Lord Harper (Con)

My Lords, I will make just a brief intervention since a long one is not necessary because the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, comprehensively introduced this set of amendments. I shall make two points. First, the noble Baroness focused, as she almost invariably does, on what is important, which is the outcome—are we actually getting more accessible services? One of the problems in this conversation sometimes is that we talk about the duties and some of the legislation but the important thing is to think about whether it is actually going to make a real difference. There are lots of duties on all these organisations but what my noble friend—if I may call her that—brings to this is reminding us where they have not delivered the actual outcome in practice. The amendments that I was particularly struck by, thinking back to my time as Disability Minister, are the ones about co-production, involving disabled people in thinking about those services, looking at the design of them through that lens and getting people involved early. Something that I learned, particularly in that role but also as Transport Secretary, is that, when you come to these things late, delivering accessible services just ends up being much more expensive, and if you had thought about it at the beginning you would have had a better outcome. Lastly, because I like to take opportunities to agree with people who I do not always agree with, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that making services more accessible for disabled people is good for everyone. Sometimes we miss that point. As she said, if you make a service better for someone who is a wheelchair user, it will also be better for someone carrying heavy luggage. Think about how you do wayfinding and signage: if that is more accessible for someone with a visual impairment or a learning disability, it will be better for everyone because it will be less confusing and more straightforward. Thinking about how we deliver these services for people who perhaps have more needs than the average person will make them better for the typical rail user as well, so it is a no-lose situation. Sometimes people overlook that and think that this is about delivering a more accessible service—maybe for a large group, maybe for a small group, but for a narrow group of people. Actually, more accessibility is better for everyone. It definitely does not make life more difficult for anyone. Generally, it makes life better for everyone, and you need to think about that at the beginning when you are designing those services, not at the end of the process. When the Minister responds to this group, I would like him to perhaps focus on how we can embed thinking about accessibility at the beginning of these journeys for delivering both infrastructure and the service rather than coming at the end and trying to bolt it on afterwards.