Public Bodies (Abolition of the Railway Heritage Committee) Order 2013

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape]

My Lords, I, too, join in the general chorus of discontent about the actions of the Government today. I support my noble friend Lord Faulkner and agree with his very able speech about the need to care for railway artefacts and his description of the work that the Railway Heritage Committee has done over the years. I have no personal interests to declare except that in the 1980s, along with the late Robert Adley, I served on the advisory committee to the Railway Heritage Committee, which was newly formed at that time. The work that it has done over the years is enormously commendable.

Some of the reminiscences—if I may put it like that—of my noble friend Lord Grocott apply to railway installations all over the world. However, there are many such installations still in the United Kingdom, which the Railway Heritage Committee would have been interested in seeing properly preserved. I do not suggest for a moment that transferring these matters to the Science Museum will necessarily adversely affect the future of railway heritage. However, I am conscious, as your Lordships will be conscious, that the Science Museum has lots of other things with which to concern itself. The great thing about the Railway Heritage Committee is precisely that it was concerned about our railway heritage, and worked to preserve that which we still enjoy at present and which future generations should also enjoy. I deplore and regret any diminution of that concern for our railway heritage as a result of this order.

I suspect, as did my noble friend Lord Grocott, that some civil servant somewhere drew up a list of quangos to be abolished and this one found itself on there. Even at this late hour, I urge the Government to think again. As a railwayman myself, and the son of a railwayman, I feel strongly about our railway heritage. I have bored your Lordships previously with stories about my own railway career. I point out that there are still artefacts—they can still be regarded as such—in use on the present-day modern railway which are well worth preserving. I am not sure I would have the ability, or that the Science Museum would have the time or patience, to listen to the case for preserving them. For example, there are signal boxes in the Stockport area, where I spent the early part of my career, which were built by the London and North Western Railway in the 1880s, and which still signal trains today. Do I approach the Science Museum when eventually those signal boxes are abolished, to say that these are part of our railway heritage, and ought to be kept?

I might say in passing that, although those of us who travel regularly on the west coast main line are familiar with the litany of equipment failures—“failure of lineside equipment” seems to be the stock response to any delays—that does not happen in the Stockport area. Thanks to the London and North Western Railway, which installed those signal boxes in 1888, they still do not have any problems, all these years later, in passing Pendolino trains through the town of Stockport. If we are properly to preserve that sort of railway heritage, we might need a wider scope than saying, “We will leave these matters to the Science Museum”.

So I ask, even at this late hour, for the Minister to reflect again. The abolition of quangos is not necessarily a bad thing, but the old proverb about babies and bath water certainly applies in this particular case.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, as president of the All-Party Parliamentary Arts and Heritage Group I would like to add one brief comment. First, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for what he has done. Secondly, it is self-evident that the work of this committee must carry on. It is often better to allow a group of enthusiasts, who are totally dedicated to a specific thing, to carry on rather than have it subsumed within a larger organisation. I have seen this happen with the subsuming of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, on which I sat for almost 25 years, into National Archives. Although I pay tribute to what National Archives seeks to do, the specialist knowledge and specific determination that were embodied in the commission have largely gone.

When there are relatively small and perhaps even obscure groups doing a very good job, it is a pity to sweep them away in the name of quango-clearing. This was not a costly quango: it was a body of dedicated enthusiasts doing a good job.

[Lord Davies of Oldham]

My Lords—