Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, both apologise that they are not able to be in their places today. They both have their names on Amendment 116; I probably should have added my name, but I already have six of the eight amendments in this group. My amendments intertwine but, rather than going through each of them in detail, it might be better to give a flavour of the problem that disabled people would like to be fixed. Starting with Amendment 121A, the current general duty appears to be unenforceable and has produced no measurable improvement. I believe that a statutory duty to make continuous improvements is necessary. Transport for All told the Transport Select Committee: “Accessibility duties in the Bill are vague and unenforceable, limited to requiring bodies to ‘have particular regard’ to disabled passengers rather than imposing clear, measurable, accessibility obligations … The phrase ‘have particular regard’ is broad, subjective and difficult to enforce. It sets no minimum expectations for action and does not define how accessibility should influence the Council’s decisions, priorities, or scrutiny functions”. The Transport Select Committee itself concluded: “The clause 18 duty … should be amended to require these bodies to exercise their functions in a way that improves accessibility of the rail network”. I turn to Amendment 144A. Passenger assistance is unreliable at scale and the regulator has found operators’ ability to improve to be seriously deficient. Obviously, the inclusion of low-floor trains in the recent announcement is positive news, and a rolling programme of platform height change will have an impact—I will be picking up on that next week—but, while we have been debating this afternoon, at least two disabled people have been in touch with me to let me know about assistance failures and also about lift reliability on the network, not least at St Pancras. If the DWP were categorising its working status, it would probably describe it as a “fluctuating condition”. It is back working again as of this afternoon; it was not working over the weekend, so we will see how long it lasts. The new lift at Northolt was out three times in the first 10 days of it being installed. Even if we get passenger assistance right, if all the other things do not slot into place, we will struggle.