Transport System: Failings

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to congratulate my noble friend Lord Snape on securing this debate. Over the years there has been no better advocate for the railway than him in your Lordships’ House and in the House of Commons before that. He features significantly in the three books on railways and politics that I co-authored.

I remind the House of my railway interests as declared in the register. I chair the Great Western Railway stakeholder advisory board and the North Cotswold Line Task Force and am president of the Heritage Railway Association. I apologise to the House for not declaring the HRA interest when I asked a question in the Chamber yesterday about coal supplies for steam railways.

For nearly 20 years from the mid-1970s onwards, I was an adviser to the British Railways Board. This was the last time the industry benefited from the influence of a guiding mind and from the energy and enthusiasm of its chairman, Sir Peter Parker, and his immediate successor, Sir Robert Reid. It was their misfortune—and the country’s—that this coincided with a period of managed decline and retrenchment on the railway, as transport policy placed far too heavy a reliance on car usage and road haulage.

One of the consequences of that mindset was the decision to reduce the size of the network and take out capacity. With the demand for rail travel having grown so markedly over the past two decades, much effort and huge expense have had to be incurred in the limited programme of station and line reopenings. So much more could have been achieved had many of those closures not happened.

We are now about to embark on another seismic reorganisation and have to get it right. The Government are not short of advice on what needs to be done, and I particularly commend the Manifesto for Rail published by the lobby group Rail Partners. It says:

“Whoever is in office after the next general election needs to take decisions to ensure the industry has the ability to attract passengers back to restore hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenue, drive modal shift for goods against more polluting modes, and ultimately set up the railway for sustainable success. The public is not that interested in how our railways are structured or organised, they just want to have trains that run on time, that are not disrupted by strikes, and fares that offer them the best value for their journey”.


It is crucial that, with a general election coming so soon and—I think most Members of your Lordships’ House would agree—a change of administration very much on the cards, every effort is made now to achieve a cross-party consensus on what needs to be done. To his credit, I believe that the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, gets this, as does the Minister for Rail in the other place, Huw Merriman. I very much appreciate the invitation the two Ministers sent to Members of your Lordships’ House to attend the briefing on the draft Bill on 19 March. The noble Lord, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, played a prominent part in that, and I am pleased to see him in his place today. The briefing was also given by members of the Great British Railways transition team.

The overriding priority is to pass rail reform legislation, establish Great British Railways as soon as possible and get on with improving the railways by stimulating demand and reducing cost. The Bill contains some helpful measures in this regard, notably the creation of an integrated rail body, the IRB. In legal terms, the body combines the DfT’s role as franchising authority and takes over the role of infrastructure manager undertaken by Network Rail. The IRB will be held to account on how it delivers rail services and be accountable for the whole system, including passenger revenue and a freight growth target. It is potentially good news for passengers and freight users and could simplify the railway, making it cheaper to run.

The Bill gets decisions away from a remote, non-operational Whitehall department and provides the opportunity to join up the railway closer to the people who use it. The new IRB model should help tackle high costs and project delays. One of our railways’ greatest challenges is the way UK capital projects regularly come in at a much higher cost than those in other countries. Stop-start investment and changing government plans result in project managers overspecifying schemes and suppliers putting in high cost estimates to cover the risk of uncertainty. The cost of electrification schemes is a particular example, and has proved to be the death knell of extending the benefits of HS2 to the north of England and Scotland.

A prerequisite for the IRB’s success is to take revenue risk away from the Treasury and cost control from the DfT. The new body needs to be judged solely on the net subsidy and public investment cost. Rail usage has broadly doubled since privatisation, resulting in a much more congested network, and it is important that we have proper trade-offs on its future usage and meet that demand.

It is evident from the statements made by the Prime Minister and No. 10 that railways are now seen as a problem rather than an opportunity and that tactical policy is now strictly controlled by the Treasury rather than the DfT, with minimising costs being the primary objective. Yet rail is essential if we are to meet the carbon reduction targets required in the transport sector. While electric cars may help, no such solution is available for aviation or heavy haulage, which will be dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Rail passenger services that offer times competitive with air are essential to reduce the need for internal and short-haul European flights. The same is true for container trains between the ports and inland distribution centres. Not only is rail now cheaper for many of these flows but customers are increasingly demanding environmentally sustainable rail solutions to reduce their carbon footprint.

I will finish with the concluding sentence from Signals Passed at Danger, my third book on railways, published last year:

“The railways’ capabilities are manifest when the management of the railways is restored to those competent to operate them, with a clear strategy and funding agreed to deliver the outputs of that strategy”.

Transport: Zero-emission Vehicles, Drivers and HS2

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend. I note his reflections and, to be honest, I share his disappointment to some extent, but I accept the decision. He made some valid points about the challenges that still face the HS2 project as a whole, and I agree: there are no major infrastructure projects that do not have significant challenges. But it is heartening to know that the Government are beefing up the governance arrangements of HS2 Ltd. A new chief executive is being recruited, and Sir Jon Thompson, the new chair who took his place in February, is very much involved in the recruitment to make sure that we get the right person to take the project forward.

My noble friend mentioned that there is some switch from capital to revenue—that always makes a Transport Minister excited because we do get much revenue funding in transport—but it is still mostly capital, of course, because we are talking about capital spend. This is an opportunity to mention one other piece of good news that I have not been able to mention to date: the “Get Around for £2” bus fare cap has been extended to the end of December. Again, that is revenue spend, and it is being used by millions of users. It has been really well received, and I am very pleased that we have been able to extend it.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interest as chairman of the Great Western Railway stakeholder board. It is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, who in the view of many of us was the most outstanding and successful Secretary of State for Transport in the past 12 years. The very good sense with which he spoke in this debate is an indication of why he is regarded with such respect.

The noble Lord was absolutely right in all his points. I do not intend to repeat them, but I would like to address the Minister, for whom I feel enormous sympathy because she has defended High Speed 2 day after day from that Dispatch Box and has not been supported by everyone in the House—and certainly not by everyone on the Benches behind her. She has now come along to defend a decision that is, frankly, absolutely indefensible because of the damage it does to the future prospects of the great cities of this country, as the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, said.

I have one question, which occurred to me when I heard the Prime Minister’s statement and read the documents today: what has happened to Great British Railways? Has it now been completely junked? If so, would it not be honest of the Government to say so? It is not a question of waiting for parliamentary time or using other means of establishing Great British Railways, about which I have written to the Minister. Is it still the Government’s intention that there will be a guiding mind and that the decisions about the future of British railways will at last be taken by people who understand how they work?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I reassure the noble Lord that it is still the Government’s intention that there will be Great British Railways. As I have said previously, it will depend on parliamentary time, but an enormous amount of work is of course going on in the meantime to establish an interim guiding mind to get as many things as we can. There are matters to work through as we develop the guiding mind principle—industrial action obviously being one of them—to give the senior leadership the head space they need to make some significant changes to establish a guiding mind.

West Coast Main Line

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The department is well aware that there is some overcrowding on CrossCountry routes. We are considering options, with CrossCountry, on the size of its future fleet. This will be balanced with the interests of taxpayers, given the financial pressures.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of the Great Western Railway stakeholder board. GWR is of course a FirstGroup member, so it is proper that I should declare it. I thank the Minister for the letter she sent earlier today. In that letter, there is no reference anywhere to Great British Railways. How does the new contract for Avanti fit in with the Government’s plans for Great British Railways, or is it the case that GBR is not going to happen?

Network Rail: Ely Area Capacity Enhancement Programme

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The Government are incredibly ambitious when it comes to investment in the north and the Midlands. As the noble Lord will know, we have the Northern Powerhouse Rail programme and we are taking forward all sorts of different schemes in the area.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, there can be very few other investment projects that have such enormous environmental benefits as the Ely enhancement. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, referred to 98,000 lorry journeys that would transfer to rail on 2,900 extra freight trains, but the benefits extend to passenger services. It is almost inconceivable that the Government will refuse to do this, because the rate of return on investment is £4.80 in benefits for every £1 spent on it. I cannot imagine there are many other schemes in the rail enhancement pipeline that will match that sort of figure, so why can the Minister not be more positive about it now?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I do not recognise the figure that the noble Lord cites. It is important that we reassess our business cases based on revised travel patterns as they are now, and that has an impact on the business case—but, as I say, we are reviewing them and decisions will be made in due course.

Great British Railways

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I point my noble friend back to the long-term strategy for rail, which will help the industry to understand what the medium-term future for the railways looks like. As to what we have been doing to increase revenues and free up the train operating companies, we are looking at the current railway contracts and at ways to put in stronger revenue-incentive mechanisms and allow train operating companies to put resources into increasing revenues.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

The Minister will have heard strong support for the establishment of Great British Railways across the House. This is an innovation that I think would survive a change of government, if one were to occur next year. Would it help her if she took a look at the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994, and the establishment of an SI under that Act, which would enable the department’s franchising functions to be devolved to GBR if we are not to have primary legislation?

Public Transport in Towns and Cities

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 17th April 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my railway interests that are relevant to this debate: I chair the Great Western Railway stakeholder advisory board and the North Cotswold Line Task Force, and I am president of the Cotswold Line Promotion Group. I am a new member of the Built Environment Committee, so did not take part in the inquiry whose report was published in November. I congratulate the committee on its excellent report and its new chair, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on introducing this debate so eloquently.

I support the report’s conclusions and recommendations, particularly those relating to bus services, which are of such importance to those in rural areas with no or limited access to private cars. I also support the call made in paragraph 132 for a clear statement from the Government on their policy on journeys made by car. There are many contradictions in national policy relating to car usage, and I endorse the evidence quoted in paragraph 128 from the Local Government Association stating that:

“Government ambitions about increasing public transport use make little sense when HM Treasury freezes fuel duty every year and cuts funding to public transport”,


and that from the Martin Higginson Transport Research & Consultancy, which states:

“A significant barrier is the unwillingness of governments, both central and local, to commit to policies that constrain car use”.


The briefing supplied to noble Lords for this debate by the Institution of Civil Engineers states:

“In the UK, transport is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions—27 per cent of the UK’s total in 2019—deriving primarily from petrol and diesel use in road transport. Passengers and freight need to switch to lower-carbon transport modes at an acceptable cost to the taxpayer, meaning the UK’s public transport networks will need to provide more journeys and carry more passengers in the future”.


I will concentrate on the North Cotswold Line Task Force. It is a well-established partnership of five shire counties, under differing political control and outside any mayoral combined authority. It brings together planning of housing growth and transport and has real track records in innovation and investment in railway services and infrastructure. Worcestershire, which leads the task force, opened Worcestershire Parkway station in 2020, weeks before the lockdown, having made the case for the station, sorted out its funding and delivered it on a third-party basis, working with the rail industry but managing the whole project itself. Its location as an interchange between the Birmingham to Bristol and Herefordshire/Worcestershire to Oxford-Cambridge arc and London lines has proven very popular. It has attracted the interest of both the Midlands Engine and Midlands Connect in the North Cotswold Line corridor. Within three years of opening, despite the lockdown, around 800 passengers are using it every day. The original forecast said that it would take 10 years to reach those numbers.

The experience of Parkway suggests that we would be unwise to plan for a permanently depleted market for travel. Leisure travel on the line is now at higher levels than before Covid. It is a vivid example of bringing together transport and housing planning. Some 10,000 new homes are to be built around the station in the next 20 years—a new garden town of around 25,000 people. Developers recognise how railway connectivity and modern, accessible stations are really attractive to our growing and increasingly environmentally aware population.

However, many of the “brick walls” that the committee’s report highlights still exist, despite achievements such as this. The task force’s local authorities have put their hands in their own pockets to develop the case for more frequent services on the Worcestershire-Oxford-London line to support the delivery of 50,000 homes for more than 120,000 people across the route. To sustain a higher level of service, as the Minister knows, will require the restoration of two short lengths of double track. Ministerial engagement has been positive, we have strong cross-party support from MPs along the line and we receive helpful advice from GWR and Network Rail.

The committee’s highlighting of costly competitive bidding is also a problem understood by task force authorities, which have committed significantly to levelling up fund and new stations fund applications. I strongly support the committee’s proposition for alternative blocks of funding, avoiding the inevitable wastefulness of public bodies competing for public funding.

What we need is a DfT/Network Rail partnership—or Great British Railways when it is formally in place—that wants to work with motivated local authorities which will get on with good projects themselves if DfT and Network Rail engage closely and offer positive support to well-constructed cases.

Successful schemes have happened elsewhere with direct DfT support, such as the splendid Okehampton line in Devon. For the task force local authorities, much better rail transport is essential to the sustainability of the sheer scale of housing growth they need to deliver. They have brought their local plans and transport thinking together and, as I said, they have financed and delivered major rail enhancements themselves.

In November 2021, the then Rail Minister, Chris Heaton-Harris, supported the task force progressing to the second industry stage—the outline business case—for its higher frequency service, with the task force local authorities fully funding and bearing risk on the scheme. In March 2022, DfT officials said that its team could not engage further with the task force until the updated rail network enhancements pipeline was announced. The original pipeline was first set out in October 2019 but has not been updated since; as I understand it, there is no planned date for the update, published in the new year.

We need to move forward now, and as it is some time since we have had a chance to discuss the project with Ministers, my request to the noble Baroness this afternoon is to agree to a meeting with members of the task force board and our Members of Parliament.

HS2: Wales

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

If the noble Lord is talking about HS2, I do not recognise his comments about the Government being ripped off, but I certainly recognise that the Government must make sure that the scheme is adequately scrutinised. Indeed, that is the case. As he will have seen from the most recent update to Parliament, HS2 remains within its funding envelope.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is absolutely right to say that north Wales will benefit from the construction of HS2, with shorter journey times and relief of overcrowding on the west coast main line. Would it not be even more sensible, rather than expecting passengers to change at Crewe, if the north Wales coast line were electrified before High Speed 2 got to Crewe, so they could run through trains along the north Wales coast which are all High Speed 2 trains?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The noble Lord is trying to get me to make commitments from the Dispatch Box which I am not able to make, unfortunately. However, I think it is worth understanding that the Crewe interchange as it is now planned was substantially revamped following significant concerns from stakeholders in north Wales and beyond. We have altered the Crewe northern connection so that it could allow for five to seven trains per hour to call at Crewe and then to be able to go down the high-speed line or, indeed, the conventional track.

Stockton to Darlington Railway Anniversary

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

To ask His Majesty’s Government how they plan to celebrate in 2025 the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton to Darlington railway, the world’s first public railway to use steam locomotives.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and refer to my railway interests as declared in the register.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)]

My Lords, railways are a product of Britain’s rich history of engineering innovation and the 200-year anniversary is a nationally important moment to mark and to celebrate. The DfT will work with DCMS, other government departments and the whole industry to make this event very special for workers and passengers.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome that splendid Answer. What response will the Government give to the submission from Sir Peter Hendy, on behalf of industry, local and national museums, the supply chain, Heritage Railway and education, for government funds to ensure that there will be a memorable series of events in 2025, including the recreation of the opening day journey of Locomotion No. 1 and the creation of a walking and cycling route along the 26 miles of the original line as a permanent legacy?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for highlighting some of the tremendous things that we can achieve to celebrate this 200-year anniversary. I am also aware that Sir Peter Hendy is out there with his begging bowl and working his magic. I am sure he is doing exactly what we want him to do, which is bringing together all the interested parties to work with government. This is a huge opportunity to not only celebrate the heritage of our railway network but promote the wider, modern system across the country.

International Travel Rules

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

We have ongoing conversations with all the devolved Administrations, because this is so important. I recognise the noble Lord’s point: if you are travelling to Northern Ireland, chances are you may be coming through one of the large airports in England. It is very important, but we must recognise that health policy is devolved. However, we have every intention of working as closely as possible with the devolved nations and ensuring that our interventions are as aligned as possible.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

The time allowed for this Question has now elapsed. I apologise to the noble Baronesses who could not be called.

Motor Fuel (Composition and Content) and the Biofuel (Labelling) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2021

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2021 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

That completes the business before the Grand Committee this afternoon. I remind Members to sanitise their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.

Committee adjourned at 5.44 pm.