Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, before I turn to my amendment in this group, I will refer to the remarks of my noble friend Lord Grayling. He made a powerful and passionate appeal that we do not get back to a situation he characterised as being the old British Rail, where the response to a decay in demand and provision was a further decay and a further cut in demand and provision—we were in that doom spiral. I think all noble Lords felt the passion in what he was saying. I certainly did. Being unsentimental about it for a moment, however, I think my noble friend will, with his experience, be the first to recognise that this will be very much connected with how much money is available. The fact is that the money is going not up but down. Behind everything in this Bill—its great plans for 30-year visions and so on—there is the hard reality that the country is under a severe financial squeeze. It seems particularly foolish that the Government should squeeze out quite deliberately, on ideological grounds, that amount of capital investment that might be available from the private sector for the provision of passenger services. I might agree that that provision or that capital might be relatively marginal in the big picture, but surely it is better to be open to the private sector to allow what is possible to be done, rather than have this hard trade union-driven left-wing line that we will have a Soviet people’s railway and there will be no private sector to it at all. That is my rather sad response to my noble friend’s powerful intervention. What the Government are doing is just so foolish. I have only one amendment in this group, and I will speak to it. It is terribly nerdish. I will speak to a few other amendments but not every amendment in the group. Clause 18 creates a number of duties that are allocated to various people: the exercise by Great British Railways of its statutory functions and the exercise by the ORR of its functions relating to the railway are different functions matched to different people. Yet subsection (2) begins by saying that “they” must exercise the functions in the following fashion. Who is the “they” that is being referred to? As a point simply of improved drafting—this is intended entirely helpfully to the Minister—if the “they” actually spelled out what I suggest it should say, which is “The relevant person specified under subsection (1)”, it would remove any possible confusion about who was accountable for particular actions and for carrying them out in a certain way. I will not go further on it. I think that would be an improvement to the drafting, and offer it for free to the Minister. There is a lot of shoddy drafting in the Bill, I think we have found, so that one he can have for free, as I say. It would improve things considerably. Amendments 119, 185, and 205 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, to which I have added my name, all relate to imposing a value for money obligation on GBR, London TravelWatch and the third one, which escapes me just for the moment. There is a requirement in the Bill that they use funds efficiently. An obligation to achieve value for money suggests something more than that, in particular an obligation to examine and compare different options as to how you might do things. Some of those options might be in the private sector. I am not talking necessarily here of the provision of passenger services because that has been ruled out on ideological grounds, but these bodies are going to procure and do many other things which, in many cases, could be done better through outsourcing, which is permitted by the Bill, rather than in house. The value for money obligation is intended to encourage them to do that in the interests of saving the taxpayer money and, if you like, making more money available for the railways, if that is what the Government choose, as opposed to giving it back to the hard-pressed taxpayer as a tax cut, which would also be welcome. Amendment 186, also in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, addresses another point that we have been making that GBR will have every incentive to favour its own operations. There would be an explicit duty to act fairly and without discrimination in the duties section and not lost somewhere else in the Bill. The noble Lord has put his finger on that, and I support him. Turning to Amendments 120 and 121, tabled respectively by my noble friends Lord Evans of Guisborough and Lord Grayling, it seems essential that criteria such as economic growth, private sector investment, reducing public subsidy, passenger satisfaction, and efficiency should be part of the duties of GBR. It might be the case that this could be redrafted to be more focused and, rather than six duties, be consolidated perhaps into one or two specific duties which encompass all these. That is a matter of drafting, which we could return to on Report, but surely there must be an obligation on GBR to do these things and if it is not in the duties section then it will not be taken very seriously. Finally, Amendment 121 from my noble friend Lord Grayling is equally important. We should not leave it entirely to GBR’s discretion whether to consider private sector provision. It should be required to assess whether procurement from private businesses could deliver value for money. It should be an obligation. That is the theme I take from this group. I know other issues have been raised. We have had another excursus into heritage railways—no doubt we will have another one in a later group—but I have nothing much to add to what I said on heritage railways before. They are a very good thing and important to many people. They add to the tourist attraction. They do not make a huge, if any, contribution to the great bulk of what Great British Railways is intended to achieve under this Bill, which is the provision of passenger rail services, but they are none the less precious and cherished for that. I am happy to repeat that when we come back to the next debate on heritage railways. This value-for-money theme is what I take principally from this debate, and that involves engagement with and an embrace of the private sector. I think these two elements will come back together when we reach Report because they are clearly important to noble Lords across a wide range of Members of the Committee.