Railways Bill (First sitting)

Andrew Ranger Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)]

As outlined in my entry in the register of interests, I am a member of GMB and USDAW. I am also chair of the all-party parliamentary group for wheelchair users.

[Andrew Ranger (Wrexham) (Lab)]

As per my entry in the register of interests, I am a member of Unite the union.

[Baggy Shanker (Derby South) (Lab/Co-op)]

As per the register of interests, I am a member of Unite the union and vice-chair of the APPG on rail.

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[Edward Argar]

Q Thank you. Mr Brown, I think it was you who mentioned the integrated business units and accountability, and you also mentioned communities and passengers. How will the Bill provide direct accountability to individual communities? How will it ensure that those integrated business units are directly and meaningfully accountable to individual passengers or an area, and that the director or MD of a particular integrated business unit is directly accountable to them rather than upwards to the chief executive of GBR?

Richard Brown: In terms of governance, they have to be accountable to the chief executive of GBR, who has to be accountable to the Secretary of State. You could say that one of the complexities of the Bill is that there are a number of accountabilities. If you are running a regional or local railway, such as Southeastern trains in Kent, particularly given GBR’s responsibility to consult with and take account of local transport plans, you cannot avoid developing a relationship with the towns, communities and mayoral authorities on your route, as well as the passenger groups. If you do not, GBR will move you on to another job, or even get rid of you.

I have run business units like that within British Rail and in privatisation, and I think the local focus is a really important feature. That is why I am really encouraged by what is happening: as each franchise comes to its end, where it can be merged with the local route management of Network Rail, it is being done very quickly. That can happen across the piece when GBR is fully up and running.

[Andrew Ranger]

Q I want to build on the points about mayors and the mayoral authorities, in the context of the devolved nations. There is a really complex picture there, particularly with cross-border travel and the different ownership of companies that may operate across the border. Do you think the Bill covers that adequately and can cope with the challenges?

Keith Williams: It is a great question. The issue, of course, is cross-border; for example, trains go from London into Wales, and similarly into Scotland. Giving total devolution was something that we looked at. There is so much cross-border traffic that you need to take that into account, so we left the devolved positions largely as they were.

Richard Brown: The Bill is pretty clear in setting out the roles and responsibilities of the Secretary of State and the devolved Administrations. In practice, these things will always need to be based on collaboration between the different organisations, which is the way you run a railway. There are inherent tensions between, for example, what the Welsh Government might want in terms of cross-border services and what might actually be affordable and in the interests of passengers, competition for capacity use, and so on. All of that will be within GBR to, not adjudicate, but work its way through, produce solutions and, where there are options, put those to the Secretary of State and the Welsh Government, for instance.

Out of that will possibly come a compromise, because not everybody will get what they want from the railway. There are too many competing people wanting different things from the railway. The great news is that all of that responsibility to co-ordinate and produce a plan for the most effective use of capacity for the different users is put on one body rather than being split between the Department for Transport, ORR and Network Rail, as it is now.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

Q On accountability, both this panel and the previous one have talked about the benefits of having a single business unit or chief executive responsible for both track and train. I accept the logic of that and the point that there are mechanisms for local communities and passenger groups to interact with that business unit and for it to have to take local plans into consideration. The step that I am missing is that I can convince the chief executive responsible for my area that we need a new passing loop at Tisbury—he is 100% convinced of that—but ultimately he is still delivering based on the broader business plan. For all of the mechanisms of interaction with my local business unit, how does that translate into delivering within a business plan, if the business plan continues to deprioritise the south-west, for example?

Keith Williams: I encourage you to work with your MD to put forward the best plan, which will then go into GBR’s overall plan and there will be a set of priorities. There are always going to be priorities. In a sense, in the past one of the failures was that that then went to the Secretary of State, who was making most of the decisions, because everyone else was avoiding making a decision, or absolving themselves of doing so, and sometimes the best decisions were not being made. I think there is a much greater likelihood that the priority list will be set by somebody who knows how to run track and train.

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[The Chair]

Andrew Ranger, you have 50 seconds for question and answer.

[Andrew Ranger]

Q It is a very quick one, so you could please just give me a one word answer. It is a question to the whole panel. After all we have discussed, in your opinion, will this Bill produce a railway service that better serves its passengers?

Emma Vogelmann: Hopefully. That is my one word answer.

Michael Roberts: Not by itself.

Ben Plowden: In principle, for sure. It is subject to various changes that we have discussed during the course of the session.

Alex Robertson: I agree with Ben.