change of management in Network Rail, and the infrastructure is improving. Nevertheless, I will take away my noble friend’s remarks on it, and we will press both Network Rail and the train operator to do better.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister to his place. I did not feel that the very good question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was adequately answered, particularly in relation to Euston. Can the Minister be candid with the House and say how much public money his department is bidding for in the current spending round to extend the operation of HS2 from Old Oak Common to Euston—or does he hold the view that this can be achieved entirely by private sector investment?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord’s question in relation to Euston is germane in relation to the usefulness of HS2. The Government have been left with a position where many things have been promised and there is not enough funding for them all. However, we are reviewing the position on Euston urgently and intend to respond when we can to the proposition to extend HS2 from Old Oak Common to Euston.

Public Bus Collisions

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, as I have said, road safety is a priority for the Government. The department is determined to make roads safer for everyone, and the delivery of high-quality walking and cycling schemes, coupled with the changes to the Highway Code in 2022, will play an important part in addressing the safety concerns of people wanting to walk, wheel and cycle. Active Travel England is working with local authorities to ensure that walking and cycling infrastructure is of the right quality and in the right places to maximise its value and impact. On the issue of bus companies investigating themselves, as the noble Lord knows from debates on the Automated Vehicles Bill, we have no intention of introducing separate investigation for buses.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that many injuries caused by buses in fact occur inside the bus, especially to the elderly and vulnerable? Care needs to be taken in examining any statistics that suggest how many bus-related injuries arise in a particular period, to ensure that a distinction is made between those occurring inside the bus, often because of excessive braking, and those involving pedestrians in the street.

Transport System: Failings

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Snape, for securing this important debate. He gave us a splendid knock-about speech to start, full of horror stories. These have been added to—stories of failures, inconveniences, cancellations and so forth—in the course of our debate. I would like to take the word “strategy” seriously. Many of the examples that have been deduced today are not pertinent to the question of strategy; they are what I would rather think of as tactical failings. You can have a large number of tactical failings without it necessarily meaning that you do not have a good strategy. That said, I do not think the Government have much of a strategy for transport, but the two are worth distinguishing.

I would like to use the few minutes available to set out some of the principles that ought to underly a transport strategy for this country and the United Kingdom. First, we need to think the right way. We need to think teleologically about transport. The purpose of transport is transport; it is moving people and goods. That movement brings economic and social benefits; these are not inherently the purpose of transport but they are beneficial consequences. Transport also brings pollution, which is not the purpose of transport but simply a negative unwelcome consequence. We need to distinguish between the purpose of what we are doing and the consequences.

Secondly, it is also not the purpose of transport to meet non-transport policy objectives—for example, net zero. As an aside, it is quite interesting that I am probably the first person in this debate to use the words “net zero”. I do not use them in a very positive way; I just give it as an example. Extraneous policy objectives are constraints on how you deliver transport policy; they tell you how you should be doing it rather than why. That is also a necessary clearing of the mind if we are to think about these things properly.

My third point might seem obvious, but it has huge consequences. Public transport works best where you have a concentration of passengers. That means that it works well, largely speaking, in cities and larger towns. Having a density of population is a necessary condition for sustainable public transport. It is possible that transport services can create density, in the way that the Metropolitan Railway created Metro-land, but our anti-development planning policies nowadays sadly make that a thing of the past.

Fourthly, as a consequence of that, we have to be realistic about what we are ever going to be able to offer rural areas in public transport services. The idea that rural areas will have transport services akin to what is on offer in London is simply unrealistic. It is to hold out a pledge that can never be met. This emphasises that, especially in rural areas, there is always going to be a very important role for the private motorcar—and, indeed, for cheap private motorcars. The whole question of electric vehicles and how far we can expect them to spread, especially in rural areas, seems to be determined by their cost. At the moment, they are far too expensive. If we want cheap ones, we are going to have to pay to import them from China. That is basically the dilemma we face. We need to be realistic about that.

My next point might be controversial. Public transport is expensive to run, particularly rail. It costs a great deal of money, and not simply because of the monopoly supply of labour and the way in which the trade unions have been able to extract enormous salaries, especially for drivers, as a result of that. It is very expensive to run and only the fare payer or the taxpayer can pay for it. The money has to come from one of those two sources. It is a profoundly political decision how that expense will be allocated.

My suggestion—unpopular though it may be—is that any national strategy should be directed at maximising fare income. This does not mean high fares for everyone, because transport is a paradigm case of where marginal pricing adds to income—railway operators have understood this since the railways started in the 19th century. The fact is that it costs more or less the same to run the train whether it has passengers on it or not. Even £1 from that last marginal passenger adds to income. Airlines completely understand this. They set and vary their prices from day to day on that basis, in order to maximise revenue—not by having high fares for everyone but by having high fares for some and lower fares for others. We should perhaps learn from that.

I am coming to a conclusion. I would like to say a lot about technology, as my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond has. That would be another speech, as there is a great deal to say on that.

Finally, I will briefly say something about the nationalisation of rail, as announced today. I am not, despite what noble Lords might think, a mad privatiser of every utility. I was deputy chairman of Transport for London, so I can hardly believe entirely in privately running things. But the announcement today will make no difference whatever. Nearly everything you can pick up and touch in the railways is nationalised already, except the trains. If you take over the train operating companies, which are already puppets of the Department for Transport, you will simply have the same people doing the same jobs. Nothing very much would change, but you would run out of capital to invest at some point. That is the great advantage of privatisation.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

3rd reading
Monday 19th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I will make a short speech, conditioned by my being a former pilot with experience of Boeing, probably the most sophisticated company in the world on unmanned aircraft. The net result so far has been that 346 people died recently, although, thankfully, nobody died in the Alaska experience. Given that situation, although this Bill is supposedly about safety on the roads, we need to take great care; I recognise that we need a framework here, but I hope my noble friend will listen to what the noble Lord suggested earlier in the debate and have the Office of Rail and Road help oversee this Bill as it is implemented in relation to vehicles on the road.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I briefly congratulate my noble friend the Minister on bringing this useful, modest and largely technical Bill to its completion. The Government have expressed optimism that the arrival of automated vehicles in large numbers on our roads is going to have no effect whatever on how the rest of the road system and other road users operate. It is the principle on which the Bill is based but, to me, it seems to be credible only in the somewhat artificial reality of your Lordships’ House.

My noble friend the Minister and his department still need to address a worry many of us have. He has stated that nothing will change—that facilities for pedestrians, for example, will not be affected—with the arrival of these vehicles, but it is clear that is not wholly credible. The people who have invested in automated vehicles will find that pedestrians and other road users are obstacles to the rollout of their plans, and they will then turn up at the ministry and say, “We have spent all this money, so now you have to do something to make it work for us”. At that point, officials will roll over, Ministers will wave their hands and the money will decide what the policy is. All of this will happen without a parliamentary debate considering the effect of the vehicles and what they mean for road users, especially in urban environments. I hope my noble friend the Minister will find an opportunity to allow us, and the public, a debate about what the vision of our cities is when automated vehicles are operating in large numbers as the Bill makes provision for.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, in line with the usual courtesies of the House, I thank the Minister and his team, all of whom were exceptionally helpful and willing to give their time and expertise in some useful meetings with myself and my Liberal Democrat colleagues. I also thank my noble friends Lady Brinton and Lady Bowles, supported by Sarah Pughe in our Whips’ office, for their work. Finally, I thank noble Lords across the House: there was exceptional co-operation in improving the Bill, and one of the outcomes was the amendment of the Minister which clarified the statement of safety principles.

The Bill was a logical progression from 2018, and I would predict that this second Bill will be followed, I am sure, by a third Bill to try and get this right. There are still unanswered questions, and I will briefly list them. There needs to be a fresh look at the legislative framework affecting delivery vehicles that are already on our streets. Those who operate them are concerned about lacunas in the legislation.

We are also particularly concerned about the issue of disabled access, which is where my noble friend Lady Brinton worked closely with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said,

“the promise of automated vehicles is accessible mobility for all”.— [Official Report, 6/2/24; col. 1585]

It is, therefore, deeply disappointing that the concept of disabled access—from the physical space of the vehicle to the software that drives it—is not to be built in from the start. It always costs more to adapt things later, and I believe this is yet another missed opportunity.

Finally, it is a great pity that the vote on the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was lost so narrowly. It was just the kind of thing an advisory council could provide a sense of direction on. I hope the Minister will reflect on the need for certainty on the future structure of appropriate bodies to provide advice and regulation.

We remain concerned, in particular, about data protection in respect of the Bill, which is predicated on a future conglomeration of personal and commercial data, and data associated with the security of the state. It will come together in an unprecedented way. It would enable a massive intrusion of personal privacy, but in its entirety would offer massive power to a malign foreign power or even to a clever, meddling, individual hacker. Although it is well intentioned, the Bill hardly starts to tackle the dangers of that accumulation of data.

Having said all that, I thank the Minister again for his co-operation, assistance and leadership on the Bill.