Lord Harper (Con)

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of two amendments in this group, starting with Amendment 118 in the name of my noble friend Lord Parkinson. Shamelessly, I want to use it as an opportunity to advertise the Dean Forest Railway, which is the steam railway that operates in the Forest of Dean. It has four and a half miles and five stations, and it interacts—this is the important point—with Network Rail at Lydney. It also interacts, probably not always helpfully, with the ORR on a number of occasions, including, for example, where there have to be level crossings and so forth. Therefore, it is important that this amendment is supported, as my noble friend said, to make sure that GBR’s interaction with heritage railways does not depend on a particular Minister who is a fantastic supporter of heritage railways, but will withstand a change of Minister. Even if you had a Minister who did not like heritage railways at all, the legal duties would be there to protect them, which I strongly support. The second amendment I support is Amendment 120, in the name of my noble friend Lord Evans of Guisborough. He alluded to the fact that adding all these duties in might create quite a long list, and I suspect that the Minister will say that everything cannot be a priority because if you have a very long list nothing is a priority, so I will make what is perhaps a helpful suggestion. I was particularly attracted by the proposed new paragraph (j) that Amendment 120 seeks to add to Clause 18(2), which would require exercising functions “in the manner best calculated to remove or reduce the need for public subsidy of the railways”. It would be helpful if the Minister inserted that into the Bill instead of paragraph (f), because “taking into account the costs that will need to be met from public funds and the need to make efficient use of those funds” is a bit weak and does not have a strong enough impetus to drive down the cost to the taxpayer. The Minister ought to be able to accept that because it is my understanding that in the last spending review—I am sure this was done entirely voluntarily by the Department for Transport and the Treasury did not put the thumbscrews on at all—the department signed up to a significant reduction in the public subsidy over the spending review period; I see the Minister is nodding. As I said, given that the Government do not seem to have any significant plans for doing that and have increased the cost of the railways, as well as the points made by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who is no longer in his place—