Railways Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Blencathra. I can remember British Rail, but I do not think any of us want to go back to British Rail, we want to go to something altogether better. We need the railways to succeed. We can see that when people feel that they have a reliable, punctual and enjoyable railway available to them, they will use it. Look at the rail passenger journeys on the Elizabeth line, which is seeing something like a million passengers a day. Where we create a railway that people can rely on and use, we can succeed. We need that to happen.

On our Benches, on this side of the House, we have already arrived in these fascinating speeches at something of a consensus view, which is that we ought to have recreated the vertically integrated regional companies, but we did not. John Major may have been in favour of it, but he was Prime Minister when that was not what was put into the Railways Act 1993. It should have happened. If I remember correctly, before the 1992 manifesto, we were arguing for exactly that and the manifesto more or less reflected that, but it did not happen.

That did not mean that privatisation did not succeed. My noble friend Lord Grayling was absolutely right. Passenger numbers doubled. Investment in infrastructure went up by three or four times. Train miles increased by 30%. So there was a dramatic increase, but what was that essentially about? It is what my noble friend Lord Redwood was saying: privatisation led to substantial investment of private capital. The first question we must examine during the passage of this legislation is: where is that capital going to come from in future? Are we going to be able to sustain the investment that we need in the railway network for the future? The Bill does not tell us that. It tells us the processes, but not the outcome.

I had my days as a civil servant, and I express my appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson. We will miss him here, but I am looking forward to seeing him in Cambridge. I hope that we will continue to have that pleasure. As a civil servant, I sat in a meeting where the investment programme of one potentially successful nationalised industry was rejected in order to provide an investment into a failing nationalised industry which had a political reason for investment.

Let us not kid ourselves. If this becomes a state-controlled industry, it will become subject to state control of investment, and that may mean state rationing of investment. The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, who introduced the Bill in an admirably concise but also very helpful way, will remember that when we examined the public ownership Bill, he very skilfully enabled the Government to reverse out of franchising into public ownership when the remaining franchises ended, but he did not tell us what the long-term structure was going to be. This Bill is about the long-term structure, who the single directing mind will be and how that single directing mind will be subject to checks, balances and challenges.

In my view, privatisation can work successfully in the long run only where it is subject to competition. In my experience, monopoly always offers short-term benefits, sometimes provides short-term benefits, but always leads to a lack of long-term investment, long-term innovation and long-term consumer benefit. So if, as my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead was stressing, quite rightly, we are going to get the consumer benefits, the innovation and the investment, we have to bring the private sector on board as well.

Some of the challenges to which I will devote my attention are, for example, in creating the regulatory structure that enables this to happen. First, the rail strategy at the moment is simply what the Secretary of State chooses it to be. There is no parliamentary scrutiny. There is not even any requirement for consultation, not even with the Office of Rail and Road, before the strategy is published. I think we are going to have to look very critically at this and look at the analogy of national policy statements, which in the energy sector, for example, are subject to examination in Parliament and to scrutiny, if not to a parliamentary veto.

Secondly, there is the rail freight target. There is a target: it is that it increase. The level of rail freight in this country has increased in the last decade but, lamentably, by only 1% per year, on average. If we are to reach the target of a 75% increase by 2050, it requires a 2.5% annual compound rate of rail freight growth. Perhaps that target should be set as not less than a 2% increase per annum; otherwise, how will the Government or, indeed, Great British Railways, be held to account?

Thirdly, on the Office of Rail and Road, I will not repeat what we heard from my noble friends Lady May and Lady Harding of Winscombe. My noble friend Lady Harding is right about ticketing. We need to press hard on that, but the issue of avoiding self-preferencing is not confined to ticketing. The Office of Rail and Road may have continued concurrent jurisdiction with the CMA in relation to the CMA’s own powers, but the Bill expressly removes the promotion of competition duty from the Office of Rail and Road in relation to such important things as access, infrastructure, timetabling and charging schemes. If we are going to avoid self-preferencing, we need to ensure that the competition duty is brought back on those as well.

Clearly, the open-access operators will not have confidence that they will be able to exploit the opportunities for private investment and private competition unless and until the Office of Rail and Road has those powers. The additional power it should have is that the appeal to the ORR should not be limited to judicial review grounds. There must be elements of those decisions made by GBR which should be appealed on their merits to the Office of Rail and Road. It will not surprise the Minister that I plan to test him on some of those competition-related issues—we have happily worked on that before.

My final point is on devolution. This carries forward the opportunity for services not to be designated and therefore to be available for the metro and passenger transport executives to be able to provide themselves. However, the relationship with local government in this Bill seems to be inadequate so far. Clause 85, for example, limits the relationship with local government to mayoral combined and strategic authorities, and clearly there are many more local authorities than those which are mayoral strategic authorities.