Railways Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. I associate myself with the chorus of praise for my noble friend Lord Wilson of Dinton. It was fascinating to hear his memories and his opinions.

I am one of the rank of non-experts here. I am a train user—a frequent user of London Overground and the very wonderful Elizabeth line. One of my favourite activities is watching the world go by from a train, particularly if I am lucky enough to get a seat with a table. I have travelled some of the loveliest routes in the UK: Exeter to Newton Abbot; Shrewsbury to Barmouth; Gloucester to Paddington via Stroud; and Oxford to Great Malvern—I commend the work of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, on that one. I have even done the sleeper from Glasgow to London.

Whereas the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, sees dystopia out of his window, I am back in the world of PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and Flanders and Swann. Flying is a chore; a train journey, when it works, can be a pleasure. But I am old enough to remember British Rail ending unloving and unloved. This is why I welcome the Bill, because it is so important. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fix public transport infrastructure in this country.

The Bill has a lot of talk, in the duties, about railway infrastructure, but it lacks detail. Will new or reopened branch lines be planned to get people on the railways earlier in the journey? If we learned one thing from Beeching, it is that people who get in a car stay in a car. These need to be truly linked with buses. One of the recommendations of the House of Lords special committee on social mobility, which the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and I sat on, highlighted the need for joined-up transport in rural areas. There is little point running buses to stations if they are not linked to train times.

There has been very little talk about resilience. Last week, I was travelling on a train, and it was late. Other trains were late or cancelled, apparently because the rails are now much longer, so they expanded more. This was below 30 degrees centigrade. European rails are subject to much higher temperatures, and to contrasts, with cooler nights. How do they cope? Let us not even talk about snow.

Is there going to be a level playing field for non-GBR activities? The Minister talked about trying to grow rail freight but, for example, to quote Logistics UK:

“Clause 63 requires GBR to reserve capacity for its own services. As such, without amendment to that and other areas of the Bill to strengthen governance, accountability and regulatory balance, there is a risk that freight will be deprioritised in capacity allocation, planning, charging and investment decisions”.


I believe this is also a worry for other passenger rail companies.

What will happen to apps such as Trainline, when the aim is that GBR’s ticketing website will combine the existing 14 rail operator websites and apps into one? The noble Lord, Lord Harper, mentioned this. According to Trainline:

“This creates an unprecedented structural conflict of interest and risks GBR favouring its own retail channels over competitors”.


The Bill talks about upgrading stations but does not mention property. What will happen to Platform4, the merger of London & Continental Railways and Network Rail’s property business? I quote its website:

“Over the next decade, Platform4 plans to unlock surplus railway land for up to 40,000 new homes and around 10 million sq ft of commercial space, including mixed use neighbourhoods with homes, green spaces, shops and hotels in locations such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cambridge”.


What is to happen to railway arches? At best, railway arches are an excellent community asset. Near to me there are arches containing a butcher, a carpet warehouse, a prop manufacturer, sheet metal fabricators and numerous panel beaters and car repair shops. The Lords and Commons cricket team nets weekly in two railway arches in Wandsworth—at this point I shout out for New Era Training which has improved my batting enormously, so I am now merely rubbish. The arches by me in Hackney are being redeveloped, so their occupants are being forced out by sharply rising rents. There must be a supersaturation of microbreweries and coffee shops. There is a real danger that the arches then lie empty.

What about complex developments such as Hampton Court station, which I coincidentally went through on Sunday? The station is held up by scaffolding. Linked to it is a site that has been derelict for more than 40 years, mired in planning issues, recently described by Andrew Roberts of the Hampton Court Rescue Campaign as a national disgrace. At the very least, it is a national embarrassment with all the tourists getting off to go to Hampton Court Palace.

Possibly the biggest opportunity for GBR is in the skills sector, and this does not seem to be mentioned in the impact report or the Bill. There is such an opportunity here for GBR. At the moment, the British Army is the biggest employer provider of apprenticeships in Britain. GBR should make beating that record its target. Will the Minister say whether GBR is talking to the DfT, the DWP and Skills England to provide all-levels apprenticeships, including the badly needed levels 2 to 4 across the board?

With the formation of Great British Railways, we have the opportunity to provide a longed-for, efficient national transport network, boost employment, apprenticeships and social mobility and grow the economy in a true renaissance of the nation’s public transport system. Let us not waste it.

Railways Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Grand Committee

I am grateful to the Minister and his officials for the time he gave me before the summer to discuss these amendments and for the care he took in explaining the Government’s thinking. He told me then that he wanted to ensure consistency of approach on Delay Repay, which I took as recognition that operators today handle compensation very differently. Some do it well and some do it considerably less well. I share that objective entirely but, on the Government’s own timetable, all operators will be absorbed into GBR next year and consolidation alone does not guarantee consistent practice. Legacy systems and habits can persist inside a single organisation unless something requires otherwise. I have not found that requirement in the Bill or the Explanatory Notes, so I would welcome the Minister’s help in understanding whether he intends consistency to be secured in law through GBR’s licence conditions or through a mechanism of the kind proposed in Amendment 208. I remain glad to work with him and his officials on getting the details right and I look forward to his response.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name rather belatedly to Amendment 208 from the noble Baroness, Lady Leaman. She has put it so well that I will not detain your Lordships at all, except to say that I added my name. I am astonished that nobody else did, because it seems like such an extraordinarily good idea that I do not know why it has not been done before.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I did not add my name, but there is a limit to the number of names you can add. Many of us feel very supportive of the recommendations from my noble friend Lady Leaman in those two amendments.

I simply want to give some context to the reasons for the amendments such as those from the noble Lord, Lord Young, to be considered for the Bill, or something based on them being considered, to secure a genuinely fair and free market in the retail sales of train tickets. It is worth remembering how much difference the private operators made to the price you had to pay for many kinds of journey. We have been discussing it in theoretical terms, but there was a time when, if you wanted to travel from Edinburgh to Penzance on the cross-country train which made that journey, the cost was enormous. What changed it? It was split ticket operators demonstrating that they could get four or five different tickets—including, when I did it on one occasion, a West Yorkshire rover ticket that carried me one small piece of the journey—and that this accumulation of a handful of tickets would give you a price less than half the cost that you would have been quoted originally for that journey.

Not only did that cheapen tickets for a lot of people making difficult journeys, but it also changed the attitude of many of the operating companies. Certainly when I go to the station to buy a ticket, I am now always asked whether I want a cheaper ticket by getting the next train or the one before it. There is an alertness to the customer’s need to know what the options are for a reasonably priced ticket, which has been brought into the system by the private operators. I do not advocate these amendments because competition is a good Liberal value, but because experience has proved that to be the case.

All this has to exist in a world in which very rapid change will take place. At the moment, operators issue their own tickets. The result is that there is an invisible interaction between the person selling the ticket, the retailer, and the revenue protection officer on the train whose decision it is whether that ticket will be valid on that train. If you have missed one and are getting the next one, it may well not be; if you have chosen to change your journey pattern, it may well not be. The Minister may fondly believe—we have talked about this in a very helpful discussion—that all this will fall away, because when GBR is the only one providing the trains, there will not be these difficulties. I am not convinced of that; I think that old habits will die hard. If we are not very careful, we will still have a situation where the retailer gives you the impression that he is retailing a piece of paper or an email that will enable you to travel on one of several trains, when you are actually buying something limited by the policies and practice of the operator. It may be one operator in principle, but there will still be different regions under different regional management, so we need to have methods of ensuring that. I hope to return to that second point later in Committee, but we should understand the context and value of what we are discussing.

Railways Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 16th September 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 129 in my name; Amendments 93, 111 and 313, which I have signed; and Amendment 130A, which has considerable overlap with the other amendments here.

Amendment 129 aims to maintain the contribution that Network Rail has made to nature recovery efforts over recent years. It is important, in many ways, to congratulate Network Rail on what it has already achieved. This potential was first recognised in 2018 when the Network Rail vegetation management review, led by John Varley, recommended that nature recovery measures be set up across the estate to produce a railway for people and wildlife. The Government accepted this recommendation and in 2019 published a policy statement requiring Network Rail to achieve no net loss of biodiversity on the existing line-side estate by 2024 and biodiversity net gain on each route by 2040.

The requirement included an expectation on Network Rail to publish an annual report on its activity and progress towards meeting these goals. It has done that and, over the past six years, this has led to progress; it is important to acknowledge that. A biodiversity plan and a regular state of nation report from Network Rail kick-started and reported on a range of ingenious projects to achieve no net loss of biodiversity by 2024. It has started to deliver on the biodiversity gain and has now brought it forward to 2035.

The latest State of Nature report already shows a minor overall increase in the amount of nature-rich habitats across the estate since 2020, including an extra 618 hectares of broadleaf woodland. In the foreword to this 2024 report, the noble Lord, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, when chair of Network Rail, indicated that this progress would continue in this new arrangement, stating:

“the rail industry is raising the profile of biodiversity alongside engineering … it is natural engineering that looks to offer much opportunity as we press on towards Great British Railways”.

Sadly, the Government’s mechanisms to achieve this continuity are currently lacking from this Bill, and I believe there is a real risk that this good recent progress will be lost with the transfer of the railway estate to Great British Railways. Amendment 129 is designed to prevent this and is strongly supported by the Wildlife Trust and other environmental groups. The issue is that the Bill places only one tangential environmental responsibility on Great British Railways, and that is the duty to make decisions in the public interest, described in Clause 18 as encompassing,

“the effect the provision of railway services has on the environment”.

That is it. This is amorphous, it is an unreportable fraction of a duty and simply no replacement for the specific and reportable biodiversity enhancement requirement that has applied to Network Rail since 2018.

The biodiversity duty set under the Environment Act in 2021 will apply to GBR but it is general in application and without a requirement to report on progress. My amendment outlines three concerns specifically. The first is to deliver measures as identified in the local nature recovery strategies. We have these strategies—and very shortly we will have 48 covering the entirety of England—and this amendment provides local-specific blueprints that affect nature recovery on every English railway holding. This really increases the impact of using local data and, importantly, the work of local communities, which have worked extremely hard to bring together this data into a local nature recovery strategy, and the organisations developing them.

My amendment additionally would require Great British Railways to report on the creation of wildlife corridors, as already mentioned by other noble Lords. As a scientist, I went back to look at the evidence base for these corridors having any effect. Is this just a nice to have? I came across a paper published last year. It was a meta-analysis across the world, looking at wildlife corridors created alongside urban infrastructure, such as roads and railways. There were 34 countries and 800 examples and over 64% of these indicated improved movement across landscapes and associated improvements in wildlife biodiversity and abundance.

One problem with UK nature right now—and I am not the only one believing this; it is the reason why we keep seeing these declines—is that currently our nature is becoming more and more fragmented into small islands surrounded by large oceans of impenetrable landscape. There is huge potential in that land alongside the railways to create these corridors. I believe they have the potential to create a wildlife corridor from Land’s End to John O’Groats or technically, looking this up in the railway network, from Penzance to Thurso. The prize that Network Rail could bring about to restoring the continuity of ecological process in the UK is huge, but it needs to be realised and supported and this would, I believe, be strengthened by reporting duty as outlined in my amendment.

There is another point to these wildlife corridors that we often lose sight of and that is that nature-rich habitats can reduce fire risks on railways. Native biodiversity replaces the highly flammable invasive or unmanaged grasses. This is because native biodiversity, particularly trees and shrubs, has a higher leaf moisture content and lower volatile oils—it does not catch fire so easily, so you do not see long strips of fire going alongside the railway. The other beauty of vegetation and the wildlife corridors along the sides of railways is in the root networks in the soil. When you have flooding events, those areas that are vegetated are less likely to see the landslides and landslips that damage railways and stop them working. This is why these amendments are important.

The railway estate has significant potential for solar deployment at stations and car parks. Again, Network Rail kick-started this work in 2025, with an agreement with EDF to provide energy from solar to meet 15% of the network’s needs. A new solar deployment reporting duty could build on this and galvanise work to fit small-scale solar across the railway estate and its more than 2,500 stations. But it comes back to legally requiring annual reports on the delivery of these three highly impactful environmental interventions. By doing that, I believe that Amendment 129 would lock effective environmental improvement into Great British Railways’ operating model. I am seriously concerned that otherwise it will get lost in the noise if we are not careful.

I turn briefly to the other amendments that I have added my name to, the chief theme in which is resilience. We need to electrify our railways in England and set a yearly target for miles electrified, as they do in Scotland —we are way behind Scotland and we need to have some targets.

We also need to ensure that trains can operate in our hot summers. I travel up and down every day by train to the House of Lords. I dearly hope that we can work it out, because my journeys were devastated this summer. The point to make is that our temperate climate is a thing of the past. This is now the norm, and we absolutely need to adapt to that.

The Bill could be an opportunity to give our iconic transport network across the UK, Great British Railways, and the sector adaptation targets and a general duty to reach our missions, adaptation and environmental targets, as Amendment 111 would. These amendments would go some way towards achieving this.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly add my voice to Amendment 313, to which I have added my name. This is the first time I have spoken, so I thank the Minister and his staff for the very good meetings we have had so far.

This is incredibly important. My last two rail journeys of any note have both been disrupted badly, one due to trains having to go slowly because the rails were buckled at 24 degrees centigrade, and the other because a tree fell on a line and pretty much put the route out of action. I hear that the strategy for tree management will have to change enormously because of the drier weather. This framework is not something that we should be bringing in now—we should have brought it in 10 years ago. As with any of these frameworks, we need reporting. We know exactly what happens if you do not report on something—it gets pushed to the back.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to support some of the amendments in this group. I am sure that we have all experienced the nightmare of leaves on the track, but by putting in place a number of the different targets, we also have to have a focus on maintenance.

The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, referred to buckling, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, but that is largely because we have moved to a continuously welded rail to have a smoother journey. That was particularly welcome. I should declare an interest here, as I live 100 yards or so from a railway line which has had CWR thanks to Sizewell C, because otherwise the trains would be exceptionally noisy overnight when they are bringing in all the different material.