Lord Young of Cookham (Con)

My Lords, I intervene briefly to speak to my noble friend’s Amendment 63A, on innovation and new technology. This country has had a fine tradition of both innovation and technology in the railways, right from the beginning. We have had the finest engineers—in Victorian times, and then, in the last century, in the 1920s and 1930s, we produced the fastest steam train. Under British Rail, the engineering was of the highest quality, but it was focused on the heavier end of the rail industry: rolling stock, signalling and track. Post privatisation, innovation and technology switched to customer service, marketing and cutting costs. That was because, under the franchise system, which you did not have under a monopoly, there was an incentive to win new customers, improve customer service and reduce running costs. None of that was there with the previous monopoly, and there is a risk that once you move again to a state monopoly, the incentives we had in the private sector to innovate and use technology will fall away. There is a risk of losing another change that happened post privatisation. If one franchise, such as Chiltern Railways, introduced a new innovation or service, customers would then expect the same, or an improvement, on Greater Anglia or Great Western Railway. Once you move to a monopoly, that sort of competitive advantage within the industry falls away, and you rely on looking at what happens overseas. That is why I wanted to intervene: to underline the importance of driving forward innovation in technology in the absence of the drive of the profit motive and the need to win business—a motive that risks falling away once we move over to GBR.