Lord Berkeley (Lab)

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 305 in this group. Noble Lords may think that Amendment 305 is a long way away from where we started in this group, but it is here. My amendment refers to Clause 87, which provides for a charge for removing road vehicles from railway property—let us call it that before going into too much detail. It seemed to me that, if the Government thought this was a good idea, they should extend it to dealing financially with the very many lorries these days which hit bridges and cause endless delays not just to road traffic but to passengers and freight. Network Rail’s website on what it calls “bridge bashing” says that, in the year from April 2024 to March 2025, there were 1,666 bridge strikes. Over five years, there were 8,300. Of course, some bridges get it all the time and others do not. Network Rail says that it costs it £23 million to repair every year. That seems quite cheap, but that is not really the point. Who pays? One other statistic is that it causes the equivalent of 120 days’ delay for rail passengers or freight. It occurs to me that either the driver or owner of the lorry or truck—it is usually a truck or bus—should be required to fund not just the cost of remedial work but some compensation for delay to the rail and road traffic. This has been going on for years, and I suppose I and many others have been saying to Network Rail that it has to do something about this. It is putting up all kinds of barriers, warning signs and everything, and it is doing a great job of it. However, I think this amendment would be very helpful. The Government want to charge people for parking on railway property. I think it says in the Bill that a road vehicle includes a “bicycle or other conveyance”. If they are even going to charge me for parking my bicycle at the station, they can surely charge the lorries or the buses which do a great deal of damage. My noble friend will probably say that the wording in my amendment needs improvement, and I am very happy to look at improving it, but it seems to me that something needs to be done to make the status of the relationship between road vehicles and trains a bit more equitable.