Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 6th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 1 is impossible to disagree with. It is fundamental to the survival of our railways that things improve. They have reached crisis point because of decades of under- investment, poor management and poor political decision- making. However, the presence of this reminder might be useful for the Secretary of State. It might be a statement of the obvious in some ways but useful for her because the big problem with nationalisation is that Governments in the UK have consistently failed to invest long-term. We can improve buses by investing within a couple of years, but when you invest in the railways it takes a couple of decades for it to make a big difference. That is the Government’s challenge in renationalising the railways and the buck now stops with them.

On Amendment 16, I understand and strongly support the wish for thorough and transparent public consultation on the contents of the forthcoming rail Bill. I remind noble Lords of the example of the public consultation undertaken by the previous Government on their plan to close ticket offices. It led to a massive national outcry, forcing them to drop the plan, so I am a great believer in the impact of public consultations. The Bill that we are expecting in the near future is considerably more complex, but the problem with this amendment as written is that it extends the timescale that it all will take. It will take far too long before we get the legislation that we all hope will make the big difference. I will listen very carefully to the Minister. We hope that there will be some legislation by the end of next year at the very latest.

One way or another, the Minister has been associated with plans for the future of the railways and the creation of Great British Railways for some years now. There is surely nothing raised in our debates that he has not thought of, he has not worked on, or that would come as a surprise to him. He has been exceptionally generous with his time in cross-party discussions in the last couple of weeks. I urge him to explain when he replies what the timescale is likely to be and to assure us that there will be full consultation and that there is a grand plan.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we have had lengthy discussion on this Bill in Committee, and it is not my intention today to repeat unnecessarily the arguments and the evidence adduced during those debates. The longer that we went on in Committee, the clearer it became that this is a very bad Bill that has been accompanied by a degree of arrogance. I do not say this as a personal comment on the Minister; it is on the part of the Government in general. There has been a tone, sometimes said quite explicitly, of “We won so we can do what we want”. That is an argument. It has some merit, but the merit that you would expect to find in an argument made in a playground.

Another type of arrogance has also been underlying our debates: “We want a better railway, but we are not going to tell you what it will look like. That’s all going to come in the future—don’t ask your pesky questions now. That will all be dealt with, and you have to trust us”. That is not a basis on which the House should be passing this type of legislation. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, goes some way to address that latter point. We all have a common desire for a better railway, but we will no doubt disagree on the details of how it is to be achieved. My noble friend Lord Grayling said that these are very complex issues. I do not think that anyone would disagree.

Therefore, on the prospect of having the Bill published in draft for pre-legislative scrutiny, I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. I do not think that will add materially to the time taken before legislation is enacted because it is likely to produce a better Bill when it eventually arrives in your Lordships’ House, one that can go through faster and be implemented better with better outcomes. It is the outcomes that we are interested in, not a particular timescale, although like her I will hold the Government to their undertaking that a Bill will come forward within 12 to 18 months.

It is more important to get the outcome right than to worry about a few weeks here or there, which is as much as we would be discussing in relation to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I am deeply disappointed that he is not going to press it to a Division as I would be very tempted to support it if he did. However, I expect and hope that the Minister, when he stands up, can satisfy the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, by saying that there will be some sort of pre-legislative scrutiny of the very large and complex Bill that he is expecting to bring before your Lordships’ House in the next 12 or 18 months, to use his phrase.

The amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Lansley is very good and commends itself. Like him, I would like to hear what the Minister says in response. I note that my noble friend does not intend to press it to a Division.

Amendment 1, tabled by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne, is indispensable. A number of things are missing from this Bill. A number of important parties have been wholly excluded. One of them, for example, which we will come to later in debate, is the staff. There is no reference to the staff in this Bill. We take for granted that they will be TUPE-ed. That basic legislative cover is there and does not need to be stated. They will not lose their jobs as a result of this but will be TUPE-ed over. However, has any consultation been carried out with the staff? You would expect that normally, would you not? Do they want to change their employer? Do they want to be working for the Government? They may all say yes, but one would have thought that in an undertaking such as this the Government would have bothered to ask them. There has been no consultation with the staff.

The other glaring omission from the Bill is, of course, the passenger. It is a passenger railway services Bill, yet it says nothing at all about the passenger. My noble friend Lord Gascoigne is attempting to put this lacuna right and to put the passenger back at the head of the Bill, as the driving force of what the Government are trying to do and to require Ministers to test their actions under this Bill against the standard of whether it will improve matters for the passenger. That is why, if my noble friend intends to divide the House and seek its opinion on this matter, I recommend that we support him.

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

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Gascoigne and Lord Moylan, for Amendment 1. I absolutely support the idea that the Government should be clear about what the railway is for and what we want it to achieve. Far too many conversations in this industry are about tracks, signals and trains and how the railway works—or, in many cases, does not work so well. There needs to be much more focus on what the railway is for, but you can do that only if the organisation fundamentally works.

I am clear that when we establish Great British Railways, we should set out a clear statement of purpose, and we will set out a proposal for this statement of purpose in the consultation we will launch ahead of the substantive railways Bill. I am also very clear about the purpose of the Bill and the Government’s wider plans for the railway. Improving the performance of passenger services is clearly a big part of that purpose, but it is not and cannot be the only purpose. The Secretary of State has set out six key objectives against which she expects the railway to deliver. In summary, the railway should be reliable, affordable for passengers and taxpayers, efficient, of suitable quality, accessible and, of course, safe. She and I are reminding senior railway leaders of these objectives very clearly and very often. I expect that to carry more weight than a statement of purpose in a Bill that, if we are honest, might not be read widely by those on the front line of running the railway. Given the range of objectives that the Government wish to meet, I would not support the idea of singling out one objective, even a vital one, and placing it in this Bill.

Turning to the specific wording of the amendment, which is about performance, the easiest way to improve the performance of passenger railway services would be not to run so many of them, and to try to run fewer freight trains. It would be much easier to make trains run on time if the railway were less congested. Of course, I do not advocate that as a solution, but it illustrates the point that trying to reduce the Government’s objectives for the railway to a single purpose might be counter- productive. I hope that my remarks will have reassured the noble Lord that I am entirely on board with his underlying suggestion that the railway needs a clear statement of purpose, but I am not convinced that it needs to be enshrined in primary legislation right now, nor that it should focus exclusively on the performance of passenger services.

The noble Lord, Lord Grayling, asked me to set aside my ministerial hat and opine about the performance of the London Overground and the type of operator that operates it. I shall not set aside the hat, but I will say that one of the differences with the Overground is that it operates within a consistent and easily understood fares structure, which has enabled a significant increase in patronage over the period it has been operating. We must change the railway fares: there are far too many of them and they are deeply confusing. But one of the reasons for public ownership of the main network is to ensure that we have control of the operation and that there is enough information to be able to do that.

I will not trouble to respond to the point about arrogance and the Government acting, according to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, as if we won the election, because it is rather self-evident that we did. I will remind him that this measure is very popular with the public, and every recent opinion poll suggests that a very large majority wish to see the railway in public ownership. We will return to the matter of the staff, but he acknowledges that the transfer of undertakings regulations will apply, and they do involve some consultation. But if you went to Waterloo station today and asked the staff there whether they want to change their employer, most of them would tell you that they have changed employer so often that some of them cannot remember who their employer is, and do not much care. The most frequent description of railway employment that I get when I speak to railway men and women—

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Are not the staff of Waterloo station already employed by Network Rail?

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

2: Clause 1, page 1, line 12, at end insert—
“25B Termination of existing franchise agreements(1) The Secretary of State must terminate franchise agreements for default in accordance with the terms of the agreement as soon as it is possible to do so.(2) The Secretary of State must assess and rank existing franchise agreements according to performance criteria established after consultation with relevant stakeholders.(3) Subject to subsection (1), the Secretary of State must only terminate a franchise agreement pursuant to a break clause if—(a) there are no other franchise agreements which are performing worse under the criteria in the list referenced in subsection (2), and(b) the Secretary of State is satisfied that provision of the services by a public sector company will improve existing service provision.(4) In this section, “break clause” means a contractual provision in a franchise agreement which entitles the Secretary of State to terminate the franchise agreement before the end of the franchise term by notice without reason.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to terminate franchise agreements for default and to nationalise the worst performing operators first, while enabling services that are currently working well to continue.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in the course of debate at Second Reading and in Committee, numerous noble Lords drew attention to the fact that the manner in which the Government are approaching the termination of franchises is going to result in some very perverse outcomes. Admittedly, most of the franchises still in existence are relatively short, but the Government—with a view to saving money, as far as I can make out—are determined to terminate them in the order in which the contract falls in.

That has the bizarre consequence that some of the most popular, effective and highly rated franchises are going to be terminated early at the head of the list, while those that are most reviled by the public—I am not going to mention any names in the course of this brief speech—and regarded as being hopeless at what they do will have the longest continuation in existence. It is of course the case that if they fell into default, the Government could terminate them early without expense, but we heard from the Minister earlier that none of them is as bad as that. None the less, some of them are very bad indeed.

This case was made most compellingly at Second Reading by the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, but it has been made by other noble Lords as well. I think there is strong demand among noble Lords for the worst franchises to be brought to the head of the queue. My Amendment 2 would have the effect of bringing that about: the worst-performing operators would be terminated first, while services that are currently working well would be enabled to continue. Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, has a similar intent and effect. It is drafted differently—it is expressed as providing flexibility to the Government, whereas mine is perhaps a little more mandatory in its tone—but they are similar in various ways.

With the time the Government have had for reflection on the strength of feeling in the House about this issue, they should be able to come forward and say something now that would alleviate noble Lords’ concerns. Otherwise, I will be interested in testing the opinion of the House on my Amendment 2.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 2, and to Amendment 10 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Scott. Amendment 2 was the Liberal Democrats’ Amendment 1 in Committee, requiring the Secretary of State to terminate franchises for default and to nationalise the worst-performing operators first, while allowing train operating companies that are currently working well to continue.

The Minister explained to us, both in this Chamber in response to our amendment and in private discussions, that this cannot be done without major costs to the taxpayer. The existing contracts have been written and signed by the previous Government so as to make it difficult to penalise defaulters. We accept what the Minister says and we are not prepared to cause the taxpayer greater costs than necessary in this process. So, having listened and learned, we turned our amendment around and wrote Amendment 10, which simply proposes giving the Secretary of State the freedom to enable services that are working well to have an extension to their franchise and to continue for a period of time suitable to the Government. Can the Minister explain to us the Government’s approach to this and whether existing contracts could be extended, as our amendment suggests?

Our view is that the Government are going to be hard pressed in dealing with the numerous parts of the rail systems that are failing, and they need to allow themselves a bit of space by letting the bits that are working well continue until they get around to the overall process of nationalisation. The Government’s whole approach has been nationalisation gradually rather than one big effort, and I hope this amendment works with the grain of their intentions.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his intervention. I think he is right, but he will forgive me if I consider it further and write to him.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, with the leave of your Lordships’ House, I may speak for slightly longer than would be normal because I would like to address a comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about my Amendment 2. She said that it was the same as Amendment 1 tabled by the Liberal Democrats in Committee. In fact, that is only superficially the case. While proposed new Sections 25B(1) and (4) are the same as in the amendment tabled in Committee— I think, by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market—the meat in the sandwich, so to speak, has changed. There would be no additional cost in early termination fees as a result of this amendment as drafted because the franchises would be terminated not as they fell in but in order of worst first, even though that might take a little longer.

I listened very carefully to what the Minister said. Although the Minister found it helpful, the intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was, to this side of the House, slightly infuriating. Throughout the debate in Committee there was a constant jumping between asking us to please focus on this narrow, technical Bill to then, when we wanted to talk about the narrow, technical Bill, being told that we should be talking about the great, big, wonderful Bill that will be coming in 18 months, because that is really what this is all about. But we cannot talk about that Bill because we have not seen it—indeed, we are not even going to get to see it in pre-legislative form. So although the Minister found it helpful, it illustrated the constant problem we have had in dealing with the Government on this measure.

For that reason, I am afraid I am not sufficiently satisfied with the Minister’s comments in respect of my Amendment 2 and I would like to test the opinion of the House.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, the purpose of Amendment 3 in my name is to explore the question of when and under what circumstances it is the Government’s intention to meet their duty in Section 4(1)(d) of the Railways Act

“to promote competition in the provision of railway services for the benefit of users of railway services”.

It was prompted by a very brief exchange that took place in Committee, where the Minister confirmed that it is not the Government’s intention to remove that duty. However, it is clearly their intention, in relation to passenger railway services, very substantially to reduce competition and perhaps to exclude it altogether. There may well be other areas of activity in the provision of railway services which are open to competition, and I want to examine where those should be. Of course, I approach this not with the intention that the duty to promote competition should be removed from the Act, but with the view that it should be exercised.

I am in favour of competition. I might say, in this context, going back many years, that where privatisation is concerned, we have found that competition between private organisations yields benefits. In the railways, in some circumstances, we have found that the absence of competition has been at the heart of the problem: that the performance has not been exposed to competition and therefore has not improved in the way we would have wished it to. So, competition works, privatisation does not necessarily work, but the combination of privatisation and competition, in my view, has worked in the past. However, we are not here to discuss privatisation; we are here to discuss competition, and there is a continuing role for competition, in my view.

I am not planning to talk at length about Amendments 13 and 17 in this group, I will leave that to my noble friend on the Front Bench, but Amendment 17 is directly relevant. One of the principal opportunities for competition would be with open-access operators. In Committee, we touched upon but did not find out whether, and to what extent, it was the Government’s intention to continue to permit open-access operators or indeed to promote them. In my view, promoting them can be a very effective way of stimulating competition and innovation, which are often—as Schumpeter would have said—very intimately linked together.

My contention in this amendment is very simple: to explore where competition will be available. Clearly, it can be done with things such as the provision of rolling stock and services to railways, and maybe, to some extent, in relation to rail freight. As far as passenger railway services are concerned—and we are dealing with that here—the Government’s intention appears to be that every aspect of the passenger railway services should be subject to the “directing mind”—as the Explanatory Notes sets out. Therefore, it will be very difficult for there to be any substantial competition, except if that can be achieved by the role of open-access operators. I hope, when he responds to this debate, the Minister will be able to say they will have a continuing role, or even that they might be encouraged to bring the innovation and competition that would enable us to avoid the downside of a dominant provider.

We have seen this in other circumstances. For example, in France, the dominance of SNCF has led to abuse such as anti-competitive pricing or the overbooking of train paths to restrict competition from other providers. We do not want to see the dominance of public sector providers, on passenger railway services, to lead to that kind of abuse. Still less do we want to see monopoly activity on the part of public sector companies in passenger railway services lead to an elevation of the interests of the companies themselves over the interests of the users of railway services. The general duty to promote competition is for the benefit of the users of railway services because, very often, they are the ones who most see the benefit of that.

I will just tease the Minister, finally, by saying that in this legislation he has the opportunity to move in the opposite direction to the fourth railway package under the EU’s transport legislation. Here is an uncovenanted Brexit bonus for the Government, in being able to move in the opposite direction to the thrust of legislation in the European Union. With that teasing moment, I beg leave to move Amendment 3.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 13 and 17 in my name, but also to respond to my noble friend Lord Lansley in relation to Amendment 3. We come now to the heart of a considerable confusion that exists in the Bill, one that the Government have done their very best to avoid and that needs to be flushed out.

My noble friend Lord Lansley refers to competition. In fact, he refers to the abusive practice by monopoly railways in France. That, of course, is in response to European Union legislation, which has had to mandate access to competition in order for it to flourish in the European Union. It is going in the direction that we went in, somewhat later than us. We are now going back to the Attlee Government, basically, and moving away from that. It is a Brexit bonus, as I think I said in an earlier debate.

The matter is made worse because the Government have not been clear about their view on competition. It has been made much worse by the Government’s confusion and blank refusal to address the question: who is going to make the decisions about competition? Who is going to decide, in relation to open access, which providers will have access to the service? I refer, as I was encouraged to do by the Minister, to the Labour Party document Getting Britain Moving. In its section 7 on “The role of open access”, beginning on page 22, it says clearly:

“The ORR will continue to make approval decisions on open access applications”,


but that is not confirmed by the Minister. Instead, we have the spectre of Great British Railways making open access decisions. That appears to be part of the great controlling brain: one of its functions is that it would make those decisions about open access. But in doing so, it will be making decisions directly about competition with itself.

We are very concerned that the sort of abusive monopoly activity seen in France, which my noble friend has referred to, is exactly what we would be exposing ourselves to if we allowed this measure to go through without having appropriate safeguards in place in advance. That is the thrust of Amendment 17, which simply calls for a report. In Committee the Minister made fun of me for calling for so many reports, but he should understand that we are doing this as a way of drawing attention to an issue of serious concern without trying to hobble or wreck the Bill. He has not given us any assurance in response. He has taken no notice of our very genuine and serious concerns.

Amendment 13 relates to a similar topic, in relation not to open access for passenger railway services but rather to access for freight services. They too compete, so to speak, for paths on the railway; they need access to the railway if they are to operate. The previous Government had an informal and non-statutory target of seeing the volume of freight on the railways increase by 75% by 2050 from a base of, I think, two years ago. This amendment would effectively put that target into the Bill.

Nobody in the Labour Party, either in opposition or in government, has resiled from or rejected that target. If anything, I think they want a more exacting target. The Minister, if pressed, would probably say that it was a perfectly respectable target, one that he would want to sign up to, so there should be no objection to seeing it in the Bill. It would give some assurance that Great British Railways, in its operations, would not simply favour its own activities at the expense of freight operators. Ideally, we would also want some sort of assurance that it would not favour its own passenger activities at the expense of open access operators.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, this is the last group on which I plan to speak. My amendment was prompted by a debate in Committee that gave rise to the question of how the new legislation would work. We have established, including during the previous group, a number of things that do not change, including the licensing of railway services and the prohibition on operating without a licence. The relationship with open- access providers therefore does not change, since they can make applications to the Office of Rail and Road for that purpose—I am paraphrasing, but that is, broadly speaking, how it works.

Where we have a change is in the process for franchising, which is to be removed. The Government have chosen to change the franchising provisions in the Railways Act, in Section 30 et cetera, and to replace that text with what we see in the Bill. I really want to explore this question: to what extent will all designated railway services be brought under Section 30, from new Sections 30A to 30C? I want to explore the consequence of the use of the word “only” in that provision. It says that a service must “only” be provided by

“a direct award of a public service contract to a”

wholly owned public sector company. In effect, it will be wholly owned by the Secretary of State—not, as we have discovered, other public sector companies.

The removal of the word “only” would, in the way in which the text works, as far as I can see, create an opportunity for the Secretary of State to provide or secure the provision of services by routes other than the direct award under Regulation 17. Clearly, that is not the Government’s intention. I will not return to the debate I promoted in Committee, but it would be good legislation to leave that option open to the Secretary of State, even if it were not the Government’s present intention to use it, because they may find it valuable to be able to do so in future.

Let us look at a practical example. Imagine that the Government thought it desirable to say that a service such as the one from Fenchurch Street to Southend and Shoeburyness should form part of the Overground services under the operating control of Transport for London. As far as I can see, as things stand, if that service is designated under Section 23 of the Railways Act—the designation requirements—it will have to be run by a public sector company wholly owned by the Secretary of State, unless it is the subject of an exemption under Section 24. In Committee, I think we heard the Minister say that the Government have no plans to extend the exemptions under Section 24. That raises another question for the Minister. Would he entertain that there may be circumstances in which it would be desirable to extend Section 24 exemptions? While London is a straightforward example, will the Government be open to that possibility, if it were a practical mechanism of securing the best operation of those services?

To what extent is the language of the Bill very deliberate, in that it requires that the Secretary of State may secure the provision of these services only through a direct award, but it does not say that the Secretary of State may provide or secure the provision of these services only by this route? I am making the distinction between “provide” and “securing the provision of”. This is customarily seen in legislation as a distinction between a government department doing it itself and doing it by means of a contract.

Where in this does the Department for Transport’s operator of last resort holdings company sit? Does giving an award of a contract to OLR Holdings Ltd constitute securing the provision of a service, or does it constitute providing the service? Is it regarded as part of the department for these purposes, or is it part of a wholly owned public sector company? There would be something rather odd now about treating it as part of a franchise agreement, since these franchises have already ended. Bringing it under a regime that is about the ending of franchise agreements seems odd.

My second example concerns East West Rail. We are not far away from the point when East West Rail will be running services itself on its new rail services. That will be very welcome—not least from my point of view, living in Cambridgeshire—when it reaches, as the Budget told us, all the way into Cambridge in due course. It will be running services quite soon in Oxford and Bletchley. It has not had a franchise; clearly, it will not now be given a franchise. It is a wholly owned public sector company. Is it the Government’s intention that it will be brought within the scope of Section 30? If so, this is odd, as this is an arrangement for franchises, but it has never had a franchise.

Of course, on the face of it, the Government will continue to designate railway services. Presumably—and here is a question to the Minister—there will be a comprehensive designation of railway services under Section 23, and that will, as a consequence, bring them all under Section 30 because of the way the legislation is now to be phrased. Therefore, is the intention, in effect, to bring all designated railway services under the scope of Section 30 et cetera, other than those exempted under Section 24?

I am sorry for asking a range of questions to explore how this works. We did, as the Minister has kindly mentioned, have the opportunity to discuss this a few days ago, so I hope he will have had the opportunity to think about explaining precisely how these interactions in the legislation will work. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Lansley for posing those very interesting questions. I am sure that the Government have answers to them, but they illustrate that this legislation is essentially very rushed and that they have not properly considered it.

I promise not to repeat what I said in Committee, but I cannot resist referring back to the final impact assessment, produced by the Department for Transport. It said that the purpose of the Bill is to meet a manifesto commitment, so it has not undertaken the normal practice of looking at alternative methods by which the same objectives might be achieved, because they are all in a terrible rush as the Government want to have a headline, essentially, and want to get ahead of the franchises as they expire. Therefore, I appreciate what my noble friend Lord Lansley has said, and I look forward to the Government’s reply.

Amendments 5 and 6, standing in my name, are linked. If Amendment 5 were to pass, I understand that there has been discussion with the Government Front Bench that Amendment 6 would pass without a Division in order to avoid having two votes on the same topic.

In Committee, I referred to two different models by which the private sector might be involved in the running of railways. One is the franchise system that we are currently discussing, which is the main subject of this Bill, but the other, generally dubbed the concession system, is the one used by Transport for London for the operation of all its services other than the London Underground, which is directly provided by Transport for London. All the other services—the buses, London Overground, the DLR, the tram and so forth—are provided under a concession system; that is, they are run by private companies on a contract.

The key difference between the franchise system and the concession system is that under the franchise system, as envisaged at privatisation, the fares risk rests with the operator. That was the model that was set up back when privatisation was introduced. If the fares went up and the companies generated more fares income, they would keep it; if they lost money on fares, it would be their problem that they did not make money because the fares were not good enough. Companies had the incentive to generate more fares, principally by generating more passengers, through all the clever things that they would do.

I was frank and straightforward in saying at Second Reading that that aspect of privatisation has never worked well because, essentially, private operators are not in control of fares income, which is closely correlated with the economic cycle—which of course they cannot control, manage or in any serious way mitigate. That aspect has never worked well, and Covid put an end to it in any meaningful sense. It has never recovered from that, nor, given this legislation, is it ever going to have the chance to recover.

The concession system is different, in that the fares risk remains with the franchisor. In the case of Transport for London, it is the franchisor of the services I referred to and it retains the fares risk. The obligation of the private sector operator is simply to have the trains and equipment in the right place, pointing in the right direction first thing in the morning, properly staffed, cleaned to a certain standard and so forth. If it fails to do those things, it will suffer financial penalties. The important point is that all those things are within its control. It receives a fee for that, but, in practice, because of competition, it is a modest fee given that risk is very limited. The risks are all things that are just a matter of it doing its job properly; if it does it properly, it will get that modest fee without penalty.

The purpose of Amendment 5 is to open up an option. It makes no obligation on the Secretary of State. When a franchise is terminated, the Secretary of State would have the option of awarding it not only, as the Bill is currently drafted, to a public sector company that is a subsidiary of the Department for Transport but to a private sector entity on a concession basis. The reason for it is simply that we know that it works. We know from Transport for London that the system can be made to work very effectively. We know that some of the best services on the Transport for London network—some of the best modes—are provided under this system. Why should it be that the Government would want to rule that out? Of course there could be a role for the private sector operating on that concessionary basis.

My noble friend Lord Lansley’s amendment gives the Government more options than mine does. My amendment gives the Government one extra option, but he would give the Government effectively limitless options by deleting the word “only”, whatever options might be available. It would give the Government more flexibility in dealing with circumstances that they may not have foreseen when they drafted this Bill.

Amendment 6 goes with Amendment 5 simply by defining in a separate clause what I mean by concession. Amendment 5 opens up the choice to do something on a concession basis and Amendment 6 says what a concession is. Despite every effort on my part and that of the Public Bill Office, we could not quite combine these into one amendment, so they stand on the Marshalled List as two amendments which, in practice, are closely linked, as one amplifies and clarifies the other.

I would very much like to hear from the Minister why Amendment 5 would not be acceptable, except to a control freak. That appears to be perhaps the Government’s vision for the railways.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

5: Clause 2, page 2, line 15, after “Regulations” insert “or by the competitive award of a contract in the form of a concession to a private sector entity.”

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, if I may respond to what the Minister said, he is asking us to make a huge bet on what he refers to as the benefits of public ownership. Most of us who are of a certain age can remember public ownership, and we remember that the benefits were few and far between. He is asking us to take a leap of faith that this time round it is going to be different, but he will not—

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

The noble Lord has spoken as if public ownership is something evil. I remember, when I worked on the west coast main line, that 90% of the trains ran on time. That is a far cry from what is now the case. It was so different from what he is saying that he really should take a history lesson in what was right about British Rail.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I made no reference to good or evil. I am talking about operational efficiency. I am sure the noble Lord is correct in drawing attention, as has happened several times today, to the deficiencies of the current operation of the west coast main line, but other noble Lords have rightly drawn attention to the fact that there are private sector operators in this country currently operating with the efficiency levels that he refers to, and better—so the private sector has a lot to be said for it as well.

The fact is that public ownership is something about which the country largely breathed a sigh of relief when we moved away from it—rightly or wrongly, whatever the history behind that might have been—and every other European country over the last few years has moved away from exclusive public ownership operation. Even train companies such as Deutsche Bahn, which stood once at the pinnacle of public regard, are now something of a joke in their own country.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am only trying to move an amendment.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

It is the introduction to it that is the problem. Is it not the case that the public support public ownership of the railways, and that the public sector had to take over the east coast line because the private company failed to deliver the service?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord brings me to exactly my point. The benefits of public ownership that the noble Lord was able to refer to were, first, that it is popular and, secondly, that it was in the manifesto. Those two things might be absolutely true, but they are not quantifiable passenger benefits. They are not passenger benefits at all; they are political facts that sit there in the background.

Of course the system has broken down, especially since Covid. I have acknowledged that, and the need for reform. What this amendment seeks to do is allow a degree of variability, non-uniformity, difference of practice, choice, options to the Government, rather than having a single, purely nationalised, purely state-controlled machine that we are told will bring us benefits, one of which, as far as I can make out, will be flexibility.

I really did not discern any others, except that we will not be paying fees to private sector operators—a point the Minister has made several times. We will not, but in the picture of the cost of running the railways the fees are extremely small; they are a tiny percentage of what is involved. If the private sector can continue, post Covid, to generate the sort of growth in passenger numbers that it generated before Covid after privatisation, and we can get back to those happy days, the amount of money being paid to operators would be swamped by the revenues that would be coming in. That is the bar that public ownership has to match and we have no guarantees that it will do so. We are asked to take the whole thing on trust. To that extent, I wish to press my Amendment 5 and test the opinion of the House on it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, our Amendment 7 is about rail devolution, discussed extensively in Committee from all sides of the Chamber. We believe it is really important that this first piece of rail legislation from the new Government not only meets their manifesto commitment to public ownership of the railways but allows further rail lines to be transferred to metro mayors and local and regional authorities where there is a strong case, and a desire, by the locally elected members. Local accountability is key.

I remind the House that we have discussed in detail the huge success of the Overground and the Elizabeth line in London and of Merseyrail in the Liverpool region, and the desire for metropolitan areas such as Greater Manchester to deliver a truly integrated public transport offer, branded under one logo and accountable to the mayor. These not only improve transport but contribute to housing and economic growth. I hope that the Minister can offer some stronger words today about future devolution, not just the limited existing devolved lines. The Minister started to outline this in response to the previous group, and I hope to hear more.

We on these Benches want our railway to become a reliable, fast, cost-effective and efficient service for everyone, with local services run in a way that serves the needs of local areas and local communities. I sensed in Committee that the Minister was listening very carefully to the points that were made, especially given his direct experience in a former role of running and expanding the Overground service in London.

I thank the Minister for his time, since Committee, meeting with my noble friends to discuss our amendments further and the assurances that we would like to hear at this stage. I hope the Minister can today assure the House that, as franchises end and come into public ownership, there will be genuine consultation and discussion with devolved authorities on how future services should look, and indeed on how best to run them—including the option for locally run and accountable devolved rail services, in addition to those already devolved. We believe that this will help bring about the transformation of the railway that is the aim of this Bill. I look forward to hearing from the Minister real assurances in this area. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 12 standing in my name. I have a great deal of sympathy with the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. Both amendments are aiming at the same thing.

I said earlier today that there are a number of crucial things missing from this Bill: one is staff, and we will come to that, and another is the passenger, and we have dealt with that. The third is the local authorities, the regions, the metropolitan authorities and devolution as a whole. On this side of the House we have always had great aspirations for the powers of combined metropolitan authorities and regional government, and for their expansion. We are largely responsible for promoting and establishing mayoralties in Manchester and the West Midlands, and in other places as well, such as Teesside and so forth. We have done that with a view to expanding their powers, and part of that was to take on a greater role in transport. We are seeing the beginning of that in Manchester with the buses, and Merseyrail is operated by the combined authority.

In doing that, we are coming from a successful metropolitan model, London, which already has many of these powers. As far as we can make out, these powers, where rail is concerned—not buses—are effectively to be closed down where they do not already exist. They will not be expanded further—the Minister has been quite clear about that—and we will not see the growth of rail on a metropolitan basis.

My Amendment 12 is simpler than that advanced by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. It would require a preliminary report that outlines the proposed framework in which Great British Railways is going to communicate with local authorities and regional authorities about passenger railway services. That it is going to communicate is something that the Government have committed to, as the Labour Party document Getting Britain Moving said so. There is going to be a great deal of consultation and involvement on every possible front, but, again, we are told that we have to take all of this on trust—that none of this will become manifest until we see the great rail Bill that will come in the future, with a bit of consultation but without seeing a proper text in advance for pre-legislative scrutiny.

We are trying to get it established now, as a principle at least, that the Government can initiate these communications before that Bill comes into effect. They can set up structures that allow those communications to take place; this amendment requires the Government effectively to do that.

If the Minister cannot agree to the precise amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, I very much hope that he will at least be able to agree to my amendment, which asks him to get those structures—which he envisages happening—in place as soon as possible, so that local authorities and the relevant regional authorities can be involved.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, in response to the previous group, the Minister emphasised— I think it was in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan—that the concession model would not comfortably fit national rail services. I accept that, and he made my point for me in making his response. The Government must not be allowed to create a national monolith, because one size will not fit all. Part of the variability that we should celebrate in this House is that which comes with devolution, because it fits local areas comfortably.

The Government have made a great deal of the £22 billion or £40 billion black hole and the shortage of public money. Money is undoubtedly in short supply. The Government have also made a lot of their support for devolution, but if devolution on rail transport services is to flourish then there has to be an alternative source of funding and of investment. Local authorities, even on the big scale of metro mayors, will not have the resources to invest in a pure public sector model.

Our concern in our Amendment 7 is that the Government leave themselves the scope to access or call upon alternative models of funding. That would be very much along the lines of what the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, suggested: some form of local partnership or an alternative structure, other than a pure public sector company. As my noble friend Lady Pidgeon says, we will be listening carefully to the Minister’s reply.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to speak in support of my noble friend Lady Brinton and the significant group of signatories to this amendment. This eye-catching group of people campaign on disability-related issues and have made important points in this debate and others aligned with it. In addition to that amendment, which speaks for itself, there is Amendment 11 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Scott.

Although the experiences of people using wheelchairs and those who do not have perfect sight and so on are very much at the sharp end of passengers’ experiences, the passenger body generally does not have a good experience in Britain these days. There are huge problems for passengers of every age group and every level of physical ability, so there is a massive job to be done in improving that experience. People would put up with a second-rate experience, perhaps, if they were paying second-level fares, but they are paying premium fares for a very rough deal, and those two just do not sit together.

Amendment 11 seeks to establish a body that will work on behalf of passengers: a body dedicated to passengers’ needs and to creating the kind of experience that those of us who are lucky enough to travel abroad on trains know can be achieved with a perfectly normal, non-premium rail service in other countries. If they can do it, I do not see why we cannot.

I am very pleased to see Amendment 15 in the name of the Minister, and I look forward with great interest to what he is going to say about it, because I hope it will reassure us that the Government’s plans include the creation of a passenger standards authority —or something similarly named—that will look out for passengers. I also hope that the Government will produce a commitment that suits the needs of the signatories of Amendment 8.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise with some humility to make a few comments on Amendment 8, which, of course, is one where the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson, bring an experience that cannot be gainsaid in your Lordships’ House. I said in Committee that I fully acknowledge—from my own personal knowledge—that the Minister is personally committed to seeing improvements in regard to accessibility. I know that it is a matter of importance to him, but none the less, fine words and parsnips come to mind. Action is needed and we need to see real progress. If Great British Railways offers something in that regard that has not been offered before, that would be greatly to its credit.

In relation to Amendment 11, from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, this is another example of what the Government could be doing now. It is already the Government’s policy to have a passenger standards authority; they have set that out in the document Getting Britain Moving. Like so many other things, it is wrapped up in a Bill that we are told we might see in 12 or 18 months. I have expressed in Committee a degree of doubt and scepticism as to whether the Government will meet that target. I hope they will, but these are very complex issues, and it could take even longer than that before we see the Bill. Then, of course, it has to be passed and enacted, and then, as I keep pointing out, it has to be implemented. Change on that scale does not happen overnight; it will take several years for it to be implemented. Where in that timeframe is the passenger standards authority going to stand? Will we see it coming to life at the beginning of the process or at the end? Could it be four or five years away before it comes into existence? We have no idea.

The amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, would at least say, “This is one thing you can get started on now. You can get it up and running very quickly and it could be something that passengers could benefit from at a really early stage”. I really do not understand why the Government cannot accept, if it turns out that is the case, what the noble Baroness is proposing.

I have no comment on Amendment 15 in the name of the Government except to say that it is, of course, entirely unobjectionable from our point of view.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak first to Amendment 8, which was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and is supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and my noble friend Lord Blunkett, and to Amendment 15 which is tabled in my name. I thank the noble Baronesses for their amendment and for the productive discussion we had last week. As I said in Committee, I feel personally ashamed of the industry that I am so familiar with as so many deficiencies come out of the way that it treats passengers, particularly those in need of some assistance. Many of those deficiencies are a result of the fragmented structure of the privatised railway.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has shown me and described to me the plethora of apps that you need to buy tickets, the differences in how they work, what they do and whether they enable you to book a seat, a wheelchair space or a ticket for the whole of your journey. I am shocked by it, and I cannot bear for her to show me much more, because all she would do is show me more apps that work differently from those that she has already shown me. We cannot and should not tolerate that. The lack of consistency in train design has been highlighted today, as has the lack of reliable, accurate information about whether crucial facilities such as lifts and accessible toilets are working, and there are other issues.

Looking ahead to the wider railways Bill, establishing Great British Railways will provide the opportunity, for the first time in three decades, to begin to take a coherent approach to these matters. Some of them can be done quickly, some of them we can start now and some of them will, by virtue of the longevity of rolling stock and structures, take a long time, but if we do not start, we will never achieve them. However, I also agree that the noble Baronesses and the many disabled passengers on whose behalf they speak should not have to wait for Great British Railways to come along before we start to improve things, so, as I discussed with the noble Baronesses last week, the Government have tabled an amendment and we also have a number of verbal commitments that I shall place on record in the House today.

First, the Government will work with the disabled community to develop and publish an accessibility road map that will explain the actions we intend to take to improve things for disabled people or others requiring assistance in advance of GBR being set up. We are not waiting for it to do that. The road map will suggest how the Government can work with the industry to prevent situations like those we have heard about in this House so far. As discussed, it will cover important matters that the noble Baronesses have raised with me. They include measuring and reporting on lift reliability and maintenance, providing confirmation and clarity about the legal obligation of operators to provide every disabled person with assistance when travelling whether or not a pre-booking has been made, and improving consistency in the service provided to disabled people across the board. We will engage with the disabled community on the development of the road map to ensure that when it is finished, it works for them.

Secondly, I commit before the House that this Government will provide the funding to develop phase 5 of the passenger assist app. As the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, knows from our previous discussions, I have made it clear and will continue to make it clear to those involved that the development of this next phase of the programme must be done in consultation with the noble Baronesses and representatives of disabled people to ensure that it delivers the assistance that people deserve and addresses their needs.

Finally, we have tabled Amendment 15, which is before the House today. It amends the Equality Act 2010 to make it clear that publicly owned train companies are subject to the public sector equality duty. Although it is the Government’s view that the public sector equality duty already applies to publicly owned train operating companies, we are concerned that that is currently not as clear as it needs to be. By adding them to the list of public authorities in the Act, we will ensure that there can be no mistake. Network Rail and Transport for London are already named in the Act, but train operating companies previously were not, which is something that, if this amendment is agreed, we will remedy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I have one very brief question for the Minister, following the warnings by the noble Lord, Lord Young. Have the Government looked at this from the point of view not just of what I would call the finished product of the nationalised railway system but of how the categorisation of a mixed economy would work? We, the nation, will be in a situation of a mixed, some-and-some economy for a significant number of years to come.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Young sought throughout Committee, with great forensic precision and courtesy, to get answers to the sort of questions he has been raising today, and I have sought, with rather blundering efforts, to get answers to very similar questions. Here we are on Report, still asking questions that the Government have consistently failed to answer throughout. The reason is that, as I said earlier today, this is a rushed Bill that has not been thought through properly as to its broader consequences. These are consequences not to be dealt with in a future Bill coming down the road but that flow directly from the measures in this Bill. I very much hope the Minister can give some account of them today and explain how the Bill and this nationalisation will affect the public finances in what I call, in my blundering way, balance sheet terms.

There are other items. Since we discussed this Bill in Committee, we and the country have had the body blow of the employers’ national insurance increase delivered by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Amendment 19 in my name is there to probe what the consequences of that will be for Great British Railways. Will there be a very significant increase in staff costs on the railways as a result, and what impact is that likely to have on the revenue expenditure that the railways can undertake?

In Amendment 18, I ask for clarity on something that also flows directly from the Bill—it is a direct consequence of it, and not something to be dealt with in a future Bill—to do with the harmonisation of staff wages, terms and conditions as they transfer from diverse employers in the private sector to a single employer owned by the state. Drivers and other staff are employed by the railway companies on terms agreed with trade unions but not necessarily the same terms as between one company and another, so drivers’ pay, terms and conditions will vary somewhat between one company and another. The Government have resisted saying, at any point, what they will do about this if they are a single employer. Of course, theoretically, each franchise as it falls due will be placed in a separate company from the others, so it is perfectly possible, legally, for it to have a separate agreement with its staff, different from that which another nationalised company has with its staff, replicating the current arrangements, if it chooses to do so. Is that the Government’s intention, or is there an intention that wages, terms and conditions should be harmonised? If the latter, do the Government imagine that they will be harmonised on the basis of the lowest common denominator, the highest common denominator, or some denominator that might be found in the middle as a sort of average? This is a direct consequence of the Bill, but nothing has been said by the Minister about it.

I come back to the question of staff consultation. There has been no staff consultation about the change of employer. The idea that the Minister might wander around Waterloo station randomly consulting drivers as he accosts them, which he held out when he spoke earlier, is an attractive and enticing one. That is to be encouraged—there are not enough Ministers going around randomly accosting staff whom they employ in the public sector—but it hardly constitutes what might be called formal consultation in industrial relations terms.

I hope I am forgiven for saying this, but earlier I saw the Minister having a quiet chat in a break for a Division with his brother, the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, with his great industrial relations experience. Who knows? Perhaps he was pointing out to the Minister that normal industrial relations consultation requires a little more than simply wandering around and chatting to the staff on the station as you meet them, welcome though that is.

I very much hope that by now, with all the warning that the Minister had about these issues in Committee, he will be able to give an account of himself that will satisfy the legitimate questions of my noble friend Lord Young, and will be able to explain to us what his employment and industrial relations strategy is as a direct consequence of the nationalisations that will take place under the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

Tabled by

[Lord Moylan]

12: Clause 2, page 3, line 32, at end insert—
“30D Preliminary Report on Communication with Local Transport AuthoritiesThe Secretary of State must, within six months of the day on which the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 is passed, publish a preliminary report outlining the proposed framework for communication between Great British Railways (GBR) and local transport authorities across the United Kingdom.”

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, this amendment deals with devolution and requires the Government to start work on that in the next few months and explain how they are going to do it. One thing that is new today, as far as I am aware and I have listened fairly carefully to all parts of this debate, is that the Minister has said that he intends to issue his consultation document before the end of this calendar year. Did my ears hear that correctly?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I said I hoped to.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

On the basis of that “hope”, which I imagine the Minister will expect to be held to—and which I will be holding him to—I am prepared not to move this amendment, because it will simply be timed out by that consultation document which would replace it, so to speak.

Amendment 12 not moved.

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

13: Clause 2, page 3, line 32, at end insert—
“30D Statement on the impact of the Act on rail freight targetThe Secretary of State must, within six months of the day on which the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 is passed, make a statement in each House of Parliament outlining how the Government’s plans to achieve a 75% increase in the volume of rail freight in the United Kingdom by 2050 are affected by the provisions of that Act.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to make a statement outlining the Government's plans to take all reasonable steps to achieve a 75 per cent increase in the volume of rail freight in the United Kingdom by 2050.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am afraid the case is rather different in relation to Amendment 13, which relates to freight and requires the Government to state not simply that they intend to meet the 75% target for the increase in freight volumes but how they intend to do so. It remains wholly mysterious how the Government are going to do this, and it is time that that veil should be drawn back and we should be allowed to know. This amendment would require them to do that. I wish to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 13.

Flight Cancellations

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I start by joining with the Prime Minister in welcoming President Trump in his restoration to office. Cancelled flights are not merely a domestic phenomenon; they affect transatlantic journeys. In the reset that the Government will no doubt undertake now with the American Administration, perhaps they could work together to improve matters for us all in that regard.

On own domestic arrangements, now that we have left the European Union, are the Government assessing whether the compensation scheme we inherited from the European Union could be improved for cancelled and delayed flights to give a better deal to the customer? Like rail nationalisation, the Minister could score it as a Brexit benefit.

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

Regulation 261/2004 sets out the rights of passengers in the event of flight disruptions, such as cancellations and long delays. On the noble Lord’s question, I have no current information about changing the arrangements, but I will certainly go away to see what can be done.

Franchising Schemes (Franchising Authorities) (England) Regulations 2024

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Grand Committee

I believe the Minister referred to the fact that the forthcoming buses Bill will contain measures that allow local authorities once again to run their own buses. The noble Lord, Lord Grayling, asked some very important questions about demand-responsive bus services. The strength that the local authorities buying and running their own buses could provide would be in those areas where socially necessary bus services—for example, to hospitals and so on—cannot be provided effectively on a commercial basis. So is it possible for the Minister to give us some indication at this early stage of whether the scope of the new buses Bill will include issues such as those raised by the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, and me?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we recently had a Statement in the other place given by the Secretary of State on bus franchising. My understanding is that this instrument gives effect to that Statement—at least its initial parts. I recall that, when we debated that Statement in your Lordships’ House, I had the temerity to describe it as being essentially a bogus offer.

I gave two reasons for that, but I have now found a third, which is that the instrument does not actually allow local authorities to go in for bus franchising at all. All it does is allow them to apply to the Secretary of State for permission to prepare a plan for doing so, but nothing is said, and nothing has been said by the Minister, about what criteria will be applied when such plans are submitted. In order to understand the implications of this instrument, we need to understand that. The Minister has said nothing about how many applications he or his department expect to receive, or about what proportion of such applications he considers it likely that the department will grant. It is perfectly possible that the answers to all these questions is “zero” under this instrument, and that bus franchising will be no further forward as a result of this very grand announcement, which was made with great hoopla in the other place, and of this instrument than it is today. We really would like to know some of the answers to some of these questions in practical and not simply theoretical and legislative terms.

I return to the two reasons I gave when we debated the Statement in your Lordships’ House. The first is that the policy comes with no money attached to it. At the time, the Chancellor had not made her Budget Statement. She since has, so it should be open to the Minister to say how much money has been allocated to supporting local authorities to undertake franchising, because the whole purpose of franchising is to generate services which the market will not bear. Nobody denies that there is a cost to local authorities in undertaking franchising—a cost that they are most unlikely to be able to support from their own resources—so what money is the department, or are the Government in general, putting behind this greatly trumpeted policy?

My second cause for complaint in that earlier debate has already been referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson: the complete lack of capacity of local authorities, certainly outside the metropolitan areas, to put together and run a bus service as an integrated operation. There is more to this than simply saying “We’d like the buses to run here”. Route planning involves thinking about demand, the locations of passengers and their relationship to places of work, hospitals and other destinations, and so forth. That is a skill; it does not just come to a committee of local councillors sitting around a table. Even if you have experience of route planning, as we have seen in Manchester, you have to think about branding, fares and ticketing, and what you will accept by way of tender. Are you accepting cash or is it cashless only? You have to know what sorts of discounts, season tickets and so forth you are willing to offer. As the noble Lord knows, and as I have had the privilege of observing in the past, in the various positions that he and I have occupied, real skill is required to do this well.

The answer that we have had from the noble Lord so far is a mildly amusing one: the Department for Transport is going to set itself up as a centre of expertise in how to plan routes, and do branding, fares and ticketing, for bus companies and services throughout the country. Now, I fully acknowledge that there is at least one person in the Department for Transport who has the skill to do that, and that is the noble Lord the Minister. But he is going to be jolly busy doing all these jobs, being both a Minister and planning routes for modest settlements and hamlets in the remoter counties of England.

However, if it is not going to be the Minister, who will be recruited to do this skilled work in the Department for Transport? Will they be recruited on a sort of ad hoc consultancy basis? Is this department waiting speculatively for applications to arrive, which may or may not meet criteria that have not been vouchsafed to us so far, and which may then be rejected or accepted by the Secretary of State? How will this wonderful offer of skill and expertise inside the Department for Transport be achieved in practice? The noble Lord should not be allowed to leave this Grand Committee without explaining those things to us in some detail.

I come finally to a point that is new to me, because it struck me only yesterday evening when I went to a reception given by the Accessible Transport Policy Commission and found myself speaking to the chief executive of a private bus company—a commercial operation in a large provincial city; I will not say which. He described to me all the good work it was doing to make its fleet more accessible to people with disabilities. We even talked about something that was new to me, which I am interested to explore—dementia-friendly flooring.

He described to me the close relationship he had, working with the local authority, then he looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re going to confiscate my business”. That took me aback, because I had not thought about it in those terms—but in practice that is what franchising will do. It is, in effect, the confiscation of a business. Of course, he may still secure the franchise, but then he would simply be operating services for somebody else, for a fee. He would no longer be running a business; he would simply be somebody else’s agent in doing that.

This is confiscation, like the nationalisation of the train operating companies, which is happening. I have to say to the Minister that there is an increasing whiff of Bolshevism about this Government’s transport policy—and we know that that did not end well.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords and the noble Baroness for their extensive comments. I turn first to the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, and his remarks about where this might apply and the circumstances in which it would be appropriate.

The primary thing to say about this is that it is a matter of choice. This statutory instrument extends choice to all local transport authorities, which might choose various solutions around the scale of public bus services in their areas.

I did not need to search for examples outside London because the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, gave me some, including the very rural county of Cornwall, where the public transport network is now a model. It includes demand-responsive transport, to a limited extent, but it has also reintroduced bus services in places where they have not been seen for a very long time.

The noble Baroness’s example of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole is one of a combined conurbation where the bus services are, in my judgment, of quite a good standard. It may well be that the local transport authorities concerned decided that that service was sufficient, but there are many other places in England where the bus service is not judged to be of a sufficient standard, where it has fallen to a bare minimum and where the reintroduction of some service standards would not only be a good thing but would create revenue which would expand the total service provision.

Regrettably, I can find some examples of places—although I think it would be better not to name them—where sufficient short-term service cuts have been applied that the revenue generated is so low that the whole bus service is in a continual spiral of decline. There are other places where that has not happened. That is the supply side of the choice we are offering local authorities, so that they can do what they think is best.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to demand-responsive transport. It is a solution, obviously, but the department is working hard on some experiments to seek to reduce the per-journey cost of DRT, which is very difficult. It is possible to register demand-responsive services, even in a franchised environment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, made a number of points; indeed, it was she who gave Cornwall as a very practical example of an extremely rural place that has, by experiment, succeeded in franchising and has a very good network. She referred to the criticism of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. As I mentioned in my opening speech, the department is revising its bus franchising guidance in order to set out the process accessibly and in detail. I hope that this will satisfy the committee’s demand.

The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, questioned the capacity of local transport authorities to do this job in rather more balanced terms than the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, did. The department recognises that active support is needed for local authorities that wish to franchise.

I draw both noble Lords’ attention to the Bus Centre of Excellence, which is funded by the Department for Transport and supported by the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to my knowledge of this process as it applies to London. He will probably be very pleased to learn that the Bus Centre of Excellence is chaired by none other than Leon Daniels, who ran surface transport in Transport for London for seven years, I think, and has an intimate knowledge of how franchising works in London. Moreover, since leaving, he has got a very good knowledge of how it might work in the rest of England.

The noble Baroness referred to the impact of legislation and to the local authorities who have successfully continued to run their own in-house bus companies when many were disposed of. She is absolutely right that places such as Reading, Blackpool and Nottingham are good examples of where arm’s-length local authority companies have delivered very successful bus services. The Government intend for that route to be open to local authorities who wish to use it; it will be part of the scope of the buses Bill. It is right to offer local authorities a real choice about how they deliver their local bus services.

Renewable Transport Fuel Obligations (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) Order 2024

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Trefgarne (Con)]

I apologise to your Lordships for not being in my place when we resumed following the Division.

I have a simple question for the Minister. Can he say whether all this applies to general aviation, in particular aviation involving smaller aircraft which very often run on aviation gasoline and not the fuel that forms part of this agreement? This is important because the price of fuel is a critical part of operators’ costing, they need to know where and when they can get it and that it will be available when required. In essence, the question is, does this apply to general aviation and to smaller aircraft running on gasoline, as well as to larger ones running on turbine fuel?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for arranging a briefing with officials so that I could better understand this complex proposal. The briefing was indeed helpful and I learned a great deal.

I find this a troubling statutory instrument not because I have any objection to the use of SAF by aircraft—indeed, I welcome that—but because of the chosen mechanism. We are still meant to be a free-market country and the normal means of market operation in this country is that, where there is a demand for something, a supply is forthcoming.

We are told that, despite the fact that SAF is estimated to cost between three times and seven times as much as standard kerosene-based fuel, there is a genuine and strong demand for it from airlines, not because they enjoy paying more for their fuel necessarily but because from their own reputational point of view they wish to do as much as they can to decarbonise the operation of their fleets. SAF is the principal technique available to them for doing that at the moment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, pointed out, so the demand undoubtedly exists. Why is the supply therefore not forthcoming? Why is it that they would have to go somewhere else to buy SAF—which is the implication of their position—when the demand exists here and we are home to major suppliers? Nobody seems to have explained this.

We have decided, despite the fact that we allegedly operate a market economy, that the Government are going to intervene so as to mandate the supply of this fuel. The means of mandating it is through this instrument —through the mandate—and that will not only oblige it to be produced but oblige it to be sold in certain quantities that will increase every year.

That addresses only the standard available type of SAF—the HEFA-type SAF that the Minister referred to. There are other, more exotic means of producing SAF not yet available, some of them perhaps even undreamt of. They will be subject to a separate mandate so that, to fulfil the mandate, it will be obligatory to produce some SAF by these alternative methods. That graph continues to grow over a period, as illustrated in the table on page 7 of the statutory instrument. What I would really like to know is: why can this not be done by the market?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this debate. I will take the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, first. Her first questions were about the length of time that it has taken to bring this statutory instrument together.

We have engaged extensively with industry in this area. Two consultations have been completed and, in both cases, industry was generally supportive of our proposals. The most recent consultation, in March 2023, received 104 responses and the government response to this was published in April 2024. We received responses from a range of stakeholders, including fuel suppliers, airlines and NGOs, so it has been extensively consulted on. This statutory instrument replaces the previous one tabled, because there has been a change of Government; the current one was therefore tabled by the new Government.

The noble Baroness asked whether this is good SAF and what good SAF is. The Government have been clear that the mandate must deliver fuels with the highest sustainability credentials. We are therefore putting in place strict sustainability criteria that SAF must meet to be eligible under the mandate. SAF must be made from sustainable waste or residues, such as used cooking oil or forestry residues; recycled carbon fuels, such as unrecyclable plastics; or power-to-liquid fuels made using low-carbon, renewable or nuclear energy. SAF produced from food, feed or energy crops will not be allowed. We will continue to monitor the sustainability of SAF pathways to ensure that high sustainability standards are maintained.

The noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, asked whether this applies to general aviation. I have been referred to a very complex answer, but I am not sure that I can do full justice to his question. If the noble Lord will indulge me, I will write to him fully on that.

Lastly, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, raised some questions. He asked about the cost implications for passengers. I am assured that, although SAF will be more expensive than traditional jet fuel, it must be right that the costs of decarbonising the fuel are borne by those that produce the emissions. Providing that sufficient SAF is available, increases in average airfares will fall within the range of their annual variations, seen historically, from which it is not difficult to deduce that the effect on passenger numbers will be quite small.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is correct that the guaranteed return is not in this instrument. That is why the Government have committed to a revenue certainty mechanism.

If there are any questions that I have failed to answer completely, I will write to noble Lords and the noble Baroness about them.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

May I briefly ask the Minister something? There seem to be two guarantees going on here. Might the Minister be able to inform your Lordships about how they will interact? One is a guaranteed price mechanism. As I understand it, although I am happy to be corrected, the suppliers will be guaranteed a price for the SAF, the suppliers being the large companies that supply this type of fuel—the BPs and so on of this world. The other is a guaranteed return to the investors. The investors are presumably the people who will pay for the construction of the facilities that will produce this material, source it and so on—that is, the infrastructure required to generate it. Can the Minister say how those two guarantees interact, both legislatively and financially? Is the Minister saying that one is being legislated for in this instrument and one is to come later? Noble Lords would be interested to understand that, I think.

MV “Ruby”: Ammonium Nitrate

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is obviously right that this is an important issue. I will write to her about the current position in this respect, but I have to say that the position of the motor vessel “Ruby” is not affected by the situation in the past that she talked about.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the tone of what the Minister has said about not spreading alarm unnecessarily, but can he say what actions the port authority has taken to engage with communities in Great Yarmouth to address their understandable concerns?

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.

Vehicle Emissions Trading Schemes (Amendment) Order 2024

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on his short introduction to this draft order. It is 14 pages of gobbledygook, mostly caused by Brexit and the inability of legislation in Northern Ireland to keep up with the rest of the country. I am sure that will not go on in future. Will the Minister say whether it matters where the affected vehicles are manufactured or stabled? I can see that some people will try to take advantage of whatever benefits there are on one side or the other to move vehicles across the water or to somewhere else. The sooner we have one UK-wide standard for things like that, the better.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, talking of strange verbs, I was always struck, when I was involved with Transport for London, that on London Underground there is the verb “to non-stop”, as in, “This train is non-stopping at this station”. I suppose that there might have been a time when I could have done something to eradicate it, but I never made the effort and so no doubt it will continue to flourish.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord also support the verb “to platform”?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

If I were to take that question, this could be a very long intervention, so perhaps the noble Lord will forgive me if I move more directly to the instrument itself. As the Minister has explained, it essentially does two things: first, it corrects some errors and technical problems that exist in the legislation—the statutory instrument—that was passed last year; it is good to see errors corrected. Secondly, it extends the vehicle emissions trading scheme to Northern Ireland, which, as I understand it, is being done with the support, and at the wish, of the Northern Ireland Assembly. As such, these Benches have no objection to raise to the approval of this instrument.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their consideration of this draft Order in Council.

I will respond to the specific points raised. The points about technical adjustments are noted. I beg the forgiveness of the House that some of this stuff about zero-emission vehicles and alternative technologies is very technically complex, and I would forgive technical people for not getting all of it right.

On the general point about 2030 and 2035, the Government are committed to phasing out new cars that rely solely on internal combustion engines by 2030. That means that pure petrol/diesel cars will be phased out and, by 2035, all new cars and vans sold will need to be 100% zero emission. We will be setting out further detail on the requirements for cars and vans sold between 2030 and 2035 in due course. I hope that continued progress on zero-emission vehicles will give people confidence to purchase these vehicles. It is very important that we deal with carbon and achieve consequential good effects on air quality.

My noble friend Lord Berkeley asked: does it matter? He gave his own answer by saying that the sooner the UK was consistent across its nations, the better. This statutory instrument is the means of doing so—so that is really the answer to that. Apart from debating the doubtful use of verbs on the London Underground— I could find several others worse than “non-stopping”; “to platform” is quite bad as well—it is nice to hear that there is no objection. It is nice that there is a considerable degree of agreement, because this rights something that clearly could not be righted at the time.

There is now consensus across the UK that the zero-emission vehicle mandate is the right tool to move our car and van market towards being fully zero-emission in 2035. The UK Government, Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive are in agreement that net zero is a priority for our economies and for our future. This consistency of approach is to the benefit of business, with barriers removed to accessing the Northern Ireland market, and to Northern Irish consumers, who will reap the rewards of zero-emission vehicles, including lower costs of ownership, cleaner air and reduced noise pollution, as the UK continues on its path to being a clean energy superpower.

Vehicle Drivers (Certificates of Professional Competence) (Amendment) Regulations 2024

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, following the last two speeches, I can tell the House that no one has ever let me anywhere near a lorry. Nevertheless, we on these Benches very much support these measures, which strike the right balance between making sure that people are safe to be on the road and removing unnecessary bureaucracy. That will be helpful for drivers and for SMEs in particular, so we support that.

I would be interested to hear from the Minister what plans there are to keep the impact of these measures under review, particularly the move to e-learning. I am sure that is a sensible thing to do, but we will probably need some data just to make sure that there is no adverse impact; indeed, it may be beneficial.

I was not entirely clear from what the Minister said whether the certificate will be interoperable in Europe and with European standards. I am thinking particularly about drivers in Northern Ireland who cross the border into the Republic multiple times. I did not entirely understand what he had to say about that.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for arranging a briefing with officials for me on this instrument, and indeed on the previous instrument, about which I should have made a similar remark.

This is a Brexit benefit; there is no doubt at all about that. It gives us the chance to set standards and a training regime for our own HGV drivers to match the needs of our economy and our workforce. That brings me—if I may anticipate the Minister—to the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market. My understanding is that this is a domestic certificate that will operate in the whole of the UK, including Northern Ireland, but it will not of itself give any right for the driver to operate on the continent of Europe. For that there will remain the international certificate and the training regime, which will be compliant with European standards. This is wholly to be welcomed as allowing us to be more flexible and responsive.

Nobody has yet mentioned the question of safety. If the Minister says to the House that he believes this regime will result in a level of competence that will not compromise safety in itself, I am perfectly happy to accept that, but the point needs to be raised because safety in the driving of HGVs is a very important factor.

I feel very inadequate in following the speech of my noble friend Lord Attlee. It made me wonder how easy it is for an HGV driver to gain a life peerage. What a pity it is that the vandalism of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill would remove the only one we actually have. However, we have no objections to the instrument.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the contribution of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and I recognise his professional competence, as he has said to me privately that he recognises mine. I agree with many of his remarks, in particular his support of this training regime. He is right that this instrument makes a difference. I will come on specifically to answer the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, about safety in a moment, but I think the noble Earl is right: this adds to the professionalism in these professions, and it is a good thing to do.

The noble Earl referred to the conditions for HGV drivers. He is right, of course, that historically there has been very poor provision. My department is making some progress on improved roadside facilities and safer rest areas. The department recently announced more than £14 million in joint government and industry funding to improve lorry parking infrastructure, boost working conditions for drivers and drive innovation and decarbonisation.

The HGV parking match-funded grant scheme was launched in 2022 to fund investment in driver welfare, lorry parking provisions, site security and so forth. The department announced the latest grant allocations as recently as 10 October. There are 23 provisionally successful bids, amounting to approximately £4.5 million of government funding and leveraging about £8 million from industry. I am sure the noble Earl will contend that that is not enough. I will therefore write to him on his question as to whether we can find out exactly how many people sleep in their cabs, when maybe they should not need to. I do not know, but I understand the question and will endeavour to answer it in writing.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for her support. We will of course keep these plans under review—especially, as she said, the one that enables people to rejoin the industry. Having left doing my five days of training until after a point at which I realised that I might be the Minister of State for Rail, it was then a bit of a struggle to get the five days in. I was wondering what would happen if I ran out of them. This is a good thing, because there are people who leave these industries and regret that they do so and who then find it difficult to get the qualifications. However, I also agree with the proposition in the instrument before us: they cannot use it to get round the requirement for the five days of training. They should not be able to do that.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, had it exactly right that, if you drive in the EU, you will need the EU certificate of professional competence. The EU, as I understand it, is considering introducing reforms, but it is not as fast as we are, so it is unlikely to recognise this national CPC in the near future. These reforms are necessary, however, and good things to do anyway.

Lastly, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to safety. Driving a heavy vehicle of any sort is a professional job and it needs to be safe. There has been a lot of consideration about the nature of this training. I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that it is a good thing, despite the opposition to it from some people—a few operators and some drivers. Apart from anything else, as I can testify, you can hold one of these licences for a long time. I passed my PCV test in July 1974 and, until these regulations first came into effect about 10 years ago, I did not need to do a single day’s further training. If you think about the possibilities of driving either a vehicle like the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, does, or the modest public passenger-carrying vehicles that I drive, that is extraordinary. It is absolutely right that people who follow these professions should get periodic training. They should be reminded of the serious consequences of breaking regulations on drivers’ hours, of not complying with the Highway Code and of a number of other things—including, if I put my railway hat on, the possibility of tall vehicles striking railway bridges—all of which are covered in this training. In addition, in the case of passenger-carrying vehicles, dealing with passengers is covered properly.

It is very good to hear that all sides of your Lordships’ House support this. We are not going to abolish the qualification. I can attest, as I said, to the focus on road safety, that the CPC brings, and I beg to move that these regulations are adopted.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

19: Clause 2, page 2, line 23, at end insert—
“30ZA Independent financial monitoring of public sector companies(1) The Secretary of State must, within three months of the day on which the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 comes into force, instruct an independent body to conduct monitoring of the financial management of any public sector company with whom a direct award of a public service contract is made under section 30(1A).(2) For the purposes of subsection (1), “monitoring of the financial management” includes the auditing of accounts, the review of spending efficiency, and the making of recommendations to improve cost-effectiveness.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires that the Secretary of State instructs an independent body to conduct financial monitoring of the public sector companies.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I suspect that this will be one of the shorter debates in our consideration of this Bill in Committee, but it is one of the most important. It will be short, I suspect, because this group is rather technical, but it has very great significance, not only for the operation of the railways but for the passenger experience.

There are four amendments in this group, all of them in my name. The first two, Amendments 19 and 20, are closely related. They relate to the very peculiar situation in which we are now going to see the railways operated in this country: that is, that they are going to be practically unmonitored independently as far as their finance is concerned. Compare the railway sector to the water sector or to electricity. These sectors have economic monitoring to ensure that best value is being delivered to the customer. Nothing of the sort is envisaged in relation to our new nationalised railway. There is to be no economic monitoring and no supervision of the setting of fares, and that is what these amendments relate to. One is to do with charges to customers—that is Amendment 19—and the other is to do with the costs incurred by the utility. The railways are a utility, and that is how they are going to be run.

Of course, if they were run by the private sector—as they would be if they were water or electricity—that economic monitoring would cover both the costs charged to the customer and the costs incurred by the operator, because their efficiency would be monitored. As I say, none of that is envisaged here. We are asked to assume that, in public ownership—I am not now talking about a Bill that is going to come to us in 18 months; I am talking about the direct consequences of this Bill as soon as it starts to come into effect and as these franchises move over—the Government are going to set fares in a reasonable way that is not exploitative of customers.

It could be said that that can be assumed because it is not going to be run by the private sector—that the Government are not going to gouge our eyes out, because Governments do not do things like that. But they do. Tell somebody who is applying for an urgent passport at a cost of £1,000 that they are not having their eyes gouged out. Tell someone applying for a statement of their nationality that recognises an existing British nationality who is charged well over £1,000, including each time for their children on top, that they are not having their eyes gouged out—that is several thousand pounds for a family that are already British and simply want to have it recognised, as they are allowed to do, and register as British because they are already British.

We know from experience that Governments are perfectly willing to charge very high fees for their services in order to make a profit. Sometimes, this profit has been complained about—for example, in relation to nationality, not least by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, and others on the Labour Benches when we have debated matters such as that.

Who will decide how fares are set, what the logic is, and what the railways’ aim is in setting those fares? This is particularly true in the case of railways, because they inevitably have variable fares. It is part of the nature of a railway that they aim for the highest return they can get from particular passengers; they are then willing, because of the nature of the structure of the business, to take marginal fares to cover marginal costs from other passengers who might pay very little for the same journey because they are willing to go at a certain time or book a certain distance in advance, and things of that sort. Those who do not have that advantage may find themselves being gouged because they need to travel at the last minute or because they are captive customers. Do not forget how many captive customers the railways have. There are not necessarily a lot of captive customers on the long-distance railways, but on the commuter network, especially around London, they are, in effect, captive customers. How attractive to the Treasury to turn the railways into a mill for generating money for the Government, if that is what it wants to do.

I am not saying what the fares policy should be. What I am saying is that there should be some independent monitoring of how it is done so that customers—or passengers, as I must remember to call them, remembering what I said to the noble Lord, Lord Snape, the other day—do not find themselves trapped in a system and exploited. No independent monitor is proposed, so we have to trust either the Department for Transport or Great British Railways. I am not sure which it will be in the long term, but in the short term, over the next few years, we have to trust the Department for Transport to set fares in a way that is not designed to maximise revenues from those who cannot resist paying them.

Similarly, if this were in the private sector, through the setting of charges there would be economic regulation—as there is in the water industry, at Heathrow Airport and so forth—of the efficiency of the costs with which the railways conduct themselves. There is no sign of that either in the Bill. Again, we are asked to trust the Department for Transport to ensure efficiency. Considering how many staff the Department for Transport employed to monitor and shadow the staff employed by HS2 Ltd, I do not regard it as a great guarantor of the efficiency of delivery and the control of costs. There ought to be an independent body to do that.

That deals, as far as I am concerned, with Amendments 19 and 20. We then come to Amendment 23, which is rather different but again relates to something the public should be entitled to know about: the great transfer of pension liabilities that will occur as a result of moving pension responsibilities from the train operating companies to the Department for Transport. I want to be clear about this: I completely understand that the staff are largely currently members of the national rail pension fund and that they will remain members of the same pension fund. The contributions and so forth should not in themselves change simply because of the Bill—I perfectly follow that. The costs will not increase as a result, but the purpose of this amendment is to probe where they will lie in balance sheet terms. Will they be a liability fully on the Government’s balance sheet? What consequence will that have for the national debt? This is something that we should know, because the railway pension scheme is, obviously, one of the largest pension schemes in the country. These are not trivial sums; they are very significant sums in terms of pension funds.

Finally, I have Amendment 25 on lease payments. I will not trespass into this very deeply because a similar amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham is due to be debated later, and I know that he is much more knowledgeable about these matters than I am, but it is certainly the case that the lease arrangements that exist for the rolling stock are between the train operating companies and the roscos, the rolling stock finance companies. That is where the lease liability exists. Are these to be transferred to the Government? If they are, where will they sit in balance sheet terms? What balance sheet effect would that have? Therefore, there is the question of public debt.

There are two separate strands to these four amendments. One strand relates to balance sheet liabilities and the effect on the Government’s balance sheet of the measures proposed. We are told that this Bill has no cost implications, but is that true? The other relates to how we ensure that the railways are properly and independently monitored to make sure that the fares they charge are not exploitative in circumstances where exploitation is open to them, that their costs are efficient and that they are efficiently delivered. Simply saying that we should trust the Government or the Department for Transport on this is, I suggest, not a satisfactory answer.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, one of the clear attractions of the new system should be increased transparency. There should be no chance that the new authority would be able to hide behind commercial confidentiality. One public body would make life very much easier in terms of national answerability. I do not agree with the mechanism suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, but he is making a valid point. Can the Minister confirm that the passenger standards authority, the passenger body that is going to be the champion of passenger standards, will have the power to investigate fares and report on problems? I gently point out that the Government will no longer be able to blame the train operators. All the blame will now fall on the Government, and passengers will make judgments based on that. It is therefore important that there is a public way for the Government to explain their decisions in relation to train fares and the fare structure overall.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her intervention. Of course, she is absolutely right. The fare system is far too complex, whether it is regulated fares or unregulated fares. One of the primary purposes of bringing train operations into public ownership is to provide the basis of rationalising that fare system without the associated complications of either compensation to private sector operators or, indeed, their saying that some of the information needed to do that is commercially confidential and hence cannot be used to rationalise the system that nobody understands.

On Amendment 19, the department already holds its public train operating companies to account for their financial management through regular review of their management accounts and business plans, as part of its routine contract management activities. That is equally true in relation to privately owned operators whose costs are funded by taxpayers. This scrutiny supports the monitoring of performance against the Secretary of State’s priority to deliver an affordable and sustainable railway. The amendment refers specifically to the auditing of publicly owned train companies’ accounts. It is already the case that those companies must publish their audited accounts annually, which are available in Companies House, so there is already full transparency of their financial performance and management. The proposed amendment would add little value to the existing scrutiny of their financial performance by DOHL ass shareholder, the Department for Transport’s contracting authority, and their own financial auditors, as well as the public via the public audited accounts. That would be an unnecessary additional cost to be borne by the taxpayer which I cannot support.

Regarding Amendment 20, the department already publishes information on its website about payments made to operators under its rail contracts. The department’s published annual report and accounts also detail the department’s expenditure on each contract, as well as any associated year-end balances in respect of payments made in advance or still due to be paid. The Bill does not change that, so there is no need for the taxpayer to pay for an independent body to report on the same data. As I have said previously, the most significant financial impact of the Bill will be that taxpayers will no longer have to foot the bill for tens of millions of pounds in fees paid to private operators each year for the benefit of their shareholders.

Amendment 23 raises the specific question of whether public ownership will expose the Government to pension liabilities that previously sat with private operators. Under the current national rail contracts, DfT funds the legitimate actual costs of the train operating companies. For example, this includes the net operational costs of running services and the cost of leasing rolling stock and pension contributions.

The noble Lord, Lord Young, asked a specific question on Monday about how the Office for National Statistics might classify publicly owned operators in future. I cannot, of course, answer that question, as future classification decisions are a matter for the independent ONS, not for me or my department. What I can do is to confirm the current classification of the DfT contracted operators, which are all currently classified as public non-financial corporations, including the four DOHL-owned operators. I can also confirm what has happened previously when a service is transferred from private to public ownership. For example, following the transfer of services into DOHL, the ONS recently considered the classification of TransPennine trains, and concluded that they should remain classified as a public non-financial corporation. That fact that these publicly owned operators are classified in this way, along with the privately owned operators, means that their costs already impact the public finances. For example—and this is particularly relevant to Amendment 25—both private and publicly owned operators’ rolling stock lease payments already come out of the department’s resource budget.

Turning to pensions, I cannot agree with those who assert that the franchising model left responsibility for funding pension liabilities entirely with the private sector. Even under the form of franchising that was in place before the pandemic, pension costs were to a substantial extent a long-term liability for the public sector. First, this is because the franchising system meant the bidder simply priced any changes in costs into their bids at reletting, changing the amount of subsidy payable to the operator or the premium receivable by Government. This meant that the burden of any increases in pension costs arising during the term of the contract would, at the point of retendering, be passed to the taxpayer. Secondly, in the more recent franchise competitions the department was required to share the risk of any adverse movements in pension deficit recovery payments, as that had become a risk that the private operators stated they were unable to bear. The Bill therefore does not materially change the Government’s level of exposure to liabilities.

On the noble Lord’s second amendment regarding pension liabilities, in previous transfers to DOHL the transferring staff have remained within their existing section of the Railways Pension Scheme at the point of transfer. Railways Pension Scheme contribution rates will not change when services transfer from private to public sector operation and, as mentioned a moment ago, the cost of employer pension contributions is already borne by the Government under the terms of the existing contracts.

The noble Lord may also find it helpful to know that the department already reports in its annual report and accounts the employer’s share of the net pension scheme surplus or deficit, the employer’s share of pension scheme assets and the employer’s share of pension scheme liabilities.

In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, transparency will be enhanced by public ownership. In respect of the question about the passenger standards authority, I am afraid it is too early to say what it will and will not do. That is why we are going to consult about its duties in order to make sure that it represents passengers’ interests in the best way possible.

In view of these observations, noting in particular that the costs of public sector operations are already in the public domain, I urge the noble Lord not to press these amendments.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I may have expressed myself very poorly when I presented these amendments, but I think it is fair to say—I do not mean to sound overcritical—that the Minister has misconceived all of them, or at least the three that I spent some time on. So perhaps the House will indulge me if I simply run through once again the points that I was hoping to make but obviously have not done so very successfully.

I shall start with the remark about pensions. I was not asking the question, “Who funds the pension contributions?” That is an interesting question but one to which I already had the answer, so I did not feel that I needed to ask it. I was asking a specific question about where the balance sheet liability lies, which is a very different question. Are the accumulated liabilities, including unfunded liabilities, now going to score effectively as government debt—the whole package, not the payment year by year? It is the difference, if you like, between the balance sheet and the profit and loss. I have asked a question about balance sheet and the Minister has answered a question about profit and loss. I do not expect to get anything further out of him today but, once he has had a chance to reflect on my comments, he may want to write to me because it is a point that needs to be properly explored and indeed, I suspect, will be returned to in relation to leases when my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham takes the matter up later.

On the question of fares being charged, I take the Minister back to the pre-Covid period when the system under which we operate at the moment was functioning in the way that was expected—Covid of course destroyed and damaged the operation of that system. It is true that not all the fares but a large number of them were set by the Government, but the Government in that case had no interest whatsoever in allowing the train operating companies to make super profits or to exploit passengers who were effectively captive. It will be a different matter when the company operating the trains is a subsidiary of the Department for Transport, and any surplus—we must bear in mind that there are railway lines in this country that generate surpluses—will accrue to the department and therefore presumably to HM Treasury. I put it as a counterfactual question to the Minister: does he believe that, if passport issuance or visa issuance were in the hands of the private sector, the Home Office would allow the private sector to set such outrageously high fees and keep the profits? Of course it would not. The only reason why the Home Office can set such very high fees for a captive audience is that it can keep the profits, or at least they score against the expenditure of the Home Office. It has a financial interest in super returns, which is not true if the super returns are to be retained by the private sector, as was the case under the system that we are currently operating under when it was effectively running. So I do not think the Minister has quite grasped my point.

A similar question arises in relation to costs. He has explained—and I do not deny for a moment—that the department publishes information on what it pays to the train operating companies under its contracts. I am not asking: what do they pay? I am asking: is it efficiently spent? Once it becomes part of the department, there is no interest in demonstrating that efficiency has been achieved if political interests overwrite that. There will be no way of knowing with confidence whether efficiency is being achieved unless there is some sort of independent monitor.

It is possible that having reflected on my closing remarks the Minister wants to take these matters up in correspondence, or we can come back to them on Report. But I think his responses—and I blame myself for this—have failed to understand the points I was getting at. I thought they were reasonably clear but obviously I did not do a very good job. With that, and with the leave of the Committee, I would like to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 19 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

24: Clause 2, page 2, line 23, at end insert—
“30ZA Impact on open access operatorsThe Secretary of State must, within twelve months of the day on which the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 comes into force, and annually thereafter, lay before Parliament a report on the impact of the awarding of public service contracts to public sector companies under subsection 30(1A) on open access operators in the United Kingdom.”

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, earlier in Committee we had a debate on the value of open access and I am not proposing to repeat that. But now that the noble Lord has drawn my attention to the biblical text Getting Britain Moving—which I understand is now the Government’s plan for the railways in the country, the Williams review having been set to one side—I will draw attention to what that document has to say about open access.

It too is full of praise. It says:

“Open access has a proven track record in driving competition”—


competition in this context, at least when the Labour Party was thinking about it before the election, was seen as an attractive thing—

“and better passenger outcomes in countries whose services are run predominantly by public operators”.

We will have a service

“run predominantly by public operators”,

and the implication here is that:

“Open access has a proven track record in driving competition”


and has “better passenger outcomes”, so it must be a very good thing.

That is not the impression I get from the debate so far. I have the impression that there is a degree of resistance to open access on the part of the Government. Indeed, there is a qualification, even in this document, on that. It has to add “value and capacity” to the rail network. Who has to be persuaded that it adds value? Here the document says something that rather confuses me. It says:

“The ORR will continue to make approval decisions on open access applications”.


My understanding was that Great British Railways, not the Office of Rail and Road, was going to make decisions about who could run passenger rail services on the network. Clarity from the Minister on what the intention is in that regard would be very helpful.

If it is Great British Railways, we run into the problem that allowing this to happen will result in competition. The whole purpose of Great British Railways —like that of Lord Ashfield, to whom I referred earlier —is to eliminate what could be regarded as wasteful competition.

This contradiction that lies at the heart of the proposition causes me considerable concern. At the root of it is a rather technical question concerning what is referred to as abstraction. The assumption on the part of those who run the railways—and this has been true of the Department for Transport as well; it is not something new, but I have every reason to think it will continue—is that if somebody provides a railway service in competition with the Government, it is abstracting fares income that otherwise would accrue to the Government. So there is a cost to the Government or Great British Railways, depending on where we are in this process, in allowing open access to operate.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The Bill before the House is specifically about the ownership of services currently operated under contract to the Secretary of State, Scottish Ministers or Welsh Ministers. Transferring and retaining these services in public ownership will not affect open access operators or prevent them running as they do now. It is therefore not necessary, as in Amendment 24, to require the Government to lay a report on the impact of public ownership on open access operators, given that this Bill will not affect the rights of those operators to access the network and run services. I emphasise that as part of the wider railways Bill, any proposed changes to access arrangements and the body that decides them will, of course, be subject to consideration and debate by your Lordships’ House before they are implemented. I beg for some patience in this debate.

Turning to Amendment 27, which requires the ORR to produce an independent report on access, I again reassure the House that under the present public ownership Bill, the ORR will continue its role in relation to access decisions. There is therefore no need for this amendment; an independent function is already in place that will decide on access to ensure there is no disadvantage to non-publicly owned operators. We will set out further detail on GBR roles and responsibilities in the coming months. Given those reassurances and that this Bill does not affect the rights of open access operators to run services, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, once again I am being deflected more than answered. I did not suggest that existing open access operators were going to be closed down. In fact, it says quite explicitly in the biblical document Getting Britain Moving that current

“independent operators (such as Hull Trains and Lumo) … will remain”.

I take it that the existing operators are guaranteed to remain, at least as far as the current terms of their arrangements are concerned.

I find it very worrying that the Minister cannot say whether his long-term vision includes allowing the ORR to make these decisions, or taking it, which I understood is very much the logic of his Bill, into Great British Railways. It simply is not enough to say that this can be deferred. Open access operators that might want to bid for new services—not the existing ones, I grant you—are now going to be entering a period with a very chilling effect, because they will not know whether open access is going to be welcomed in the future. They will not know, when the new Bill comes forward in 18 months’ time, whether they are going to be welcomed or turned away. That is a direct consequence of this Bill and not something that can simply be deferred on the grounds that it will all be wrapped up in 18 months or so.

I find it very unfortunate that the Minister cannot give a franker and more candid answer on the Government’s intentions at this stage. I fear that the effects for passengers of the measure in front of us are therefore going to be detrimental, even in the short term. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 24 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, the amendment and the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Young, indicate the obvious advantages of nationalisation in terms of greater access to information and transparency; it has disadvantages, which the noble Lord set out, but it also has advantages. The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, was compelling: the evidence and information he gave us illustrated much better than I have heard before the issues that have been referred to—I referred to them on Second Reading and on Monday—regarding the imbalance between the attitude of the Government towards the speed of taking over the train operators and the fact that they are prepared to leave well alone the roscos, which can quite clearly be seen to be exploiting their situation and therefore getting excess profits as a result. I will be very interested to listen to the Minister’s explanation of why that is happening.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, at this hour I would like to expand considerably on my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham’s remarks on his amendment, but I find there is nothing I can add, given how well expressed his argument was technically. I shall say only that I hope the Minister, by contrast to his response to the previous group, will recognise the serious balance sheet issues that arise in relation to lease obligations. I understand that, while the department currently recognises its obligations to the end of the current contracts, most of which are a matter of months or very few years away, when the responsibility transfers to the Government, they will be responsible for the lease payments for the whole of the life of the remaining contracts for the lease of the trains and these will therefore represent a balance sheet liability, not simply an ongoing cost, that may well need to be recognised. I am not, as I say, as proficient in these matters as my noble friend, but I hope very much that the Minister treats that seriously and gives us a proper and robust answer about how this is to be treated.

I shall save the bulk of my remarks for the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, with which, it may surprise noble Lords, I have a great deal more sympathy than they might expect, certainly as far as his analysis is concerned, though not necessarily with his solution of total nationalisation and so forth.

The fact is that there is a very large amount of capital in the world, and a capital is seeking a return. However, this capital is not buccaneering 19th-century capital of the sort that built the railways in the first place; this is not capital that is looking for investments at risk; and this is not capital that sees that it might win a large prize on one investment in its portfolio but is willing to tolerate the total loss of another investment in its portfolio. This is capital that is looking for risk-free returns—or returns that are close to being risk free—but at a rate of return that is considerably higher than it would achieve if it invested in government bonds.

Such capital is to be found throughout our economy—this is a criticism not of the current Government but of the previous Government and of the Labour Government as managed by Gordon Brown—because it is the basis on which funding is now provided to most of our utilities. That is why they all belong to large, foreign—although they are not necessarily foreign, and I do not object to the fact that they are foreign, so I will drop that word—investors who are looking for super returns and are achieving them because the Government are so accommodating towards them.

The noble Lord, Lord Sikka, asked why the Government do not do something about this and why they do not nationalise the roscos as well. That would be a true nationalisation. As I said at Second Reading, this Bill is not really a nationalisation of the railways; as I said in Committee on Monday, it is more like dismissing your chauffeur at the end of his contract. That is all that is really happening. If you are nationalising something, you normally have to pay for it and you normally acquire assets. That is not what is happening here, because the assets are all left in the private sector. The Bill’s headline claim of nationalising the railways—after all, that is the main purpose of this Bill: to get a headline out there quickly—is largely bogus. The main reason that the Government are not acquiring the roscos is that they cannot afford to do so.

There is a second reason that the Government are not acquiring the roscos or going even further—as I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, would—by seizing their super profits and acquiring them at a price that would reflect a reasonable rate of return closer to the risk-free rate of return for the rest of the period of their leases. That reason is that this Government, rather like the previous one, are wholly dependent on that source of funding for nearly every infrastructure project that they want to carry out, be it railways, environmental stuff, net zero and so forth.

In fact, there was a great conclave of these investors only a week or so ago, at which the Government told them what wonderful prospects they would have with their super, close-to-risk-free returns if only they would invest in Britain. It is not that we will get less of this sort of finance that is so objectionable to the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, under this Government; we will get a great deal more of it. That is the simple explanation, whatever the Government say, as to why they will not do what the noble Lord would like them to do, and which anybody who values true competitive capitalism would also consider to be moving towards terminating an outrage.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not want to reply to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, because I would be here all night picking holes in every point he made in reference to me.

Perhaps I may help the Minister out. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, talked about the liabilities of Network Rail. The composition of government debt published by the ONS includes the liabilities of Network Rail, but the assets acquired with that debt are excluded. That means that the government debt is overstated. In a balance sheet, you will have assets and liabilities. In the ONS approach, only Network Rail’s liabilities are included in the debt. I understand that, for quite a long while, the Treasury has been looking at reconfiguring the composition of public debt, and I very much hope that, soon, it will do the proper thing by either taking off the debt altogether from the ONS numbers or including Network Rail’s assets as well.

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[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

It is now 10.18 pm. I am unable to get agreement from the usual channels to finish the last amendment, which is a bit disappointing. If I cannot get agreement then we will have to adjourn. In all my years as Opposition Chief Whip, I have never been in a situation where one amendment cannot be finished off.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I understand that there has been agreement with the usual channels. I do not think that the matter is in my hands.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

In this situation, the House will resume. It is very disappointing. Never in my time as Opposition Chief Whip would I have acted like that.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

12: Clause 2, page 2, line 21, at end insert—
“(1D) The relevant franchising authority must consult the Council of the Nations and Regions before making a direct award of a public sector contract to a public sector company for a rail service that serves destinations in two or more of England, Scotland and Wales.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment requires the relevant franchising authority to consult the Council of the Nations and Regions before making a direct award of a public sector contract to a public sector company for a rail service that serves destinations in two or more of England, Scotland and Wales.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we come now to one of the most important debates in our consideration of this Bill in Committee: a group of amendments on devolution and the powers of local authorities, devolved authorities and combined mayoral authorities in relation to the vision of passenger railway services. At this stage in the debate, I intend to speak only to the amendments in my name—Amendments 12, 13 and 50—although I will offer general support to the others in this group, many of which I have added my name to. I may have more particular comments about them later in the debate when their movers have had a chance to speak to them.

I shall dispose briefly of Amendments 12 and 13, which were intended to be helpful. Indeed, Amendment 12 is still intended to be helpful. It would require the relevant franchising authority to consult the newly established Council of the Nations and Regions, which the Prime Minister has set up, before awarding contracts to a public sector company. We on this side of the House thought that it might be useful for the new council to have something practical to do; I would have thought that considering the provision of railway services is something that would take up a considerable amount of its time and generate a great deal of interesting debate. I shall say no more about this amendment because I imagine that it will be happily accepted by the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I start with a brief apology to the noble Lord, Lord Snape, for not having signed his amendment and assure him that if he wishes to approach me in the corridors between now and Report, some sort of grubby deal can probably be done between us in that regard. My signature is readily available for the many wise things that he has said in this debate.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

If we are going to meet to discuss these future amendments, grubby deals or otherwise, better in one of the bars where the noble Lord can put his hand in his pocket.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

There is the basis of a grubby deal, I suppose, but I am sure it will be done on an equal, Dutch, shared basis.

The Minister has heard what the Committee has had to say from every corner, and he will know that his response will have left noble Lords on all sides bitterly disappointed. He has promised to combined mayoral authorities, to local authorities and to regional authorities every conceivable aspect of devolution except the right and the possibility to run their own trains, which has been done so successfully in London and, I understand although I have no personal experience of it, on Merseyside. That is now suspended; it is off the table, for a number of years at the very least, on no rational grounds at all. As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, so rightly said, we need to know the final outcome now.

For all the Minister’s talk of this being a narrow and technical Bill, its effect, in combination with his letter, is to put an end to the further devolution of rail services to local and regional authorities for the foreseeable future, and that is something the Committee is clearly not willing to accept. There is a fundamental difficulty at the heart of this Bill, and that is the commitment made so fulsomely to devolution, endorsed or otherwise by Mr Williams, whose views seem to be plastic and developing and to respond differently to every telephone call he gets from the noble Lord—it is possibly getting to the point of rent-a-quote from Mr Williams. Despite all the commitments made by Mr Williams and by the Labour Party in its pre-manifesto document on rail services, there is not going to be any meaningful devolution. Those commitments are not consistent with the Government’s other commitment to the single controlling brain. It is a contradiction at the heart of the legislation.

As for the ability of local authorities to commission services, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, so rightly said, it is all a question of money. We promise it for buses, but as we said when we discussed the Statement made on buses—on that occasion too the noble Lord, Lord Snape, was very helpful in supporting what I said —it is all very well telling local authorities they can commission new bus services, but they do not have a bean to do so. It is all very well telling regional authorities they can commission more rail services, but unless we understand, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, who is going to pay for it and who is going to get the fares revenue, it is all pretty meaningless.

It seems to me that the great single brain is already suffering a serious headache and that the paracetamol of devolution may be what it needs to dilute the effects and to take the pressure off that brain. I think this is a point on which the Government are going to have to give some ground, and I certainly think it is one we will debate again when we return to the Bill on Report. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 12 withdrawn.

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[Lord Ranger of Northwood (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly offer my support for my noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom’s Amendment 14A and echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about what services we are looking to deliver when we talk about driverless vehicles, trains, et cetera.

In referring to my register of interests, I recognise that I have spent my entire career with one foot in technology and the other in transport. The two have overlapped, and we have seen great innovation in technology in transport. This takes me back to what we achieved in London Underground and Transport for London: we looked at how bringing in gate-line technology and new systems such as the Oyster card would enable us to rely less heavily on ticket offices. Eventually we removed a lot of them. That was not just because we wanted to get the people out from behind those ticket office windows; we wanted those people, freed from sitting behind that thick piece of glass, to support passengers on the Underground system by providing assistance, information and other services. This is about innovation evolving the service and removing the need for one sedentary type of activity, enabling something else to happen.

When we think about our trains—again, I note the observations of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on the kind of support that can be required on a train, especially for long-distance journeys—safety and security are primary. It would also be good if we could have more services, if the food and beverage shop stayed open a bit longer because people are there, and even if somebody is there to help you connect to the wifi, which is always eternally promised but sometimes hard to achieve. Having a greater sense of the passenger experience, focusing on developing the passenger experience by freeing people from the role of sitting in the ticket office and allowing them to do other things, will be of great value.

The main point is that we need to leave space for the design of innovation. It is always hard to tell at the early stages what we will be able to do later with that innovation, but as long as we leave space in the Bill to consider it, we can, I hope, achieve our aim of really improving the passenger experience.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am not accustomed to making speeches on technological matters but, on this occasion, I feel I have some modest qualifications for doing so—although I must say in advance that I do so with a degree of trepidation, because nearly everything I know about driverless trains I have been taught by the Minister. I therefore sit in the uncomfortable position of being subject to not only his correction but his immediate correction the moment I sit down and he comes to respond.

It is possible to get oneself into a tizz about these things called driverless trains when what one is in fact discussing is signalling. When I first got involved in railways, I thought that signalling was a system where arms went up and down and red and green lights flashed, but that is all in the past. Modern signalling is, in effect, a huge computer brain that fundamentally drives the trains. It tells the trains when to go, when to stop and how fast to go in between. Its purpose is to maintain a safe distance between trains as they travel, taking account of the speed and the track’s condition and nature. It is specific to the track.

Although the noble Lord, Lord Snape, will find counterexamples—I am sure that he is right to do so—broadly speaking, it is safer to have the train driven by this great controlling brain than it is to have it driven by a human being. A large number of historical train accidents have been caused by driver inattentiveness. Indeed, in Committee on Monday, it was the noble Lord, Lord Snape, I think—it may have been another noble Lord—who drew attention to one cause of such accidents, driver tiredness, whereas the machine does not get tired. It knows what it is doing. It knows where every train is going and where it is in relation to every other.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, spoke of the person who remotely drives the train. There is not a person remotely driving the train; it is the great computer brain.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

From my experience on the then Automated Vehicles Bill, there is a person who watches various vehicles driving. If there is an issue, they will intervene. That is how reassurance was given, so it is not left only to the computer.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I was going to come to a point relating to that. I am sure that what the noble Baroness said is absolutely correct in relation to automated vehicles but, like automated planes, automated vehicles are very different from automated trains. An automated plane—indeed, any plane—must be 110% safe and known to be safe before it takes off, because if it develops a problem when it is in the air there is nothing you can do about it.

With an automated train, the approach to safety is totally different. Safety is based on fail-safe devices. If the computer brain sees that something is wrong—for example, if it loses a train on the system and does not know where it is—everything is brought to a stop. That is the solution. That is how you guarantee the safety of not only that train but the trains close to it. The trains further down the line are brought to a stop, which is of course not remotely possible when you try to apply a different technology to the air and to automated vehicles. That is the sort of system we are talking about. The level of automation that can be achieved is graded. Level 3 automation, as it is known, requires a driver to be present, although the driver is not actually driving the train.

My noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom referred to the Docklands Light Railway coming into operation in the 1990s. I think I am correct—here, I very much worry that I might have got this wrong and that the Minister will correct me—in saying that the Victoria line, which was introduced in the 1960s, was introduced with automated signalling at level 4. There was a driver in the cab, but they would arrive in stations reading the newspapers. This so disconcerted passengers that a stop had to be put to it and they were told that they could not read the newspaper while they were sitting in the cab, at least not while they were in or coming into a station.

So we know perfectly well that this can be done safely. We know that we can run trains much closer together and provide greater capacity if we have an automated system, because it is safer. That is why, if you go down to the Victoria line today—it benefits not from a 1960s signalling system but from a brand-new signalling system installed in the last few years—you will see the trains coming into the station so fast that the previous one hardly has time to get out before the next one arrives. If you had a driver driving that train, the headways between them would have to be much greater. By comparison, on the Piccadilly line, which, as I have mentioned on several occasions, has a signalling system so decrepit that it is hardly a signalling system at all, you can see how slowly the trains come into the stations. The driver has to conduct himself with great caution whereas, with automated signalling, they will come in faster and stop in exactly the right place. They do not have to make the human judgment that the driver has to make about stopping exactly on his mark; that is what he is meant to do, but it takes time.

I think that everybody who is involved in railways wants to head towards that; it is the direction we want to go in. The question then arises: if you have driverless trains with literally no driver in the cab, how are you going to handle the customers? First, as some people have said, there will be trepidation on the part of customers. I think that will be overcome. Even I have a degree of trepidation; I took some flights over the summer. Not many people realise that the pilot is already pretty redundant in most of the aeroplanes they are flying in. Conscious of this, I was thinking about it when I took off the other day, so trepidation is a factor.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, makes a much more serious point perhaps, which is that services are required for passengers in the train and in the event of an emergency. As I said, an emergency is likely to result in the train being stopped in the middle of nowhere, and possibly stopped long enough that passengers have to be disembarked. Who is going to do all that? Of course the train has to have people on it; it has to have staff on it. Although the Docklands Light Railway has no driver—which, as noble Lords probably know, allows children to sit up front and even adults to fulfil their childhood fantasies by sitting up front—even it has a member of staff on it to deal with the sort of eventualities referred to by the noble Baroness.

There is a sort of fantasy here. I depart slightly from remarks made by some of my Conservative colleagues—not here in your Lordships’ House but in other fora—that this will somehow free the railways from dependency on staff and, therefore, on the unions. It will not, of course, because those staff will have to be present even if they are not in the cab. They will probably be members of the RMT, too, which is not exactly freeing yourself from the trammels of the trades unions.

The general intention behind my noble friend Lord Hamilton’s amendment is an extremely good one. We should be moving, as far as we can, from level 3 to level 4. Over time, it is an inevitability, and the costs involved in doing so will have to be found. The increase in both capacity and safety that will arise from doing so will probably be worth 10 HS2s or HS3s or whatever we provide on the existing lines.

Knowing the Government’s intentions on this will be extremely helpful. Knowing how it will be afforded and prioritised in an entirely nationalised system is something that we would all like to know. I suspect, as on previous occasions, that the answer from the Minister will be that we will have to wait, that he is not going to tell us, that this is a very narrow, technical Bill, that all the goodies are coming down the track in 18 months’ time, and everything else. I hope he is taking account of the fact that the Committee is very concerned about this—that technological change has to be at the heart of the modernisation of the railways and that the Government are going to find the investment capacity to do so. It is a matter of priority and money. Can he tell us about it, please, when he stands up?

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The Government quite rightly want urgent improvement on the railways. There is no reason why a focus on passengers should not be a big step towards that improvement. I urge the Government to amend the Bill to specify legal obligations with respect to disability access. We on these Benches give notice that we may well return to this on Report.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we have heard some very powerful and moving speeches, based on their own personal experience, from the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson. I feel it would almost be impertinent of me to try to add to what they are saying, given how rich and deep their experience is of travelling on the railways as passengers who are confined to wheelchairs. They also spoke, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and others, of those with other forms of disability, including those affected in their sight and their hearing.

However, if I were to add anything of any great substance, it would probably be along the lines of the excellent speech made by my noble friend Lord Moynihan, who clearly set out a programme—a challenging and demanding programme, admittedly, but one that should be embraced by the Government and by Great British Railways—for improving the experience of disabled passengers on the railway. It is very important for us to hear what the Minister will have to say in response to that. I know that he personally is very sympathetic to the experience of disabled passengers and the difficulties they have. However, although I do not make this as a personal remark, Network Rail as an organisation has been making similar noises for a long time, yet the difficulties continue—perhaps not always the same difficulties, and there are some improvements from time to time, but none the less the difficulties continue, and here we are today, hearing these speeches. I look forward to what the Minister has to say.

I was interested in the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, in relation to the passenger standards authority. We have heard too little in our Committee debates so far about the role and purpose of that authority. It is promised in the document Getting Britain Moving, but what scope it will have as a strong voice for passengers—that is how it is described—and how it will be much in advance of the existing passenger representative bodies, we have yet to learn. It would be helpful if the Minister could explain his vision for the passenger standards authority. I hope we do not have to have that deferred until we hear about the next Bill coming down the line at us, because I think it is what people want to hear.

I have an amendment of my own in this group. It will not take me a great time to speak to it. It relates to something else that we all want to know about: discount fares. Perhaps I should declare that I am the holder of a senior railcard—I hear a certain hum around the Chamber that suggests, to my surprise, that I may not be alone in that—but there is a multiplicity of other railcards too. If you click the button on the website that says, “Apply a railcard discount to this fare”, you will find a drop-down box containing a whole list of the various railcards that are available. I think passengers want to know that those railcards are going to continue to be available to them in the new system.

One of the difficulties that the Government have—indeed, that we all have—is that we are told, “We’ll pass this Bill and then everything is, so to speak, frozen until we get the next Bill”. As I have said repeatedly, and perhaps I have bored the House by saying it, simply getting the next Bill does not change anything. Change has to follow the Bill, and change is itself very time-consuming to implement. So, even on a good timetable for the Government, we are talking about four or five years before we see change, yet we are getting the impression of life being frozen in the meantime. Hence, we get pleas from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for something to be done about ticketing in the meantime. We all want to know, not just on ticketing but on other matters, what is going to happen in the meantime when, in a sense, no one is in charge because shadow Great British Railways will have been set up but it will have no powers. We will be awaiting Great British Railways and things will not actually be happening.

To come back to my own amendment, that situation applies also to discounted fares. Are they to continue as they are? If they are to be changed—and there may be an argument for change; it may be that a new one has to be added or some have to be deleted, merged or changed in some other way—what would be the mechanism for doing that? I do not mean simply the legal mechanism, because that exists already and it is not being abolished, but who is the driving force behind that? What is the machine that is going to run that sort of thing and make the decisions? We would like to know about all those things. We want some assurance about their continuation but, more importantly, we would like an understanding about the change and the directing mind in this transition period, which could go on for several years.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for the remarks that he has just made. He talks of delay and nothing happening. One of the reasons why I personally am here is that I have been waiting six years for rail reform and, in the end, when I was asked, I volunteered to see whether I could move it forward, because it has taken a very long time. Not much has happened since the timetable crisis of 2018 and the report that Keith Williams wrote.

I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Randerson, for Amendment 17, which is supported also by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. I absolutely recognise the need to address the passenger experience, and I know that my noble friend Lady Blake, who took the Second Reading, recognises it too. Improving accessibility on the railways is a key priority for the Government and something that the Secretary of State and I are personally committed to. We know that the assistance that passengers receive too often falls short of what they deserve and what they have every right to expect.

I was going to list a range of areas where things need to change, but I am embarrassed to do so because so many speakers in this debate have listed them themselves. All I can do is acknowledge that I have heard the list quite clearly. We know that we need to do better, and it hurts me that the public service that I care about fails so regularly to look after people in the way that it ought to. I personally—and the Secretary of State is in the same position—will do my best to do differently in future.

Many of these issues are, frankly, best solved under public ownership, as the problems that have arisen are a direct result of the current fragmented system. For example, on the specification of new trains, which the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and others referred to, a guiding mind will take an approach to a greater consistency of design and improve the outcomes for disabled passengers.

In addition, it has been explained, more eloquently than I can do, how many apps there are, how weak they are and how they fail to work. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, took me through, and showed me a huge litany of things that are wrong with, a variety of apps, all of which she needs to make quite simple journeys. I am terribly embarrassed by that. Why should we need so many different electronic devices to deliver such a relatively poor service and outcome in such circumstances? That is an obvious case where consistency is desirable. I referred earlier today to not having a proliferation of train operators, and this is one of the reasons not to do so. We do not want everyone inventing their own process; we want one consistent process, designed with the people who use it, not done for them and not delivered to them after it is done. I have heard the experiences of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and others of getting something that they wanted but then discovering it did not do what they wanted.

I contend that one of the clearest reasons for the Bill, which seeks to take train operations back into public ownership progressively, is to make those sorts of improvements a great deal easier to deliver in future. Public ownership and control give us the best platform possible to do that. I appreciate the engagement that I have had to date, especially with the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson. I believe I have offered a meeting to both of them— I hope I have, but that is done for me—and we will have that before Report. That is not an explanation; it is more of an apology, but I hope that for now it will allow them to withdraw their amendment.