Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group dealing with different matters. I may take slightly longer than my customary brevity, because I also wish to speak to some amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Lansley, to which I have put my name. They are not those to which my noble friend Lord Harper has spoken, because there is no need for me to repeat what he has said, but there are others that have not been addressed. Before I come to those, I turn to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Boateng. I understand very much what he is saying. During the 2012 Games, I was chairman of the Olympic park, and it was a great ambition and hope of mine that we could, at some stage, get Eurostar trains to stop at Stratford International station, which is on the line and was available to do that, in the interests of promoting growth and regeneration in Newham and that Olympic park area. It was hopeless: there was never any chance of doing it and no interest whatever on the part of Eurostar, which was a great disappointment and an opportunity missed. To be frank, there is little point in that station if those trains do not stop; I know that the Javelin trains stop, but it is a bit pointless in a way. We need the Eurostar to stop. Then I moved on and, later, I was a member of the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation for three or four years, and we did have trains that stopped. That was absolutely marvellous. We had not only the Javelins, so that you could get to Ebbsfleet in 19 minutes from St Pancras—as I used to do to go to board meetings—but the Eurostar trains. I think they did not stop at Ashford, which is what the noble Lord mentioned, but they stopped at Ebbsfleet until Covid came along. Without a doubt, Covid was why they stopped stopping at Ebbsfleet, but Eurostar took that opportunity never to resume. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, suggests that this is inevitably all driven by commercial considerations and a railway company’s choice of where to stop its trains to maximise its revenue. The implication is that if the Government want to do something and make use of these stations, to get the sort of advantages that the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, referred to, they need to provide some subsidy or something of that sort. Actually, the new competitor, whoever it may be, who wants to provide a service, needs a depot in London. The only person who is working hard—I know this for a number of reasons—to secure that depot in the Walthamstow area is the Minister. I do not think he needs to supply subsidy to achieve his aims; he has leverage, and we should use that leverage to secure the economic and connectivity benefits we have built the stations to secure. So, I have considerable sympathy with the thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, said. If the Minister does not accept this precise amendment, I hope he will show some gumption about this and try to get something done.