Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, in the course of preparing for this Committee, I have had a number of meetings with the Minister and his officials, and I thank them for making themselves available for those meetings. I say that now because I shall almost certainly forget to say it at more appropriate times later on, but if I do it is not because I do not mean quite seriously how grateful I am for the contribution and effort that they have made. We are here on the first day of the Committee to create a Soviet-style railway in the United Kingdom and to go back—and we now know explicitly that it is the Government’s and the Prime Minister’s intention—to the warm and fuzzy 1970s. The 1970s are now the paradigm of where our nation should be. Those of us who remember the 1970s—there may be a number of us in the Room—do not have such fond memories of the standard of public services then compared with what we have today. We do not today have bodies unburied, we do not have refuse piled high in the streets as a result of government folly and we have railways that run broadly on time compared to the—I see that the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, is not here to be annoyed by this—relative catastrophe of British Rail in its worst days as it trundled towards its final station. Now it is to be resuscitated. We are to get Great British Railways in place of British Rail and we are going to have it on a totally nationalised basis. There are two separate things going on here. First, the Minister makes a case that the railways would operate more efficiently if, as he puts it, track and train were united. That argument can be debated. I do not wholly accept it, but it can be debated, but it is not necessary in order for track and train to be united that they should all be owned by the Government in a single company. We know that because the Williams review, which was warmly welcomed by the Minister when he was chairman of Network Rail and was supported by the Conservative Government at the time, gave an alternative way forward, so the decision to nationalise the whole thing is particularly spiteful. The only explanation for it—because it is not necessary for the purpose of achieving the Government’s stated objectives—is that it has been done to pay off the trades unions that made such generous contributions to Labour’s victory at the polls in 2024. We know that privatisation has been a huge success on the railways and that passenger numbers increased enormously after privatisation. It would be astonishing if the Government nationalising the railways achieved anything like that increase in passenger numbers. New operators entered the market and competition stimulated improvements. I have four amendments in this group, but one of them is consequential, so three that I intend to speak to. My Amendment 2 addresses a particularly vicious little clause in the Bill, which says, first of all, that the body designated as Great British Railways has to be owned wholly by the Crown. In other words, a future Minister would have to pass primary legislation to redesignate or designate a different body in the private sector to carry out Great British Railways’ activities. What is the need for that? It is simply to gratify the trades unions. A second part almost seems to impose a penalty of some sort on any Minister who makes even a suggestion that Great British Railways should be transferred to the private sector. My Amendment 2 deletes that part; it does not stop Great British Railways going ahead as a nationalised body but it allows a future Secretary of State without the need for primary legislation to redesignate a different body, not necessarily owned by the Crown, to carry out the role of Great British Railways. Amendment 1 is addressed at sloppy drafting more than anything else. The Bill talks about a body corporate being designated as Great British Railways, whereas later, in the next clause, it is implicit that the body corporate should be a company constituted under the Companies Act. But the Bill does not actually say that the body corporate has to be constituted under the Companies Act; it only says that it has to be wholly owned by the Crown. Other bodies corporate could be designated, as long as they were wholly owned by the Crown. It is simply sloppy drafting not to say at this point that it is to be a body constituted under the Companies Act. When I mentioned this to the Minister, he said, “Oh well, everybody knows it’s going to be a company constituted under the Companies Act”. Well, they do not, if they read the Act—it needs to be written into the Act by him that that is what the intention is. It should say quite explicitly that that is what he intends to do. We will come back to this when we discuss amendments later in Committee that relate to the board of this company. There are some from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, to which I have added my name, about the board of this company and how this corporate structure works, because the Bill is very silent on that. This needs to be done. Finally, Amendment 8 probes Great British Railways’ organisational structure. To this day we still have no idea at all—and maybe the Minister has no idea at all—how Great British Railways is going to be structured. Let me give a couple of options. It could be that it will be structured geographically, roughly mapping the existing structures, so that one division deals roughly with the south-western main line, one division deals with the east coast main line, and so forth. It could be structured like that, but you could have a totally different structure. There might be an argument for saying that we should have one division that deals with operating the railways, one that deals with managing the major stations, another division that deals with the minor stations and another again for retail. You could have an organisation that was completely functionally based rather than geographically based. These are important questions, which I think Parliament should have a chance to have a say on, yet not only is the Bill silent about them but the Government are silent as well. The effect of Amendment 8 is to require the Government to publish their organisational structure before the Bill can come into effect. That is enough for the moment—I understand that other noble Lords have things to say. I will just say in advance—and I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me for pre-empting her—that I have taken note of the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. They are not wholly aligned with my view of the role of the private sector and she will not therefore, I think, be surprised if I find myself not able to support them. I beg to move.