Andy McDonald

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to tell us where he thinks the dividends go when they ship out of the system. The Conservative party was quite content to see massive dividends paid out to Abellio, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Deutsche Bahn, and every other nation state on the planet that could subsidise its own transport system because of the ridiculous system imposed on this country’s railways by the Conservative party. Rather than serving passengers and performance, what we got was money shipping out of our system for decades, subsidising other nation states’ transport systems—if that is not a good example of barmy ideology, I do not know what is. We are correcting that, and rightly so. The Minister in the Lords, my noble Friend Lord Hendy, said that “the Government do not believe that we should either pay compensation for termination or keep paying fees to owning groups of train operating companies when we do not need to.” He also clarified that some contracts may end early if their performance requires it: “if we have the opportunity to put passengers out of their misery by ending a failing operator’s contract early and bringing their services into public ownership, we will do just that.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 6 November 2024; Vol. 840, c. 1519.] The Government are clear that they are moving ahead with restoring passenger rail to public ownership. They have a clear plan to do so, but Lords amendment 2 creates obstacles to doing that. It is not in the interests of passengers, and I hope the House will throw it out when we vote later.