Member

This is an arrangement that would have been wholly unacceptable to Transport for London under the guardianship of the Minister—and quite rightly so—but this is now what is going to be offered to London. The Government are trashing a system which is known to work and has delivered significant improvements, certainly in London, and replacing it with something that is untried and untested and goes to the heart of their own conception of what the railways should be like: that they should be running everything but some things can be run by other people because they already are run by other people. That is the irrational basis on which this project is being advanced. The Government seem to have very little clarity about where they are taking us as a direct consequence of this Bill and its prohibition on the Secretary of State awarding franchises or contracts of any sort to anybody, any organisation, that is not a public service company effectively owned by the Secretary of State.