Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail

Iain Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 14th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing this timely debate. I concur with much of what he said. The desirability of the amount of time to spend in Cleethorpes I will leave to him to determine, but otherwise it was a powerful speech. He referenced the Bradshaw lecture that the Secretary of State for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), delivered a few months ago. That was very well received and warmly applauded by the industry as a direction of travel from, not the paralysis, but the uncertainty that the covid period delivered. That appreciation has waned and has been replaced by a deep concern that what is happening with GBR is starting to drift.

There is a strong call for the legislation to be included in Parliament’s next Session. I understand that the Bill is drafted and has been consulted on. It is a small Bill, so it could be introduced fairly quickly, however as a former Government Whip and Minister I know that it is not necessarily in the gift of the DFT to set the legislative slots, and that all sorts of considerations must be taken into account. I urge the Minister to argue as strongly as he can for that Bill to be included, because it would provide the certainty that we need.

In the absence of that legislation, there is a lot that could be done to give reassurance and certainty to the industry. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes has pointed out, there are simply too many decisions that have to be made by the DFT and the Secretary of State himself on the day-to-day operations of the railways and that they should not be making. That level of command and control is not conducive to developing the railway. The single biggest problem, as has been identified, is this split of responsibility between cost and revenue, with the Department for Transport responsible for cost and the Treasury getting the revenue. No business would operate that way, and it has to be ended as quickly as possible.

Industry needs certainty to invest for the long term. That applies not just to the operators, but also the supply chain for engineering and procurement—all the different parts of industry need certainty. They also need the flexibility to respond to post-pandemic patterns of travel, which have not settled down. I do not think that the business world has yet settled on a final mix of home and office working. Just in the last couple of weeks, we heard Google urging more and more of its employees back into work. We will probably not get back to the traditional levels of commuting into the office in the morning and the going home peak in the evening, but the industry needs to have agility to respond to the changing demands.

What can be done in the interim, in the absence of legislation? I strongly urge the Minister to look at the suggestion made recently by Nigel Harris, editor of Rail Magazine, that GBR could be set up in shadow form, in the same way the Strategic Rail Authority was set up back in 2000. It could do work such as developing new passenger service contracts itself, with the Secretary of State only coming in to do the legal bit—the signing—and then it can proceed. I think that is worthy of consideration. Similarly, it could progress with the ticketing reform that is much overdue. It is a thorny issue, because as soon as we reform something we create winners and losers in that model, but it is long overdue. I am not just looking at ticketing reform within rail itself, but rail as part of the wider transport ticketing strategy, so that multimodal tickets can be more easily introduced.

GBR must also not become a heavy command and control body. It has to be the guiding mind, but in a light-touch way. It needs to work with the sub-national transport bodies, the mayoral combined authorities and others so that there is flexibility geographically as well as in the types of service. There is not a plan B. For this work to happen in the absence of legislation, there needs to be a will in DFT and more widely in Government, at both ministerial and official levels. There is an appetite there. I met recently with Lord Hendy and others from the GBR transition team. They want to get on with the work, and they can do it, so I hope the Minister can give me some assurance that that work will progress and the industry can get the certainty it needs.