Lord Berkeley (Lab)

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. As noble Lords know, I am a former chairman of the Rail Freight Group. Some of the examples that the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, just mentioned have been dear to my heart for decades—including why the hell do they not electrify some of the routes to increase the capacity further? I want to give an example that affects both access and charges, relating to both noble Lords’ very interesting speeches. In the past few weeks, I have visited a lithium mine in Cornwall, at its invitation. I do not know how much noble Lords know about the Cornish china clay works, including the holes, the mountains and everything else. There are little baby railways that go everywhere; most of them do not work any more, but some of them could be redone. Anyway, I was invited to visit this work, which is in its final stages of getting fast-track planning permission. When the work is complete, it will, I think, produce something like 50% of the lithium-ion that is needed in this country. It is massive—there is a great big hole—but it also needs quite a lot of processing. It is not about just pouring it into a truck and hoping that it goes away: it mixes other materials in the process—including, I am told, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite, as well as a drop of sulphuric acid to help it along.