King’s Speech

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I have had a long career in transport, particularly in the railways. I can remember the day they were first nationalised. I worked in the industry in good times and bad times. In the good times, for example when I was chief operating manager at Crewe, more than 90% of the trains on the west coast main line ran on time, day after day. Money was tight, but we managed.

The newly publicly owned railway faces radical change, which I welcome. Running railways is a job for railway professionals, not civil servants, regulators, armies of lawyers, financial manipulators and consultants, often paid a lot of money, producing poor standards of punctuality and poor financial management, as we see in the case of HS2, which was not designed or built by railway professionals. This is about to change radically, and I hope the Minister will endorse these thoughts and say that the integrated railway that he envisages will result in consistently better performance for users and taxpayers.

Can he confirm a changing role for the rail regulator and that Great British Railways will strategically plan network access to make best use of the network and the limited capacity we have available and hope in time to improve? Does he believe that freight deserves a better deal, particularly as train loads and speeds increase? Does he believe that the curse of bus substitution is something we can look forward to seeing the end of, because people always prefer to stay in a train as long as they have reasonable notice of what is happening? Will the Minister turn his back on the blame game and concentrate all efforts by operators and engineers on putting right yesterday’s failings the next day or as soon as possible thereafter? I believe the recently appointed managing directors are doing this already and will be keen, as will their staff, to run the best operated of the franchises, or divisions, or whatever they will be called.

What is the future for open access operators? What changes does the Minister think need to be made to safety regulation and for the needs of the mobility-impaired?

Railways are a long-term industry, and planning timescales are necessarily long. We need a financial framework that supports this, not year-to-year planning. Does the Minister share my view of the railway that we need to set our sights on for 2040, when Scotland and London will be half an hour closer together and one mainline route will always be open between important centres?

I want to finish with something that I heard last night. When the Chelsea Flower Show came to its conclusion with the awards, the best show was exhibited by a lady who has won 19 gold medals. She said that creating something like this was like creating a decent railway; it was all down to team effort. I hope that the Minister will endorse that view when he comes to speak.