Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grayling (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend’s amendment but perhaps from a slightly different perspective to his, given his—and indeed the Minister’s—track record, which had a strong focus on London. I believe it is very important to ensure that there is a clear explanation and, frankly, that there are detailed rules about how the interaction takes place around the London boundary, simply because there is a democratic issue here as well.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, made reference to the attempt by the mayor to take control of the Southeastern franchise some years ago. I blocked that, for two reasons. First, there was a significant level of opposition outside London to that transition taking place—the sense that the mayor should not be running services that cross into Kent, Surrey and so forth—including strong opposition from local MPs. Secondly, there is the issue of fragmentation: who operates which depot, how do you divide the franchise in half and so forth? It is important to maintain a system that is simple and as easy to run as possible.

None the less, there is and will always be an issue around how the mayoral responsibility for services that cross the boundary interacts with services operating under the control of shadow Great British Railways and subsequently Great British Railways, how they interact and work together, and how the whole system is managed. While I do not support my noble friend’s level of enthusiasm for devolution because I worry about fragmentation, it is none the less important in this new world to have very clear guidance, rules and methodology about how the system in London will operate with the system that crosses paths with it around the London boundary and, indeed, into the termini in London.

I think my noble friend has put forward an important point here. Although we have a slightly different perspective on this, I very much hope that the Government will adopt this proposal, because I think it is the right one.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by reminding the Committee that this is a short Bill, simply to bring back the national railway operations into public ownership. This is a popular policy with the public, absolutely necessary to making the railway run properly, and a necessary precursor to a more major Bill next year.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for this amendment, which would require not a report this time—although he has sought to require many—but Statements to Parliament about the relationship between services in Greater London provided under contract to TfL and those for which the Secretary of State is responsible.

There is no reason to expect the Bill, which allows train operations to transfer from private operators into public ownership, to have any adverse effect whatever on the existing collaboration between operators and TfL. The Bill makes no change to the existing duties on the Secretary of State for Transport and on Transport for London under Section 175 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999 to co-operate and co-ordinate passenger rail services in London. Like many noble Lords in the Committee, I know from my own experience how that works. I think we can all conclude that it has worked very satisfactorily so far and there is no reason why it should not continue.

The Bill will not have any adverse effect on those services: substantially the same staff will be running those trains under public ownership on the national railway network, as they do now, so there should be no concern about a sudden deterioration of service. In fact, I expect it to improve: publicly owned operators will prioritise the interests of passengers, rather than exploiting contractual conditions in pursuit of short-term profit.

The Bill says nothing about the devolution of further passenger rail service to the Mayor of London. It would not prevent further devolution, and nothing I have said would prevent that. If they were devolved, they could be operated in the same way as the current London Overground services are operated, under a concession from Transport for London.

When I said, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, quoted, that there is no current plan for further devolution, that was an accurate statement. Of course, it may not be an accurate statement in the future, but when I wrote the letter to him and other noble Lords and Baronesses, it was true. We will see what happens. It is only a few weeks since what the mayor said in July and, if he does have aspirations to operate further services, I am sure there will be a cordial discussion under the auspices of Section 175 to discuss whether and how that is carried out and the costs of doing it.

The noble Lord is also mistaken on Manchester. Certainly, the evolving situation I described with the Mayor of Manchester and Transport for Greater Manchester is that services would be operated not by Network Rail, because that is currently an infrastructure provider, but by a train company. In fact, it is most likely to be Northern Trains, which is already owned by the public sector and has been for four years.

As I have already said, I give a commitment that the future, wider Bill will give a statutory role for combined authority mayors that is better than any they have now. I have just repeated it for the avoidance of doubt. In that case, it is under Section 24 of the 1993 Act. If they were to want to operate train services, this Bill does not alter Section 24 and that would be a discussion that could be had. I described the situation as I understand it currently unfolding; in fact, they do not wish to do that, but the Secretary of State could devolve more under Section 24 if she chose to.

At the moment, if I have counted correctly, the operation of rail services in London is currently the responsibility of eight different franchised operators, plus two more under contract to Transport for London. That is without the long-distance operators whose services start and finish in London but do not otherwise serve the London market directly and, indeed, Network Rail, which is responsible for the physical railway infra- structure. Public ownership and subsequent integration into Great British Railways will simplify all this by bringing the currently franchised services together in ownership in one place. If TfL wishes to discuss or influence the provision of other rail services across Greater London in the future, it will have an easier job of engaging with Great British Railways. It will be assured that the train operators that are performing will be interested in acting in the interests of passengers.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked where I think it is all going. I will come back and answer that on Report.

It was a pleasure to hear the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, talking about the particular circumstances of Bexley, and it is nice to see her in her place. I do not envisage any immediate change to the railway geography of south-east London. I cannot answer for much of the rest of what she said in the way that I once could, as the commissioner of Transport for London, but I am sure that she knows where to go to make the points about the Superloop, ULEZ and the other things she referred to for the benefit of her borough of Bexley.

The noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, referred to Crossrail 2. It should be evident—I hope it is from what I have now said about Section 175—that, were Crossrail 2 to be promoted and come into effect, it would, like Crossrail 1, be complex, but the outcome would be a significant transfer of services to the mayor, because it would, and hopefully will, eventually take over some national railway services. The ease with which Crossrail has taken over former national railway services in London and transformed them into a coherent service for the benefit not only of London but the national economy would be replicated in Crossrail 2. Nothing in the Bill would change that; nor would it change the way that Crossrail was funded had it been proposed now, or the way Crossrail 2 would be funded if it were proposed in the future.

The answer to a lot of what has been said about the Overground is that the Bill primarily seeks to remedy those parts of the railway network that patently do not work well. I would contend—I have always contended in all my roles and in this one too—that the railway service in London works. It works because it is coherent, and there is no reason for the Bill to interfere with it.

I was very interested to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Grayling. I remember well his position on the devolution of Southeastern services, and he is right that many of them go well beyond the London boundary. There is a democratic issue about how well they serve the areas outside the boundary, and his recollection is correct that at the stage at which it was proposed— I recall it well because I proposed it, even if it was politically advocated by the mayor—it cost more to operate those services separately than it did together. That would be quite a good reason to think carefully about whether a proposition could now be made to do it differently. In a sense, he is making my case because one of the things that we need to have some regard to in a post-Covid railway, with less revenue but similar costs, is the cost of the whole thing. One of the reasons for the proposition in the Bill is to start to sort out the costs of the railway, increase its revenue and improve its performance.

I listened carefully to the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, on devolution and I intend to come back to them on Report.

The Government’s plans will improve co-operation, not hinder it, so I see no need for the statement envisaged in the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. I am sure that all involved will work together to ensure that publicly owned and TfL services can co-exist effectively side by side. On that basis, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly deal with two points. In answer to the very reasonable question from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, the reason for a separate London debate is the three different cases that currently exist for the devolution of rail services. One is London, where services are in large measure devolved—not all of them but there is a large measure of devolution that exists. The second is the other large conurbations where devolution of rail services does not exist—Birmingham, Manchester and so forth, with the exception of Liverpool, which we agreed earlier in Committee was a slightly separate case. The third is the local authorities that are too small to have much credibility as operating services on the national rail network, although there might be specific cases. It seemed to me that, even though it was mentioned at the time, London deserved a distinct debate because it is different from the other cases that we debated.

Turning to the Minister’s response, I think we have had some instances of documents that have rewritten themselves during the course of Committee. The latest is the letter which it turns out we had all misinterpreted because the weasel word “current” had not been given sufficient prominence, but which in fact means that there may well be devolution of the operation of rail services to London and elsewhere. That is not quite what it meant when everyone first read it, but there we are. I suppose the Minister will feel he has got away with that.

But what has he got away with when he offers a statutory role? We have a notion of what is meant by statutory role when we turn to the Labour Party document Getting Britain Moving, which says:

“there must also be a statutory role for devolved leaders in governing, managing, planning and developing the rail network”.

Eloquent by its silence is the word “operating”—it is not on offer. Whatever the Minister says may or may currently be the case, and whatever provisions of existing legislation he refers to, it is not going to happen. It is inconsistent with his argument for a single brain, it is not mentioned in the Labour Party policy document as it could have been, and there is not going to be meaningful devolution unless there is a change to the legislation. This may be a very short Bill, as the Minister says, but it is heavily pregnant with possibilities for the future.

With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.