Lord Harper (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to a number of the amendments in this group. First, I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Moylan said at the beginning about ownership. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, just said that this Bill is about public ownership, but actually it is not. That was the other Bill to which she referred; this Bill is about setting up GBR as the guiding mind, bringing track and train together—however one wants to characterise it. It is not essential to the core purpose of the Bill; the ownership structure is not core to delivering the services. My noble friend Lord Moylan was right to make those points in his opening remarks. Of the specific amendments, Amendment 2 is very pertinent. My noble friend Lord Moylan focused on the “owned by the Crown” piece, but Clause 1(3) talks about Great British Railways being “wholly owned by the Crown”. Even if we accept that GBR should largely be owned by the Minister—in effect, on behalf of the public—who is able to direct things, I am not sure that we should be in favour of it being “wholly owned”. There is a very good argument for having some private capital. It might be that you want to get that capital involved in the company. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, referred to infrastructure, and we may wish to use it for that and people could have a shareholding. It may be, as my noble friend Lord Lansley said, that we would wish to have some joint ventures. I will give two examples. One of the countries whose railways people generally admire is Japan. Interestingly, people involved in the railways in Japan largely admire how we do them, as well. There is an enormous amount of cross-fertilisation between experts from both countries. They have very successfully defrayed some of the costs of running their railway by using the value of the property in which the railway system operates—on top of, below or alongside —to generate some effective retail operations and other things that generate a significant amount of money. This keeps down the cost to the taxpayer from running the railway. Network Rail does some of those sorts of joint ventures already in developing property and that seems perfectly reasonable. Even if we accepted that running the railway piece should be publicly owned—and I do not—it would seem perfectly reasonable if Network Rail, which will now become part of GBR, wished to have some joint ventures with people who develop property and people who help to maximise the returns for the taxpayer on the assets owned by GBR. The state is frankly not very good at doing those things, which are important not just to raise revenue to defray costs but to develop and energise the economy in some of our towns and cities up and down the country. Core railway assets are often where you could develop housing and other things to redevelop areas. To give a specific example, there was a Written Answer from the Minister recently—forgive me, but I cannot remember whether it was answered yesterday or in the previous few days—about how the Government will develop Euston station. Originally, that was going to be done by HS2, but, when I was Secretary of State, we came to the conclusion that HS2 was probably not going to make a good fist of that. At that time, the Minister was the chairman of the Euston Partnership, which brought together representatives of the Mayor of London, local authorities and private sector companies involved in developing the station. We came to the conclusion that a development-led approach would be better, in order to develop a significant amount of housing for that part of London as well as private sector office and business space, as we had done around King’s Cross and St Pancras, which has had a huge impact on the economy. But that involves working in partnership with the private sector. I do not know how in the end the Government will structure that approach, but it seems to me that it would be sensible at least to keep open the option that, at the very least, a subsidiary of GBR could potentially own a joint venture or part of the entity involved in delivering the development, either to help to run it or to share in some of the capital gain. You may or may not wish to do that, but ruling out the ability to do that does not seem to me sensible. Therefore, my noble friend Lord Moylan’s amendment, which probes that issue, is sensible and has a lot of merit. On the issue of private shareholders, I will make the argument just briefly, since this Bill is not about nationalisation, about where the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, misunderstands the point about private companies. As my noble friend Lord Moylan said, from the point of view of the consumer and the delivery of services, privatisation was for most of its life a massive success. It brought into the railways an enormous amount of private capital, new rolling stock, new services and a hugely greater number of people using the railways than had been the case under British Rail, under which passenger numbers had, frankly, been declining since the Second World War. It was a huge success. Now, it is absolutely true that the passenger franchise model had some issues and, in fact, was effectively destroyed by the pandemic. I am not suggesting that we necessarily would have wanted to carry on with that model, but there are other models involving the private sector. For example, the way that TfL operates in London is that TfL specifies the services but, in a number of cases, it contracts with companies to run those. also, as the then Mayor of Greater Manchester, the Prime Minister set up the bus services that he wished to procure, but it was the private sector that delivered those. Those models seem to me perfectly sensible. If you set them up properly, the company makes money only if it delivers services that passengers require. That seems to me a very sensible model. I know that the noble Baroness does not agree with it, but I just wanted to set out how it actually works, as opposed to her characterisation of it. The last point that I want to make is on Amendment 8, also tabled by my noble friend Lord Moylan, which talks about the organisational structure of GBR. The reason why that is important—I think we will come on to this in some of our later debates—is that it is, in effect, how you set up the organisation and, therefore, how it takes decisions and who takes the decisions within the structure.