Contribution
My Lords, let me just speak briefly, following on from what my noble friend Lord Grayling said—I will try not to repeat what he has already said. First, I go back to the original 75% target, which was referred to in the Minister’s Written Statement—the 40% is effectively a subset of that. As I have said on previous occasions, the reason why we put that in is that most of the conversation about rail inevitably ends up being about passenger services, as my noble friend Lord Grayling suggested. The point about putting a rail freight target in was to make sure that GBR, when it is taking decisions, has to consider the impact on rail freight.
I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Grayling said, because the target is the top piece, but it is important to understand what flows from it. I make just one point to reinforce what he said about investment. The key issue is going to be capacity. The reason why a number of us are getting exercised about open-access operators for passenger services and about rail freight is that, in a capacity-constrained network, decisions about who has access to the network are incredibly important.
One way of improving the situation is clearly to deal with capacity, which is about investment decisions. There are two issues that I would ask the Minister to speak on. One, obviously, is the total quantum of investment: how much investment is going to the network overall. The second issue is what that investment is being spent on. Is it being spent on new capacity for passenger services, is it being spent on new capacity for freight services or is it being spent on new capacity that could be used for either? It may, for example, be spent on things such as electrification, for speeding up the running of services. The point about having a target is to drive those decisions and make sure that a decent amount of investment goes into freight services. My noble friend Lord Grayling referred to Haughley junction and Ely. Those were very good projects, which had very good cost/benefit numbers—in fact, staggeringly good, compared to many. The reason why we did not pay for them was that there was a certain amount of money and that money had already been committed. I simply could not find, if I remember correctly, the £600 million or so required for that investment.
The point of these amendments is to make sure that as GBR, the Department for Transport and the Treasury are thinking about the overall amount of investment that they are making, they are making the right amount of investment overall, but also that how they then carve it out into passenger services, freight services and those bits of the network that could be used for both will reach this target. We set the 75% target a couple of years ago; the 40% target is a relatively recent iteration of that. As I said, I reinforce the question from my noble friend, which is how the decision to come up with the 40% in 2040 arose. The Minister could have said that there was an interim target in 2030 or at some other point, so why 2040?
Presumably, as quite a bit of time has elapsed, there is a plan that sets out how we get from where we are today to there and what is required to do that. Will that require infrastructure investment? Will it require the Network Rail bit of GBR—I do not know whether that part of the business is going to have a name—to invest in some specific projects that actually exist, so that we know what they are, which are going to drive freight investment, or are there other projects that the Minister is aware of? A little bit of detail would be very welcome. That is all I wanted to say.
The case for rail freight has been very well made. I do not particularly want to see people using rail via the punishing of people who use roads. I want to make moving freight by rail more attractive; you do that by making sure that there is capacity on the network and it is cost-effective to do so financially, but also that you can do it at speed and it is convenient, taking it from ports to where it needs to go. That is the better way of doing it, rather than trying to price people off the road network.