Contribution
My Lords, this has been an important debate. I start on a slightly philosophical note in trying to reconcile the opposing views of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. They illustrate a very important point of disagreement, which we actually have to reconcile if we are going to operate a railway. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, says that safety has to be the top priority; the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, points out that if safety is your top priority, you would not run any trains. There is truth on both sides.
It always irked me, when I was deputy chairman of Transport for London, that if ever there was an incident on the railway, the comms people would immediately be out there with their standard line, saying, “Safety is our top priority”, and I always thought, “No; running a public transport system carrying millions of people a day is your top priority”. But what is safety? Safety is, so to speak, the condition without which you cannot get out of bed. It is not an objective or a priority; it is a condition of operating at all. If ever the public got the impression that railway operators are cavalier about safety, there would be no railway—there would be no passenger demand for it. So the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, is right to say that safety needs to be thoroughly embedded in the Bill.
In saying this, I am not endorsing any of her particular amendments, but there is something to the general thrust of what she has been saying. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is also right to say that you cannot describe that as your top priority. As I say, it is, so to speak, part of your licence to operate—not the licence referred to in the Bill, which is the legal licence, but your moral licence to be able to operate in the first place.
We need to get around this issue in some way, because it is important. In many cases, it can engage people operating the railway in a practical way, day to day. We need to understand that safety has a crucial role to play even if it is not, so to speak, the main purpose of what the railway is doing. It is an essential precondition of operating at all.
In that light, and with a view to strengthening the reputation of the railway for safety—not just its reputation but its actual effectiveness—I will speak to my Amendment 289. It would essentially require GBR to implement recommendations from the Rail Safety and Standards Board, so that it becomes an obligation in the Bill for it to do so. Your Lordships might say that that is taken for granted, and it is fair to say that the safety record of the railways in Britain has been very high. Part of that is because of lessons learned. The trouble is that, as other noble Lords have said, some of those lessons have historically been very expensive and serious in terms of lives and injury, but lessons have been learned, and things have improved. Embedding in the Bill an obligation to learn the lessons as they accumulate in the future, and as articulated by the Rail Safety and Standards Board, is an important point and it should be inserted.
Turning to other matters that have been mentioned, I come to individual passenger safety. I am discussing systemic safety in my amendment—making the system safe—as was the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, when she moved her amendment. However, there is this additional parallel and crucial debate about the individual sense of safety of passengers. I will not speak at length to individual amendments, but I have indicated my view of the ones I would certainly support by adding my name to them. Indeed, I would probably support some of the others as well, but I did not get round to doing so.
I know that the Minister, if he were participating in this particular debate, would agree with me that that sense of safety is crucial to passenger commitment and involvement in the railways. It is not simply when travelling on the train; it is also in the station, the approach to the station and so on. There are practical techniques that can improve a sense of safety. Many of them are well understood, and they need to be implemented universally. They are to do with things such as lighting, visibility, not having hidden corners, visible staff on the station, mechanical or electrical help points that are visible and accessible—so people can hit a button and actually get a response—and so forth.
These things can be done, and other things need to be done too. This needs to be a prominent part of GBR’s activities, as I say, because it is part of its moral licence to operate, granted to it by the public at large, who are paying for it.