Great British Railways

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young, for tabling this debate. Much of his involvement took place in the mid-1990s. At that time, he was my ultimate boss, and I became the ultimate student of this operation, in which, on the basis of the somewhat bizarre writing of an excellent letter, we could have been involved as well.

My simple answer to the Question is that open access should be phased out as quickly as reasonably practical. It is a bit of a shock to be informed that I am agreeing with the RMT on that matter. Rail privatisation was a product of the political doctrine of the day: that private ownership and competition would solve all our problems. My personal view is that privatisation as a generality has failed. Rail privatisation has failed, at best, bizarrely, and, at worst, disastrously. The bizarre part of it comes from the track being given to Railtrack, which is a sort of private sector company which went broke and then turned into Network Rail, which is a pretend independent company that was nationalised not by the Government of the day but by the ONS, which said that so much of it was tied-up with the Government that it was really a nationalised company. It dumped £34 billion on the national debt, which virtually nobody seemed to notice.

There was little pure competition in the railway throughout this process; open access was the closest, and was therefore pursued. There was some slack in the system and some open access operations emerged. It is my view that they undoubtedly cost the taxpayer money and that there was not much benefit. In future, they will inhibit total system optimisation.

Any operator of open access will need long-term stability of their rights, whereas the great thing about Great British Railways is that it will eliminate all the conflict in optimising the railway. There will be a single guiding mind. The only disputes in future are likely to involve open access operators, since they will be the sole source of external commercial pressure. This will absorb a disproportionate amount of management effort. The only case for open access is doctrine, and it is a doctrine I do not share.