Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Snape Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Cryer and to congratulate him on a superb maiden speech, which informed and entertained both sides of this Chamber. I am delighted to say, and I am sure I speak on behalf of colleagues from both sides of the Chamber on this, that despite his early fame in the film world, the attractions of Hollywood did not drag him away from a political career and he stuck to his parents’ views and principles. I will come back to Bob and Ann in a moment, but my noble friend’s career, as a Member both of the other House and of this House in the years to come, shows equal talent to that of his mother and father.

My noble friend was elected in 1997 in that Labour landslide—unusually, with his mother. That was a fairly unusual combination: fathers and sons occasionally get elected, but mothers and sons rarely do. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to Ann, his mother, who fought a long, and for her sometimes unpleasant, battle on behalf of women who were being exploited in various parts of the country. The championship that Ann showed will be and is being followed by her son, and I know that she is enormously proud of his elevation to this House.

Going back to my noble friend’s experience in the other place, he became the longest-serving chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, which is enormously to his credit. Those on this side of the House, particularly those who have spent some time down the Corridor, know just how fractious meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party sometimes are. It shows the strength and character of my noble friend that he was not just elected but re-elected chair. There were instances of—I should not say it—skulduggery when we elected the chair of the PLP, but my noble friend was respected enough to hold off against any plots against him and to be re-elected. He quite rightly reminded us of the difficulties that our party suffered under its previous leadership, and the fact that he played such a prominent and courageous role in opposing anti-Semitism in the higher ranks of our party is, again, greatly to his credit. I know I speak for both sides of the House when I say that we look forward to hearing him again in the future.

I also congratulate the two other maiden speakers. I know the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, because I have taken an interest in transport for many years. I cannot say that I have entirely agreed with him over the years, but I thought that his contribution today was excellent. I particularly congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, who also made a superb maiden speech. She greatly enhanced her reputation right from the start by her knowledge of the subject that we are discussing today—transport.

I also congratulate my noble friend the Minister on her appearance during this debate. I hope I do not cause her too much embarrassment when I say that I do not share some of the good feeling of many of my colleagues about the Bill. I do not think it tells us very much. It was 2021 when the Great British Railways project was brought before us following the publication of the Williams-Shapps report. Here we are, three years later, and all we have to show for it is the total bill for GBR so far, which I understand is about £61 million. I have no idea what that money is being spent on and what will happen in the future, because this is very much a skeleton Bill.

I spent my working life in the railway industry, as my father did. I have bored noble Lords from both sides with some of the stories from my past. I started on the railways in a signal box, as a teenager in the late 1950s. I qualified as a signalman at 18. I have to say —my late father would agree with me on this—that working for a nationalised railway in those days was not all it was cracked up to be. In those days, the railway industry was dependent on Treasury largesse, but many of us spent our time, as I did, in signal boxes built by the Victorians, some of which are still working and are perfectly safe. They were built to last, unlike some of the modern equipment on the railway system.

However, the fact that we in the railway industry never had the opportunity or the finance to modernise until recently made me feel that perhaps an injection of money from elsewhere—from the private sector, if you like—might benefit it. I listened with interest to the contribution of a former Secretary of State in the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. He outlined graphically and aptly the difficulties in trying to persuade the Treasury, against all other financial pressures, to put money into the railway industry. However, we managed it on two occasions over the years, following the 1955 modernisation plan and with some of the modern equipment that has been installed since.

The fact is that we competed for scarce resources against hospitals and schools, and against one’s colleagues. I chaired the Channel Tunnel Back-Bench committee in the other place, when many of my colleagues from the parliamentary party said, “What do you want to waste money on that for? I need a hospital in my constituency”, “I need to repair schools in my constituency”, or, “There is a finite amount of money available and I want some of it for my constituents”. That is a perfectly legitimate stance to take, but it indicates the difficulties of depending entirely on His Majesty’s Treasury for finance.

Look at what happened immediately after the 1994 Act. The concept of privatisation and the way it was implemented was crazy, and I said so at the time. I understand that John Major, then Prime Minister, wanted to privatise the railway based on old-fashioned regionally based companies. He was a bit sentimental in that way. What was his comment about old maids cycling to church on a Sunday morning? Some of the old maids in the Cabinet at that time were not prepared to allow him to privatise on that basis, so we got the rather nonsensical and fragmented system that we have at present.

However, at least initially, a lot of money came into the railway industry that would never have come had matters been left to the Treasury. There were lots of new trains. The crazy system was such that millions of pounds were made and taken out of the industry by those running the companies that provided the trains, but many of those trains did end up on our railway system.

I was speaking recently to a gentleman known to many noble Lords on both sides of the House, Christopher Austin, the former British Rail parliamentary affairs officer who retired upon privatisation in 1994. I asked him whether in 1994 we would have got the Treasury to agree to the amount of investment into the new trains that took place, and he said, “No, we wouldn’t have done: we would have been scratching around”.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Liddle on his contribution earlier. I went to see his boss in the late-1970s about the renewal of the classic diesel multiple units that were introduced in the 1950s. He said, “I’d love to be able to say that we can find the money to renew them, but we can’t at the present time”. Because of that, those classic diesel multiple units from the 1950s were eventually renewed in the 1980s on the basis of Treasury parsimony, if you like—the Treasury certainly had a big input—which said that, for every three-car classic diesel multiple units that you have inherited and are now past their sell-by date, you have to replace them with two-car diesel multiple units, and so we got the sprinters and pacers. We have only just got rid of the pacers. Anybody who has travelled on them will know full well that they were known by drivers as “threepenny bit wheels”—noble Lords will remember the old-fashioned threepenny bits. Travelling on them, hearing them screeching around curves, was more third-world than modern-day history. That was a result of the parsimony. It was asked at the time by BR management whether a similar number of seats should be provided as the trains being abolished. They were told, “Just put the seats closer together”, and the result was the discomfort of those cut-price trains, some of which we still have at the present time.

My noble friend understandably had some harsh words to say about franchising. But what will happen in this city, for example, where TfL franchised its railway system, and with Chiltern Railways—in my view the one success of the whole privatisation process, where a line that was being run down by British Rail now provides two trains a day to Birmingham and an extensive commuter system? Again, BR management did not want to close these down, reduce the services and stop early-morning and late-night trains, but it was given a block amount of money every September and told “Run the railway with that money and don’t come back for any more”. My noble friend the Minister when she comes to wind up will say that this will not happen in future as far as the Treasury is concerned, and I will believe her. Well, I will try to believe her—let us put it that way—because it has never been noticeably generous, and I will need some evidence that it will be so in future.

I say again: look at the big cities. How will we provide train services in and around those big cities with one national rail system making decisions here in London? Many of our metropolitan mayors want the right to implement their own train services in their way, and that is a model that does not fit too well with nationalisation as a whole. So, although I wish the Bill well, we will certainly return to these issues in much more detail when we see exactly what plans His Majesty’s Government have for the railway industry.