Railways Bill

Lord Davies of Brixton Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak, with my customary brevity, to Amendment 7 and to open the debate on this second group. I have a large number of amendments in this group, so I shall speak only briefly to each of them because I do not want to provoke any noble Lords to start waving their hands at me again, which is only intended to distract and does not promote debate.

Although Amendment 7 starts the group, I intend to return to it towards the end of my remarks. I will start with Amendment 9, which may appear to be pernickety, but I will explain it to noble Lords, many of whom will know that I have a background in local government. But it is not entirely a local government matter; it applies to legislation more broadly. We are well familiar with the notion of powers. Local government is given powers to do things, and so is the Secretary of State periodically. We are also familiar with the notion of duties—we are clear what the distinction is—which can be placed on local government and, similarly, on the Secretary of State. I do not claim huge experience, but I have never come across the question of functions, and I do not understand what a function is. It is sloppy drafting. Is a function a legal power? We understand what that is. Is it a duty? When does a function slip over into being a duty, and vice versa?

But then I go to a second level of refinement. Clause 3 refers to the “general functions” of Great British Railways. If I am unclear what a function is, I am doubly unclear what a general function is. It could be that this is a fuzzy notion—it is a general thing and we are not quite clear what it is—in which case it is not very satisfactory as a piece of legislation. Or it could seek to set out a hierarchy of functions, where these are the general functions and there are other more minor functions that sit under them but have to conform to, contribute to and be ancillary to the general functions. Is that what “general functions” is meant to mean, or is the word “general” simply redundant? I ask because later the Bill refers to “the functions” of Great British Railways on several occasions and the expression “general functions” never reappears.

I suspect that this is not a very complex issue. I suspect it is just sloppy drafting. But we cannot put up with that—we need to know what is meant by functions, how many duties are being imposed on Great British Railways that we can hold it to account for, how many powers are being given to it by statute that it has to explain and justify using or not, and whether “general” is creating a hierarchy with subordinate functions that must comply or not. I do not think this will necessarily be settled today; it is very likely that we will come back to this so that we really understand what the Bill is doing.

Amendment 13 would exclude rail safety advice and standards from Great British Railways. Under Clause 3(1)(g), Great British Railways will be

“publishing advice and standards on matters related to railways and railway services”.

I really do not know why it is doing this. Publishing advice and standards is normally the function of either a regulator or an independent standards board. I do not know why Great British Railways is doing this. In so far as it is doing it to itself, that is okay. I have no objection to its setting internal standards. However, my Amendment 14 says that it should not be able to create standards and issue advice to non-GBR actors on the Great British Railways network. Internal standards are no problem, but if standards are to be set then they should be set by an independent board, a regulator or the ORR.

Finally on this point, Amendment 13 would exclude safety standards entirely from that scope. I say this because safety on British railways has been at a very high standard and it is a common view that the role of the Office of Rail and Road as safety regulator has been an important contributor to that. I do not want to see its role diluted, and I do not know anybody in the industry who does. The danger here is that the power being given to GBR to set standards implicitly for other people operating on the railways, implicitly including safety standards, creates a tension with the role of the ORR that can be only destructive of and damaging to the effectiveness and reputational safety of Great British Railways.

Amendment 18 relates back to the question of functions. It would remove the Secretary of State’s power to confer additional railway-related functions on Great British Railways. If it requires an Act of Parliament to set up the general functions of Great British Railways, why should we want to give the Secretary of State the undiluted, unrestricted power to create new functions to add to them? I do not think this is the correct way of doing it. If there is a requirement for further functions in future, it should at the very least be done by statutory instrument, if the power is to be granted at all.

I turn to Amendment 80. My noble friend Lord Grayling, with his very considerable experience of the railways from being Transport Secretary, has tabled a number of amendments but unfortunately is unable to be in the House this week. But I have signed Amendment 80 in its support, so I will speak to it. It is slightly out of place in this group, but we will come back to this topic eventually.

The amendment would require that charges imposed by Great British Railways for certain railway services are “reasonable”. Who can object to that? Who would want charges that are not reasonable? But that is not the power given to Great British Railways by the Bill. The power to make these charges is relatively unconstrained— I agree that it may be constrained by competition law—and would, in effect, allow GBR to set charges as it sees fit. That is too much latitude; the power should be constrained by the necessity for charges to be reasonable.

Amendment 81 is, in fact, in my name, but is close to the previous one. It would give to an individual—it might be a company—who is aggrieved by the charge, term or conditions imposed by Great British Railways a right of appeal to the Office of Rail and Road. Again, who would think that this very modest constraint on the absolute discretion of Great British Railways could be anything other than reasonable and necessary? I beg to move.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

I am keen not to be seen as a support act to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, although some of my remarks might echo points that he made in the previous group.

Amendment 15 would place on Great British Railways a duty to act as a single employer for the staff transferring into it from Network Rail and the train operating companies, as they move into public ownership. The starting point is that the Bill is silent on this question. It creates Great British Railways and sets out its functions, and it deals in some detail with the machinery of transfer, but says nothing about who will employ the people who run the railway. There are well over 100,000 people involved: more than 40,000 are directly employed by Network Rail and there are more than 60,000 across the train operating companies. They are no clearer today about who their employer will be than they were before the Bill was published.

This matters more than it might appear. The operators are coming into public ownership on a staggered basis, contract by contract, over several years. The uncertainty is therefore not settled by a single moment of transition; it is spread out and repeated. Staff in one company would inevitably draw conclusions from what happens in another. In the absence of a stated employment model, people will assume the least favourable one: that subsidiary companies will be retained, terms and conditions will diverge and the integrated railway will turn out to be a holding company with much of the same fragmentation underneath it. I hope that this is not what the Government plan.

The founding document here is Getting Britain Moving. Those interested in the reason for putting the railways into public ownership would find their time well served by consulting that document, which addresses the issues in contention today. That document was explicit that Great British Railways would be “a new, single employer” and that the workforce would be treated

“as an asset to be nurtured rather than a cost to be cut”.

That was a clear commitment, and these amendments asked for it to be put in the Bill or, failing that, restated from the Dispatch Box.