Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 20th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall endeavour to be brief. I repeat what other noble Lords have said in expressing my gratitude to the Minister, as I mentioned at Third Reading and when the Bill passed, for his courtesy and collaboration in our debates on the Bill.

The Government’s problem is this: they wish to reform the railways. There is a great deal of support in your Lordships’ House, across all parties, and generally among the public for a reform of the railways. We would like to discuss what the Government are going to do on a number of issues. Had they brought forward the measure in this Bill as part of a large and comprehensive Bill introducing those reforms to the railways, we would have had the opportunity to have those discussions. We would have been able to discuss, for example, the role of freight, and the tension between the priority given to passenger services and freight services that inevitably exists in a constrained system. We would have had the chance to discuss the continuation of open access and competition on the railways. We could have discussed the devolution of the operation of train services to regional and local authorities, such as exists in London and might exist in other parts of the country. We would have been able to do all those things as part of a comprehensive reform Bill.

But the Government have decided not to bring forward a comprehensive reform Bill, of which this is part; they have decided to take this step first—that is, to seize control of the train operating companies—and the great Bill of reform is promised for the future. The Government say that it will be brought forward within 12 to 18 months—that is a challenging target. As I have said, tediously, in the past, over and over again, even after that Bill has gone through its parliamentary process and passed, it will still take several years for it to be implemented.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree that there is a substantial degree of consensus on the need for reform, which the previous Conservative Government started five years ago with the Williams review. However, when we came into office, we found that a very partial Bill had been prepared which did not cover all of the issues that needed to be included in a railway reform Bill. It is the neglect of his previous Administration that has led to this situation.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am not here to defend the previous Government, and I was not making a tedious trivial party-political point when I said that. I will say that I suspect the previous Government were dilatory and slow in bringing forward a massive reform of the railways because it is a very complicated business, and that goes to my point: I doubt this Government will be able to bring forward a Bill within 12 to 18 months precisely because of that complexity. Because of this large gap in time, through the passage of this legislation we are creating a new situation for the railways that could endure for four to six years, with no sense of accountability or purpose that the Government have, because the answer on everything that we wish to discuss —freight, open access, devolution—has been, “We can’t discuss it now; we can’t tell you anything now; you have to trust us”, just like the Government said “Trust us” to the pensioners, to the farmers and to large businesses that are landed with business rates.

The truth of the matter is that we do not see why we should trust the Government. That is without any disrespect to the Minister, but he is just one person and, like all of us, fragile and frail. We cannot build an entire railway system and entrust it to the Government on the strength of one particular Minister because of his noted, genuine and respected skills. We need to know what the standard will be to which we can hold the Government accountable during this new and quite lengthy period.

The objective of the purpose clause is not to set an objective for the railway, as the Minister has sometimes said; it is to set an objective for this Bill, and the Bill is about seizing control of passenger railway services. All we are saying is that the standard we expect to be set is that the purpose is the improvement of passenger services. If we cannot see those improvements then at least we would have a standard to which we could hold the Government to account, and that should be in the Bill. Warm words butter no parsnips. They are nothing to which we can hold the Government accountable. So, if my noble friend Lord Gascoigne chooses to press his amendment to a Division, we on this side will support him.

I turn to Motion B. I do not think the Government realise how helpful Motion B was intended to be to them. It is after all one of those rules in life that, if something is doing well today, it is likely that tomorrow it will not be doing so well, and vice versa. What are the Government now holding out as a practical prospect? They are going to move ahead, and one of the first franchises they are going to take control of is Greater Anglia, one of the best performing and most popular. What is likely to happen to Greater Anglia? Just by random chance, it will start to deteriorate and the Government’s programme of nationalisation will be damaged in the public eye as a result, whereas if they had seized control of Avanti, which is what we were guiding them towards through Motion B, then some improvement would have carried them forward and shown how well nationalisation was working. So we were trying to be helpful to the Government, but the Commons has claimed financial privilege on this issue and, as far as we are concerned, we give way.

On Motion A, I am sorry to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, say she is going to trust the Government. She will be joining a long queue of people who have trusted the Government, but I fear she will be disappointed. But that is enough for now.