Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)

I have tabled Amendment 120, and I thank my noble friends Lord Grayling and Lord Moylan for their support. I add my support to my noble friend Lord Parkinson on his heritage rail amendment. Growing up in the north-east, I used to visit the North Yorkshire Moors Railway as it was developing back in the 1970s very often, and it is heartening to hear that it is now extending its service to Whitby, which it did not at the time. That must necessarily bring a lot more tourists and a lot more users on to that rail route than were available previously. Amendment 120 seeks to expand and improve Clause 18. Clause 18(2) lists six duties for GBR and the Minister to work to, and Clause 18(3) lists four more by seeking to define words such as “public interest” and “railway service performance”, which are necessarily vague in Clause 18(2). My amendment would add six more duties to that subsection. They would be numbered from g to l and line 9 would need to be amended to reflect that. The first of these would be a duty to increase passenger numbers. One of the great successes of railway privatisation over the years has been an increase in passenger numbers and use of the railways. That is something we all want to see, and I do not think the Government would disagree with that proposition as a priority. The second would be to drive economic growth. I appreciate that there are different definitions of economic growth. All I am really asking for here is that whatever the Government decide are their economic priorities are also supported by the railway network. That seems sensible. The third and fourth additions would to be to prioritise attracting private sector investment and reducing public subsidy. We have already heard this afternoon about the tight financial situation that the Government find themselves in. It is an unfortunate truth, and it certainly was last time the railways were broadly in public ownership, that taxpayers’ money tends to go to other projects instead. In addition to health and education, which were always seen as priorities, we now have the need to provide defence for our country, which will not come cheap. The fear that we have is that the railway network will come a long way down the list of priorities when it comes to taxpayer funding, so seeking additional private sector investment and trying to limit the subsidy seem to be sensible things to do in these circumstances—indeed, in any circumstance. The fifth addition would seek to bring in improving passenger satisfaction as measured by the Passengers’ Council. This would give greater strength to the proposed Passengers’ Council. I have a number of later amendments on that council, and we will discuss those in some detail, but perhaps a better measure of satisfaction will be what the Passengers’ Council determines is important to rail users. Right now, it is reliability and the mitigation of overcrowding, as Clause 18(3) rightly highlights, but in future these things may change. I look in later amendments at wifi connection on trains and the availability of electric sockets for people to plug into—the sorts of things that you would not have considered important in the past. Given the way that technology is developing very fast now and outpacing our ability to legislate for it, I can see there will be other services that passengers will think are important on trains in future but which are not included in the legislation. We can include those sorts of things by having the Passengers’ Council keeping abreast of developments and by putting the Passengers’ Council’s requirements into the duties, as this amendment would. The final extra duty would be to improve efficiency and productivity. We have heard a lot about productivity today and I think everyone agrees that it is a good thing; perhaps we have not had enough of it in the past and certainly we will want more of it in the future. I recognise that in legislation such as this you can carry on putting new priorities into it until you fill several pages, and I suspect the Minister will suggest that these are not necessarily of as high a priority as others. If that is the case, though, I would like to hear his justification for that, because none of the six important issues that I have set out here is any less important than the ones already identified in the Bill. I believe my amendment would improve the quality of this part of the Bill.