Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th October 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

47: Clause 2, page 3, line 32, at end insert—
“30D Management of rail services in Greater London(1) The Secretary of State must make a statement in each House of Parliament on the impact of shared responsibility between Transport for London and public sector companies awarded a contract under section 30(1A) under the management of Shadow Great British Railways, for the provision of railway passenger services in the Greater London area within three months of the day on which the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 is passed.(2) The statement made under subsection (1) must include an assessment of how the provision of any services procured by Transport for London under section 30(1A) can be managed in a manner that is consistent with the remit of Shadow Great British Railways.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to make a statement assessing the impact of shared responsibility for railway passenger services in Greater London following the changes in the Bill.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, a great deal was said earlier in Committee about the achievements of Transport for London in improving passenger rail services in London, predominantly through the London Overground system. It would be wrong and unnecessary for me to repeat that; any noble Lord who wishes to see it summarised can read the excellent speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, who explained it all extremely well.

When it comes to London, the Bill has a huge lacuna at its heart: the mayor. The office of the mayoralty was established by referendum, and it is not to be treated with contempt. I may surprise noble Lords by saying that I had an increasing regard for the first mayor, Ken Livingstone, who defeated his Labour opponent to become mayor in 2000. We bonded over our joint opposition, on which we worked together, to Gordon Brown’s disastrous PPP for London Underground. That brought us together, and he always treated me with great courtesy and kindness. He started London Overground, and it was his success in winning the Olympic bid that secured for Transport for London a huge amount of investment in the capital’s transport, which was transformative.

How do this Government treat his successor? On 9 July, immediately after meeting the Prime Minister and other Ministers in the immediate wake of the election, the mayor said:

“What’s clear from listening to Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer today is they are really keen to devolve more powers not just to London but to other parts of the country. You will be hearing in the course of the next few weeks and months examples of those additional powers”.


Well, here we are, a few weeks and months later, and what do we hear? But he said something else on 9 July:

“One of the things that was confirmed from the meeting this morning is once those franchises end and are brought into”


the Department for Transport,

“they will be talking to mayors like me about which of those railways we can take over. I’ll be lobbying for once those franchises end, those commuter trains that come into London for us to have that”.

That was the position of the mayor and, as far as I know, it remains unchanged.

But the truth must have dawned on him when he read—if he has by now read—the letter sent very courteously by the Minister on 18 October to noble Lords who spoke at Second Reading, in which he said in unequivocal terms:

“The Government has no current plan to devolve responsibility for operating further national railway services to local authorities”.


I take it—of course, he could contradict me on this—from that and from the tone of the debate earlier in Committee that he includes London and the mayoralty among those local authorities.

So, what is he actually offering? The Mayor of London will have the ability to agree national and regional services with Great British Railways, to be run by Great British Railways, and earlier in Committee, the Minister gave an example of how that might work. Again, I am not reading this from Hansard, but I think my recollection is correct. He told us that he was already in discussions with the Mayor of Greater Manchester about how the mayor could purchase services, I presume from Network Rail at this stage—as we know, Great British Railways does not exist as a legal entity, nor does shadow Great British Railways have any legal substance—which could even be branded with the Bee Network logo, which is the characteristic mark of local transport services in Manchester and of the buses operated by the mayor.

It is worth dwelling on this for a moment. I think I can say—it is very much up to the Minister to correct me—that, had this been put to the Minister when he was commissioner of Transport for London, he would have rejected it out of hand. The Transport for London brand is of huge value, and it goes to the reputation of Transport for London in a very intimate and direct way. There is no way that he, or I think the mayors he served under, would have accepted that services operated by a different operator altogether could have been travelling with the TfL brand on them, over which he had minimal control. Some noble Lords may say, “But doesn’t that happen already? He has private companies operating services in London with the TfL brand on them”. But they are of course operated on a concession basis, and they are very tightly controlled by Transport for London. Transport for London remains in control of its own brand. It is a question of the power relationship.

But what is the power relationship going to be between the Mayor of Greater Manchester and Great British Railways if the services it offers are branded with the Bee Network—which, I admit, does not yet have the global brand recognition that TfL, with its logo, its merchandising, its map and so forth, has? None the less, the Bee Network is an important brand for the people of Greater Manchester. What power is the mayor going to have if those services are operated in a way that is shoddy or objectionable or fails in some way? I will not speculate on the way, because we can all imagine it, whether it is timeliness, frequency, reliability, cleanliness or any of the other standards that have a direct and immediate impact on passengers. Of course, he will have no power at all, partly because he has nowhere else to go. He is simply a mayor, while this is Network Rail. It is huge and he is relatively small.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

Amendment 47 withdrawn.