Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, I thank Peers for the Planet, which alerted me to the fact that I had an amendment today, because I got missed off the distribution list from the Government Whips’ Office. I am afraid that I have not had the opportunity to explore other people’s amendments in this group and I hope that they will not think me rude in covering some of these points. I am slightly disappointed that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has left, because I thought that he might like part of my speech. My amendment may make it seem like we are going back to the 1980s or the 1990s, and in some ways it does. There is a twofold approach to what I have tried to do. I was told that it was not in scope to remove functions from the ORR but that I could create a new one instead, so I have created the one that was originally created back in the 1990s. That is basically to go back to having a simpler body that looks after rail. Ideally, roads would be dealt with elsewhere, if at all. Let us follow a bit of the logic here. Great British Railways will basically be taxpayer owned—government owned—and there is now no need whatever to have a non-ministerial department as a regulator. This will be run by the Government. I am more than happy to sit down with the Minister another time to go through how he could get some brownie points or gold stars with the First Secretary of State in helping to rewire the state, given the discussion that has been going on within the Government about how to get back more control. The control is not just about owning the railways; it is about how people are accountable. A non-ministerial department is accountable not to Ministers but to Parliament. That does not mean that there are no discussions and the like but, if the Government are going to own the railways, I think people would rather them to be in charge, to be accountable and to look into how they operate. I appreciate that there is an element here about safety, and there are currently two functions of that. The Railway Accident Investigation Branch is not part of the ORR; it is a body that reports directly to the Secretary of State. The ORR has other functions to do with safety, which it took on in 2006 instead of the Health and Safety Executive. It is perfectly acceptable for there be a much closer relationship, in thinking about how safety is applied on government-owned railways, than through some other third-party body. There is another example. The Health and Safety Executive is a NDPB, but the Defence Safety Authority is in the Ministry of Defence. It has a different way of having accountability: to avoid it going straight to the Secretary of State, it goes through a Permanent Secretary. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is back, and I hope that he might enjoy part of my speech on helping to rewire the state and have fewer of these non-ministerial departments. The reason why I am focusing on this is that, if the whole point is to have much more control of railways by Ministers, there is a sense of starting to strip away other unnecessary aspects of the state to make sure that that can get done efficiently and effectively.