Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it was a real pleasure to hear the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. We overlapped for eight years on the London Assembly, and I guarantee your Lordships that they have seen the softer side of her today. When I was introduced to the House, they found it difficult to find anyone who knew me, because I was a London representative, but the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, spoke up for me. She warned the House that I take no prisoners, and I think that that applies to the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, as well. That is a real asset to our debates here, so I look forward to her next contribution.

I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, who is not in his place at the moment. I will have a quiet chat with him about the fact that, if you had fewer tourists, you would need less nature recovery—but that is probably a job for another day.

On this Bill, I support the idea of public ownership. It is excellent that Labour has gone slightly back to its roots, and I think that it is doing the right thing by taking back control as each of the railway contracts comes up for renewal—that is good. The Green Party opposed privatisation in the first place, and we do not have much criticism of the mechanics in this Bill, given that it seems to be heavily based on the rail renationalisation Bill championed by our former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas more than a decade ago. I thank the Government for picking up Green Party policy, albeit 10 years later.

These contracts are expensive, and the train companies are already discredited. When rail was nationalised, we had 15% of trains running late, but at least the fares were rated as among the cheapest in Europe. Since then, the percentage of late trains has doubled, and rail users are paying the highest fares in Europe. Plus, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, pointed out, each franchise does its own thing, with passenger confusion over ticketing, websites and delayed compensation. Before finalising plans, perhaps the Government could think about taking some advice from the people who actually pay their way and buy tickets on a daily basis: for example, The Man in Seat Sixty-One might have some very useful advice on how to make things easier.

Alongside that rise in fares, the taxpayer subsidy has grown from under £2 billion to around £12 billion. Both taxpayers and fare payers are thoroughly fed up with their money going into the pockets of shareholders rather than improving the service they get. Public ownership makes sense, but I do not understand why this impeccable logic applies only to railways; surely the Minister’s comments also apply to all other forms of privatisation of essential services. In the next five years, for example, nearly all the big NHS contracts are up for renewal, so will Ministers apply the same logic to them and save this money by bringing them back in-house? The NHS is paying £2.1 billion per year on PFI schemes. The NHS budget is expanding, and yet we are getting less back because of the growing role of the private sector. I have heard a lot from this Government—and from the previous one—about value for money, but those rules go out the window when we look at PFIs. Taxpayers have spent £80 billion on NHS PFI schemes that only got £13 billion of actual investment; that does not seem like a good deal.

Public ownership of rail is a good thing, but what difference will it make to passengers? I hope it will enable Ministers to directly reduce fares and have a real impact on traffic reduction. In the years between climate change becoming a recognised issue in the early 1980s and the husky-hugging era of Prime Minister Cameron, the cost of motoring fell while rail and bus fares rose rapidly. Season ticket fares are often 80% higher than they were before privatisation, and longer-distance fares can be twice as high as they were. This is not the record of a country serious about climate change, and we have failed to reduce emissions from the transport sector.

This Government, like the last one, tell us that there is no money. However, during my time on the London Assembly, which other Members of your Lordships’ House might remember, we worked with the mayor on promoting the congestion charge and the ultra low emission zone. That generated the extra revenue that helped to keep fares lower and provided some of the money needed to build new Tube and rail lines. Politicians of all parties knew the value of having a public transport system that worked and was fairly cheap to use, but only a few of us were willing to raise that money for investment by saying that the polluter should pay more. In fact, there was a classic comment from the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who said that the only people supporting his congestion charge were businesses in the City and the Green Party.

Portugal has just introduced a £20 monthly rail pass for all its services. That is the kind of vision we need here in the UK from a publicly owned rail system. It would take ambition and money, but we could make the polluter pay by finally taking the brake off the fuel duty escalator that new Labour introduced.

The Government have taken positive steps to give local authorities the power to regulate buses, so the next logical step is to give the metropolitan mayors a big say in how rail works with bus and tram services, to be the better option in large areas of the country. We need democratic control of the railways, not decisions driven by Whitehall and, even worse, the Treasury.

Privatisation of rail has given us higher fares and generated a fat profit for all the state-owned German and French rail companies, which took advantage of UK taxpayers. I congratulate Labour on bringing this to an end. But why not end the disastrous mistake of water privatisation that will cost £12.5 billion in this Parliament alone, only to pay shareholders and creditors, but which will still result in waterways full of faeces, agricultural run-off, other chemicals, drugs, paint, bleach and plastic? If water companies collapsed, we could buy them for pennies and run them ourselves.

On public ownership of the energy system to deal with the huge jump in household bills, we could end the scandal of record-high standing charges that do nothing to discourage energy use and which hit the poor really hard. Rail companies have made a good profit, but British Gas has made a tenfold profit over the last year, and the likes of BP and Shell have doubled and trebled profits. Public ownership could end those excess profits and bring down prices for consumers.

The public can see these injustices and the way this system of privatisation eats up taxpayer cash and consumer monthly payments. It holds back public investment in our economy and, instead of new hospitals or railway rolling stock, our money buys new private jets for the super-rich. The public want more public ownership, and I hope the Government start listening to voters rather than lobbyists and party donors.

To sum up, my speech is a mix: “Well done, Labour, but why stop there?”

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, who is not here, the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, who is, and the noble Lord, Lord Cryer, who still has to speak to us—I am sure I can congratulate him on his speech, although I have not heard it. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said that the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, did not take any—oh, whatever it is.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Prisoners.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

Maybe the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, does not take prisoners either, but she always does it with a great degree of humour, and we are pleased to hear her speak. I remind Members of my presidency of BALPA, the pilots’ union, which is not exactly a rail union but is in the transport sector.

I will carry on from where the noble Lord, Lord Browne, finished, because Winston Churchill not only supported nationalisation in 1919 but, when he came back into office in 1950, did nothing to undo the actions of the Attlee Government. In fact, he specifically said to Walter Monckton, who was his Minister of Labour, that he must not upset the rail unions; so, Churchill, to an extent, was fairly consistent.

The noble Baroness, Lady Blake, said that we had had three decades of failure; I point out that half of them were under the Labour Government, but we will pass over that and look forward. I do not agree that it has all been failure. I fully support the manifesto commitment, and I am not going to vote against it or anything. However, I have lived those last three decades in the city of Cambridge, and I have observed that we have a new railway station, with another one half built. We have three separate train lines, one running to King’s Cross, one running to St Pancras and one to Liverpool Street, and thanks to the way the franchises have been distributed we have never been without trains, because if one goes on strike the other goes to work. Also, of course, the number of passengers has gone up tremendously. I admit there are downsides to all this but let us not think that it is been a complete mistake, because it has not.

I would like to ask about, and draw a line under, the future of investment in rail when we move forward from where we are, because the history of rail and road investment has, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, been one of constant Treasury interference and investment decisions being based not on what is needed for the service but on how you split up a pie between defence, health, education, infrastructure, transport, et cetera. That is not a way, as they say, to run a railway. I hope that we can get round to some better system of allocating capital expenditure. I know this because in my part of the world we had years of campaigning by Members of Parliament from different parties for the widening of the A14 road. It did not come up against any transport needs; it kept on coming up against the Government’s capital allocations. When we look at the transport and railway needs going forward, we need to look carefully at this.

The final set of points I want to make are about this legislation. It was very clearly in the manifesto. I say to people on my own side: do not keep bringing the unions into it. The fact that there were long-standing disputes, particularly with ASLEF, was a sign that Conservative Ministers did not manage to solve them, as much as anything else. Just as a hobby, because I am a rather sad person, I printed out all the donations that were received by the various parties. Apart from the fact that the Conservative Party had £44 million, against the Labour Party getting only £34 million, with the Liberals getting just under £10 million, individuals contributed £20 million to the Labour Party’s donations; trade unions contributed £7.3 million. Of the individuals, one lady, Mrs Anna Lisbet Rausing, gave the Labour Party around £1 million.

I do not deny her that pleasure, but the railway unions gave the Labour Party £143,000. That is the clothing allowance of the Cabinet. Let us be realistic about this. The unions certainly have influence in the Labour Party—partly because our party does not treat them very well—but they certainly do not buy the party. I can speak from having been in the Labour Party as well as the Conservative Party. On this, I say, “Do come off it”. The fact of the matter is that there has been tremendous demand for change in how the railways are run; that has been present for probably the last 10 years.

What we have here is the beginning of a new era. Not everything is right; I certainly want to see some serious consideration given to the way in which capital investment will be put out. I would also like to know how the Minister and the unions will relate to each other. If there is not going to be a pay body, how will they go forward? The Minister is not going to sit in the office and say, “What shall we do today? Let’s listen to the unions’ pay demand”. There must be some sort of structure and body to look at how the pay awards are given, as there has been up to now. I would like to know how we are proposing to go ahead in the future with that very difficult area.

Finally, if a train driver earns £60,000 or £70,000 a year, they are doing a highly skilled job that requires training. They are driving a train that costs millions and which is full of lives that could be lost if they make a mistake. They are well worth the money. I have always resented the fact that there is a certain middle-class thing where, if you do not have a pen and a piece of paper and sit at a desk, you somehow are not worth a decent salary. That is rubbish. Most of the railwaymen I know work hard for the money they get and deserve every penny of it. We should remember that. I am not saying that we over-reward them, but we should not get jealous and tied up because we give hard-working people decent salaries.