Private Crossings (Signs and Barriers) Regulations 2023

Motion to Regret

Moved by

That this House regrets that the Private Crossings (Signs and Barriers) Regulations 2023, while providing improved safety and visibility designs, do not set out the need, timing and costs for private crossing owners to replace existing signs.

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to move this Motion, which many noble Lords will think is not the most important thing facing the country at this stage. Unfortunately, when the original draft regulations were put down, those of us who have a liking for and an interest in railways, in particular private railways—some of them are steam railways—we found that no consideration was given to the costs, the timing or even the need for putting up new notices every time there was a crossing. I am grateful to Ministers for having upgraded some of the Explanatory Memoranda on this, but it is worth spending a few minutes explaining what the problem is and why I think a little more could be done.

The first thing to say is what the scope of the regulations is not: it is not public roads; it is private roads. It might be a private footpath but, as Regulation 2 says, it can be

“a private road … a private path; or … both”.

Who is the crossing operator? These days, most crossings are operated by Network Rail—there are a few private and other railways that we know about. I am told that Network Rail is happy with this—probably because it did not have much choice—but it is a good thing, and it will probably get some extra funding from the Department for Transport to enable it to change the signs.

In case noble Lords are wondering what it is all about, there are 30 pages in the regulations of pictures of signs that have to be put up on private roads or paths when they cross a railway line. One can debate whether it is time to put some obligation on the users of the crossing—by that, I mean car drivers, cyclists and pedestrians—to take some responsibility for looking before they cross. We are all told in the Highway Code that we must look before we cross the road, but it sometimes seems as if, on the railways, you just cross and if the train is coming, it is the train’s fault. We can debate that. Anyway, these regulations and my Motion do not really cover that, so I shall move on.

I want to talk about heritage railways, which will find it much more difficult to fund all the notices that they will have to put up because they are charities. At the moment, the heritage sector is suffering quite a lot post Covid and from the recession and everything else. My question to the Minister, therefore, is: how often must this really apply to the heritage sector? My noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester—who sadly cannot be here today—has been very strong in his opposition to the way that the regulations have been introduced. I know that he would be keen to contribute significantly to this debate, but he had something else that was equally important.

We are talking about a crossing, be it pedestrian or farm—it is a track; it is not a road owned or maintained by a local authority—of a railway line. There is a requirement to put up a very large number of signs to warn people that a train might be coming and what they have to do. The new Explanatory Memorandum is now helpful: it says that the Government want all the signs to be put up by 2029. That seems a long way away but, when you are running a charity and have problems getting passengers to pay the fares, problems with coal, or all the other things that you have to do, that is not very long. You might be able to do it voluntarily. It is quite clear in paragraph 7.4 of the Explanatory Memorandum, however, that:

My main question to the Minister is this. I understand that the Government are going to be publishing guidance on this, but it would be comforting to charity workers to know that, if they do not put up a new sign because they think the old one is good enough, and then there is an accident, they are not going to be liable; a charity is not a good place to be if you are liable and something goes wrong.

A solution is that the Government could be generous and say that, as this is going to cost only a couple of million pounds over the whole country, why not offer to gift new signs to the heritage sector as a way of making sure that the signs are beautiful and neat and everything else and save the sector a bit of money? I hope the Minister will be able to answer that question.

My final question is inevitable. There are lots of private railways in Wales, and therefore possibly a need to put up all these signs in Welsh, as well as English. If there is a sign there in English already, and therefore it does not have to be replaced because it is in compliance with the Transport and Works Act, but it is not in Welsh, is there a requirement for a new sign to be put up in Welsh, as well as the English one? On that basis, will the Minister commit the Welsh Government to funding that?

These are very small questions and I am not going to detain the House any longer. We have 50 pages of regulation on this issue, which affects only a small number of charities that run chuff-chuff railways, or steam railways. They have quite a lot of problems on their hands, and I suggest that this is not the most urgent problem. If people stop and look, they will see that the trains are not doing 100 mph; they will be lucky to be doing 25 mph. I beg to move.

My Lords, I declare an interest which is not in the register of interests, in that I am a patron of Avon Valley Railway, and the questions being debated this afternoon may well apply in the case of Avon Valley. I want to refer to the points the noble Lord has made and their potential implications elsewhere.

Noble Lords will have seen that I have an Oral Question tabled for 8 February on traffic marshals and the backwards and forwards crossings on this estate. One of my many Written Questions has been about trying to establish what alternatives are available, other than these costly traffic marshals, to mitigate the risk of pedestrians crossing where cars are moving at less than 5 mph. I noted the speeds that the noble Lord referred to and that we are talking here about a much lesser speed. When I queried the cost of the traffic marshals—remember, this is going to run for several years—I was told that the annual cost of a traffic marshal was £65,600 a year. A four-year programme means that we are talking not far short of a quarter of a million pounds. I then asked about the cost of the traffic marshal supervisor and was told that it was £91,700 a year. I have not yet asked what the cost will be of the manager of the traffic marshal supervisor and the like.

I will be very interested to see the costs in relation to these signs. I have been told that there are no alternatives to these traffic marshals, yet, as the noble Lord says, there are 35 pages of guidance. I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the options identified in those 35 pages may well be available to use on this estate, and might cost substantially less than the figures I have been given for what we are spending.

I do not necessarily want my noble friend the Minister to answer my observations today, but I am just recording that I have an interest in the costs, which have implications for matters I will be pursuing on another occasion.

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Berkeley in his objective. It seems to me, as I suspect it does to other noble Lords taking part in this debate, that this is a typical example, if I may say so, of departmental overkill. For some reason, the regulations, which cover the national railways separately, are to be paid out of Network Rail’s budget. That will be taken care of, presumably, in the grants made to that organisation. But despite representations being made by the heritage railways sector, the regulations are now to apply to every farm track, crossing and so on across the country, as we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Hayward.

These are not matters of minor expense so far as the heritage railway business is concerned. Perhaps I should rephrase that: most of these railways are not businesses, because they are run largely by volunteers. The Department for Transport consulted the HRA and was warned about the total cost of these regulations, but it went ahead anyway. The department’s own estimate of the cost is £1.5 million to £3 million. That is a substantial amount for such organisations, which, as my noble friend Lord Berkeley said, are hardly profitable under the present circumstances. Indeed, the future of some of them is under direct threat.

As my noble friend indicated, crossings, whether on the mainline railway or the heritage railway, are there to protect not the railway traveller but the motorist from the consequences of their own folly—and sometimes not particularly successfully so. It appears that a minority of motorists is prepared to ignore railway crossing signs. In those circumstances, the road network surely ought to make a proper contribution, rather than it being left to the railway industry the whole time, particularly given that, as I and my noble friend have indicated, the lower speeds of heritage railways, which are restricted to 25 mph, make the likely dangers considerably less than on the mainline railway.

I do not expect a direct reply from the Minister today, but I ask him either to write to me or to set out in the Official Report the duties of the ORR as far as the road network is concerned. It appears to be only too ready to intervene on railway safety; indeed, the last time I met the ORR, it proposed an increase in railway freight rates in a particular area of this country because, it said, the railway industry was charging less than it should. As far as I am aware, it does not intervene in—how does one diplomatically put it?—the rough and tumble of the lower end of the road haulage industry. Why, therefore, should it take such a deep interest in railway matters, which, in many cases, I do not consider it capable of doing? Will the Minister set out the ORR’s duties so far as the road network is concerned, allowing those of us who take an interest in these matters to compare the two and, in the interests of fairness, make future representations about the ORR’s involvement in the railway industry?

My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the South Tynedale Railway. Earlier today, in my capacity as chairman of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, I signed off on its response to the Government’s call for evidence on overregulation, which closed at 4 pm. I put it to the Minister that perhaps the best response to the close of consultation might be to withdraw this proposal and to come back with something that is a bit less mean-spirited and a bit more proportionate.

My Lords, I hope that the Minister will not just do that but will recognise that there is already far too much regulation on small railways.

I will refer to the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway, which is a very small railway because it never made any money. Previously, the Member of Parliament for Ipswich invested in it; he went bankrupt and had to resign as a result. He and the railway were foolish enough not to get the wayleave to enable them to link with another railway. Therefore, it went to Ubbeston, a place that is very difficult to find even if you are the Member of Parliament for the constituency—which I was.

I am so excited by the people who work on the railway, repairing and rebuilding engines and coaches. It is a magnificent thing to take one’s grandchildren to. Many an unpleasant afternoon has been lightened for me because we have done that. Just recently, they have managed to buy the land and extend it by some quarter of a mile. That almost doubles the length of the railway. The point I will make is, simply, that the regulations mean that the railway operators must have the same investigation into whether they can run over a quarter of mile as they would if they were running the London to Edinburgh express—that is a nonsense.

I went to the trouble of looking at the regulations, which had so far eluded me, and discovered that they were nonsense. They do not take into account the fascinating and very British thing of maintaining steam railways. I hope that the Minister will not narrow his interest to those that have been raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley—important though they are, and supportive of them though I am. We are now in a situation in which one of the most attractive things about our British heritage is under threat: the protection of these railways by people who give their lives to doing things that I would be totally incapable of even beginning to do. They turn absolutely destroyed engines into the most beautiful things steaming along, even though it is but half a mile, to be enjoyed by both children and adults—because most of us are like children in this situation.

My Lords, I take this opportunity to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, on his assiduous scrutiny of the regulations today and on previous occasions. I join those who take great interest in heritage railways by declaring that I am president of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, which is a great honour—it is in fact the most visited facility in North Yorkshire as a whole.

I make a plea to my noble friend. Without adding to his brief, could he be proportionate in the way that his department approaches this? If you take the route that the North Yorkshire Moors Railway follows, obviously it is deeply rural in nature and will have many crossings, and I hesitate and shudder to think what the cost of each signpost will be. I therefore urge my noble friend to commit in his response to taking a measured and proportionate approach to the way that his department will implement these regulations.

My Lords, I am afraid that I will strike a slightly different note from the love-in for heritage railways that has taken place this afternoon. I love travelling on heritage railways but I do not join other noble Lords in objecting to the principle here; I object to some details of this but I do not object to the principle of the need for it.

Greatly to my surprise, I discovered that there is a growing problem with private crossings, far from all of which involve heritage railways—other private crossings are involved. There are about 3,000 of them in the UK. Every year, a couple of people die on them and there are on average 137 near-misses each year. Therefore, there is a case for making them more carefully signed.

Where I do join other noble Lords is in my amazement at the range of diagrams, the variety of signs and the level of detail in those signs, which is so great that, probably, anyone seeking to cross a railway line in a hurry would not be able to read them from a distance and would probably skip the detail and take a risk in certain situations. Therefore, the complexity of the signs being offered is actually self-defeating.

I have other points of concern, moving on from my basic point that there is a real problem to be solved, and one is the delay in implementing the findings of the Rail Accident Investigation Branch investigations which recommended these changes. There were two investigations, one into the Oakwood Farm collision in 2015 and the other into the Frognal Farm collision in 2017. Why has it taken so many—nine—years to produce and test this suite of signs? Other noble Lords talk about the financial constraints for heritage railways but there is nothing more likely to finish the success of a heritage railway than someone being killed or seriously injured, which would lead to a very significant insurance claim against it. Therefore, it is very much in their interest to have the best possible signs.

My Lords, I apologise to the House and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley: I was a little late for the beginning of his opening remarks, although I did hear most of what he had to say.

I just want to say to my noble friend that on my journey to the House each week, I travel through the beautiful New Forest in Hampshire. This is the Weymouth to Waterloo line, so we travel at quite a speed. Across the section that covers the New Forest, there are crossings for pedestrians and for horse riders. As we approach a crossing, at a reasonable distance, the train driver is always required to sound the whistle. Would my noble friend consider whether that could be the answer for heritage railways—that the drivers of trains travelling at a much slower speed than the Weymouth to Waterloo train should sound the whistle? It seems to me that, if this has been satisfactory for so many years on a fast main line with South Western Railway, surely it would be adequate for heritage railways.

My Lords, our Front-Bench team on transport has grown dramatically over the past six months, from one to two. From time to time, my new partner—my noble friend Lord Liddle—and I have agreed on who should take business on a case-by-case basis. I thought that I would do the magnificent thing and offer to take this one. Little did I know how foolish that would turn out to be.

The essence of my noble friend Lord Berkeley’s regret Motion is that he is basically saying, “Here’s all this stuff that defines what this should be, but it’s going to involve costs”. It is not self-evident from the regulations that it will but, as you go into this, it becomes clear that, largely speaking, it will. I managed to knock together some paperwork this morning with the help of my friend Google and I have looked into this. As one who has done thousands of statutory instruments, I know that the first thing to do is not read the regulations, because they are almost impossible to read—so you go to the Explanatory Memorandum. However, in this case the EM came to the knowledge of the splendid Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee; it did a full job on these regulations, including extracting from the department a set of answers to its questions, which created much more information.

One thing that comes out of this is the fact that there is no impact assessment, because it will be below £5 million in any single year, et cetera. When one reads the appendix, one realises that the creation of this document makes doing it mandatory, even though the statutory instrument itself does not say so. I thought, “Well, I’m not going to be able to oppose this instrument”. I mean, no Labour person could stand up and criticise the Government for spending more money on railway safety—and I am sure that, deep down, it makes sense. Sadly, that sense has eluded me. The immediate questions that come up are these: why are we doing this? What is the hazard? What problems are we seeing? Our attention is drawn to two accidents: RAIB report 12/2018 and RAIB report 07/2016.