Contribution
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Boateng for that introduction. I declare an interest in that, apart from having been involved years ago in the Channel Tunnel and Ashford station—getting that built in the right place was not very easy —I am now involved in one of the cross-channel services that he mentioned, Gemini, whose ambition is to stop trains regularly at Ebbsfleet and Ashford. It is all quite complicated because you have an independent infrastructure manager which obviously wants the maximum return. It operates local services to Folkstone, Dover and Ramsgate, I think, and they all have to be fitted in together. That is before you get involved in the frontier control issues, which I had probably better avoid for the moment.
On international services, which is what these are called, it is for the operator to decide its timetable of services and which stations it wishes to stop at, which is the same, really, as open-access operators in this country, with a few minor differences. It has to look at the costs of infrastructure, of police and of everybody else who has to be there; it has to find somewhere to park the trains at night, and all the other things that go with it. My noble friend’s point is that this needs some kind of economic encouragement—I hope from the Government. It is very similar to what should be being provided up in the north now, or in Wales, or even where I live in Cornwall—wherever it is needed—to try to balance the economies of these various areas.
It is then a question of who makes what decision as to where to run the trains. If it is an open-access operator—we have talked about that elsewhere in the Committee—we have the ability in the Bill to encourage or allow open-access operators if they do not get in the way of the other trains and the freight trains. It is more difficult when you get smaller operators that want to go on a short journey. Will they be allowed to operate? We really do not know that yet. The link between economic demands and what the railway can provide is fundamental. As my noble friend said, the needs of Ashford, and to some extent the rest of east Kent, are horrendous compared with other parts of the south-east. Therefore, stopping trains at Ebbsfleet and Ashford has many benefits; it also links to other routes down to Brighton and Hastings. It is all a question of the decisions the Government make on these various priorities, bearing in mind that they probably do not have too much money to spend.
I believe that the idea in the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, to abolish the ORR and create a new one would be a complete disaster for the railways, because I worked on rail freight as well. You need an organisation that can be seen to act independently on all the issues when you are trying to fit more trains than you can possibly need or want on to a track and decide who gets priority. There is the argument about fares, speeds and, basically, competition issues.
Over the years, the ORR’s terms of reference have been changed once or twice but it has mostly operated fairly and in a timely manner. We can compare its terms of reference and what it does with the Civil Aviation Authority or the similar one for maritime, whose name I cannot remember. All they do—I say “all”, but it is a very important thing—is to act as an independent appeal body, if you like, so that you do not have to go to court and you do not need the Competition and Markets Authority every time you want to blow your nose. The ORR, with whatever amendments are decided in this Committee and later, is a fundamental part of keeping the network fair and as full as it can be, and encouraging new operators. New operators, if my noble friend really wanted, could mean extra, more reliable traffic that is provided fairly and at the best possible price.