McNulty Report and West Coast Rail

Baroness Clark of Kilwinning Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. As I mentioned earlier, an announcement was made recently about additional rolling stock for services into Leeds. I had it in my mind that that covered the route in question, but he is testing the extreme edges of my memory now, so it would be better for me to write to him with the specific answer to that question.

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

Surely the Secretary of State must accept that fragmentation costs more. For example, I understand that Network Rail employs about 600 legal staff to negotiate with the train operating companies, and no doubt each operating company also employs significant numbers of such staff. Surely we should be looking at integration, as it will save us money.

[Mr Hammond]

The hon. Lady has obviously read the RMT press release from this morning. Of course there are additional frictional costs—interfaces—in the operation of the railway that we currently have, with franchisees and an overall network operator. However, there are also a lot of unnecessary costs that are caused by the adversarial relationship between Network Rail and the train operators. As I said earlier, I do not believe that the answer is some massive revolution that requires primary legislation and will take the rest of this Parliament to deliver. Instead, this is about getting people working together differently. Let us get to a railway that is different from the one that we have now. In the railway that we have now, the brightest and the best people in all train operating companies are the ones who spend their lives allocating responsibility for failure and collecting money from each other. Hundreds of people are literally spending their days trying to decide whether each delayed train is the responsibility of Network Rail or of this or that operator. That is not productive. Getting the industry to work together, looking at industry-wide costs and focusing on solving the problems, rather than allocating blame for them, is the way forward.