Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 129 in my name; Amendments 93, 111 and 313, which I have signed; and Amendment 130A, which has considerable overlap with the other amendments here. Amendment 129 aims to maintain the contribution that Network Rail has made to nature recovery efforts over recent years. It is important, in many ways, to congratulate Network Rail on what it has already achieved. This potential was first recognised in 2018 when the Network Rail vegetation management review, led by John Varley, recommended that nature recovery measures be set up across the estate to produce a railway for people and wildlife. The Government accepted this recommendation and in 2019 published a policy statement requiring Network Rail to achieve no net loss of biodiversity on the existing line-side estate by 2024 and biodiversity net gain on each route by 2040. The requirement included an expectation on Network Rail to publish an annual report on its activity and progress towards meeting these goals. It has done that and, over the past six years, this has led to progress; it is important to acknowledge that. A biodiversity plan and a regular state of nation report from Network Rail kick-started and reported on a range of ingenious projects to achieve no net loss of biodiversity by 2024. It has started to deliver on the biodiversity gain and has now brought it forward to 2035. The latest State of Nature report already shows a minor overall increase in the amount of nature-rich habitats across the estate since 2020, including an extra 618 hectares of broadleaf woodland. In the foreword to this 2024 report, the noble Lord, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, when chair of Network Rail, indicated that this progress would continue in this new arrangement, stating: “the rail industry is raising the profile of biodiversity alongside engineering … it is natural engineering that looks to offer much opportunity as we press on towards Great British Railways”. Sadly, the Government’s mechanisms to achieve this continuity are currently lacking from this Bill, and I believe there is a real risk that this good recent progress will be lost with the transfer of the railway estate to Great British Railways. Amendment 129 is designed to prevent this and is strongly supported by the Wildlife Trust and other environmental groups. The issue is that the Bill places only one tangential environmental responsibility on Great British Railways, and that is the duty to make decisions in the public interest, described in Clause 18 as encompassing, “the effect the provision of railway services has on the environment”. That is it. This is amorphous, it is an unreportable fraction of a duty and simply no replacement for the specific and reportable biodiversity enhancement requirement that has applied to Network Rail since 2018. The biodiversity duty set under the Environment Act in 2021 will apply to GBR but it is general in application and without a requirement to report on progress. My amendment outlines three concerns specifically. The first is to deliver measures as identified in the local nature recovery strategies. We have these strategies—and very shortly we will have 48 covering the entirety of England—and this amendment provides local-specific blueprints that affect nature recovery on every English railway holding. This really increases the impact of using local data and, importantly, the work of local communities, which have worked extremely hard to bring together this data into a local nature recovery strategy, and the organisations developing them. My amendment additionally would require Great British Railways to report on the creation of wildlife corridors, as already mentioned by other noble Lords. As a scientist, I went back to look at the evidence base for these corridors having any effect. Is this just a nice to have? I came across a paper published last year. It was a meta-analysis across the world, looking at wildlife corridors created alongside urban infrastructure, such as roads and railways. There were 34 countries and 800 examples and over 64% of these indicated improved movement across landscapes and associated improvements in wildlife biodiversity and abundance. One problem with UK nature right now—and I am not the only one believing this; it is the reason why we keep seeing these declines—is that currently our nature is becoming more and more fragmented into small islands surrounded by large oceans of impenetrable landscape. There is huge potential in that land alongside the railways to create these corridors. I believe they have the potential to create a wildlife corridor from Land’s End to John O’Groats or technically, looking this up in the railway network, from Penzance to Thurso. The prize that Network Rail could bring about to restoring the continuity of ecological process in the UK is huge, but it needs to be realised and supported and this would, I believe, be strengthened by reporting duty as outlined in my amendment. There is another point to these wildlife corridors that we often lose sight of and that is that nature-rich habitats can reduce fire risks on railways. Native biodiversity replaces the highly flammable invasive or unmanaged grasses. This is because native biodiversity, particularly trees and shrubs, has a higher leaf moisture content and lower volatile oils—it does not catch fire so easily, so you do not see long strips of fire going alongside the railway. The other beauty of vegetation and the wildlife corridors along the sides of railways is in the root networks in the soil. When you have flooding events, those areas that are vegetated are less likely to see the landslides and landslips that damage railways and stop them working. This is why these amendments are important. The railway estate has significant potential for solar deployment at stations and car parks. Again, Network Rail kick-started this work in 2025, with an agreement with EDF to provide energy from solar to meet 15% of the network’s needs. A new solar deployment reporting duty could build on this and galvanise work to fit small-scale solar across the railway estate and its more than 2,500 stations. But it comes back to legally requiring annual reports on the delivery of these three highly impactful environmental interventions. By doing that, I believe that Amendment 129 would lock effective environmental improvement into Great British Railways’ operating model. I am seriously concerned that otherwise it will get lost in the noise if we are not careful. I turn briefly to the other amendments that I have added my name to, the chief theme in which is resilience. We need to electrify our railways in England and set a yearly target for miles electrified, as they do in Scotland —we are way behind Scotland and we need to have some targets. We also need to ensure that trains can operate in our hot summers. I travel up and down every day by train to the House of Lords. I dearly hope that we can work it out, because my journeys were devastated this summer. The point to make is that our temperate climate is a thing of the past. This is now the norm, and we absolutely need to adapt to that. The Bill could be an opportunity to give our iconic transport network across the UK, Great British Railways, and the sector adaptation targets and a general duty to reach our missions, adaptation and environmental targets, as Amendment 111 would. These amendments would go some way towards achieving this.