Railways Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, on his valedictory speech. It was great fun. I do not think that we have ever met, but there is plenty of time before September, so perhaps we can get that in our diaries.

I do not say this often, but I welcome the Bill. The Green Party has long argued that our railways should be run as a public service and not for private profit. After decades of failed fragmentation, spiralling costs and confusing accountability, bringing the railway back under public leadership is important and overdue. The Bill is, therefore, a step in the right direction.

If we are creating Great British Railways, we must create a railway that is genuinely great: one that is affordable, accessible, integrated and capable of helping us meet the defining challenge of our age, which is the climate and nature crisis. At present, the Bill does not achieve that. It lacks ambition. For example, Great British Railways will have numerous duties, so why does the Bill not contain a clear duty to increase passenger numbers?

I welcome the target for shifting freight from lorries on to trains, but why is there no equivalent ambition to encourage more people out of their cars and on to trains? To do that, we must make train travel cheap and easy. For millions of people, the biggest barrier to travelling by rail is not whether a train exists but whether they can afford the ticket. Affordable fares are perhaps the single most effective tool available to increase passenger numbers, tackle inequality and reduce car dependence. Yet the Bill contains no explicit duty to promote affordable fares, and changes to the licensing arrangements of Great British Railways could see fares rising as there is less focus on public duties.

There seems to be even less ambition to create one system that covers the whole journey someone might take. As the Minister knows well, this works in Greater London, where TfL runs the London Overground under the mayor’s control. Manchester is moving that way, but what about democratic control over integrated transport for the rest of the cities and regions? People do not think in terms of operators or transport modes; they simply want one journey. Whether someone is connecting from a local bus, a tram, a cycle route or a ferry, the system should feel seamless. Integration should be one of the central purposes of Great British Railways, creating a public transport network where different modes work together rather than competing with one another. I hope that the Government will clarify how the railway will become genuinely integrated with other forms of public transport.

Rail is already one of the lowest-carbon forms of transport. We should be supporting every passenger to choose rail over driving or domestic flying. If we are to meet our legally binding climate targets, modal shift cannot simply be left in policy papers; it should be a statutory objective of the organisation that is responsible for running the railway. Staggeringly, environmental responsibilities appear only fleetingly in the Bill. There is little recognition that our railway must become climate resilient as extreme weather becomes more frequent or that it should contribute to restoring nature alongside the lines it manages. Some 10% of all train services were cancelled or severely delayed in the most recent heatwave in Britain. Last week, I spent six hours getting home instead of three, and I felt lucky to get home at all.

Great British Railways should have a clear public mission that recognises its contribution not only to transport but to our economy, our environment and our wider society. Passengers deserve the reassurance that a publicly owned railway will be judged not simply on financial performance but on whether it provides affordable access to work, education, leisure and family life. Profitable routes should be able to support socially essential services in rural and underserved communities, where success is measured not only in ticket revenue but in reducing isolation, supporting local economies and giving people a genuine alternative to cars. High ticket prices mean empty seats.

Equally important is protecting the workforce that keeps our railways running. I welcome the reassurances that the Government have given regarding the future of the Railways Pension Scheme, providing valuable certainty for thousands of rail workers. The future of Great British Railways will depend as much on the people who run it as it will on the infrastructure they manage.

Of course, the Bill misses one of the biggest opportunities of all: setting Britain on the path towards a fully electrified railway. Britain has spent decades pursuing a stop-start approach to electrifying its rail network. Only 39% or thereabouts of our railway is electrified, which is is well behind many comparable countries. We know what needs to happen. The Climate Change Committee has made it clear that substantially more of the network will need to be electrified if we are to decarbonise rail and meet our climate obligations. Yet the Bill is silent on this.

Finally, I hope that the Government will look carefully at how passengers themselves are represented. A publicly owned railway that fails to listen to the public will have missed the point entirely. Public ownership should not simply change who owns the railway; it should change for whom the railway works. Passengers, disabled people, local communities, rail workers, devolved Governments and regional authorities should all have meaningful opportunities to shape services, investment priorities and future strategies. Improving accessibility will be a huge benefit for our ageing population.

We also need more clarity on how mayoral, local and combined authorities will be able to control investment plans and services. The Green Party has long argued that rail should be viewed not simply as a transport system but as essential national infrastructure for delivering economic opportunity, social justice and climate action. Public ownership is not the destination; it is the foundation. The Bill moves us away from the disastrous experiment of fragmented privatisation—for that, it deserves support —but we should not settle for a railway that merely functions better than before. We should build one that actively reduces carbon emissions, restores nature, connects communities, integrates public transport, makes travel affordable and expands opportunity across every part of the country. Those ambitions really must be written into the Bill itself.

I welcome the Bill’s Second Reading and hope that, during its passage through this House, we can strengthen it so that Great British Railways truly lives up to its name as a railway that is run in the public interest, serving people, communities and the planet for generations to come.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords, I must confess I had mixed feelings when I saw that I had been drawn 30th out of 31 contributors to the debate this afternoon, but, in fact, it has been a huge pleasure. It has been an excellent and very well-informed debate, and it is a privilege to take part. I was particularly taken with the valedictory speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton. I thank the noble Lord for his service. I can tell, even as a relatively new Member, that he will be missed by the House.

It has also been a privilege to take part in a debate which has included contributions from a number of former Secretaries of State for Transport. They made the case for privatisation very well, using hard numbers: increased numbers of passengers, increased projects, improving reliability on the railways, and savings made, whereas, the proponents of this Bill, I fear, are relying largely on nostalgia. The reputation of British Rail, back as it was in the 1970s, appears to have undergone something of a renaissance in recent years. I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Blencathra managed to puncture that particular balloon and remind us all of exactly what it was like.

I had the privilege to work for the Royal Mail in the 1980s and the early 1990s. We had a lot of dealings with British Rail. I would come into the office—I was private secretary to the director of operations here in London—and I would be faced every morning with a tray full of telexes; noble Lords will recall telexes, I am sure. Every one of them was about some form of delay or disruption to the mail overnight, and a very large proportion of those was due to failings on the part of our partner, British Rail. I would have to assemble those into a file and present them to the rather sceptical director when he came in later during the day. I can remember well how incandescent he was when I had to tell him that British Rail had forgotten to put fuel in a train and it had ground to a halt just outside Birmingham with its load.

I remember a particular day with some pride when we launched the mail train which ran from Euston station to Carlisle. We had a train full of bigwigs—directors from British Rail, directors from the Post Office; we had my noble friend Lord Jopling, who was the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry at the time, and Lord Clinton-Davis, who was his Labour opposite number. We set off from Euston with our hearts high, looking forward to reaching Carlisle. Unfortunately, something fell off the train at Nuneaton, and we ground to a halt and sat in a field for an hour, with nobody telling us what the reason for that was. Nobody on the train knew, least of all, of course, the senior British Rail operators who were panicking somewhat about the experience. It was a constant source of controversy and difficulty for us, because we knew, as a nationalised organisation, that if we wanted to please the Government, we would put all our letters on to the trains. If we wanted to help the environment, because we cared about that even in those days, we would put all our mail on to the trains. But if we wanted the letters to get there the next day, we would put them in a van and drive them ourselves, because that was the only way that we could guarantee the quality of service that people required from us.

I particularly enjoyed the early contribution from my noble friend Lady May. She raised the issue of devolution and the contradictions that that will raise. The Minister, having run Transport for London, will be only too aware, I am sure, of the contradictions and the challenges this puts in place for London and for other major cities around the country. When he was running Transport for London, he would have wanted the trains to stop at every single stop going into London, provide a metro service and pick up the maximum number of people possible, but when he becomes the one controlling mind that he presented to us, running the trains on behalf of the country, no doubt he will want them to run express services and stop in as few places as possible to keep to the timetable and connect the cities. That is before the contradictions and the challenges raised by increasing the amount of freight on the rails as well. Perhaps the Minister can explain to us how the concept of one controlling mind will meet what is known as the Makerfield test.

My noble friends Lord Lansley and Lord Young of Cookham raised the issue of investment. Again, this is a serious problem. Public money is paid by taxpayers by and large because they expect it to be spent on schools and hospitals, and those things will have the priority. This is why the old British Rail was always so badly underfunded. When we look forward to the situation facing us now in the UK, we are in a world where we need to boost our defence spending and there are all sorts of other demands on the budget. Great British Railways is going to be very fortunate if it gets much money out of a government settlement with all those other high priorities competing.

Furthermore, there is an issue of London versus the regions. I know that when I was deputy mayor for London, we could always make a good case for investing in London’s railways because, if nothing else, if you put the money into London, you know you are going to get it back eventually—there will be a return on that investment. That is how we got the Elizabeth line, although I am sure the Minister remembers that it was quite tough to get. It will be even harder to get investment in projects outside London, which will not cost in so easily because they will not meet Treasury rules.

From my point of view, I would perhaps give some advice to the Minister. Transport professionals should rely a bit less on putting in massive projects—big toys for boys, if you like—and look at breaking that money up and spending it on smaller projects, which may not get the headlines but which can be completed much more quickly. That will have a demonstrable effect in improving the reliability of the rail services.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

Thank you. He was heard in silence, almost.

We often hear in such debates—we have not heard it too much today—about how much better the rail services are in other countries. I just want to let the House know that that is not just a debate or an opinion which is voiced by people in the UK. I remember that quite a few years ago, and the Minister will recall this as well, we brought in a man called Bob Kiley from New York to run Transport for London. I was in a hotel in the West End talking to some New Yorkers at the bar, and I said to them, “We’ve got Mr Kiley coming over to run our services”. They said to me, “Well, he’s made a much better job of your Tube than he ever did with our rail services in New York”. I said, “The only problem is that he’s actually not arrived yet”. So it is a truth that, when we travel, we see the best of people’s rail services; when we live there, we do not quite get the sort of service that we would expect. If the Bill is to be successful, I hope that that situation will be corrected.