Contribution
I simply say to the noble Lord, first, that there will have to be 100% transparency because, apart from anything else, GBR will have to put all the costs into its business plan. My other point about his first point is that there has been a lot of investment already, with very little protection. Part of what we are doing is to give greater protection for retailers in the future, which they need because they have invested. That is a valid point.
Amendments 47, 51, 52, 53, 136 and 139 concern oversight. The retail code of practice will, as I said, be administered and enforced by the ORR. It is the appropriate body to assess complaints and determine whether GBR has complied with its obligations, but GBR will also be fully subject to competition law, alongside the existing oversight of the Competition and Markets Authority. Nothing in the Bill prevents the CMA from acting on competition challenges in rail, and nothing prevents retailers from referring issues to the CMA—either competition issues relating to the code of practice or wider competition issues. So a second opinion is always available and, of course, if they wanted to appeal to the courts, they could judicially review those decisions further.
Currently, at least, additional approval requirements and further statutory appeal routes simply duplicate the existing regulatory arrangements without providing meaningful additional protections, and transparency, as I have referred to, is already baked into this framework. It is a core regulatory principle for the ORR, which has historically publicised the launching, and formal outcome, of railway licence investigations, and I would expect it to continue to do so. The Bill retains the requirement for the ORR to give notice for any decision not to issue an enforcement order following a licence breach, providing a legislative backstop for this transparency.
I move to Amendments 136 and 139. It would not be appropriate for the ORR’s general duty to promote competition to apply to rail retailing wholesale. If it did, the competition duty would conflict with the ORR’s role in fairly and objectively enforcing the safeguards that the Government have charged it to deliver via the code. Enforcement of the code should be fair and evidence-based, determined simply by whether GBR has complied with the code of practice or not. It should not be subject to other goals, which might cause the ORR to judge operators’ compliance unfairly. This is usual practice for enforcement provisions.
However, I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, that the competition duty will absolutely apply to the ORR when it is writing the code of practice, so the code itself will have competition principles embedded within it. My officials wrote to her on that subject. The noble Baroness put to the Committee a number of clear propositions that I will consider carefully as a consequence of what she said. I believe I have answered many of them, but I will look at what she said further, and of course the publication of the draft code of practice will help considerably. I will also consider what the noble Lord, Lord Young, the noble Baroness, Lady Alexander, and other noble Lords said. As I said, we expect the CMA to respond to the consultation, so we will see what it says.
On Amendment 17, the Government fully agree that appropriate oversight and scrutiny of public spending is important. However, the amendment is unnecessary. The government policy has long been that GBR will retail tickets online through a high-quality website and app, as the train operating companies do now and have done for many years, without fees to passengers.