Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, before I turn to the substance of this group, I would like to say that I received this morning from the Minister, as I imagine other noble Lords have, a letter setting out certain corrections to statements that he made on Tuesday. I have not had the opportunity to study that, but I hope that there will be an opportunity at a later stage in Committee, if necessary, to come back and question the noble Lord on the points made in that letter. However, I also yesterday received an email from a group calling itself the Association of British Commuters. It referred to the debate that we had on Tuesday concerning what constituted in this context a wholly owned subsidiary of GBR and whether that was consistent with some sort of public/private partnership for the purpose, for example, of developing land. This was not a strange email; it was very coherent, sensible and well written. The thrust of it was that not only did noble Lords on these Benches get it all wrong—if I may say so to my noble friend Lord Lansley; if he has not received the email, I will send it to him—but so did the Minister. I have two questions before I start on this section. First, has the Minister received this email? If not, I am very happy to send it to him. Secondly, does he expect to return to the Committee at the earliest opportunity to make corrective statements? Clearly, if he has not seen the email, he will not be able to answer the second question, because his officials will not have had the chance to advise him, but he is under an obligation to return at the earliest opportunity if he has something to correct, as he has today—I am giving him that opportunity. When I sit down, I will send him the email. If he tells me at the end that he has not received it, I will very happily send it to him, as I will to my noble friend Lord Lansley. I turn to the group of amendments that we have been debating. I shall speak to—I shall not read out the numbers—all the amendments that I have tabled in this group, which are quite a lot. I shall also speak briefly on Amendment 27 on behalf of my noble friend Lord Grayling. These amendments go to the heart of the devolution agenda. None of us is satisfied with what the Bill contains on devolution to local authorities, strategic authorities, regional authorities—whatever they are called. I have been thinking about why none of us is satisfied and what the fundamental flaw of the Bill is in this regard. The answer is that there is no devolution in it. What the Bill does is give those authorities the right to request things from Great British Railways—as I said on Tuesday, I find the phrase “right to request” quite objectionable in a free country, because we all have a right to request things of Ministers as part of our democracy. In other words, they have the right to ask to become customers. If those things are granted to them, they will have those services provided by Great British Railways and they will make payments towards them, if necessary, to justify the carriage of passengers on that particular route. All they have, therefore, is the right to request to become customers. There are no devolved powers in any of this. There is no devolved running of railways, because that would be inconsistent, I suspect, in the Minister’s mind with the single directing brain that is going to be controlling the railways. So there is very little. The amendments that I have tabled fall into two groups. Two of them relate to devolution in general, and the second group relates to TfL in particular. To start with TfL, I need to start by saying that although it is not a current interest, as many noble Lords in the Room will know, I used to be deputy chairman of TfL and indeed worked closely with the Minister during that time. The Mayor of London has made it clear that he wants further devolution of rail services to TfL. In fact, this is a process that started when I was deputy chairman of TfL and the Minister was commissioner, and very successful it has been. Lines that were, in effect, abandoned became busy commuter routes, with very little investment—just through good management, making the stations attractive and having some new trains. It has been a huge success. The London Overground is one of the huge rail successes that this country has achieved in the past few years—all of it run on a concession model, incidentally, involving the private sector or external train companies of one sort or another. The Mayor of London wants more of that—that is understandable. I think Londoners want more of that. The Mayor of London now has a high-powered friend in Downing Street. The Prime Minister has said that power has been hoarded in SW1 for too long. He wants power carried to every postcode in the land—et cetera—and the Government will be redistributing power. This Bill does not redistribute power to anybody in local government. So I would hope that the Minister would have changed his mind in recent weeks and would be extremely sympathetic to these amendments. Amendments 28 to 30 seek to ensure that the Secretary of State remains properly involved in arrangements between GBR and TfL, rather than allowing those relations to be determined solely within GBR. This is the bear in the room again. GBR is going to be so huge. It will make all the decisions. Everybody else is just a taker of decisions by GBR, they are not participating in them. Amendment 159 seeks to protect existing TfL and London Underground arrangements and would ensure that they could not simply be displaced without proper process and consultation. Amendment 301 makes the principle even simpler: where GBR is making a decision affecting TfL, it should inform TfL and allow TfL itself to determine whether the decision is sufficiently significant to require consultation. That seems entirely consistent with the Prime Minister’s philosophy. The same principle lies behind Amendments 23 to 25, 156 and 297 in relation to mayors and local government more widely, to which I now turn. Amendments 23 and 24 would give greater flexibility for railway functions to be exercised locally and for the necessary financial arrangements to flow in either direction. At the moment the Bill allows GBR to collect money from local authorities. Why should it not be the other way round? What if GBR makes a profit on a line? Why should it not pay money to the local authority? Why is everything so one-sided in the Bill? Amendment 25 would provide an independent route to the ORR where agreement cannot be reached. There is no way in the Bill of resolving disagreements. So let us provide one. Let us have an appeal to an independent ORR. It is not that I think the ORR is tremendous, but it is currently the only available appeal body. If the Minister says he is happy to have an appeal but would like a different structure, we would be open to discussing that, but let us have an appeal route so that disagreements can be resolved independently. Amendment 156 would allow mayoral and combined authorities to procure local passenger services through concession agreements, including using private operators where that offers the best solution. Currently they are limited to using GBR to provide the services. What if GBR is no good? I know that GBR is going to be managed beautifully and nothing will ever go wrong in the utopian vision we are looking forward to, but what if it is not actually very good? What if people are constantly on strike? What if the management is sloppy? Why should you not be able to turn to a private train operator to manage your local service? This is not a question of track access or timetables, because they have been agreed, but why would you have to use GBR to provide these services if you are genuinely enjoying devolution? Amendment 297 would require GBR to notify a mayoral combined authority before taking a relevant decision. I accept the point made by my noble friend Lord Lansley that that terminology might be improved, but I am not entering into that issue at the moment. That would allow the authority itself to judge whether the decision is sufficiently significant to require consultation. Why should GBR be the body to decide whether something should be consulted on, when it is the local authority that has the knowledge of how sensitive it might be with the local communities that could benefit from consultation? These amendments test how far the Government intend to follow through on the Prime Minister’s policies. Do they genuinely trust mayors and local authorities to shape local services? Do they support further rail devolution to London where TfL can demonstrate that it would improve services? Will they ensure that GBR becomes a partner in genuine devolution—not simply acquiring local authority customers—rather than just a national body through which decisions are centralised? Given the new Prime Minister’s stated agenda, I hope we will see a different approach from the Minister for the first time. The amendments tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Berkeley, and my noble friends Lord Lansley and Lord Grayling are at the heart of many of the issues that I have raised in this group. They also sit squarely with what the Prime Minister himself advocated when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester—a song that he has continued to sing, on the whole, since he became Prime Minister, about the importance of devolving power, giving local leaders greater control over transport and allowing places to shape growth around their own priorities. It is time for the Minister to step up, get real and get with the swing of where, we are told, Burnham’s Britain is going.