Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, to her position in this interesting debate. She is smiling at me; that is good progress.

The first question has to be this: is change necessary? I answer: undoubtedly yes. I was very close to the development of the franchising regime, not because I had a direct interest but because the railway I was responsible for at that time was but a signature away from being engulfed in it. On detailed examination, it seemed to me a piece of doctrine that somehow the railways had to be privatised. The question was: how the hell do you do it? Well, they managed to create a process of privatisation without competition. In order to make up for that, it has to be massively regulated. There is nothing the private sector likes more than gaming the regulator; indeed, in many ways, that is what has happened. In addition, there was no single mind optimising performance.

So, yes, we need change. This is the right first step, but that is all it is. It is necessary because of the upcoming franchise decisions but what is before us is incomplete for managing the necessary change in this industry. So far, we have no clarity on the mission. What is the railway for? In the document that my party produced for the election, Getting Britain Moving, there are lots of words about making a better railway but that is simply too imprecise. Simply listing all the things that are incomplete does not accept the reality that the problems of any complex organisation, particularly the railways, are the trade-offs.

The trade-offs in the railway are between capacity, reliability—both cancellations and delays—and cost. Making those trade-offs is a complex exercise. If we are to get the best out of this change, there will be a requirement to understand how to optimise and, in particular, how to contribute to the various missions. Clearly, the contribution has to optimise growth, since growth and efficiency are necessary for the future of this country, but, if we simply optimise growth, we miss out two other important areas.

The first of those is levelling up. If you take the railway as it is now and ask it to optimise growth, you will almost certainly end up spending your money in the south-east and around London. A particular criterion—a particular political statement—will need to be made that biases investment away from the south-east towards early investment in capability to allow levelling up to take place. The second area is the whole issue of social benefit. In this country, we must recognise that part of government’s role is to look after the young, the old, the sick, the poor and those who live in disadvantaged places, particularly the problem of urban areas. Maximising social benefit, the levelling-up agenda and the growth and equality agenda all have to be offset against one another and optimised. To do that, there has to be much more clarity in the decision-making processes.

If decision-making processes are not clear, you get drift—a lack of responsibility and focus. The new Bill must be much clearer about those processes. I hope there will also be a recognition that making each decision on its merits simply is not good enough. My railway was relatively small compared with the national railway, but the number of decisions one had to make was enormous. We overcame that only by developing a process of criteria-driven decision-making, where we had a big debate at executive level and then at board level on how to trade off the various forces and areas of improvement that were necessary.

Crucially, the next Bill has to have clarity about the mission. Part of that must be a relationship with other areas of public transport. It is particularly important that, when we concentrate on the railway, we do so in an environment where the other modes are considered—in particular, that all too often under-supported and valuable mode called buses.

I do not ask the Minister to answer any of the questions that I pose, but I hope she will recognise that there are much more difficult decisions to be made on the next Bill, and that we can discuss it at that high level of criteria, focus and relativity. I hope that we will not fall back on giving Ministers powers to decide. We included those things in the Bill, and it has very significant government involvement. Perhaps we could even have some pre-legislative scrutiny and certainly debate. All I ask for from the Minister today is an acceptance that we have to work on these difficult strategic issues for the railway. We need to know how the Government plan to address these issues and it is essential that Parliament is involved in them.