Lord Gascoigne (Con)

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Moylan’s Amendment 47, which addresses the interaction between Transport for London and public sector companies. There are three points I wish to make. First, if, in future—as the Minister knows all too well, having sat in on these conversations—the Mayor of London wished to build an entirely new part of the network and go for, let us say, Crossrail 2, what would be the Government’s position on that? Would they allow London to retain its independence and choose between public and private or insist, not least because projects require significant government funding, that the Bill takes effect across all new infrastructure and future services in London? Secondly, and linked to that—as again the Minister knows all too well—infrastructure in London requires the private sector to play its part and contribute at least to help unlock wider renewal and regeneration. I referred to Crossrail, of which, from memory, London businesses paid about 40%. Has there been an analysis of the Bill’s impact on the ability to raise funds from business? I imagine that the Minister will say that that is a matter for the mayor, but there surely must be wider read-through from the Bill to the country far beyond London. Thirdly, I wish to seek clarity from a policy point of view. My noble friend’s amendment exposes a real problem with the entire premise of the legislation. After all, it does not merely address what the relationship will be between one entity inside London and another that falls outside, which takes precedence. In the main, the amendment demonstrates why London is an anomaly that undermines the coherence of the Bill and the credibility of the whole policy. Ultimately, we are having the debate on this group because London is exempt from nationalisation. As we heard repeatedly in Committee, part of the agenda for reform is to try to bring all the transport network together and make it less fragmented, yet London is exempted from this for whatever reasons. I make this point because, with this Bill, we are enacting a two-tier system. Choice is gone, and we are strengthening or at least reinforcing fragmentation. I can almost sense the response from the Benches opposite. It will be, as we heard before, that their manifesto talked about this, but it talked about public ownership, not the retention of freedom of choice in London. Next we heard—not today, sadly—that public opinion polls said that people want nationalisation. When we heard this the other day, the only thing that struck me in my mind was this: are we really governed by public opinion? The other day—it might have been yesterday—there was a poll in which, I am afraid, our illustrious Prime Minister had fallen behind and was now more unpopular than Rishi Sunak. Does Labour, as it believes in public opinion, now believe that Rishi should be the Prime Minister? Next is that the capital is so important, and that is indeed correct, but Liverpool is granted these freedoms too. Next it will be that I want to level down the capital —not at all.