Railways Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and hear his comments about, in particular, training on the railways, which, incidentally, has been, I think, modernised dramatically by HS2. But that is a separate issue.

I shall say a few words today questioning the point of this Bill. That may seem a bit dramatic, but I have been working on the railways for nearly 50 years, since I was building the Channel Tunnel, and I have noticed that the railway has effectively been controlled by the Government for at least 20 years, as many noble Lords have said, on timetabling, charges, ticketing, investment in the track and the rolling stock for many trains. They may have said that it is in the private sector, but in fact it is controlled behind the scenes in many instances, so I wonder whether we should be talking about ownership or control. We have control at the moment, and listening to many noble Lords speaking this evening, it occurred to me that most of the changes that they quite rightly recommend could be done without primary legislation.

I spent several decades, if not more, working in the rail freight industry, in the European industry more lately and in ALLRAIL, which is an association of companies across Europe which believe in open access and competition in passenger services. I suppose I can claim some small input into the European Commission bringing liberalisation to the continent after it was seen by me in those days, and I still think it is, as an important element here. We were telling our friends on the continent, “Why don't you follow the Brits?”. Now it is the other way round, but we will see how that goes.

I do not know why the Government are trying to go the opposite way. In my book, in many instances, they are trying to stifle competition. Many noble Lords have talked about competition. It is an important issue, so I have questions for the Minister, and many more, I expect. Is GBR going to save money by bringing efficiencies beyond what we have at the moment, all effectively government controlled? Many noble Lords have said what is wrong with the railway, but it is already government controlled.

Will GBR bring an increase in passenger numbers and freight volumes? I know the Minister says it will, but where is the evidence? On many routes, open access operators have delivered significant passenger growth. It does not happen on all lines, where the operators have tried, failed and stopped because there was not enough revenue. I got the impression that part of the content of the Bill is to prevent open access passenger and freight operators and make life as difficult as possible.

The Bill appears to me to be an attempt by the Government to implement what is, frankly, a dogma of nationalisation without looking at the alternatives. There are many alternatives, such as open access with a proper regulator. We have a good regulator at the moment, but he is going to have his hands tied behind his back if we are not careful in the Bill. He is not able to regulate access to the tracks, because he cannot decide who gets the next access to the tracks or whether it is passenger or freight because that is done by GBR, which is also going to be the operator of the trains. It seems to me that, if we are not careful—obviously, we need to dig into this a bit more in later stages of this Bill—the extent of the monopoly being created by GBR should probably be referred to the CMA. But I suspect that is not for today.

There is also a lot of criticism about Network Rail—or not, since many of the comments made by noble Lords refer to Network Rail rather than any of the train operators. Will the Minister say what evidence there is that Network Rail’s performance will improve? Last week’s report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on Network Rail’s performance on the Northern Powerhouse Rail project is hardly reassuring. Northern Powerhouse Rail is a much smaller version of HS2, which we have talked about ad nauseam. It is a very important project, and my noble friend the Minister has spoken about it in your Lordships’ House on many occasions. The PAC is

“not confident the Department for Transport … has learned all the lessons from past failures”

in its management of other rail projects. It carries on to say that there are clear risks that the full programme and its benefits cannot be delivered within the £45 billion funding cap. HS2 was a disaster, and we are all hoping that Northern Powerhouse Rail will be done properly, but the PAC’s conclusions are worrying.

Another couple of issues are the charging and compensation scheme in the Bill, which seems to suggest that operators, and therefore passengers, are not compensated for delays outside their control, which might be weather or whatever. They are compensated at the moment. Is that a good thing to change? We can debate that.

So we have a lot of work to do to talk about the future of the competition issues and the Rail Regulator. The concluding aim must be that GBR should act fairly and non-discriminatorily. Network access should remain impartial and independently challengeable—and I mean independently. Capacity should not be reserved indefinitely for unspecified future GBR services. Charging should be neutral and predictable. Existing rights should be protected. Public money should be subject to genuine value-for-money tests. We have a lot to debate, but I hope that my noble friend will be able to convince your Lordships’ House that the Bill is necessary and that most of the issues raised by noble Lords cannot be addressed without legislation.