Contribution
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and to acknowledge his expertise and his dedication to the rail industry. When I saw that I had been drawn to speak after him, I knew that, by the time we came to that part of the debate, we would be on the transport section. I am grateful to the noble Lord for being the first speaker to take us into transport as far as the Loyal Address is concerned.
The Government put GBR in their manifesto, so it was obviously going to happen. It is interesting to note that, since privatisation and franchising of the railways, there was a Labour Government for 14 years, who decided to stick with the system that they had inherited. I think they decided to stick with that because they knew that it was working. Prior to privatisation, there were 700 million passenger journeys a year on our railways. During the period of privatisation, that figure went up to 1.7 billion. That was pre the pandemic. We saw private investment taking in the railways. I remember when I first got elected that the last place anybody would want to spend any time was St Pancras station. It was a dump. It was awful. It lacked investment. It lacked investment because nobody was investing in the railways. If you are competing against the health service and education for public sector money, and you want to put money in the railways, guess which comes last? It is the railways. I raise my concern about that and what may well happen. I am sure that, in the new utopia that we will get as far as GBR is concerned, we will see no delays and everything will be fine in the future—well, in your dreams, and in the Government’s dreams. It is a great pity that they will not be using the expertise of getting private investment in.
As a Secretary of State for Transport, I saw the detail that was gone into when a new franchise was coming up for renegotiation, the extra services that were lobbied for by local Members of Parliament and the like. That was encouraging, and more services were provided. I worry about the conglomeration of it all as to whether we will get that sort of dedication into those individual services; I am sure it will happen.
I want also to make a reference to HS2. It disappoints me immensely that we have got ourselves into such a mess on that project. Yesterday, the Secretary of State said that she was angry. She singled out four Prime Ministers. Not surprisingly, no Prime Ministers of the Labour Party were singled out, just Conservative Prime Ministers. So I had a look at the original Command Paper that was given to Parliament in 2010. Who was it signed by? The answer is Gordon Brown and Andrew Adonis—the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, as he is now. Who started this project? The Labour Party started it.
How did we get it so wrong? How has it been possible for such an important national scheme to have gone so wrong, and been deliberate? It is not the first time railway projects have gone wrong. The Command Paper is still a relevant document, and a very good one. On page 12, it says:
“The West Coast Route Modernisation Project cost £8.9 billion”
—let us not forget that this was 2010—
“and took almost a decade. It delivered fewer benefits than originally envisaged and caused serious disruption to travellers and to business, at a significant economic and social price in addition to the cost of the project itself”.
Getting rail infrastructure right, as the Minister knows probably better than most, is not something that happens overnight. It takes time, and a commitment over a longer period.
There are other Bills in the gracious Speech. I want to give the Minister one possible quick win: when it comes to the highways finance Bill, how about a clause saying that any utility company that has traffic lights on roads over the weekend, particularly A roads, has to pay £50,000 a day to leave those traffic lights in position over that weekend? I am pretty sure that, if there was such a charge on them, they would get them down fairly quickly over those weekends and that motorists would be very pleased indeed. They are growing like mushrooms, like we have never seen before.