Rail Infrastructure (Train Operating Companies)

Theresa Villiers Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Fortunately, there is not an imminent Labour Government. The trouble is that Labour Members want to turn the clock back to the days of British Rail and of the unions having beer and sandwiches at No. 10. We want to modernise the railways and make them work better. This is not about privatisation. I am not privatising Network Rail. I am creating teams on the ground with the same incentives to work together in the interests of the passenger. An essential part of that —the bit the hon. Gentleman has not spotted—is that the Shaw recommendations on route devolution, which will give real power to local teams to make decisions about their routes without always referring to the centre, will make it possible for those alliances to work much better than they have in the past. We know that where there have been alliances, they have made something of a difference, but they could do so much more.

This is not rocket science. If the trains are being run from over here and the tracks from over there, when things go wrong we get two separate teams waving contracts at each other rather than working together. Of course our railways do not maximise their potential. This is about forging teamwork on the ground to respond to challenges, to plan better and to deliver a better service to passengers. That is what we should all be aspiring to. Moving the deckchairs around, renationalising the railways and taking away hundreds of millions of pounds a year of investment in new trains from the private sector would take our railways backwards and make the travelling public worse off. This is a sign that, as always, the Labour party has not made it into the modern world.

[Mrs Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

I warmly welcome efforts to create greater integration between those who run the tracks and those who run the trains, but will my right hon. Friend acknowledge that a one-size-fits-all model would not be the right one, because certain lines are so heavily used by diverse operators that such a degree of integration would be difficult to achieve?

[Chris Grayling]

That is absolutely right. It is very straightforward in areas where there is complete synchronisation between the Network Rail routes and the train operators, such as on the west coast main line, which has multiple operators. We also have to be careful to protect the interests of freight operators and open access operators. I am not planning to change the fundamental regulatory structure, but by forging teams together by letting franchises and structuring Network Rail in a way that allows them to integrate, we will be able to deliver better day-to-day performance and a more reliable railway over the vast majority of our network.