1: Before Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Purpose: improvement of passenger railway services(1) The purpose of this Act is to improve the performance of passenger railway services in the United Kingdom.(2) The Secretary of State must, in taking any actions under the provisions of this Act, have regard to this purpose.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would place a duty on the Secretary of State to have regard to the purpose of the Act, namely the improved performance of passenger railway services in the United Kingdom.
My Lords, I rise briefly to fire the starting gun on Report with my Amendment 1. In doing so, I express my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Moylan for his support with this amendment. I also thank the Minister for taking the time to meet me the other day. I very much appreciated the opportunity he took to address my many questions in his usual cordial way.
This amendment today flows from my first amendment in Committee. Everyone wants the trains to improve. That is a given. As I said in Committee, and when I met the Minister recently, the reason I care about this is that we need the whole rail reform package and we need it not to be piecemeal. Personally, I would like to go down the route proposed under the Williams-Shapps review, but I recognise that that ship has probably sailed. That said, the overall goal is the same: to make it more efficient; to make it easier to travel; to make it more punctual and, ultimately, to improve the passenger service.
In Committee I used the word “Ronseal”: making sure that the Bill delivers what it is intended to, so that it does, in effect, what is on the tin. While I will not repeat word for word what I said, there are three technical points I want to address following on from Committee, for the benefit of the House today.
First, is this Tory language being inserted really a sort of Trojan horse, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting Minister in the Labour Government once they have welcomed it? No. In Getting Britain Moving: Labour’s Plan to Fix Britain’s Railways, published during the campaign, the then Shadow Secretary of State said in the foreword:
“We need a modern rail system—with improved services for passengers and better value for money for taxpayers—to serve as the backbone of a modern Britain”.
Later, she said:
“Labour’s challenge is to put our rail system back on track to sustainable growth and improvement”.
My Lords, I support my noble friend on his Amendment 1 and will speak to Amendment 14 in my name. My noble friend very kindly referred to our debate on the same amendment in Committee. I note the reference in the Railways Act 1993 and that I see two merits in my noble friend’s amendment.
First, it is always a good thing for Bills to be clear about their purpose. Unless I am mistaking something, this amendment accurately reflects the Government’s purpose in this legislation. We may debate whether it will be successful or otherwise, but the purpose seems to be straightforward, and to have that in legislation is always helpful.
Secondly, because this Bill is essentially about amending parts of the Railways Act 1993 and nothing else, it is clearly subsidiary to the existing provisions of that Act, as amended. There are 10 general duties in that Act. The first is in Section 4(1)(zb),
“to promote improvements in railway service performance”.
My noble friend has accurately reflected the first of those 10 general duties, one of which we will come to debate in a subsequent group in relation to my amendment.
It seems to me that one of the abiding issues for public agencies, often including government departments, is the multiplicity of duties that are imposed upon them and the risk of conflict between those duties. Here, for these purposes, that would be clarified if it were made very clear that this important change to the way in which the provisions of the Railways Act are structured and to be used is to improve railway service performance. To raise that general duty in importance above the others would be helpful in clarifying the balance which the Government and the other agencies should take. I support Amendment 1 for that reason.
Amendment 14 refers to the new subsection of Section 30 of the Railways Act, inserted by the Bill, which provides that the provision of railway services can be made only via
My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendment 16, which is in this group. I am, as ever, grateful to my noble friend for sparing the time to talk about this. My amendment is designed to be helpful. It is designed from experience of previous railway legislation, in which we got bogged down in massive detail, with hundreds of amendments; we may get somewhere, but it takes longer.
Given the discussion that we had on a large number of subjects in Committee, and will probably have today on Report, I thought it would be useful to probe the Minister’s view of how long it will be before what I call the definitive Bill is published. If that is going to take until spring, as some of us have been told, it might be useful to publish a draft Bill or a draft Command Paper that we could read several months before and have the opportunity to debate. That might help us resolve what the real problems are and how to deal with them, rather than on the Floor of the House for many days in Committee and on Report.
That is the purpose of my amendment, and I look forward to my noble friend’s response. I am not going to press this amendment, but it will be interesting to hear what he has to say.
My Lords, I will speak briefly on some of the themes that my noble friend Lord Gascoigne has been pursuing around reporting on performance. The Government seem to be a little reticent about being willing to accept amendments which increase reporting requirements. However, there is an important issue here: will public ownership do what the Government have promised it will and improve performance on the railways? I have my doubts about that. I think the challenges of the railways are much more complex and not about ownership but the complexity of our system.
I have a very simple question for the Minister. When you arrive in this House as a new Member, one thing that is very noticeable is the extraordinary level of expertise that exists on Benches on all sides. He brings a very considerable degree of expertise in this House after a long and distinguished career in the rail and transport sector. Can he set aside for a moment his ministerial hat and give us a professional judgment about the likely performance? To take a comparison, can he reassure us that the London Overground, for example, would perform better if run directly as a public body by Transport for London rather than being contracted out to a private operator as it is at the moment? Can he reassure us on that, for the precedents that will exist elsewhere?
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.
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.
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.
I was referring to the people who drive and operate the trains. There are more of them on Waterloo station than there are employees of Network Rail.
To finish what I was saying, most people on the railway refer to their employer and their work as “the railway”, which tells you something about the way in which the franchise system has dealt with loyalty to employment.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for Amendment 14 and the discussion we had in the last few days. He is right that Regulation 17 requires the publication of a specified list of information within one year, following the direct award of a contract, where that information has not already been published. However, we expect the majority of the information included in Regulation 17 to have already been published well before one year has expired. That is because Regulation 23, which covers post-award publication, requires a competent authority to publish a similar set of information within two months of contract award. The information which must be published is set out in Schedule 2. Regulation 23 also allows interested parties to request the reasons for a direct award within one month of the post-award publication. I agree that a year would be a very long time to wait before the information is published. However, I do not believe that the noble Lord’s amendment is needed because similar and, in many respects, more detailed publication requirements are already provided for in Regulation 23. I urge him to withdraw the amendment, and I note that he does not intend to press it.
I note that Amendment 16, from my noble friend Lord Berkeley, is somewhat novel constitutionally, as it would constrain parliamentary sovereignty by imposing limitations on when primary legislation relating to the railways could be introduced. I am very happy to confirm to my noble friend, to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and to others who mentioned it that the Government intend to set out their key proposal for the railways Bill in a consultation document that I very much hope will be published before the end of this calendar year. This will give all interested parties, including Members of your Lordships’ House, the chance to review and scrutinise it and to feed in their views before the Bill is introduced later in this parliamentary Session. The Government do not intend to publish a draft of the Bill before it is introduced, as I would expect that to delay progress in implementing the Government’s planned reforms.
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response, to all those who spoke in this relatively short debate, and to those who supported my Amendment 1. I am pleased to see that the Government Chief Whip is on the Front Bench, and I am conscious that many people have sat through days of Committee and we are about to head into recess, so I will not detain noble Lords for long.
As I said in Committee and earlier, I want to make the case for why this amendment is not against the spirit of the Bill. It does not stop it, and I want to ensure that everyone knows that these changes are not being done through ideology and that they are focused on the passengers. Effectively, it forces the department, Ministers, civil servants and everyone to deliver this mission and this mission alone. Otherwise, we will enter into what President Ronald Reagan called “trust me” government.
Without boring on for too long, and to repeat the point I made, Labour has used this language repeatedly, in opposition and in government, so I am still not sure why the amendment cannot be included, especially given that the Minister, who I respect greatly, warmed to the sentiment behind it and understands it. As I said, we risk entering into the world of having to trust the Government that that is the intention. Despite those words of reassurance, the Bill still needs something on the face of it—Ronseal, like I said. With that, I would like to test the opinion of the House.
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This was followed by:
“Labour’s vision is to deliver a unified and simplified rail system that relentlessly focuses on securing improved services for passengers and better value for money for taxpayers”.
Indeed, in just the foreword alone, there are eight references to either “improve”, “improving” or “improved services”, not to mention countless others in the rest of the document.
The Government and Labour may argue that those references are about the whole suite of rail reform: it is only then that you will get a better service after everything has changed. However, after the election, at Second Reading, in response to questions, the Transport Minister in the Commons said:
“Let me begin by dealing with the issue of public ownership. According to the shadow Secretary of State ... we have no proof that it will improve outcomes for passengers, but that is clearly not the case. We know for a fact that this Bill will save tens of millions of pounds in fees, and if that is not a good start, I do not know what is”.
A little later he went on to say:
“I am confident that public ownership will provide the right foundations to drive forward improvements for passengers”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/7/24; col. 1135.]
I could read out plenty of other quotes which all use the same terminology and the same rationale for this Bill, but, as I hope noble Lords can see, this is not about me inserting language into this debate: it is already there from the Labour Party, both in opposition and in government.
Secondly, are we not overlapping existing commitments? My noble friend made the inspired observation in Committee that similar references are made in the Railways Act 1993. He is, as ever, correct that the obligation to improve services is used elsewhere and is not altered by this Bill, so why cannot it, or a reference to upholding that element of the 1993 Act, be put in this Bill?
Thirdly, from a technical point of view, do we need a purpose clause given that this Bill is focused on how nationalisation will take effect? I have said before that some will question whether a purpose clause is needed, given that this is a tightly focused Bill. I will suggest later why it is needed in general terms, but, from a purely technical point of view, in Clause 2 the Secretary of State will have to take a view and make a judgment of the virtue or otherwise of a franchise when deciding whether temporarily to extend the said franchise. By inserting this purpose clause at the outset, it is a necessary barometer setting out exactly what this Bill is seeking to do and what should be the Secretary of State’s overriding concern when making a decision.
This is not about stopping the Bill, nor is it about inserting assessments, reports or tests before anything can happen. There is no bureaucracy being created here, I am pleased to say to my friend the noble Lord, Lord Snape. It would not be costly—indeed, it would not cost anything—and I am not saying that it would lead to cheaper fares, although that is what people want to see and expect. It would not add anything onerous or new. As I said, this is language used elsewhere in legislation. It does not issue specific demands or expectations about cleanliness, the number of guards, ensuring decent toilets—or toilets that are open, which they absolutely should be. My amendment could talk about access and address some of the shocking things we heard in Committee about the experience of disabled people when travelling, which I know will come up later. But it merely sets out what the goal of reform is, to ensure that everyone from top to bottom knows what the Government are doing this for. We wish them to succeed in improving the service. It is language that Labour has used, and which is used elsewhere in legislation, to make it clear what the Bill will deliver. I beg to move.
“a direct award of a public service contract to a public sector company in accordance with regulation 17 … of the 2023 Regulations”.
Noble Lords will be aware of those regulations. Subsequently, the requirement for pre-award publication is disapplied by this legislation. However, paragraph (2) of Regulation 17 states:
“Where a competent authority makes a direct award of a public service contract under this regulation, the competent authority must, within one year of granting the award, and while ensuring the protection of commercially sensitive information and commercial interests, publish a notice on its website”.
The information required about the contract and the contractor is then listed in the regulation. Is one year right? Is it desirable that we should, in any circumstances, wait so long to be given information about the direct award of these contracts, given that they are instrumental to an understanding of whose responsibility it is to provide passenger railway services?
I have discussed my amendments with the Minister, and I am grateful for his time and that of his officials. I hope he has had a chance to think about my amendment and that, if he will not accept it, he will at least be able to tell us that it will be the Government’s intention to make new regulations quite soon, and in those new regulations to reduce to as little as three months after the granting of an award of a contract of this kind the publication of the notice and details. To assist later consideration, I say that it is certainly not my intention to press Amendment 14 when it is reached.
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 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—
It is now more than six years since the previous Government declared that the structure of the railways is
“no longer fit to meet today’s challenges”
and appointed Keith Williams to lead his review. Passengers, freight and everyone on and who uses the railway have waited too far long already to see meaningful change. I have to say that my own experience is that the previous Government went through pre-legislative scrutiny in a desultory manner, and frankly, we all concluded that they did not intend to bring a Bill before either House any time soon.
While the Government are keen to hear the widest possible range of views on their proposals, including the noble Lord’s, I do not on this occasion support the idea of publishing a draft Bill. It also does not seem necessary, given that noble Lords can submit their views during the consultation I have committed to and will be able to debate the Bill once it is before the House. I am of course happy to meet with my noble friend Lord Berkeley and other noble Lords at the time of the consultation launch to seek their views, as we have done during the course of the Bill before us, if that would help persuade him to withdraw his amendment.