Old Oak Common: Train Disruption

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right to criticise a railway that cannot operate reliably on Sundays and a lot of work is going into making sure that the optional working arrangement for Sundays for drivers and train managers on the Great Western Railway is addressed. But he is conflating two issues. We are mindful of the railway needs of the south-west of England. I think I have met virtually every Member of the other House west of Bristol on the matter of Old Oak Common. Old Oak Common will be an asset to the railway, and the railway to the south-west of England. As always with these things, construction is difficult and takes more time than we would like, but the result will be a better railway network for all parts of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister said that a station at Euston is indispensable for the success and effectiveness of HS2. Indeed, the Government made funds available in the Budget to build the tunnels from Old Oak Common through to Euston. How close are the Government to seeing deliverable engineering proposals for the construction of those platforms at Euston that allow passengers to board, alight and make use of these tunnels? How far away are we from actually having a plan?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I am not sure whether the noble Lord knows, but one of the things that I took on in my previous role was chairing the Euston Partnership, which I did for five years. In that time, we saw at least two iterations of a design for the HS2 station. One was eye-wateringly expensive and included air-conditioned platforms, which is not the case even in Saudi Arabia. The alternative looked like an eastern European railway station after the Second World War, with corrugated iron canopies. Neither of those is at all sufficient. I have seen work going on for an integrated station between the Network Rail side and the HS2 side. I am optimistic that it is affordable, and that it can be financed and built. Incidentally, there will be a large amount of office space, creating jobs and housing in that area as well.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is difficult—in fact, impossible, really—for me to add meaningfully at this stage to the many personal and emotional tributes that have been paid by noble Lords to the late Baroness Randerson. I knew her since I entered the House, but only rather distantly as a figure who spoke authoritatively and compellingly from the Liberal Democrat Benches on the subject of transport. But over the last few months, as I have taken on this role, I have had the opportunity of getting to know her better. Indeed, if I may say so, I developed over that period a degree of affection for her rather shrewd sense of humour. Others know her a great deal better than I ever achieved, and I regret that I shall not have the opportunity to develop the growing personal regard that I had for her. We shall miss her very much.

I thank the Minister and his officials for the time that they have given to briefing me on this Bill. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate.

I turn to the Bill itself. Over Christmas, I had a message from a foreign friend asking me what it was like living in a socialist paradise, which led me to reflect a little on the nature of the Government. What strikes me about the Government, and it is present here again, is not really their socialism, though there is a degree of that; it is the fact that they are a Government who are almost solely and utterly focused on the public sector. The public sector is the solution to everything, and of course the policies of the public sector unions are determinative. So it is that we come to what is, in essence, a public sector Bill that is fundamentally driven by a rather narrow ideological approach. It is statist and anti-enterprise. It is also mildly nostalgic and backward-looking—a sort of return to the Attlee Government is essentially what we are being offered today.

Our first objection to the Bill, therefore, is that it is bureaucratic. It is anti-enterprise and, through franchising, it is likely effectively to snuff out a number of private sector businesses, which will be reduced to becoming not entrepreneurial entities at all but merely agencies of the state, operating to a fee and doing what the state instructs them to do in terms of routes, services and charging the fares that the state, through the local transport authorities, has set for them.

The Minister knows, from his time as the owner of a private bus company, the benefits to passenger service of private businesses. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, and my noble friend Lord McLoughlin drew attention to the decline in passenger numbers, and the implication that certain noble Lords appear to draw is that it is a consequence of private provision. The same noble Lords, however, do not give credit to the private sector for the massive increase in usage of railways under privatisation. In that case they are probably right as well, to some degree. The point is that both bus and rail demand are subject to stronger fundamental forces. That is the fundamental problem that the Government have in trying to revive the sort of 1950s vision of bus services that we see in this Bill.

The fact is that in the case of rail, the Government hope to benefit from a secular rise in demand for rail passenger services. In the case of buses, they can hope only to prop up what is in fact a secular fall, a decline, in demand for bus services. A number of noble Lords have pointed out that that is very expensive to do. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, gave some illustrations of how expensive it might be. It is a random example and many examples were developed, but one of the first examples given in the debate was by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, who referred to North Shropshire and the cuts in services there. Does anyone really imagine that those cuts can be reversed and restored without heavy public expenditure?

The Government’s chosen case studies, of which they are so proud, include London and Manchester. Going back to November 2024, shortly before her political demise, the former Secretary of State, Louise Haigh, wrote in the Sunday Mirror about London:

“This represents record capital investment to the majority of places and a once-in-a-generation reform plan that aims to deliver London-style buses to every corner of the country—including those areas that are usually overlooked”.


The noble Lord, Lord Snape, said it would cost £850 million a year to sustain London buses. The figure I have is £738 million a year in 2024 but we are in, as the Americans say, the same ballpark. If I may be so bold as to disagree with such an experienced transport commentator as my noble friend Lord McLoughlin, there has in fact been a reduction in bus mileage in London of approximately 5% under the current mayor. There was a plan to reduce it by 7%. I do not think the full 7% was delivered, but it was certainly of the order of 5%. This is palpable to those of us who live in or close to central London in particular. In the case of Manchester, the Bee Network celebrated its first year of franchised bus services in September 2024. Passenger journeys in Greater Manchester grew by 5% in the first year of franchising.

By contrast, however, in the year ending March 2024—I agree this is not exactly the same period, but it is the best overlap I can get—national bus passenger numbers grew by 7%, and those figures are taken from the Department for Transport’s official statistics. I might say also in the context of secular decline that that also illustrates how little can be learned from simply looking at one year’s figures. The idea that Manchester demonstrates a huge success—outstanding, apart from the rest of the country—because of franchising needs to be substantiated. It is not necessarily very persuasive on the numbers given. As my noble friend Lord Effingham pointed out, the establishment of the Greater Manchester Bee Network required over £1 billion of central government investment. If you are spending the thick end of £1 billion a year sustaining the London bus network, you might regard a one-off payment of £1 billion to Manchester as mere small change, but replicate that around the country and you will eventually be looking at real numbers. The upshot is that any promise by the Government to give London-style bus services to the whole of the country is essentially a chimera. It is a bogus offer that the Government cannot afford to deliver.

Let us turn briefly to passengers, which is my next topic, if we move away from costs. We argued forcefully when we debated the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill that the focus of the Bill, its overriding purpose, should be to improve passenger services. It was, after all, a Bill—now an Act—about passenger services on the railway. However, the Government resisted that and overturned it in the other place. Similarly, this Bill makes no commitment to an improvement in services for bus passengers. It simply hopes that by making structural and procurement changes it will somehow achieve that. It has no overall duty on the Secretary of State to seek to improve passenger services. It says simply that perhaps the Secretary of State should.

Is the Bill going to work? In its manifesto, the Labour Party committed to reform the system for procuring bus services and to give local leaders new powers. The reality of the Bill is that the Government are not really giving local leaders new powers, but simply removing the Department for Transport’s role in confirming the appropriateness of franchising in other areas. It is our view that the Government’s decision to remove the Secretary of State’s discretionary power to grant franchising powers to local authorities risks too much, and we believe that the Secretary of State should have the power to intervene where a local authority’s franchising model is failing, as a safeguard to protect services for local people where local leadership is poor.

It is essential to understand the differences between large concentrations of persons living in an urban area and the structure of a market that exists in rural areas. That was the logic behind the 2017 Act, which gave powers to certain conurbations, in effect, to franchise or take more control of their own buses but to deny them elsewhere. Extending that power throughout the whole country is, I am afraid, to take a chance and offer a bogus prospectus to the public. The vast majority of local transport authorities will not have the skills to plan routes, assess demand, set fares and introduce a ticketing system, No doubt we will be told that the Bus Centre of Excellence will be deployed to help them. Perhaps the Minister could tell us when he responds how many people are employed by the Bus Centre of Excellence. As other noble Lords have said, the consequence is that the Bill has no answer to the needs of rural communities.

We believe that some subsidiary elements of the Bill are welcome—for example, closing the loophole in the safeguarding of children who are being transported to school on independent school bus services—but we have other concerns, which I will briefly run through, because we will have an opportunity to discuss them further in Committee.

The first is the relative silence of the Bill on ticketing, which is remarkable. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who is always ahead of the game, said—to the rather older Members of the House, perhaps—Oyster cards are not where it’s at any more. Contactless payment, at the very least, is what one should be looking at, rather than a bespoke Oyster card-type system. But it is remarkable how little the Bill has to say about that and, as she said, about the ability to deploy that payment method outside a particular local transport area. Where is the Bill taking us on that; what do the Government have in mind?

Data collection is very important, but more important is its dissemination. In London, the data collected by Transport for London is available free to all app developers. Do the Government intend the same with the data collected nationally; or is it, heaven forfend, the secret plan of the Department for Transport to develop its own app to disseminate this on an exclusive basis? I think we would like to know.

The training of bus drivers in relation to disability in particular is very important, but as the Minister knows, because I have expressed this to him privately, I am concerned about the implications of the passage in the Bill on drivers being trained to tackle anti-social behaviour and potentially violent activity. It is my very clear view—and I suspect it is, on reflection, his—that it is not right for the public to expect bus drivers to put themselves at risk in order to confront incidents that the police would tackle by deploying two, three or four uniformed officers. We have to be very realistic about this, and we will want to explore the issue when the Bill is in Committee.

Safety is of course terribly important, as the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, made clear. It is worth asking to what extent the franchise model contributes to a sort of aggressive bus management that might lead to buses being driven less safely than might otherwise be the case. I said earlier that the Bill has a sort of nostalgic “back to Attlee” flavour to it. One way of illustrating that is that it completely fails to mention anything to do with demand-led transport. The Bill very much envisages a fixed-route, traditional bus service but in fact, in many rural areas demand-led transport might well be and is already proving to be a much more effective way of providing affordable services to communities. The Bill as it stands contains almost no provision for that and makes no reference to it; it will be interesting to see how that fits with the franchising system.

I will conclude. This is an ideologically driven, backward-looking, bureaucratic and expensive Bill. We, for our part on these Benches, shall do our best to improve it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

It was a long time ago.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

It was a long time ago; the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and I completely agree. I wanted only to say that I do not claim particular credit for it; if you lead a team, you should give credit to the team that you lead and not take it all yourself.

The noble Lord’s more important points were about inclusion and accessibility. I absolutely recognise the points he made about the accessibility of the bus service to people with disabilities. I note his contention that Clause 22 does not go far enough, but I promise—and I am sure we will discuss it in Committee—to look at the degree and extent to which this clause can answer his points. He must be able to see that the intention of Clause 22 is to improve bus stopping areas and for the Secretary of State to give some guidance, which ought to be mandatorily taken into regard by local transport and highway authorities.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, raised points about community control and who is in control. As I said, the point of this is to return control to local transport authorities. He also raised a question, which he largely answered, about what happens if local transport authorities do not do their job. One would hope that the citizens of the local transport authority would vote them out for not doing their job. That is the remedy. I do not think that the Secretary of State coming down on local transport authorities like a ton of bricks is a satisfactory alternative; we want to return control to the people who should rightly have it.

Incidentally, there have been bus routes down the Embankment since the trains went. I used to travel on route 109, but it does not go there any more.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, also raised some important points on the Bill. She raised Clause 9 on approved persons, which we will discuss in Committee. The intention is not to deregulate approved persons but to widen the range of them. I completely agree with her that they should have some qualifications. An unqualified person should not be able to make a judgment about whether a franchising scheme is right.

The noble Baroness asked whether Clause 11 complies with the procurement regulations. I am advised that I am able to tell her that it does.

The noble Baroness welcomed Clause 19 and referred to assistance data. I will take that away and see what can be done. Bringing data on bus service usage into the 21st century is quite important and I am sympathetic to the idea that, as long as it is not a burden to bus operators, or indeed local transport authorities, collecting data is the right thing to do, so that we know what is going on.

I note very clearly the noble Baroness’s comments on Clauses 24 and 25, that diversity training is not the same as the rights for disabled people, and on what we did, with her great assistance, in the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill, referring to the Equality Act. I will go away and reflect on that.

Lastly, I come to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who has some extraordinary views about socialist paradises and returning to the era of the Attlee Government. I find it particularly extraordinary because I know that the noble Lord has such a strong view about the autonomy of local authorities. The Bill intends to return bus services to the autonomy of local authorities and for the Secretary of State not to intervene so much in the provision of services.

I have to tell the noble Lord that there is currently a huge disparity in the provision of bus services across Britain. I was not only responsible for the bus service in London, as he knows, but, for a measurable length of time, I was responsible for the bus services in what was laughingly called south-east England but apparently included Norfolk, Northampton, Leicester and Southampton. Even within one bus group, 20 years ago, there was an extraordinary variation in the provision of services and the extent to which bus operators sought to maximise the network and the return on it, or cut off individual journeys, to the extent to which some towns and cities in Britain find themselves short of or even without bus services after 7 pm and on Sundays.

I think I know roughly how to run a bus network, and one of the things you should do, which is the feature of the best bus services run by the private companies outside London—I can mention some places, but I will not—is to seek to service the network and to take people to school, hospital, work, leisure and home. It is in those places where those services have drifted away that something else needs to be done.

That is also true of rural services. The noble Lord alleged, quite wrongly, that the Bill does not deal with demand-responsive transport. It very much does—that is one of the remedies open to local transport authorities, as it should be. It is not a particularly cheap methodology but it is there to be used and, in fact, there are some startlingly good examples of it. He refers to it as though it is an urban feature but his own Government instituted an experimental regime in Cornwall, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, knows, has produced rather a good bus service in Cornwall by having features of Cornwall Council’s activities that amount to franchising in the same way that the Bill will allow to happen.

I have come to the end of my allotted time. There is a limit to what I can answer here. As I set out earlier, the Bill is primarily about empowering local leaders wherever they are. It is a privilege to bring this forward to your Lordships’ House for Second Reading. I thank all noble Lords who have participated in today’s debate. I welcome the support of those who have spoken in favour of the Bill’s measures and look forward to continuing the debate on the Bill in Grand Committee.

Electric Scooters and Electric Bicycles: Pedestrian Safety

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I certainly recognise the passion with which the noble Baroness speaks. Before Christmas, the Government published the English devolution White Paper, which has in it a provision for local transport authorities to be empowered to regulate on street micromobility—that is, e-bikes and e-cycle schemes—so that local areas can shape these schemes and tackle the scourge of badly parked e-cycles and e-scooters.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, as well as being potentially criminally ridden, these vehicles are also being used in the course of committing crime. In 2023-24, there were 11,000 offences recorded involving the use of e-bikes and e-scooters—a huge growth on previous years, and there is no sign of abatement. Do the Minister and his Government have a plan for curbing this epidemic?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

It is easy to recognise the position the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, talked about. Indeed, he talked about it in very similar terms the week before Christmas. It is primarily a matter of enforcement by chief police officers, simply because, as he says, there may or may not be a crime in relation to the use of e-scooters and e-bikes, but crimes are being committed as a consequence of using them. This debate is one of the ways of drawing it to the attention of chief police officers, so that enforcement action is appropriately taken.

Cost of Living: Rail Fares

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her warm tribute to Baroness Randerson.

As I said, the Government are to have a rail sale early this year, in which many millions of tickets will be sold at discounted fares. Noble Lords will know that, following Covid, the demand characteristics of the railway have changed: there is still less commuting, despite changes in working practices, and more leisure travel. That gives real opportunities to produce fresh fare scenarios that will incentivise travel. To pre-empt a question that otherwise will be asked, the railway needs to be adequately able to cope with leisure travel for all seven days of the week in order that people can not only travel cheaply but get a seat when they do.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I echo what the Minister said about the late Baroness Randerson. We will have an opportunity to discuss her sad demise later in the week and return to the subject then.

In the future that the Minister envisages for the reformed railways, will it still be the case that regulated fares are set by the Secretary of State, or does he expect that power to pass to Great British Railways? Will that be in the consultation document that he has promised is going to be issued? When are we going to see that consultation document, given that he told the House he hoped it would be issued before the Christmas Recess, which clearly has not been the case?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his comments on Baroness Randerson.

On the future of the fares structure of the railway, it is overwhelmingly likely that, whoever the Secretary of State is, they will continue to have a strong interest in the fares structure of the railway. However, the proposition is that Great British Railways will be responsible for both revenue and cost, and therefore will have some freedom to set fares. It is true that I had hoped that the consultation document would be available before Christmas, but clearly that was not the case. The passage of the seasons in political time is variable, but I am going to promise that it will be available in the next few weeks.

E-scooters and E-bikes

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister referred to a trial conducted by the previous Government which has gone on rather a long time—rather too long, in my view. Would it not make sense for the Government to draw that trial now to an early conclusion and see what lessons could be learned from it before proceeding with legislation, so that it could be informed by the results of the trial? Will the Minister be able to give a commitment that that will be done? When he learns the lessons of that trial, and will he take a particular interest in the use of e-scooters in relation to crime which we see on the street, which is a cause of great concern—not least mobile phone theft?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Happy Christmas to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan.

Hammersmith Bridge

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

We know what the range of costs for a future renovation of the bridge should be. They are very significant—at least a quarter of a billion pounds. I cannot currently say how detailed that is, but I know that it is the order of magnitude of what would need to be done to move further than just stabilisation, which will be completed, as I say. It must have been quite a burden to both chair and be in those meetings, and I am interested to hear about that. I hope that my honourable friend the Minister for Local Transport, when he reconvenes the taskforce, quickly brings the meeting to a clear understanding of what the bridge is to be used for in the future, and therefore what needs to be done to it in the long term.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the Greater London Authority Act explicitly transferred the responsibility previously held by the Government Office for London to fund capital transport projects by the boroughs to the Mayor of London. It is undoubtedly the Mayor of London’s responsibility to provide funding for this. Does the Minister not agree that what we are seeing here is a failure by two Labour-run authorities that, at the expense of members of the public, are engaged in a competition to show who can be more anti-motorist?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I will say two things to the noble Lord. First, the bridge has got into its current state over decades, which have seen various changes of control by the owners, the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. Secondly, he will know better than most that the level of settlement afforded to the Mayor of London for transport purposes by the previous Government was frankly derisory, and therefore the current Mayor of London has not been able to allocate money to all the things he would like to. We need to establish what the use of the bridge will be in future, which is a matter for the two boroughs. In other circumstances the noble Lord would defend fiercely the right of local authorities in London to decide what to do with their local roads. That has to be established. From that, it can be worked out what to do with the bridge, how much it will cost, how long it will take and, incidentally, who should pay for it.

Train Crew Shortages

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. The lengthy disputes were damaging to passengers and to the railway’s revenue and sapped the morale of the staff—and, indeed, of the management. In particular, in relation to Northern, the number of disputes and the length of time for which they have taken place reflect the fact that no serious effort seems to have been made to resolve them in the time that the company was in the ownership of the last Government. The previous Secretary of State, the current Secretary of State and I are absolutely resolute that we have to resolve these issues. They are quite deep-seated, but as we are here today, the management and the trade unions are in discussion about how to do that, and we are strongly supporting them.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I start by commiserating with the Minister on the fact that transport does not appear to be being mentioned in the latest great reset speech today. It must be tough not being a priority. On the running of the railways, the noble Lord knows better than anybody else that, to run a railway, you need management with strong focus and a strong hand. Does he not accept that the morale of management at the train operating companies is absolutely shot to pieces as a result of the recent legislation, while it waits for the Hendy axe to fall, and that, in effect, at least over the next few years, the railways are being run by the unions—much as the Government appear to be being run by the unions?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

There is no need to reflect the Government’s policy on railways in any particular speech by any member of the Government. We have a clear direction to go in, and we are going there. On the management of the railways, I have to say, if the noble Lord opposite knew the managers as I did, he would know that many of them were in fact rather pleased that there is now a direction. Their morale, as with my own when chairing Network Rail, was significantly damaged by the promise of reform, which started after the May 2018 timetable debacle and was not fulfilled by the previous Government. This Government are going to do it.

Road Transport (International Passenger Services) (Amendment) Regulations 2024

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I have a question for the Minister about this generally positive instrument. It is about electronic travel authorisation. If a bus comes from Great Britain to the Republic and into Northern Ireland, electronic travel authorisation will be required, as I read it. Can the Minister confirm this? Many of us see this as a disincentive and an obstacle to tourism. People visiting Ireland from outside the EU and from outside Ireland need, as I read it, electronic travel authorisation to come into Northern Ireland—that is effectively a visa. Can the Minister confirm that? If he does not have the information available, he can write.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for arranging a helpful briefing with his officials this morning. This is, I imagine, one of those very rare occasions where I find myself more in sympathy with the proposal from the Minister than with the speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, who seemed determined to reopen all sorts of arguments about Brexit and who did what when.

This is, in my view, a sensible and necessary disentangling of our laws from the pernicious effect of EU legislation, so that we stand on our own feet with our own laws, making international agreements—such as the Interbus agreement—and adhering to, and adopting, in this case, its protocol relating to these coach services, which the Minister spelled out in considerable detail, with great clarity for such a complex subject.

The impact assessment for this instrument says that it has no impact and that that is the reason for not having any consultation. I welcome that; we should have more laws that have no impact. Most of the laws that set out to have an impact seem to have only perverse impacts and do not achieve what they are intended to at all. This one is deliberately intended to have no practical impact—with one exception that I will return to—because it seeks to maintain the existing situation but translate it into domestic law. As I say, this is not only desirable but necessary because the provisions of the TCA under which it operates will effectively expire at the end of March next year, as the other foreign parties join the Interbus agreement. So, on the whole, we welcome this instrument and are happy to support it.

On cabotage, it is of course possible—as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said—that there is some diminution of immunity to British travellers as a result of that. The Minister has been asked a question, and I certainly do not know the answer to it, but he may. It is possible that certain services currently operating start in, say, Paris and go to Edinburgh, stopping along the route, collecting passengers and dropping them off. Those services will no longer be able to operate in that fashion—picking passengers up and dropping them off along the route—once these provisions come into effect, which in practice will be on 1 April next year. As I say, that could constitute a diminution in services.

However, it is interesting that the noble Baroness focused on that, because the counterpart to that is that British coach operators will not have those cabotage rights in the European Union. I would have thought and hoped that the Liberal Democrats would be more interested in promoting the interests of British coach operators travelling abroad than protecting the business model of foreign coach operators operating in the UK. However, that appears not to be the case: her focus is on the latter—she did not mention the others at all.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Wednesday 20th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I do not follow the Government’s logic so far. They accepted our amendment, in the names of my noble friend Lady Brinton and others across the House, on disability access and the equality issue. That was and is a hugely challenging issue for the railway and for the Government, and a very expensive one to fulfil. Yet they reject this simple statement, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, just pointed out, is simply a statement of purpose.

We are very grateful to the Minister for the discussions and for the way he has moved to address our concerns. But, as the Government have said, nationalisation is not a silver bullet. Across the world, there are examples of both publicly and privately owned railways that provide an excellent service. Unlike both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, we on these Benches judge a railway not by its ownership but by its efficiency: how good a service provided to passengers is and putting passengers at the heart of things, always. Incidentally, we welcome the Conservative Party’s new-found enthusiasm for passenger efficiency.

This amendment would make it clear that the primary —but not the only—purpose of the Bill is to improve passenger railway services. This should be a statement of the obvious, so I am mystified as to why there is any debate about incorporating it in the Bill. I am also concerned about the points the Secretary of State made in the other place yesterday. It is unrealistic to assert that you can interpret the amendment, specifically the words

“improve the performance of passenger railway services”,

as meaning that the Secretary of State could decide to run fewer services on time, which is, in essence, what she said. I add that if the Government are not happy with the precise wording, because they believe it could be misinterpreted and misused, they could, of course, have offered to amend it.

We would have preferred the issues of ownership to be more closely linked with improvements, passenger standards and other key issues that need to change if we are to have a robust 21st-century rail service. The Government, in our view, have therefore put the vehicle ahead of the delivery. However, we accept that they have a mandate; we accept that there is more than one way to deliver these improvements. We will be listening carefully to the Minister’s response, and I hope that he will be able to be more persuasive than the Secretary of State, because his expertise and reputation are always taken very seriously in this House. If he is able, today, to commit the Government to improvements to passenger services at the core of future legislation, at the core of the responsibility of the Secretary of State, we will be able to support the Government. Passengers desperately need to see improvements, having had a decline in service for so many years under the previous Government. So let us get that commitment on the record; let us get it in legislation, if possible, as soon as possible, so that the work can start.

Very briefly on Motion B, we acknowledge the primacy of the other place on financial issues, but we hope that the Government will continue to apply the flexibility that current legislation affords them so that they will not, unnecessarily rapidly, bring to an end very successful franchises.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall endeavour to be brief. I repeat what other noble Lords have said in expressing my gratitude to the Minister, as I mentioned at Third Reading and when the Bill passed, for his courtesy and collaboration in our debates on the Bill.

The Government’s problem is this: they wish to reform the railways. There is a great deal of support in your Lordships’ House, across all parties, and generally among the public for a reform of the railways. We would like to discuss what the Government are going to do on a number of issues. Had they brought forward the measure in this Bill as part of a large and comprehensive Bill introducing those reforms to the railways, we would have had the opportunity to have those discussions. We would have been able to discuss, for example, the role of freight, and the tension between the priority given to passenger services and freight services that inevitably exists in a constrained system. We would have had the chance to discuss the continuation of open access and competition on the railways. We could have discussed the devolution of the operation of train services to regional and local authorities, such as exists in London and might exist in other parts of the country. We would have been able to do all those things as part of a comprehensive reform Bill.

But the Government have decided not to bring forward a comprehensive reform Bill, of which this is part; they have decided to take this step first—that is, to seize control of the train operating companies—and the great Bill of reform is promised for the future. The Government say that it will be brought forward within 12 to 18 months—that is a challenging target. As I have said, tediously, in the past, over and over again, even after that Bill has gone through its parliamentary process and passed, it will still take several years for it to be implemented.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree that there is a substantial degree of consensus on the need for reform, which the previous Conservative Government started five years ago with the Williams review. However, when we came into office, we found that a very partial Bill had been prepared which did not cover all of the issues that needed to be included in a railway reform Bill. It is the neglect of his previous Administration that has led to this situation.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am not here to defend the previous Government, and I was not making a tedious trivial party-political point when I said that. I will say that I suspect the previous Government were dilatory and slow in bringing forward a massive reform of the railways because it is a very complicated business, and that goes to my point: I doubt this Government will be able to bring forward a Bill within 12 to 18 months precisely because of that complexity. Because of this large gap in time, through the passage of this legislation we are creating a new situation for the railways that could endure for four to six years, with no sense of accountability or purpose that the Government have, because the answer on everything that we wish to discuss —freight, open access, devolution—has been, “We can’t discuss it now; we can’t tell you anything now; you have to trust us”, just like the Government said “Trust us” to the pensioners, to the farmers and to large businesses that are landed with business rates.

The truth of the matter is that we do not see why we should trust the Government. That is without any disrespect to the Minister, but he is just one person and, like all of us, fragile and frail. We cannot build an entire railway system and entrust it to the Government on the strength of one particular Minister because of his noted, genuine and respected skills. We need to know what the standard will be to which we can hold the Government accountable during this new and quite lengthy period.

The objective of the purpose clause is not to set an objective for the railway, as the Minister has sometimes said; it is to set an objective for this Bill, and the Bill is about seizing control of passenger railway services. All we are saying is that the standard we expect to be set is that the purpose is the improvement of passenger services. If we cannot see those improvements then at least we would have a standard to which we could hold the Government to account, and that should be in the Bill. Warm words butter no parsnips. They are nothing to which we can hold the Government accountable. So, if my noble friend Lord Gascoigne chooses to press his amendment to a Division, we on this side will support him.

I turn to Motion B. I do not think the Government realise how helpful Motion B was intended to be to them. It is after all one of those rules in life that, if something is doing well today, it is likely that tomorrow it will not be doing so well, and vice versa. What are the Government now holding out as a practical prospect? They are going to move ahead, and one of the first franchises they are going to take control of is Greater Anglia, one of the best performing and most popular. What is likely to happen to Greater Anglia? Just by random chance, it will start to deteriorate and the Government’s programme of nationalisation will be damaged in the public eye as a result, whereas if they had seized control of Avanti, which is what we were guiding them towards through Motion B, then some improvement would have carried them forward and shown how well nationalisation was working. So we were trying to be helpful to the Government, but the Commons has claimed financial privilege on this issue and, as far as we are concerned, we give way.

On Motion A, I am sorry to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, say she is going to trust the Government. She will be joining a long queue of people who have trusted the Government, but I fear she will be disappointed. But that is enough for now.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and I congratulate him on another polished speech. It ought to be well polished—he has made it at least four times during the passage of this particular legislation. He has not said anything new; we have cantered around the same course about Avanti trains and the future of the railway system.

This is a small Bill designed to create an overall body to be responsible for running the railway system. It was an idea conceived by the party opposite.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

With respect, this Bill does not do that. If this Bill created Great British Railways, that would be another story altogether. This Bill does not create a body; it simply is the Government seizing control of existing railway companies.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

That is absolute nonsense. This Bill is designed to implement a body, as a result of an inquiry into the railway system set up by the party opposite. Indeed, that party was so impressed when in government by the Williams report that the then Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps, added his name to it. He did not actually do anything about implementing it because the backwoodsmen opposite felt it was a bit too much like nationalisation to have an overarching body responsible for the railway system.

We could have disposed of this particular amendment late at night during the course of the Committee stage of the Bill, but the noble Lord who leads for the Opposition refused to sit after 10 pm. There might have been a good reason for it—perhaps it was past the bedtime of the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, or the equivalent, but he and his party were not prepared for a proper debate on this issue, and they still are not.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the amendment which we did not debate late at night was about the management of the railways in London; it had nothing whatever to do with what the noble Lord says. I see him giggle in the corner now; he knows he is having fun at the House’s expense.

The fact is that this Bill does not do what the noble Lord says it does. The other fact is that the Williams review did not envisage the nationalisation of train operating services in this country but rather the use of the private sector on what is referred to as a concession basis, rather than a franchise basis, the technical differences between which I shall not bore the House with now.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I am neither giggling, nor am I in a corner. I find the noble Lord’s contribution to be as specious and inaccurate as most of the contributions he has made during the course of this debate. He keeps repeating the same tedious stuff.

Bus Funding

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, another week and another highly operatic Statement from the person in the other place who wishes to be known as the passenger-in-chief. But, unlike the Statement we had last week, this one has some substance. Its purpose is to announce how the Government are going to spend on buses the approximately £1 billion allocated for that purpose by the Chancellor in her Budget a few weeks ago. About £750 million is to be given to local authorities and the other quarter to bus companies.

There is an important methodological change in this that I would like to explore with the Minister, which is that the Secretary of State announced that previously councils had to compete for funding—wasting resources and delaying decisions. In making that statement she puts her finger on something that has come to the attention of quite a number of noble Lords, not least those who are members of the Built Environment Select Committee of your Lordships’ House, which I have the privilege to chair, which is that the widespread use of bidding by local authorities is time consuming, costs money and is particularly wasteful for local authorities that bid and receive nothing at the end of the process.

Perhaps there is a case for something being done about this—perhaps. I also understand that Governments want to know that the money they are allocating will go to good projects that stand up to scrutiny, so there is a balance to be struck. None the less, the right honourable Lady has made a point of interest. She has said that funding will be allocated based on a “formula”, saying:

“We are taking a fundamentally different approach. We have allocated funding based on local need, population, the distance that buses travel, and levels of deprivation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/11/24; col. 43.]


I know what a formula looks like: it has pluses and minuses, multipliers and weightings, and it shows how money is to be allocated according to certain criteria. I would love to explore this formula and know more about it, but it has not been published. That is the most astonishing thing. We do not know what the formula is or how these criteria have been melded together to produce an outcome. Indeed, what do these criteria mean? Local needs—how many Governments are going to allocate money that is not related to local needs? Population—does that mean that areas with higher populations get more or less money? If it means they get more money, what is that saying to rural areas, which are very dependent on buses? The distance that buses travel—what does that mean? Again, in rural areas buses may travel very long distances. Does that mean that they get more money or less because it is the shorter distances that are being rewarded? Levels of deprivation—I think we have a reasonable idea what that means.

What does it all mean? Was it consulted on? I think we should know. Local authorities might have wanted to have a say in how this money was allocated and how a formula was developed. Was an independent assessment made of what its effects and impacts would be? Were alternatives considered by Department for Transport officials before this particular formula was alighted on? How crucially does it relate to what the Deputy Prime Minister might do when she comes to allocate money to local authorities? It is very likely that she too will say that the bidding system is discredited and she wants to move to a more formulaic allocation of funding. As I say, there is an argument for doing that but it depends fundamentally on the credibility of the formula used, which means that it has to be exposed to light.

Finally, I do not mean to be rude about anybody, certainly not the Minister or his Government, and I also know that £1 billion is just loose change for a Government who are determined to spend their way to growth. But we on this side of the House would still like to be assured about a formula that nobody can see, which depends on criteria that need to be interpreted and are not in any sense plain, and which could simply be a way of spending money to reward your mates. Is that what is going on here? There is every reason to think that it might be.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to welcome the Statement made by the Secretary of State in the other place. Bus services outside London have been allowed to atrophy and die for far too long. They are vital to society and our economy. They are used by the poorest, the oldest and the youngest. Although we love to talk about trains here, buses are the most used form of public transport.

The funding information in the Statement, as far as it goes, is welcome, as are the commitments to reform. The situation with buses has been too complex, too fragmented, too short-term and too competitive. In practice, the competition has led to money going to, in effect, the councils that are best at filling in the forms rather than those most in need.

Courtesy of the Campaign for Better Transport, I have some illustrative statistics. Why should Swindon get £3.98 per head for buses and Reading, just down the road and not dissimilar in size, get £168.68 per head? No formula would explain that. Of course, Reading has extremely good buses as a result of extremely good funding.

There are currently six different funding pots. We need one single integrated fund with “long-term” written all over it, so can the Minister explain in more detail exactly how the current six funds will be amalgamated and repurposed?

I turn to the £3 bus fare cap and its impact. It is, of course, effectively a 50% fare increase in an industry that has already seen fares rise by 59% since 2015, so it will have a huge impact. Yet there were reports at the weekend that the Secretary of State had said that maybe it would be linked in some way to the rate of inflation. Will the £3 cap be applied in the same way as the £2 cap, or will it be amended in some way? What analysis have the Government made to lead them to abandon the £2 cap, which appeared to be working well?

In many areas, particularly rural areas, demand-responsive and Dial-a-Ride services are vital. I ask the Minister, because this is not mentioned in the Statement: what will the Government do to encourage these services to ensure proper co-ordination between local authorities, bus operators and other bodies, such as NHS trusts, so that rural areas get a better deal from the providers at various levels in their area and a structure that local people can rely on?