Member

I grant that the Government have given an assurance, which I accept, that existing open access operators will be allowed to continue under the new Great British Railways regime, but they have contracts to do so only for specific periods. We could easily be contemplating, in a number of years, a railway that was a total monopoly, one in which there was no open access for passenger services and none of the benefits that those very popular services have brought to the railways. It could also be one in which freight was being, so to speak, shunted to one side to give priority to Great British Railways and its own passenger services. It would be different if the ORR were guaranteed to be doing the allocation of paths, but we have no guarantee of that at all because the Labour Party document I refer to has no statutory basis.