Great British Railways and Rail Services in the North

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, when I read the Williams review, I thought it was a very well-considered document. I would like to ask the Minister a number of questions about services affecting the north and my own home area. What is the real reason for the delay in not going ahead with the Great British Railways proposal? Is it legislative time? As others have pointed out, we have had a lot of pretty useless Bills, which are totally unimplementable, going through this place at great length, such as the asylum and immigration Bills, and all sorts of others that people could cite. Is legislative time the reason, or is it that the Treasury, having realised how much overspending has occurred, particularly in London, as a result of Covid, simply wants to find a way of keeping the transport budget within bounds by cutting back on future investments which were once promised?

On Avanti trains and TransPennine Express, can the Minister tell us firmly what her timetable for a decision on these franchises is? If there is no improvement, when will she act? I do not see any evidence of improvement in my own journeys to and from the north. What I see, from London to Glasgow, is virtually every other train being cancelled, and the trains that are left being packed out. Who financially benefits from this? Does the operator benefit from it? Do the Government? Will she make a statement on how the finances of the chaos in these franchises actually work out?

The Government do not appreciate the economic damage that this chaos produces. In recent years—the past decade or two—we have had a lot of people come to live up north in Cumbria on the basis that they can run a consultancy business, which involves regular travel a couple of days a week probably to London, Birmingham or other parts of the country. However, this model of living in a nice place in the north and occasionally going to see your clients in the south just does not work if we do not have an effective train service. People will give up on it. That is a worrying development.

Finally, since George Osborne in 2011-12, the Government have talked at great length about the northern powerhouse, getting on with the east-west link and all that, but what is actually happening? When will contractors start on building something new to link our great northern cities together? I fear that what we need is not a lot of talk but some action. We are not getting any decisive action by this Government.