Railways (Interoperability) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Lord Snape Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I endorse everything my noble friend said. This SI represents a significant change, not just in our relationship with Europe, but as far as our industrial potential is concerned.

For too long, this country has given away to, or allowed takeovers of its major industrial production by, foreign Governments. At the time of nationalisation, back in 1948, there were more than 150 railway workshops in this country. Those of us of a certain age are familiar with seeing that “Made in Britain” sign in railway industries in other parts of the world—for example, on locomotives, rolling stock and signalling systems. I was in Hong Kong in the 1970s. The new rapid transit system there depended on the expertise of GEC Alsthom, which built the first trains for that system in Birmingham. Yet we have thrown away all that expertise and allowed foreign companies to take over our industrial production.

This SI will make matters worse. If we are to have different standards from EU—that will happen over the years—the ever-smaller market of the United Kingdom will continue to shrink. Even as we speak, the signalling systems in Europe are being unified. The French and German Governments have just refused—temporarily, I suspect—the amalgamation of two major signalling production companies to create, in effect, a European monopoly on signalling. Again, if this SI goes through, our prospects of competing in these areas will be diminished. That is what it means.

We are moving away from the European railway agency—the ERA—and placing these decisions in the hands of the Department for Transport and the Secretary of State. The Minister will be relieved to know that I will not indulge in any knockabout about the current Secretary of State; after all, even with his powers of survival, I cannot see him being in the department much longer. We are moving away from European standards and allowing him, or some other Secretary of State, to decide standards for rolling stock and railway materials more generally in this country. That is what we are doing. That is how significant this SI is.

I indicated earlier that there were more than 150 workshops in this country at the time of nationalisation. There were 52 at the time of privatisation. There is a small handful of them now, all of which are foreign-owned. People do not invest in this country because they love the British; they do so for various financial reasons. If we are to reduce our market in the way that this SI will, those companies could decide that it is not worth investing in the United Kingdom in the long term and move elsewhere. That is how significant this SI is. I do not know what the Minister can do other than adopt the associate membership my noble friend Lord Berkeley talked about, but I regret that this Motion is not fatal. Unless the Minister can satisfy us and assuage our very real fears, this barmy piece of legislation ought to be resisted.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friends Lord Berkeley and Lord Snape in their opposition to this measure and add my regrets that we are not pursuing a fatal Motion on this issue. My interest in this is personal. I am a railway clerk’s son from Carlisle and I have always been passionate about the railways. My first job in national politics was as special adviser to the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, when he was Secretary of State for Transport, so I have a personal connection. Also, I happened to learn quite a lot about the detail of this SI from being a member of your Lordships’ EU Sub-Committee on the Internal Market, chaired so wonderfully by my noble friend Lord Whitty. The Secretary of State appeared as a witness before us on these questions and it was absolutely plain that the reason he wanted to withdraw from the European agency was nothing more than ideology. He could not stand the fact that standards would be set by Europe. That is what we face all the time from Ministers in this Government. There is no pragmatism about Brexit, so why do noble Lords think we are in trouble? It is because of that absolute absence of any pragmatism.

When we had that hour-long disquisition by the Secretary of State, I raised the issue of the manufacturing plants, which, as my noble friend Lord Snape said, are now foreign-owned but based in Britain. My noble friend Lord Adonis is not in his place but I know that a remarkable achievement of his—one of many, by the way—when he was Secretary of State for Transport was to get Hitachi to establish a plant in Durham that would manufacture trains.

[Lord Snape]

I hate to interrupt my noble friend in full flow, but may I point out to him that that plant in Durham is not a manufacturing plant, it is an assembly plant? That is the great weakness of British industry these days. We put together materials and trains that are built elsewhere. That is what we are going to do in Durham.

[Lord Liddle]

I quite accept the point made by my noble friend but it is better than nothing and it provides hundreds of jobs in Durham. While my noble friend says it is just an assembly plant, how could such a plant operate in Britain if we decided to have different technical standards from those on the continent? That would completely destroy the business model on which that inward investment had been made.