Railways Bill

Lord Harper Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness who resides on the other side of the Welsh border from me. I still live very close to it, in the constituency that I had the pleasure to represent for nearly 20 years. I mention that because I share the Minister’s sentiments about the work of those who helped all those affected by the terrorist attack on 7/7. It is particularly memorable for me, because it took place relatively shortly after the 2005 general election, when I first joined the House of Commons. It was my first experience of how, as a parliamentarian, you end up dealing with the impact of a terrorist incident. I remember it very clearly, and the impact on the transport system. I remember—it was a very small price to pay—walking all the way from here to Paddington and seeing the enormous numbers of people whose lives had been disrupted that day, sometimes permanently, by that terrorist attack. So I am pleased by what the Minister said.

I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Grayling said about the Minister’s capabilities in this particular area. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, added a cross-party aspect to that, because I was fearing that, if only a Conservative colleague had said nice things about the Minister, we might perhaps have been doing him a disservice. But I can add my support to what the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, said, and also note that it was supported from the other side of the House, which I hope means that, when there is a change of Prime Minister in a couple of weeks’ time, we will see the Minister still sitting in his place. I had the great pleasure to work with him very closely when I was Secretary of State and he was the chair of Network Rail, and in the capacity of the work that he did in chairing the Euston Partnership. We worked very well together and I have great respect for his knowledge and capabilities, particularly in the rail arena.

I was listening very carefully to what my noble friend Lady May said about the importance of putting passengers first—or rather customers first. It is important to remember that the rail network is not just about passengers, it also about freight customers, and both are equally important. That is where I have some broad welcome for GBR, but I have some concerns about the way the Government are going about doing it. I support bringing the operation of track and train together; we have already heard the arguments about why a regional model of keeping those together might well have been a better solution.

Of course, the Minister will know that this Bill is not necessary—I had this debate in the department—to bring track and train together. Something that has been very good, which started under us and has continued under the present Government, is joint appointments of individuals running the train operating companies and the network rail operations in that region to get rid of the buck passing and the shifting accountabilities, and having a single individual who is responsible for infrastructure and the train operations. That has actually been very successful. So, to the extent that the Bill is delivering bringing track and train together, I welcome it.

I do not support the removal of private sector operators—I know that is in another Bill. The Government will rue the day that they nationalised or continue to nationalise the passenger operating companies. We have heard that there are other models. The franchising system perhaps had reached an end and certainly had enormous damage caused to it by the pandemic. But there are other ways of doing it; several Members have talked about, for example, the way it happens in London. It is just worth recognising the enormous success of privatisation; I am not going to do it at length, because my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham did it admirably. I just want to focus on one aspect of it that is the clearest exposition of the passengers’ response to privatisation, which is the more than doubling of the number of rail journeys from privatisation to the peak before the pandemic.

I mention the pandemic again because it had a massive impact on the rail network. It drove away, literally overnight, 80% of passenger rail journeys. It caused us to spend £30,000 million of taxpayers’ money on just keeping the rail network going, which I note is a responsibility that we bear on the Conservative Benches. We did not get anything for that in terms of productivity improvements or reform of how the system was run. Even now, we still have not quite recovered the passenger volumes that we had before the pandemic. That is important, because it means that the system requires more subsidy.

I heard a number of Members talk about profits being extracted. The real problem post pandemic is that there have not been any profits. Before the pandemic, the passenger operating companies overall made profits and returned money to the Treasury for the benefit of the taxpayer. Post pandemic, overall, the passenger operating companies lost money and have been subsidised every year by the taxpayer. That is not sustainable, given that most people in the country either never use or very rarely use trains. For the vast majority of people outside London, the most common method of getting to and from work and doing your daily business is to get in your car—and if you do not use the car and you use public transport, you do not use a train, you use a bus. Buses are a much more popular form of public transport than trains and it is important to remember that.

I do not have time to go on at length now about the three areas I want to focus on in Committee. One is about the retail operations. The noble Baroness, Lady Harding of Winscombe, set that out extremely well, so I will not repeat what she said. When I was Secretary of State, officials were very keen on GBR having its own online retail operations—it was an official thing, not a Minister thing. I directed that to be removed. I thought it was a terrible idea. I thought the idea that the state could be nimble enough to run a fantastic digital operation when we already had some very good ones run by third-party retailers was completely pointless. I see that, upon the change of government, officials have snuck it back in again. I say to Ministers that they should challenge that. I do not think it will add anything. One area I will come back to is trying to reinsert competition in this area. I was very pleased to hear the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Dixon of Jericho; I hope that means, if we can craft some sensible amendments along those lines, that they will get support on these Benches, on his Benches and, I hope, from enough Cross-Benchers to encourage the Government to change their mind.

The other areas I want to look at are rail freight, to make sure we have a system where fair decisions are made about allocations, and open access.

My final point is on the tests that are important to judge the Bill. Does it drive up the volume of passengers? Does it reduce the cost to the taxpayer? Does it, as my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said, make sure that we can get private capital involved? If it all relies on investment from the taxpayer, it will be a failure. Will it deliver a better rail system for all rail customers, both passengers and freight? Those are the tests that we should use to judge the Bill and we look forward to doing so in its next stages in this House.