Member

This all sounds fine if you approach it from the point of view of many of us in this Room, who want to grow the railways and see more people using them with better onboard conditions. However, another way to reduce overcrowding and make services more reliable is to run far fewer trains and to increase prices—to price people off the railways. Then trains would not be as crowded, and they would be more reliable if you run fewer of them. So you would meet the requirements set out in the legislation, but that is not what we want and it is not what I think the Government intend in this Bill.