Railways Bill

Lord Redwood Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

I agree with the Minister’s three main aims for railway improvement. He is right that punctuality is insufficient. Last year, under 85% of trains arrived within three minutes of timetable and over 4% of services were cancelled altogether. He is right that we need to improve the quality of the passenger experience. That will require innovation, new services geared to people’s lives and their travel demands, and delivering them a travel offer at an affordable price, an acceptable fare. The railway is too detached and is running far too many nearly empty trains around to fill a timetable. This is interspersed with, at popular times, too few popular trains, with 169,000 people standing in very cramped and unsafe conditions on a typical day. A lot of work needs to go into getting into the modern world and understanding travel patterns.

Above all, the Minister is right that there needs to be a revolution in value for money. We are paying far too much as taxpayers, in some cases far too much as fare payers, and in other cases travelling on heavily subsidised fares, in relation to the amount of work that the railway is able to do. Last year, taxpayers had to put in £21.6 billion to this railway system, and fare payers were persuaded to put in only £11.5 billion. So limited was the offer that was made available on this vast network that taxpayers were paying twice as much as fare payers—general taxpayers twice as much as the more limited number of people who were actually using the railway.

So we do need a revolution. I share some of my noble friend Lady May’s scepticism about whether the right revolution can come from nationalisation itself. The Government need to describe more accurately to the public the nature of the railway that they took responsibility for some two years ago. I am the first to confess that the Governments I supported did not get it all right and that there were many failings that needed to be corrected. But the Minister should be honest with the public and remind them that all the track, all the signals, all the structures and all the stations were taken into public ownership by a previous Labour Government in 2002. He should also point out that many of the problems, delays and interruptions of service have, in recent years, been created by failings in the nationalised part of the system, as well as some of them, as he will rightly point out, being created by the train operating companies which the predecessor Government were gradually getting rid of—and it is also his policy to complete that task.

However, this great, controlling mind they are going to find—I trust that this lady or gentleman exists—is going to need a lot of vision and drive to get value out of this extraordinary network. All these thousands of miles of track that go into the very hearts of our cities and towns are not being used properly and nearly enough. They are far too empty. If you see a bird’s eye view from a camera, or a plane with a camera, of our country at morning peak—there still is a bit of a morning peak on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, although Covid has made a bit of a difference on Monday and Friday—you see inadequate roads, increasingly reduced in scale and size by Liberal Democrat councils, with huge traffic jams and queues, making it very difficult for people to drive to work or to the shops or do what they want to do. You see largely empty, fabulous, straight trackways into the centres of our cities, with trains spaced out at two-mile intervals, or whatever it is, because the signalling is pretty primitive and for safety reasons they are very worried about running more trains on the same track, even though they are all going in the same direction on that bit of track. You would have thought that, with modern digital signalling, if we are going to get it, you could actually run more trains safely on that track to take more of the strain of travel.

The travel opportunity for the railway is enormous because its market share has sunk so far. If you look at trips in the last year, you see that only 2% of people’s trips were by train and 59% of their trips were by car, and then there was walking and cycling and so forth. Even if you take miles, where the railway does rather better because people tend to go on trains for rather longer journeys, people are still travelling seven times as much in a car as they are on a train. This is the business opportunity. So my suggestion to the Minister is that this piece of legislation needs some quite big tweaks in order to make it more likely that a controlling mind can come up with a way of selling all that empty rail and track space to enough people and organisations that can run trains to service the true travel needs of the public.

The first thing this controlling mind is going to need is access to private capital. If nationalisation means no more private capital then the railway is going to be even shorter of capital than it has been to date. I urge the Minister to allow for private capital, which must mean allowing challenger companies to offer services and facilities on the properties or the tracks to bring in the innovation and extra capital capacity that will be needed. Given that we are going to need a lot of innovation, a vital part of that package is open access. Once the Minister has completed his great train set under nationalised control, he must allow others to say, “I can do it better”, “I can do it differently”, or “I can make proper use of this track which the nationalised industry is not using properly”, in order to bring in the innovation and extra service quality that we will need.

I hope that a nationalised industry will want to take more pride in the railway than Network Rail has taken to date. When I go on a rail journey, I am often absolutely horrified when I look out of the window and see the rusty old rolling stock in the siding just wasting away, the old sleepers piled up as if nobody owns them, the brambles and the weeds growing out of the parallel track that is not used very much, and the uncared-for look of the whole place, with peeling paint on the stations and rusting iron on some of the very old stations. It is a mess, with graffiti over everything. I say innovate, allow contestability, bring in new services and clean the place up. Let us be proud of it, then the public might want to use it.

Railways Bill

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I will principally refer to my Amendment 19 in this group. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, that I am not really in a position to comment on the points he makes, but I think the discussion we had previously about the corporate and organisational structure of Great British Railways gives force to his points about how the employment of the railways will be structured in future, so I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on that.

I want to make a quick point on the amendment from my noble friend Lord Moylan about creating a purpose clause for the Bill. Generally speaking, I am in favour of purpose clauses where we are not principally legislating in order to change existing legislation where the purposes are already set out. This Bill will effectively get rid of the purpose set out at the front of the Railways Act 1993 and therefore I think it is a pity that there is no purpose clause at the front of this legislation to tell us what we are trying to achieve. In my view, that is distinct, as I think my noble friend was saying, from simply a description of what Great British Railways is going to do and what it should think about.

Paragraph 13 of the Explanatory Notes sets out the view that the purpose can be defined simply by what the functions of Great British Railways are and what it must have regard to under the general duties. But functions and duties are not in themselves sufficient to constitute purpose. For my money, I would have been in favour of drafting a purpose clause up front as Clause 1 that would have told us what we are trying to achieve. I think that makes for rather good drafting these days.

I will get down into the nitty-gritty now with Amendment 19 in my name. It relates to Clause 3 where, just as the functions have been set out for Great British Railways, there is an interesting moment where the functions are replaced by a little subsection that tells us what the “statutory functions” are to be. These are all the functions that we have just been told about and the ones that the Secretary of State might give Great British Railways at any time in the future, but not anything relating to service facilities or the supply of services under the 2016 regulations. That sent me off to look at the 2016 regulations to see what the service facilities and the supply of services are. I will minimise it for the purposes of this debate; essentially, on the one hand it is provision of access to freight and international traffic by an infrastructure manager under the access rights, and then supply of service facilities is essentially service providers giving, again, freight, other railway undertakings and international access to services—things from stations, depots and so on.

Interestingly, as far as I can see, those bits relating to access to the infrastructure and the provision of services in the 2016 regulations are intended to be substantially replaced by the access policies set out in Clause 59. But Regulations 5 and 6 and Schedule 2, I think, of the 2016 regulations are not to be repealed. The interesting thing is that Great British Railways will be expressly taken out of the definition of an infrastructure manager, so it will not have the requirements to provide access to infrastructure or to provide services implied by Regulations 5 and 6, even though they remain in place.

In a sense, this is a probing issue. Who will take the responsibility for the provision of infrastructure to freight and international if it is not Great British Railways? With supply of services, for things such as stations and depots, if it is not Great British Railways which has a responsibility for providing those services and the minimum access package specified in Regulation 6 of the 2016 regulations, whose responsibility is it? It is not set out in this Bill. All we know from this Bill, as a result of Clause 70, is that it is not Great British Railways. Then who is it? Who will do those things?

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome these probing amendments and look forward to the Minister’s response to some very important general issues. It is right that the staff in all the operating companies that will be affected by this should have an early idea from the Government about what is planned for their future employment.

I am one of those who welcome the idea that we want a well-paid profession serving on the railways, but for the sake of taxpayers, who are putting in substantial grant in aid and capital money, and of fare-paying passengers, who often have to pay very high fares, we need a system for negotiation between staff and Great British Railways which is more likely to achieve the increase in productivity that could justify the higher pay for staff without imposing an ever-higher charge on the taxpayer and fare-paying passengers. This is more than a detail that can be left open; we need to know who the employer will be, what the status of the current contracts is and how they will be put into transition to new contracts for the staff when their employment changes.

Is there anything the Government can tell us about how they might—they hope—have better relations with the unions in future so that we can look forward to a better experience in getting that balance of better pay for better delivery, smarter working, adopting work practices and being willing to operate new capital investment in a way that delivers higher productivity and higher quality of service?

I also welcome my noble friend Lord Moylan’s draft of what the purposes should and could be, which may not entirely match all the Government’s aims. It would be interesting to hear from the Government which of his suggestions are intended or implied in the current legislation, so that we can have some early indication of what the mission statement of the new railway might be.

I think taxpayers and railway users are expecting more services, not fewer. That has not been the early experience of the last two years. They are expecting better punctuality and timeliness, which would also be welcome. What the new railway will definitely require is more feel for where more passenger movements are required or possible. As in the early days of privatisation, surely the early days of full nationalisation might want to achieve a trend of rising passenger numbers, which privatisation achieved very well, and the ability of companies to develop timetables and services more suited to modern travel needs and therefore fuel the continuing progress of providing more growth in passengers and revenue.

If a new railway management—the controlling mind of GBR—knows how to do that, it will make everything a lot easier if the background of the completion of these arrangements is rising passenger use, rising revenues, greater flexibility over timetables and thinking about growth rather than cost cutting and the elimination of less profitable routes. That can easily get you into a spiral of downturn, as with the nationalised railway experience for most of its time post war, until privatisation reversed those difficult trends.

I hope that the Minister will not rule out one of the modest successes of recent years, which is the ability to have a competitive challenge to the monopolist. There are times when people outside will see ways of harnessing people, talent and capital to provide additional and better service using the existing track, and for that they will clearly need fair terms for access, and that will provide an innovative stimulus to the nationalised monopoly. However, I fear that the Government will not want to do that, and so I think they will find it that much more difficult to innovate and improve the timetables without that stimulus or spur from others generating such ideas and providing such a challenge and opportunity for the growth of the railway.