Member

My Amendment 130A builds on Amendment 129 from the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, which I support, but I want to ask whether we could be a bit more ambitious. We are legislating for a new Great British Railways at a time when we face both a climate emergency and a biodiversity crisis. We should be asking what this new body can actively do to address those challenges, rather than simply ensuring that it does not make them worse. The railway estate gives us an extraordinary opportunity. Network Rail is one of the largest landowners in Britain, with around 52,000 hectares of land. Its own description of the railway estate is as a “green corridor”, recognising that railway land can connect fragmented habitats across the country. I suggest that we find a way to put that opportunity into the Bill. Imagine a continuous green corridor running from Penzance to John O’ Groats, following the railway where possible—not necessarily a continuous strip of woodland or one uniform habitat, but a connected network of grasslands, wetlands, scrub, woodlands, ponds and other habitats joined together by the railway estate.