Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, in the light of that last vote on the Bill, I will have to be very careful about what I say to ensure that it does not offend staff. It must be tough being the Secretary of State for Transport, because every time the Government are in difficulty with their Back-Benchers she is sent out to make another announcement about some great, distant spending plans. Of course, all the rail announcements made in this Statement were in fact announced by the previous Government. Before the Minister says, “Where was the money?”—and when he does say that, it displays a certain frailty of constitutional grasp—the fact is that, had the previous Government been re-elected, there would have been a spending review, just as this Government have had a spending review, and the schemes that this Government have announced would be in that spending review. That was the pledge; that is how our constitution works. Part of this Statement is not about announcing new rail schemes but about cancelling road schemes. We are not going to get the widening of the A12 or the A47 scheme from Wansford to Sutton. They are gone for the foreseeable future. However, I will turn back to the rail schemes, as my few remaining remarks will be about them. We find ourselves in the extraordinary position of being asked to celebrate rail expansion when the Government have still failed to lay the Great British Railways Bill before Parliament. Great British Railways, optimistically suggested for late 2026 at the earliest, now appears increasingly likely to slip to 2027 or beyond, with the legislation yet to appear before either House of Parliament. Perhaps the Government have finally realised that centralising control of our railways is not the simple solution that they once claimed it would be. The complexities of their grand nationalisation project appear to have caught them rather off guard. So my first question to the Minister is: where is the Bill? Where is Great British Railways? More pertinently, where is shadow Great British Railways—which already has a remunerated chair—in these announcements? The relevance of that is that, under the Government’s scheme and their plans for rail, proposals such as this—the expansion of the rail network—are meant to be proposed, worked up and delivered by Great British Railways, subject to government funding, not the other way round. We are not even sure that all these schemes will necessarily be carried out, because what guarantee is there that they will be a priority for Great British Railways when that body comes into existence? Is it, in fact, merely a puppet for the department after all, as we suspect might be the case? When we were debating the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill, which began the process of nationalising the train operating companies, I warned that the Government were moving not from one state to another but from one state to a huge transition period. That is what we are in at the moment: a transition period where we have no idea who is in charge of the railways and no real accountability. It is a governance mess. The Department for Transport continues its iron grip on the rail operators, which it now owns through subsidiary companies, with civil servants in effect running train services while the promised arm’s-length body remains a distant aspiration. This raises fundamental questions about whether their calls for rail growth are genuine or merely a smokescreen for increased state control. The Government’s actions speak louder than their words. The Office of Rail and Road, under instruction from the Secretary of State, has already rejected eight open access operator contracts, despite compelling evidence that competition drives service improvements and passenger growth. That ideological opposition to open access operations flies in the face of economic evidence and passenger benefits. Consider the transformative impact of operators such as Grand Central and Hull Trains, which have brought direct services to previously underserved communities in Sunderland, Scarborough, Bradford and Hull. These are not abstract policy successes but tangible improvements to people’s lives, connecting communities that had previously lacked such direct rail links. Independent research by Arup and Frontier Economics provides unequivocal evidence of competition’s benefits. On corridors with open access competition, service frequency rose by up to 60% and total passenger numbers increased by approximately 40%. Those are not marginal gains; they represent the kind of transformational improvements the Government claim to seek through their infrastructure spending. Yet instead of embracing this proven model for growth, they actively suppress it. If this Government were truly committed to rail growth, they would be encouraging, not stifling, the competition that demonstrably delivers increased services and passenger numbers. The fact that they do the opposite suggests that their rail policy is driven more by ideology than economic efficiencies. The delays to Great British Railways reveal a Government who perhaps underestimated the complexity of their grand nationalisation project. What was once promised as a streamlined solution now appears mired in the very bureaucratic inefficiencies they claimed to oppose. The latest date we have for the Great British Railways Bill to appear is the autumn. Will the Minister confirm that date or will he have to say, as is now widely believed in the industry, that he will not make that deadline and that the Bill will be coming much closer to Christmas at the earliest? This House has a duty to scrutinise not just the Government’s spending commitments but the coherence of their overall transport strategy. We cannot properly fulfil that duty when key legislation remains unpublished and when policy appears to contradict evidence. The Government must explain why they continue to reject open access applications when the evidence so clearly demonstrates their value. They must clarify when Parliament will finally see the Great British Railways Bill and they must reconcile their rhetoric about rail growth with their actions that constrain it. Until then, I fear we are being asked to applaud announcements while the fundamental questions about rail policy direction remain unanswered. The British public deserve better than this policy vacuum masquerading as progress.