Olly Glover

I am happy to thank the Minister here and Lord Hendy for engaging with my hon. Friend’s amendment to better enable members of our armed forces, veterans and their families to travel to services on Remembrance Sunday. New clauses 6 and 2 and amendments 2 and 3 would require GBR to deliver meaningful fares reform and innovation, such as tap-in and tap-out contactless payment, as is currently available in the entirety of the Netherlands, and other forms of convenient digital payment, as well as our rail miles scheme, which would extend the concept of air miles and promote domestic tourism by making journeys on our railways as valuable a commodity as air miles are today. New clause 9 would reduce the ability of the Department for Transport and the Treasury to meddle in the affairs of GBR, because interference and micromanagement by those organisations has caused a lot of the issues afflicting our railways today. To that end, amendments 7 and 6 would align track and train budgets, putting right what I feel is a detailed and structural flaw in the Bill. The Bill’s current intention to have infrastructure subject to five-year funding cycles, but funding for passenger services and train operation subject to spending review timescales, undermines the ability to achieve a “whole railway” way of thinking, planning and funding. Amendments 8 and 9 are intended to deliver stronger accountability and transparency for GBR in relation to capacity allocation and network access fees, powers and decisions, particularly given that freight will remain in the private sector and as an open access endeavour. Amendment 5 and new clause 3 counter the Bill’s poverty of ambition for the railways’ potential to further tackle road congestion, improve access to work and productivity, and cut carbon emissions, as shown by the Government’s repeated and, frankly, bizarre and incomprehensible refusal to include a requirement for a passenger growth target in the Bill. This is an area on which Liberal Democrats, Greens and Conservatives all tabled similar amendments in Committee—how often does that happen? Not very often, in my experience. Myriad stakeholder organisations have made the same point, as indeed has the Transport Committee. Perhaps the noble Lord Hendy’s recent comments to the Transport Committee partially give the game away. When I asked him about summer service cuts to Avanti West Coast services, he said: “It is a perfectly reasonable proposition to reduce train services in the short term when there is less demand for them.” On one level that is an understandable view, but where there is lower demand for train services, we need to look at the reasons for that, and perhaps Avanti West Coast’s outrageous fares and poor track record are part of that, or it may be less attractive because of the lack of open access on the west coast main line compared with the east coast.