Lord Berkeley (Lab)

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for putting down these two amendments. I too have had many representations from all kinds of people and companies who already operate trains or would like to. We are not talking about the branch lines, which are on the whole private and are not covered here anyway; there are an awful lot of what some people might call excursion trains, dining trains or whatever—there is the Jacobite train going to Mallaig which, I am told, is highly successful—as well as freight, which all need access to the network. Even at the moment, there are stories of people applying to get on the network, for a pass somewhere, to be told that it is already full; then they go back to what is Network Rail at the moment and say, “Well, if you did this and that, you could get an extra train or two on”. It also covers the issue of the risks and the penalties if something goes wrong, because Network Rail at the moment will think, “We do not want this because it could muck up the service and cause delays elsewhere”. On having the independent ORR being what you might call an appeal body, I do not look upon it as a secondary directing mind, because the first directing mind is quite often a monopoly. We spent a lot of time this afternoon talking about monopolies and how we do not want them, and the Minister said he does not like monopolies either. This kind of catch-all amendment covering all the different types of train that might want to use the network, and with an appeal body in the ORR, would be a very sensible solution. I fully support it.