Member

Then we come to London—the most congested and complicated part of the network—where the services on the Network Rail tracks are, of course, run partly by Network Rail and partly by the Mayor of London. The effect of what the Minister says in his statement is that the steady progress of transferring responsibility for local lines from Network Rail to the Mayor of London that has taken place over the last 10 or 15 years —irrespective of the party colour of the mayoralty—is now to be stopped. It is to be set in aspic. The current arrangement is to be left as it is, whether there is a rational basis for it or not.