Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, who is not her in place at the moment, for her introduction, which explained this Bill to me rather more than what was evident from the text. I congratulate all three Members on their maiden speeches. My noble friend Lord Cryer is not in his place but I remind him, given his praise of Gladstone, that, according to Gilbert and Sullivan, the parliamentary train was an extraordinarily slow beast; he should bear in mind that that was not quite the flashy new railway we hope to introduce.

Like my noble friend Lord Liddle and various other noble Lords, I have an ideological commitment to a nationalised railway system. I believe that the railways, together with the water sector, are the worst examples of privatisation. Others I can live with but, with those two, I cannot. This week, we see the preliminary Bills on both. We are not going for the nationalisation of water, as I understand it—I had hoped otherwise—but we are going to make some radical changes. We need to: both of those models of privatisation have utterly and completely failed.

My recollection of the comparison with British Rail is not the one on which I heard the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, expand. My pre-Beeching memory of British Rail as a lad was that the railway down to the south-west was dual-tracked, regular, uncrowded and cheap, while the food was actually quite nice. These days, none of those things applies; indeed, South Western Railway has decided to abolish food on trains altogether and the journey is much less pleasant. We may not be able to go back to those halcyon days but I hope that we have a coherent policy for the subsequent stages of this return to a nationalised system.

I will not comment greatly on those terms—I had a lot of questions I was going to ask, but most of them have been asked and I hope they will eventually be answered—but, on the central issue, the only way in which to get the railway system to work is to have some degree of controlling mind and some degree of consistent management across the various bits. It does not matter how many entities there are, how many private companies there have been at various times or how many public companies there are going to be; somebody somewhere has to oversee the totality, both of the infrastructure and of the running of the system.

On most journeys of more than a few miles there is a change. Most passengers are utterly frustrated by the way in which the railway timetable is run, by the system for booking seats and buying seats on the day, and by the way in which there is no integration between the different parts of the network. That needs to be addressed. It can be addressed only by a relatively integrated oversight, and I believe that has to be within the public sector. I agree with the Government that the majority of cases need to see a public sector authority there.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, referred to the passage of the Transport Bill of 2000. I was a junior Minister on that Bill with my noble friend Lord Macdonald of Tradeston. We did not include nationalisation in that Bill. My noble friend Lord Prescott did have inklings in that direction, but the Treasury and No. 10 turned him down. Instead, we invented the Strategic Rail Authority, which did not work. We now need a system that works. I hope that the subsequent stages of the renationalisation of the railways sees a system that works.

Two issues have hardly been mentioned, except indirectly. My noble friend Lord Balfe—I call him my noble friend because we are both officers of BALPA—mentioned the industrial relations side. The workers have not been mentioned to any great degree, yet we have one of the most skilful, long-standing and long-serving structures of employment in the railway industry. We have one of the most heavily unionised sectors of industry, which has been badly mismanaged by Governments of all sorts and by private companies in the past. We need a new start in industrial relations in the railway industries. That is not just a question of making sure that the leaders of the unions are not too left-wing; I do not believe the unions—or at least their membership—are that left-wing. They just want to play a positive, constructive part in the running of the railways.

Many years ago, when I first worked for the TUC and was made secretary of the transport committee, I was told that the previous general secretary of the TUC, George Woodcock, had wanted the transport committee to end up with one union for the railway industry. We did not quite get there, and that was in 1970, but we could now have a relationship between the nationalised entity, the trade unions and the individual companies which looks forward for strategy, for planning and for engagement of the workforce, which has never been seen properly in the railways since the very early days of British Rail.

The other group, of course, are the consumers, whom we have talked about. I have also been a consumer champion. We have never seen a strong consumer organisation for the railways. Transport Focus does its best, but we need to have a representation of the voice of consumers in the future of the railways that is properly financed and supported by the industry and the Government. At the moment, all that consumers are left to do is to be frustrated—I was going to use a different word—by the way in which their complaints are dealt with. What they want is an organisation which has the strength to convince the management to alter the system in favour of consumers. At the end of the day, the passengers are vital to the railways, and the railways ought to recognise the importance of keeping the consumers happy and making sure that the system works for them. If we do not do that, we do nothing.