Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 21st October 2024 Lords Chamber

Unlike my Amendment A1, there are four areas which I believe should be addressed: timeliness, likely cancellations, passenger numbers and ticket costs. If there are not predicted improvements made on these benchmark tests, I do not see what the overall purpose is, never mind the possible decrease in service and increase in costs that may follow. While the current franchising system is far from perfect, it allows the Government to intervene and break a contract when it fails, and competition does drive standards, while there is not much clarity as to what would happen under the proposed changes. This amendment will also provide the public with a transparent analysis of their railways and what they can expect. Both amendments combined put the public where they should be—at the heart of improving their railway network. I beg to move.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be brief. As the focus of this is on passenger travel and the noble Lord’s desire to put that at the centre of the objective of the Bill—which is a laudable objective shared, I am sure, by the Government—I cannot help pointing out that one of the major decisions by the last Government, which will of course affect the capacity of the railway network to deliver first-class passenger transport, was their in my view crazy decision to truncate the HS2 programme.

That programme was introduced by a Labour Government, supported by the coalition Government and by Conservative Governments over a period of about 15 years in total and at two strokes—first, getting rid of the Leeds link and, secondly, getting rid of the Manchester link—so much planning, expenditure and work was wasted. I am sure my noble friend the Minister will agree with a lot of this. It means that, among other things, the service to passengers, which is at the heart of the noble Lord’s amendment, is bound to be diminished from what it could have been. The network was there to provide passenger transport, freeing up space on the west coast mainline, which is close to, if not beyond, capacity, and helping freight as well, of course, which is a very important part of what the rail network delivers. It would have enabled that by freeing up the west coast mainline, the old mainline, if you like, built by the Victorians and still doing remarkable work, and improving the network overall.

So, when he winds up, I really would like the noble Lord to take the opportunity to apologise on behalf of the Government he served for making those nihilistic decisions to scrap that section of the railway. Ironically, in an attempt to justify the action they took, they claimed that somehow several billion pounds would be saved and one of the ways the “saved” money would be spent—I think the figure was £9 billion—would be on filling potholes. Now I am strongly in favour of filling potholes, but it will not help passenger services on the railway—which the building of the two northern legs of HS2 would have done. So, as welcome, in many ways, as his emphasis is—I do not know whether it is on behalf of the Opposition or not—on supporting and improving passenger services, that has a long way to go to make up for the damage it did by the cancellation of HS2 north.

[Lord Grayling (Con)]

My Lords, I rise along with the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, as someone who has worked closely with the new Minister. I congratulate him on his appointment. He knows more than almost anyone about our railway network—the problems, issues and challenges—and, while he may find himself on the other side of the political fence to me, he will be a great asset in trying to sort the challenges of our rail network.

He will know, very much more than anybody else, what the challenges are. He will also know, therefore, that sorting out our railways is not simply about changing the ownership structure. He knows full well, for example, that many of the issues that passengers have experienced in recent years have been laid at the foot of Network Rail—the company he chaired, although it was not his fault, of course—and rightly so. However, all of us involved bear the scars from the difficult times in 2018 with the timetable change. The noble Baroness, Lady Blake, knew well the challenges then, particularly in her role in the north. In the north, they were caused most immediately by Network Rail’s failure to deliver an electrification programme in the timetable that had been committed to, which had a dramatic knock-on effect on the rest of the railway.

Therefore, I am not clear, and it is why I have a lot of sympathy with the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, why a move of ownership is going to deliver a transformation for the passenger. I hope that the Minister, with his experience, will be able to talk a bit about that as he responds to the debate. Fundamentally, on both sides of the House, we are all about improvement for the passenger, and simply transferring ownership from public to private and private to public does not solve the challenges. Ironically, I was reading at the weekend—and I am sure it is true—that the Government are looking at bringing the private sector in to run Euston station, at the same time it is planning to take the private sector out of the railway to run the trains that go into it.

So I would be grateful if the Minister could set out why he thinks this change will deliver improvement for passengers and why, therefore, the amendment being proposed by my noble friend is wrong.