Contribution
My Lords, it is immensely good that we are back here discussing this very slow Railways Bill and the attempt that it puts before us to recreate the railway system of the Soviet Union in Great Britain.
Freight is an important part of our rail business. Everyone agrees on that; there is no dispute in this Committee as to the importance of freight. However, the Bill is woefully inadequate when it comes to addressing the question of freight. The Government have a target to increase rail freight by 75% by 2050. That is a target inherited from the Conservative Government, and the originator of that target, I think I may say, is my noble friend Lord Harper, who is in his place, when he was Secretary of State for Transport. So there is a commonality of view in support of that target.
However, there is a tremendous absence of detail and a great deal of vagueness about how that target is going to be achieved. In recent weeks, the Government have announced that there is to be an interim target. That is a helpful step, but the interim target is to have a 40% increase by 2040, which is so long away that I believe a great deal of the rail freight rolling stock might well have been renewed by then. It is not an effective target at all.
The notion that rail freight is to have its own target is both positive and negative. It is positive in the sense that it shows that the Government are behind freight and want to support its growth. Remember that these are private businesses that have invested their own capital in freight, so they will be pleased to know that the Government are generally supportive, but bear in mind that a cack-handed and inept attempt by the Government to promote that target could start imposing activities and targets on the rail freight sector, which would be profoundly uncomfortable for it. I am not suggesting that there are any such at the moment, but the fear is always there. Then, in the minds of the freight sector—we will come to this in another group—there is the fear that Great British Railways will be determining access to the network when it is also a competitor for the use of that capacity. Noble Lords will understand that there is a degree of nervousness in the rail freight sector on both those fronts.
I have two amendments in this group. Amendment 113 calls for an annual report on progress. That is so simple and straightforward that I think there can be no doubt that noble Lords would want to support it, or, at the very least the Government would want to give an assurance that, whether or not it were part of the Bill, there would be an annual report and the Government would commit themselves at the Dispatch Box to producing such a report. That barely requires any argument.
Amendment 91, the lead amendment in the group, requires a more subtle and nuanced response from the Government than they have been willing to give so far. It asks them to fill in to some extent the sort of detail that we and the rail freight sector need in order to have the assurance that the Government are going to achieve their target, not simply by some remote interim date, but by 2030. What is their staging post for 2030, for example, and how do they expect to get there? Secondly, it asks that the means that they are going to use to achieve that target have been worked out carefully with the rail freight sector and are practical, deliverable and something that the private sector can accommodate and work with, because all these things in the railways, as the Minister knows better than anyone else, require long-term planning. The private rail freight sector has to be involved in doing that and we want to hear from the Minister that that involvement is going to be there. I beg to move.