Contribution
My Lords, I will be brief, so the Minister must not relax too much before he comes to respond.
As before, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has, both on her own behalf and on behalf of my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, given us a distressing and convincing account of the difficulties that people with disabilities have when travelling on the railways. We all have sympathy with that, I think. On previous occasions, I have tended to support what the noble Baroness has advanced but, today, I wish to probe one point a little further. I am sure that the Minister has grasped this but, I have to say, the Conservatives are no longer enthusiastic about supporting the public sector equality duty, which was mentioned by the noble Baroness; indeed, they might scrap it in due course. None the less, for the sake of clarity, it is important to understand what is being said here.
When the private sector TOCs were taken into national ownership under the passenger rail services Bill of two years ago, they were made subject to the public sector equality duty; each individual TOC was done. That was achieved by amending a particular section of the Railways Act 1993—I cannot quite remember whether it was in 1993 or 1995; Hansard will put it right—but one of the effects of this Bill will be to abolish that section, so the assuming of those bodies into the public sector equality duty is being taken away. Instead, GBR is being made subject to the public sector equality duty. However, it is not clear that that will continue to apply to the subsidiary companies that will be operating the services and effectively taking the place of the private sector TOCs or services that were nationalised. I am only trying to be helpful but that is, I think, the point that the noble Baroness was making; it is one that I think is acutely interesting.
It may be that the Minister’s answer is that, if the duty applies to the parent company, it applies to the subsidiary companies and nothing more needs to be said, but then the question arises: which subsidiary companies? As we know from previous discussions, GBR, a bit like the theories of the constitution in the 17th century, has two bodies: GBR the railway body and GBR the company that exists under the Companies Act. Different obligations and impositions arise depending on the role under which GBR is acting. For example, the Secretary of State cannot give directions to GBR in relation to company matters. The most obvious one of these is the development of property, possibly in partnership with a private sector company. Direction cannot be given by the Secretary of State in relation to such an activity.
If one says simply that it covers subsidiaries automatically, does it cover subsidiaries that are engaged, for example, in property development or other activities, such as the provision of training and consultancy to railway operators outside the United Kingdom for a profit, a perfectly respectable activity? I am not suggesting this will be high on the agenda of GBR, but it might happen in due course. Does it apply to those as well? If it applies to all subsidiaries, why not to those subsidiaries? I do not think it will be an entirely satisfactory answer to say that, because it captures GBR, it captures all the subsidiaries, unless there is a means of distinguishing the subsidiaries you wish to capture, or you wish to say that all subsidiaries, irrespective of their activity, will be captured by the public sector equality duty. Clarity on this would be helpful.