Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Debate between Lord Sikka and Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not want to reply to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, because I would be here all night picking holes in every point he made in reference to me.

Perhaps I may help the Minister out. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, talked about the liabilities of Network Rail. The composition of government debt published by the ONS includes the liabilities of Network Rail, but the assets acquired with that debt are excluded. That means that the government debt is overstated. In a balance sheet, you will have assets and liabilities. In the ONS approach, only Network Rail’s liabilities are included in the debt. I understand that, for quite a long while, the Treasury has been looking at reconfiguring the composition of public debt, and I very much hope that, soon, it will do the proper thing by either taking off the debt altogether from the ONS numbers or including Network Rail’s assets as well.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who contributed to this discussion. First, I should say that the objective of this limited Bill before the Committee remains to unify track and train, to provide better services to passengers, to reduce the cost of the railway and to increase the railway’s income. The phrase I would use to start with is, “We are where we are”.

The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, referred to Network Rail. I am very familiar with its arrangements post being put back on the Government’s balance sheet. All I can say to the noble Lord is that managing it is and has been a difficult job. However, it has still managed to make significant investment in the railway infrastructure of Great Britain. In some ways, its exposure to being in the public sector did it a great deal of good. I was paid significantly less to chair it than my predecessor was; its chief executive is paid significantly less than any of his predecessors and to my mind, he does a very good job. The organisation is a good deal more frugal than it used to be, yet it still does some very good things in operating the railway infrastructure.

The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, knows that Chiltern was always an outlier. There was no other plausible large-scale investment in railway infrastructure by a train operating company; certainly, there has been no recent interest in it. If you looked at the owners of the train operating companies now, you would see that their balance sheets simply would not support it.

Of course, the noble Lord knows that I cannot predict what the Office for National Statistics will or will not say. Although the suggestion is that, after six years, LNER was still capable of being put back in the private sector, there was absolutely no evidence that it or Northern, which was in public ownership for four years, was being prepared at all. There was also no move in the previous Government’s department to do so. Nevertheless, there was no change in the status of the public accounts of those companies. The noble Lord may speculate that there might be in future, with these arrangements, but I could equally assert that experience suggests that there will not be.

My noble friend Lord Sikka made a further point about the treatment of the assets and liabilities of Network Rail. I will write to both him and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, about that.

On the other hand, I recognise completely the passion with which my noble friends Lord Sikka and Lord Hanworth spoke about the rolling stock companies. Again, we are where we are. I heard my noble friends’ arguments with interest, but the Government will not buy back the rolling stock companies. Great British Railways will enable a longer-term view of the rolling stock market and it will reduce the margins it needs to make. Everybody is right to say that rolling stock lasts for 30 to 35 years, but a railway that is more accurately able to predict how long that rolling stock should last and where it should be used will reduce the uncertainty of relatively short-term leases. It will also significantly reduce the cost of those leases and will actually enhance competition in the market. We will see how that market evolves over time.

Having said all that, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

Mail Carriage by Rail

Debate between Lord Sikka and Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

In respect of the carriage of mail by rail, my department officials are working closely with officials from the Department for Business and Trade. I would be happy to take the noble Lord’s comments back to both departments. I have to say that this is still an operational decision for Royal Mail, over which Ministers and the regulator have no role under postal regulation.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, Royal Mail is a private company but the effects of its operations are public. It affects traffic congestion, as has already been mentioned, as well as health and carbon emissions. This will have some impact on everybody. In the light of that, can the Minister explain what additional taxes will be levied upon Royal Mail for causing these harms?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for his question. Only 3% of Royal Mail’s letters and parcels are moved by rail. There are 600 freight services running on the network every day, of which the trains in question account for just six, so it is not thought that this will have a substantial impact on the overall amount of freight moved by rail. The matter of the taxation regime for rail and road is quite different.