Railways Bill
Monday, 12 October 2026
Contributions
Committee (4th Day)
Scottish and Welsh l egislative c onsent sought . Relevant document: 4th Report from the Delegated Powers Committee .
Clause 15: Rail strategy
Amendment 91
Moved by
91: Clause 15, page 9, line 9, at end insert— “(c) the development of rail freight network usage.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment seeks to ensure the rail strategy includes developing rail freight.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, it is immensely good that we are back here discussing this very slow Railways Bill and the attempt that it puts before us to recreate the railway system of the Soviet Union in Great Britain. Freight is an important part of our rail business. Everyone agrees on that; there is no dispute in this Committee as to the importance of freight. However, the Bill is woefully inadequate when it comes to addressing the question of freight. The Government have a target to increase rail freight by 75% by 2050. That is a target inherited from the Conservative Government, and the originator of that target, I think I may say, is my noble friend Lord Harper, who is in his place, when he was Secretary of State for Transport. So there is a commonality of view in support of that target. However, there is a tremendous absence of detail and a great deal of vagueness about how that target is going to be achieved. In recent weeks, the Government have announced that there is to be an interim target. That is a helpful step, but the interim target is to have a 40% increase by 2040, which is so long away that I believe a great deal of the rail freight rolling stock might well have been renewed by then. It is not an effective target at all. The notion that rail freight is to have its own target is both positive and negative. It is positive in the sense that it shows that the Government are behind freight and want to support its growth. Remember that these are private businesses that have invested their own capital in freight, so they will be pleased to know that the Government are generally supportive, but bear in mind that a cack-handed and inept attempt by the Government to promote that target could start imposing activities and targets on the rail freight sector, which would be profoundly uncomfortable for it. I am not suggesting that there are any such at the moment, but the fear is always there. Then, in the minds of the freight sector—we will come to this in another group—there is the fear that Great British Railways will be determining access to the network when it is also a competitor for the use of that capacity. Noble Lords will understand that there is a degree of nervousness in the rail freight sector on both those fronts. I have two amendments in this group. Amendment 113 calls for an annual report on progress. That is so simple and straightforward that I think there can be no doubt that noble Lords would want to support it, or, at the very least the Government would want to give an assurance that, whether or not it were part of the Bill, there would be an annual report and the Government would commit themselves at the Dispatch Box to producing such a report. That barely requires any argument. Amendment 91, the lead amendment in the group, requires a more subtle and nuanced response from the Government than they have been willing to give so far. It asks them to fill in to some extent the sort of detail that we and the rail freight sector need in order to have the assurance that the Government are going to achieve their target, not simply by some remote interim date, but by 2030. What is their staging post for 2030, for example, and how do they expect to get there? Secondly, it asks that the means that they are going to use to achieve that target have been worked out carefully with the rail freight sector and are practical, deliverable and something that the private sector can accommodate and work with, because all these things in the railways, as the Minister knows better than anyone else, require long-term planning. The private rail freight sector has to be involved in doing that and we want to hear from the Minister that that involvement is going to be there. I beg to move.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, I have Amendment 106 in this group and apologise to noble Lords for not being able to be here at the last Committee session when a number of amendments to which I had put my name were debated. I am grateful to other noble Lords who spoke so well to those amendments—better than I could have done—which was particularly helpful. This amendment and this group are about the specifics of the target in Clause 17. It tells us that the Secretary of State must set a target to increase rail freight but does not tell us by how much. We know that rail freight has increased in the recent past, but not by the required amount—I think that it is about 1% a year on average. As my noble friend quite rightly said in moving the initial amendment, we want to see rail freight grow. We have seen substantial investment and, for a range of purposes, both economic and environmental, we want to see an increase in rail freight activity. The parliamentary task is not only to say that the target must be for an increase, but to be quite clear that it should be consistent with targets set by the Government generally. The numbers matter. My noble friend said that there was the inherited target of an increase by 2050 of 75%. The 2% per annum was not quite sufficient to do that—I think it would have had to be in excess of 2% and something like 2.1% every year cumulatively to arrive at the target for 2050. The Secretary of State’s target of achieving 40% by 2040 is consistent with a 2% per annum compound increase in freight, so by setting a 2% figure Parliament is effectively saying that it agrees. If the increase was set at less than 2%, that would be below the trajectory that the Secretary of State has given as the target. As it happens, 2% a year between now and 2040 might meet that target, but it does not do what we need for 2050, as we would have to increase the rate of growth to 2.25% in the subsequent decade. As we have heard, the Secretary of State, in addition to setting an intermediate target, referred to a number of expectations among which, I thought quite notably, was the 65% increase in high-value goods to be carried by freight over the period to 2040. I have not extended the amendment, but I think that it is worth just stopping and saying that this means some pretty substantial increases year on year. I want to take this opportunity to raise with the Minister—I have discussed this with him and am grateful for those conversations—that if we are going to increase the high-value goods freight traffic, a number of significant projects need to be brought forward, not least in the long-term rail strategy and the financing that the Government are going to give to Great British Railways. Noble Lords will not be surprised that I draw particular attention, as a Suffolk resident and former Member of Parliament in Cambridgeshire, to the importance of the Ely junction and Haughley junction improvements. The Ely junction improvements have a benefit-to-cost ratio of five and, as noble Lords who have been in the department will know, it is quite a rare feat for a project to show a return on investment as good as that. We know that the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Paul Bristow, is committed to trying to make this project come forward and is doing what he can, using his resources, to tackle some of the level crossing issues. The issue is whether Great British Railways, with the support of the Government, will bring this forward. My calculation, which is only my working of the numbers, is that, if Felixstowe has about a third of UK container traffic—by definition, these tend to be high-value goods such as manufactured goods, rather than construction materials—roughly half of that goes via Ely and would benefit from the Ely junction improvement. When we look at that, something approaching 5% of total UK container traffic goes through Ely, and the improvements could increase the capacity by 40%. So it is not an answer in itself, and there are other projects, of which noble Lords might be aware, that will help enable the freight traffic to move. But what the industry cannot do for itself is put the capacity on the line through the improvements to the route. I ask the Minister to say, “We should accept that there ought to be not just an increase in this clause but an increase consistent with the trajectory that meets the stated targets of the Government, and, in order to make that happen, certainly by the mid-2030s, we will need some major projects to increase the available capacity”. I hope that the amendment commends itself. I take heart and comfort from the fact that it seems to be consistent with Amendment 106A, which was tabled by my noble friend Lord Grayling, who is a former Secretary of State. So I think that noble Lords will find merit in setting the target in the way that is proposed.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. As noble Lords know, I am a former chairman of the Rail Freight Group. Some of the examples that the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, just mentioned have been dear to my heart for decades—including why the hell do they not electrify some of the routes to increase the capacity further? I want to give an example that affects both access and charges, relating to both noble Lords’ very interesting speeches. In the past few weeks, I have visited a lithium mine in Cornwall, at its invitation. I do not know how much noble Lords know about the Cornish china clay works, including the holes, the mountains and everything else. There are little baby railways that go everywhere; most of them do not work any more, but some of them could be redone. Anyway, I was invited to visit this work, which is in its final stages of getting fast-track planning permission. When the work is complete, it will, I think, produce something like 50% of the lithium-ion that is needed in this country. It is massive—there is a great big hole—but it also needs quite a lot of processing. It is not about just pouring it into a truck and hoping that it goes away: it mixes other materials in the process—including, I am told, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite, as well as a drop of sulphuric acid to help it along.
The concern of the company that is developing this is that it can get most of these raw materials from somewhere in the UK or from other UK ports, but as making the lithium is going to be a continuous process it cannot risk these other materials not turning up. It has quite a big stockpile, but even so it wants some assurance that it will be able to get materials in by rail.
The other thing the company has done, very sensibly, is give the residents of the clay pit area—which, for noble Lords who have not been there, has a lot of poverty and awful roads, and when there are jobs, they are good jobs—an assurance that all materials will come and go by rail. It is quite an assurance to give—“all materials”—so the company is keen to know how Great British Railways, which it will be by the time this starts, will be able to guarantee that it will have the capacity to bring in the various materials from all around the country, some in large volumes, some in much smaller volumes, but all by rail.
When one looks at the priorities, at the moment, if there is a problem you can appeal to the ORR and it deals with it properly, one hopes, but if Great British Railways decides that somewhere further up country, not necessarily in Devon or Cornwall but further up country, it would rather start a new passenger service on the line which means that there will be only one path for freight to this particular lithium-ion factory a day and that does not work, then the company is lost. It cannot continue to operate. The same comment applies, of course, to many of the cargoes that noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has just mentioned.
It is a misconception that freight does not mind when it goes or where it is going. It does not always mind when it goes, whereas passengers are much more important and they do mind, as we have been debating. But we have to have some assurance in the legislation that customers can get a train path that they believe they need, within reason, and if not, that there is an appeal mechanism. That is why the role of the ORR is so vital. I hope my noble friend will be able to explain that this is going to be all right on the night and that this company in Cornwall at least can run trains when it wants and at a reasonable price; that is another issue which may end up with the ORR. It is very important that we look at the different demands of customers, whether they are passenger customers or freight customers, and try to make sure that their priorities are looked after independently. I support these amendments and shall be coming back on some of the other ones.
Lord Grayling (Con)
I have three amendments in this group, one of which, Amendment 106A, follows on from what my noble friend Lord Lansley said. Before I start, I should declare my interests as an advisor to Hutchison Ports and a member of the UK and Ireland leadership team of AtkinsRéalis. I tabled Amendment 106A as a bit of a challenge to the Minister because I am well aware of the issues around the statutory meeting of targets and so forth, but the Government’s announcement that they have a 40% target by 2040 has to have some meat to it. You cannot just say, “Here’s our target”. The Minister is, of course, far too experienced a railwayman to have taken such an approach, so I want to probe him today about how we are going to get to that point because this is by no means easy. My noble friend Lord Lansley rightly referred to Haughley junction and Ely junction, the corridor from Peterborough to Leicester and the constraints going through Oxford. The reality is that significant problems are holding back freight traffic on the network today. For a variety of reasons, the projects that I put into the system as the Secretary of State were gobbled by the budgets that were taken by HS2. This Government have come in and frozen rail fares, which benefits passengers but it is a financial decision for the railways, and they are taking other decisions about public spending. In my understanding, it is very unlikely that there will be new money for enhancements to the network for the next 10 years, pretty much. Any realistic prospect of spending money has already been committed. I know that issue and I am sure that my noble friend Lord Harper knows it, too—he and I became Secretary of State and discovered that, basically, all the money had already been committed and we did not have much opportunity to put new projects in place. I am sure that that is the issue for the Minister and the Secretary of State, but you cannot then pluck a 40% growth target out of the air and hope that it will just happen. This is also coming at a time when the sector is under different kinds of pressure. DB Cargo, one of the three major operators, is up for a fire sale at the moment, with big question marks about its future. GB Railfreight is doing okay, with a new chief executive coming in, but it none the less has some challenges ahead of it. Freightliner has just been broken in half. Half of it—the intermodal business—has been sold to CMA, a big shipping company; the rest has been left as heavy haul to do bulk haulage around the country for Network Rail and others. I would not say that any of those three businesses is at the moment in the most organised shape to drive growth. In fact, frankly, most observers of this sector would say that you have three businesses chasing the same clients and the same volumes of business, and it is not clear where the growth is coming from. If you talked to most of those companies, they would say that what we need is disincentives to carry freight by road and more incentives to carry freight on the rail. That is a separate debate, but that is what they would say. It is not entirely clear to me where the growth will come from. I have a number of concerns about this, not the least of which is an issue that I have discussed with the Minister before: will it lead to Great British Railways trying to take on freight itself? I know that that is not the Government’s current intention, but the way the Bill is structured would allow that to happen in the future. If that happens, you could end up with the big guys squeezing out the smaller operators, and would we be certain that Great British Railways would do a decent job anyway? One of the constraints around Ely is that the last time we had a nationalised railway, British Rail, it took up the tracks between Soham and Ely and, as a result, constrained capacity for rail freight through to the Midlands. It was expedient to do so because it wanted to spend money on passenger services at a time of tight budgets. Of course, we are now in a situation where we could very well have a national rail operator wanting to spend money on passenger services at a time of tight budgets. Not only is there a risk of lack of new investment but even sustaining the existing services might be a challenge. My challenge to the Minister is this. He is a man we all respect, who has deep knowledge of the industry, but he must stand up in front of this Committee and explain how a 40% target for 2040 is viable. What will the Government do to facilitate that? It is a private sector job to drive the business, but the Government, by definition, will create part of the environment, having nationalised the passenger railway and taken Network Rail and the passenger railway together under one roof in the way that existed under British Rail. How will he do that? What will he instruct Great British Railways to do? The purpose of Amendments 108 and 109 is to say clearly from this Committee that we expect Great British Railways to have a focus on freight as well and not to simply ignore it and concentrate on passenger services, because passengers vote and rail freight wagons do not. I want to hear the Minister explain in detail where that 2040 target has come from, how it will be achieved and, to make that happen, what necessary changes he and his colleagues in the Department for Transport will commit to.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, let me just speak briefly, following on from what my noble friend Lord Grayling said—I will try not to repeat what he has already said. First, I go back to the original 75% target, which was referred to in the Minister’s Written Statement—the 40% is effectively a subset of that. As I have said on previous occasions, the reason why we put that in is that most of the conversation about rail inevitably ends up being about passenger services, as my noble friend Lord Grayling suggested. The point about putting a rail freight target in was to make sure that GBR, when it is taking decisions, has to consider the impact on rail freight. I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Grayling said, because the target is the top piece, but it is important to understand what flows from it. I make just one point to reinforce what he said about investment. The key issue is going to be capacity. The reason why a number of us are getting exercised about open-access operators for passenger services and about rail freight is that, in a capacity-constrained network, decisions about who has access to the network are incredibly important. One way of improving the situation is clearly to deal with capacity, which is about investment decisions. There are two issues that I would ask the Minister to speak on. One, obviously, is the total quantum of investment: how much investment is going to the network overall. The second issue is what that investment is being spent on. Is it being spent on new capacity for passenger services, is it being spent on new capacity for freight services or is it being spent on new capacity that could be used for either? It may, for example, be spent on things such as electrification, for speeding up the running of services. The point about having a target is to drive those decisions and make sure that a decent amount of investment goes into freight services. My noble friend Lord Grayling referred to Haughley junction and Ely. Those were very good projects, which had very good cost/benefit numbers—in fact, staggeringly good, compared to many. The reason why we did not pay for them was that there was a certain amount of money and that money had already been committed. I simply could not find, if I remember correctly, the £600 million or so required for that investment. The point of these amendments is to make sure that as GBR, the Department for Transport and the Treasury are thinking about the overall amount of investment that they are making, they are making the right amount of investment overall, but also that how they then carve it out into passenger services, freight services and those bits of the network that could be used for both will reach this target. We set the 75% target a couple of years ago; the 40% target is a relatively recent iteration of that. As I said, I reinforce the question from my noble friend, which is how the decision to come up with the 40% in 2040 arose. The Minister could have said that there was an interim target in 2030 or at some other point, so why 2040? Presumably, as quite a bit of time has elapsed, there is a plan that sets out how we get from where we are today to there and what is required to do that. Will that require infrastructure investment? Will it require the Network Rail bit of GBR—I do not know whether that part of the business is going to have a name—to invest in some specific projects that actually exist, so that we know what they are, which are going to drive freight investment, or are there other projects that the Minister is aware of? A little bit of detail would be very welcome. That is all I wanted to say. The case for rail freight has been very well made. I do not particularly want to see people using rail via the punishing of people who use roads. I want to make moving freight by rail more attractive; you do that by making sure that there is capacity on the network and it is cost-effective to do so financially, but also that you can do it at speed and it is convenient, taking it from ports to where it needs to go. That is the better way of doing it, rather than trying to price people off the road network.
Finally, it is worth the Government thinking, in how they talk about this subject, about reinforcing for the public why they should care about this. It is clear that in the first instance, people immediately think about passenger services. But there cannot be very many people in the country who do not use something that is moved by rail freight, whether that is the disposal of waste, which they clearly welcome, moving energy supplies to power generation, or moving either new construction materials or waste from construction projects off the roads, thus reducing the congestion, noise and inconvenience to the public. All those are reasons why the public should care about rail freight.
If we made some of those arguments, or made them more prominent, it would enable the Government—whoever the Government of the day were—to make the case for investment in rail freight as opposed to just in passenger services, so I think reminding everybody why they should care is part of the Minister’s job. I would also be interested to know what the department is doing to reinforce the value to the wider public and the economy of rail freight in general.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, the debate on this group shows that across the Committee, we are all supportive of increasing the use of rail for freight as well as for passenger services. Amendment 107 in my name would strengthen Clause 17 on the rail freight target. The Bill as drafted states that GBR “must, when exercising its … functions, have regard to … the target”. My amendment would change this to say that GBR must “give significant weight” to the target, strengthening the focus on freight as an important part of the rail network, both economically and environmentally, as we have heard. However, I want to put freight into context here by trying to drill down and understand the true meaning of the target. A lot of this discussion has been about the target and what it means. The December 2025 release of Transport Statistics Great Britain says that rail has an 8% share of domestic rail freight and 1% for international. In this context, even the target of a 75% increase by 2050 feels unambitious. We have heard that it was inherited from the previous Conservative Government. For comparison, Switzerland’s percentage share for rail is 39%; the Government are looking at a 6% increase by 2050. Let us go back further. In 2000, the Department for Transport published a 10-year transport plan; it pledged then to increase freight by 80% in that timeframe. I do not think that was achieved, but the questions that arise here are: why did it not succeed, why will this target be different—as has been discussed in this debate—and why is there much less ambition now? If that is perhaps a product of learning from past failed target-setting and delivery, maybe this is an ambitious target, but is it? It does not seem so at face value. It would be useful to hear the Minister’s thoughts on that. I have also read the access and use policy that is out for consultation, which was referenced in the recent letter from the Minister. As I read that, Great British Railways will try not to meddle with freight services, but it says that it can do almost whatever it likes with its passenger services, including changing frequencies. The noble Lord, Lord Grayling, set out that he sees a potential threat to the freight sector compared with the passenger one. The consultation document says, in paragraph 2.31, that for passengers: “It does not require the continuation of a particular operator or … service design features (such as frequency, calling patterns, origins and destinations, or timings)”. It goes on to say, in paragraph 2.32: “Having considered relevant issues and mitigations, GBR may decide to make such a change to better serve the wider interests of all passengers”. I would be alarmed by that as a passenger, but paragraph 2.34 says: “For freight, supporting established traffic is fundamental to making rail an attractive and commercially viable option for customers and to achieving freight growth”. It seems to me that freight has far more protection than passenger services within GBR and the consultation documents. Perhaps the Minister could clarify the meaning of that within the consultation document, because it would be of huge concern to passengers and wider communities. The other amendments in this group are in a similar space, and we have heard from former Transport Secretaries on this area. The point from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about investment in infrastructure alongside any target is really important. The Ely junction example he gave shows what is needed if we are to achieve this target or a more ambitious one. I know that the Minister is passionate about growing freight on the railway alongside passenger services. I look forward to his response and clarification on the issues that have been raised, as well as the assurance that the industry, but also passengers, are looking for.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)
My Lords, first, on Amendments 106 and 106A, the Government share the noble Lord’s ambitions for the freight sector, which is why we have committed to the overall target of increasing rail freight by 75% by 2050 and why we recently announced, as has already been mentioned, the interim freight target of 40% growth by 2040. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, is right: 75% requires a growth rate of a little more than 2% a year, whereas 40% is about 2% a year. The Bill requires the Secretary of State to issue a growth target in perpetuity, so the effect of Amendment 106A is, I think, already achieved. I discussed Amendment 106 with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, before Conference Recess, and I take his point that it can be helpful to guide GBR towards the freight growth that it would need to achieve to reach the freight target. I agree that it would be helpful—in fact, I think it is essential—for GBR’s business plan in particular to consider how to maintain the average growth needed over the five-year plan, whether that be 2% or otherwise. I can assure the noble Lord that the ORR and the Secretary of State will assess that business plan with that in mind. However, I do not want to enshrine a specific target per year into legislation, as it is also true that GBR will be planning over a five-year period and there may be greater opportunities to make gains in some years rather than others. Significant investment in infrastructure, as several noble Lords mentioned in the debate, may enable large gains in a particular year and that investment may of course come from particular sources. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, raised Ely-Haughley, which I agree has great value. I will write to him about the actions that I and Network Rail have taken to move that forward. He is right that the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough is involved; he and the county councils and highway authorities concerned will, I hope, help in reducing the cost of that scheme. The fact is that you do need steady growth, but any of the significant investments in infrastructure that release capacity may release a lot of capacity in a relatively short space of time. I turn to Amendments 107 to 109. The wording in the Bill already requires GBR to take the target into account while exercising all its functions; in other words, when making any and all decisions relevant to freight. That includes decisions around access to the network, such as which paths should be prioritised for freight use, which is deliberate. It ensures that GBR cannot ignore the target at any time unless it undertakes activities that are completely removed from the railway or from opportunities for freight growth. Additionally, in acknowledgment of the challenges that rail freight has historically faced in today’s first-come, first-served market model, we have provided not one but two duties to promote and grow freight. I therefore hope that noble Lords cannot think that the Bill provides anything other than absolute support for a thriving freight sector.
Lord Grayling (Con)
I hear and understand what the Minister says, but the bit that is missing is that he already controls in his department most of the passenger rail network. He also controls in his department Network Rail. So what is the strategy to get to the 40% increase by 2040?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The answer to the noble Lord is to have a strategy rather than not to have one. GBR’s business plan will have to set out how it seeks to achieve that, and in order to do so it will have to interact with the freight sector—not only freight operators but freight customers—to work out what needs to be done in order to increase the amount of freight. That has been done in the past, but not as seriously as it should have been. For example, I was at London Gateway last Thursday, on a brand-new bi-mode freight locomotive, and talked in some detail about how the railway network can accommodate further growth of what I think the noble Lord Lansley—or we—called high-value traffic in order to get more rail freight into and out of the port. It is that sort of five-year plan, with details about the investments that need to be made and a discussion with those parties who are in a position to make them, including government, that will deliver the increases that we are talking about. I should also reassure the Committee that the Secretary of State cannot ignore this target. Public law principles already require the Secretary of State to have regard to it, due to the legitimate expectation the publication of the target creates, and it would clearly be unreasonable for the Secretary of State to set a target and then, without good reason, disregard it. That is why it is very uncommon in legislation for any public bodies to be required to have regard to their own targets or strategies, because that consideration is implicit in the issuing of the target. Another example for the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, is that there will have to be further plans for the west coast main line. Parts of it are physically constrained by the lack of not only railway infrastructure but power, and in future those plans will have to look also at freight growth. There have been a number of plans in the recent past which have not looked at freight growth, and now they will have to. On Amendment 113, to ensure that the freight target is delivered, as I said, we expect GBR to set out a credible pathway for meeting the growth target in its business plan. The Secretary of State will sign off this plan only once she has received expert advice from the ORR and is satisfied that the plan effectively sets out how GBR will meet the Government’s expectations and priorities for the railways, including on rail freight. The business plan will be published and updated annually. GBR will then be responsible for delivering the business plan and will be held to account by the Secretary of State when doing so. The ORR will also monitor GBR’s delivery outcomes and provide expert advice on GBR’s delivery to the Secretary of State. That means that there is no need for the annual report required by Amendment 113. There will be transparent recording of GBR’s delivery against the freight target, which is built into the Bill, and a mechanism for holding it to account against that too. On Amendment 91, I can confirm to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that the long-term rail strategy will absolutely include freight, as growing freight is one of the Government’s main priorities for rail reform. Representatives from the freight industry have been engaged during the development work of the strategy and will continue, without which the necessary actions will not be able to be achieved. In fact, the discussion document published last month highlights the protection and development of rail freight as a key prioritisation test that GBR will need to pass to meet the rail freight target. “Freight” appears no fewer than 36 times in that document and I can assure noble Lords that it will be similarly prevalent in the final long-term strategy. I take great note of what the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, said about the lessons from the past, and I will be very happy to debate that with her further. Of course, in the last 25 years, there has been massive change in the freight industry from the movement of coal and iron: some of the early targets of 25 years ago are simply not relevant. Indeed, one of the reasons for having a good look at the best use of the railway infrastructure is that some of the reserves of freight paths on the rail today have not been used for many years, because coal and iron are no longer moved around the country. Conversely, some are well used, and the reason why some of them are protected is that freight operators need that protection in order to satisfy their customers about the consistency of delivery.
My noble friend Lord Berkeley mentioned that freight has its own timeliness. That is increasingly true, particularly of container freight to the Midlands. One of the reasons—when we get on to capacity—for having a fresh look at the capacity of the network is to give paths where they are needed and to take paths away where they are not needed. I am better briefed on Cornish lithium production than I was two weeks ago, and the target will ensure that GBR takes such proposals seriously and seeks to find usable paths. That is the reason, when we get on to capacity, for GBR’s duty to make the best use of the railway infrastructure.
I believe that we all share the same intentions for freight. I hope noble Lords are encouraged and that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, will feel able to withdraw his amendment. I can certainly discuss with them further, although probably not today, the particular issues that in the past the railway industry either has not been equipped to deal with or has not treated as seriously as it needs to in the future in order to satisfy these targets.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I hope I do not sound too harsh when I say that the Minister’s speech was completely lacking in any substance about how he is going to achieve the target which is being imposed, willingly, by this legislation on the Government. It is all still on a wing and a prayer. It is possible that a way of addressing this, when we come to Report, would be to develop my amendment requiring an annual report so that it is more specific in saying that it is an annual report that would explain how 2% or 2.1%or 2.2%, whatever is the necessary figure, was being achieved each year and, where it was not being achieved, what remedial measures the Government were going to take to achieve it. That might be a way forward when we get to Report, but there are other considerations and other noble Lords may have their own ideas. It is very unsatisfactory that the Minister has had several weeks to prepare for this. Our previous session in Committee was over three weeks ago, when we broke just at this point; had we been a bit more speedy, the Minister would have had to address these issues back then, on Wednesday 16 September. But no, the Damoclean sword was raised from his neck and he was given three extra weeks to prepare. What has he made of those three weeks? Very little indeed, as far as I can see. I beg leave to withdraw.
Amendment 91 withdrawn.
Amendments 91A to 95 not moved.
Amendment 96
Moved by
96: Clause 15, page 9, line 11, at end insert— “(2A) The rail strategy must include a workforce pay and productivity policy for Great British Railways and GBR companies.(2B) The policy must provide that Great British Railways and a GBR company must not agree to or implement a general pay increase unless the increase is accompanied by material and measurable improvements in productivity or operating efficiency which are proportionate to the cost of the increase.(2C) Great British Railways and each GBR company must act in accordance with the workforce pay and productivity policy.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment would require the Secretary of State’s long-term rail strategy to include a workforce pay and productivity policy under which general pay increases for employees of Great British Railways and GBR companies must be linked to material and measurable improvements in productivity or operating efficiency.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, the question of the workforce is absolutely crucial to passengers. The Bill has very little to say about it. Indeed, the Government have been very quiet on the subject. My Amendment 96 would require the long-term rail strategy to include a workforce pay and productivity policy, under which general pay increases for GBR employees must be “accompanied by material and measurable improvements in productivity or operating efficiency”. Perhaps I might draw an analogy. In the late 18th century, agricultural yields in Britain and Russia were roughly equal. The remarkable fact is that, at the beginning of the 20th century, agricultural yields in Britain had increased by 110%, whereas agricultural yields in Russia were absolutely static, the same as at the end of the 18th century. Now, where would we put the railway industry on that spectrum? Is it Britain over that period, with huge leaps forward in productivity, as we have seen in so much of the private sector in this country, or is it equivalent to the Russians still producing the same amount of potatoes per acre as they were 150 years before? That is where the railway industry is in this country: almost no productivity improvement over much of my lifetime. Indeed, in many respects, the industry is getting worse and getting higher pay for it. This cannot be allowed to continue. The Government have to have a policy for addressing it and it is right that noble Lords should call for a mandatory policy that the Government are required by the Bill to produce. Amendment 324, also in my name, goes to the question of how GBR should engage with recognised trade unions on pay, hours and holidays. Unions should be consulted: nobody has any doubt that they should be consulted on matters affecting their members. I entirely agree with that. But recent events on the London Underground demonstrate why there is a real distinction between consultation and a statutory requirement to negotiate. The Bill creates statutory requirements to negotiate. We have seen the RMT take strike action over TfL’s proposal for a four-day working week, although the arrangement was entirely voluntary and ASLEF described the RMT’s attitude as “bizarre”. Why should there be a statutory obligation to negotiate, going beyond consultation, when trade unions take positions such as that? What is there indeed to negotiate about? It becomes even more important when we consider Amendments 315 and 316, tabled by my noble friend Lord Harper, to which I have added my name. The Government have removed important industrial action thresholds through the Employment Rights Act. My noble friend’s amendment seeks to restore safeguards around turnout and support for strike action in respect of railway industrial action, and to prevent industrial action in one part of GBR automatically spilling across the wider group of companies. If those protections are being weakened, it is even more important that GBR is not simultaneously placed under an unnecessarily rigid duty to negotiate on pay, hours and holidays. Consultation is more appropriate than creating a structure in which management’s ability to reform working practices, improve productivity or control costs can become dependent on securing agreement through negotiation. My noble friend’s Amendment 316 addresses a very real risk. If GBR is allowed to become, in effect, a single employer across the railway—that is, across the 75% of the railway that it is in charge of, so to speak, obviously not including freight and so forth—as opposed to the multiple employers that currently exist in passenger railway services, where separate companies are responsible for different parts of the network, the Government risk creating the conditions for national industrial action in response to even quite localised disputes. This could have a devastating effect on passengers. If this is what the Government are, in effect, introducing in the Bill, popular support for railway nationalisation will dissipate very quickly indeed. In areas where there are two services available—for example, in Oxford, Cambridge and other such places—currently a strike might occur on one of the services but leave the other operating freely. If the Government are creating circumstances where the whole network can be closed down over, as I say, what is almost certainly going to be a localised dispute, because most disputes are, that would be extremely bad and the Government need to say clearly whether they are willing to run that risk and what their policy is on this. Amendment 327 in the name of my noble friend Lord Harper is a very important amendment. Disabled passengers are often among those who are most severely affected by industrial action, particularly where alternative transport options are limited or inaccessible. The idea is that those of us who need to travel might take the bus, go by car or walk, but these options may simply not be accessible to disabled people. I do not see any reason at all why trade unions proposing such action should not be specifically required to discuss it with disability groups before doing so. I beg to move.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, I want to say a word or two about Amendment 96, which my noble friend just moved. I will then spend most of my time on the three amendments in my name. I will be very interested to hear what the Minister has to say on my noble friend’s key point about pay and productivity being linked, because I know that the Minister—or at least a previous incarnation of him—absolutely believed in this. Not only did he believe in it, he was actually rather good at delivering on it. When I was the Secretary of State, he and the then chief executive of Network Rail delivered a pay deal with the RMT. To use that terrible phrase, it stuck within the envelope that the Treasury and I had set, but it delivered a decent pay rise for the workforce but also productivity improvements, which meant that the taxpayer was not unduly burdened by the pay deal. Everybody was a winner: the workforce got a decent pay rise, the business ran more productively and efficiently, and the taxpayer was not done out of money unfairly. That is, I think, all that my noble friend Lord Moylan wants to achieve with his amendment. If the Minister does not support it, as I suspect, I would be interested to know how the Government propose, under the GBR model, to ensure that what the Minister delivered when he chaired Network Rail—pay improvements and the productivity increases that funded them, at least in part—happens in future. I look forward to hearing about that.
Lord Moylan (Con)
Will my noble friend confirm whether it is his view that, since the Minister became a Minister and ceased to be the chairman of Network Rail, the pay agreements that have been reached with the rail industry have notably failed to include the productivity improvements that were a characteristic of his previous employment?
Lord Harper (Con)
I would say two things about that. First, I can confirm that that is indeed the case. However, I would absolve the Minister in front of us of responsibility. I was going to come on to this point later on in my remarks, but I may as well do so now since my noble friend has given me an opening. Relatively quickly after the election, the then Transport Secretary, who is now the very important First Secretary of State, handed money over to train drivers and ASLEF in a completely “no strings attached” deal. Of course, by “no strings attached”, I mean “costing nothing in return”: no productivity improvements, no improvements to efficiency and nothing at all either to improve the operation of the railway for passengers or to reduce its costs. That is what we are worried will happen. Then, ridiculously, we see subsequent pay deals where, just to use new technology, the taxpayer is required to hand over money in trade union deals. In no other workforce is that required. People are expected to use new technology to make businesses more efficient and help them compete. They are not expected to say, “We’re going to carry on using paper and pen unless you give us large amounts of money”. Any competitive business that did that would discover that it was not going to be in business for very long because it would be put out of business by all its competitors that were moving with the latest technology. That is the mindset that we want to make sure does not happen.
My Amendment 315 would disapply the change in the Employment Rights Act 2025 for passenger railway services to ensure you had to have at least 50% of eligible union members participating in a strike ballot and at least 40% of those eligible members supporting industrial action. The reason for that, as my noble friend said, is that many people depend on passenger rail services to get to work to earn a living, to get to educational opportunities and to get to medical appointments—all the essential things that people need to do in life. Strikes on passenger rail services are incredibly disruptive and this is about making sure that you cannot have a dispute without significant support for it. Otherwise, a relatively small number of people voting for a strike can carry a ballot and, with relatively low support, you could have a strike causing enormous inconvenience and economic damage. This amendment simply tries to preserve that higher bar to have a strike; it does not say that you cannot have a strike but simply that you need a higher level of support to have one.
Amendment 316, which my noble friend alluded to, is about GBR remaining a separate company from its subsidiaries for the purposes of industrial relations legislation. There are two very important reasons for that. One is to prevent rail unions being able to have a national rail strike and cause enormous inconvenience not just for passengers but for freight operators and those requiring access to the network. The second thing, which I think, certainly under this Government, would be more likely but not necessarily the Minister’s doing, is that, because of the power handed to trade unions to be able to have a national rail strike, in practice their bargaining strength would be increased. We would see larger pay rises going to those trade unions, not merited by any improvement in productivity and entirely paid for with a nationalised rail industry by the taxpayer. I do not think that that will be acceptable.
Ministers will not admit it here, but I suspect in their private moments they must be asking to themselves whether it is a good idea to have a nationalised rail service that counts as a single employer where trade unions are given the power to have national rail strikes so that they are able to demand unlimited amounts of money from us for fear of bringing the country to a standstill. Perhaps in their quieter moments they might just reflect on whether that is entirely sensible; I would argue that it is not. Putting this in place means that, if you had a dispute on a particular part of the passenger network—perhaps because of local issues, as my noble friend Lord Moylan said—it would not be possible to turn that into a national rail strike. It would also mean, for example, that, if there was a pay dispute on the part of the network where there was an open access competitor, you could not have the network going on strike and shutting down the open access operator to strengthen the bargaining power of the passenger operator in competition with it. Because that is what could happen.
From the public’s point of view—I think we should always think about how this looks from the public’s point of view—my amendment would reduce the risk of having a national rail strike in the first place and stop significant amounts of bargaining power being handed over to trade unions, limiting their ability to extract larger amounts of money from the taxpayer without anything in return. I have no problem with people who work in the rail industry, whether drivers or other staff, earning decent salaries. However, just like in every industry, those salary rises have to be paid for by productivity improvements, because otherwise they are just paid for by taxpayers—most of whom earn significantly less than train drivers—or by passengers.
My final amendment, Amendment 327, is about consulting disabled passengers before unions can give notice of industrial action. The reason for this is that the DfT’s own research into rail strikes found that passengers with mobility, memory or learning disabilities were more likely than non-disabled passengers to say that making alternative arrangements was simply not feasible. Disabled passengers were also more likely to report a loss of earnings as a result of a strike.
Noble Lords do not have to think too hard to understand why that might be. If you are physically disabled or visually impaired, for example, and you are not able to drive—until self-driving cars are widespread—or take a road vehicle cost-effectively, you simply have no choices. If the railways are not running, your chance of going to work or living your life is impaired, and there is a disproportionate impact on you compared with non-disabled people in society.
My reasonable and modest amendment does not say that unions cannot have a strike. It says simply that, before they give formal notice of industrial action, they have to speak to the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee and other organisations representing disabled people, explain the action and its likely effect on services, allow at least seven days for representations to come back about the impact, and consider those representations before they go ahead and have the strike. In any other environment, the trade unions would think it was a marvellous idea if businesses had to obey these strictures, so it is reasonable that they should apply to them also. I commend this amendment to the Committee.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I will intervene briefly on this group and follow up what my noble friend Lord Harper said on Amendment 316, which specifically refers to separate companies under GBR employing staff. On privatisation, under TUPE, those who worked for British Rail were transferred over to the train operating companies under the franchises. Subsequently, each franchising company developed different terms and conditions and different salary levels. The position at the moment, as I understand it, is that, as the franchises expire, they fall into the lap of DFTO. Because the staff will be on different terms and conditions, at the moment I assume that DFTO keeps them in separate entities, be they companies or what have you. However, the trade unions want to move away from these separate bundles of contracts into GBR as one employer, with similar terms and conditions. Mick Whelan has said he wants to enter into discussions about equalising salaries, so that drivers get the same salary for the same job. He has pointed out that, at the moment, one train driver can earn £10,000 more than another train driver for doing basically the same thing. The RMT wants standardised rates of pay: basically, a 32-hour, four-day week. If we are going to move to GBR running the railways, it would be slightly illogical to have totally different terms and conditions throughout the network. So how does the Minister plan to proceed from where we are, with the franchises operating as they fall in under separate terms and conditions, to where I expect he wants to be—and certainly where the trade unions want to be—with one cohesive, standardised pay? Of course, the trade unions will want to level up, which will have implications for GBR and the subsidy it needs from the Treasury. So it would be helpful if the Minister could outline the map: how does he plan to get from where we are to where I think he wants to be? What is his negotiating position likely to be with the trade unions? They will say exactly what I have just said: we will have one nationalised industry, and it does not make sense to have totally different terms and conditions. I hope that, when the Minister winds up this debate, he can shed a little light on the way forward for what I see as one of the major problems facing GBR if it is to manage industrial relations sensibly and avoid what my noble friend Lord Harper referred to: the possibility of national strikes on a scale that we did not see immediately after privatisation and that I hope no one wants to see that again.
Lord Grayling (Con)
My Lords, I support what both my noble friends have said and, indeed, what my noble friend Lord Moylan said at the start. This matters because up to now we have seen no evidence that this Government are going to push through the modernisation of practices on the railways. In fact, we have seen just the opposite. When the first Secretary of State settled with the unions after taking office, there was no provision for improved productivity. This leads to one of two places, one of which is a national strike, which in the end the Government will almost certainly have to cave in to, to some degree. Crucially, going back to our conversation a moment ago when the Minister was talking about how we get to the freight strategy for 2040, how projects might come on stream and unlock extra capacity of freight and so forth, we already know that in this legislation the Government are taking the power to close down a control period spending package to allow the Secretary of State effectively to row back. I gather that that was pushed by the Treasury in the summer. I have no doubt about that, given the pressures on the Treasury, the pattern of public spending over the next two to three years until the next election and the fact that Rachel Reeves spent the money in the first two years. We know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has described the spending plans for the last two to three years of this Parliament as eye-wateringly tight and probably unsustainable, that the Treasury has changed the legislation to allow the Secretary of State to claw back planned spending in a control period that is otherwise supposed to be set for that period and that the Government have so far done nothing to enhance productivity on the railways. We also know that a substantial amount of money was spent by the previous Government on improving the rail service between Oxford and Cambridge—for the moment between Oxford and Milton Keynes—and it is sitting idly because the unions will not let Chiltern Railways operate in the same way as it does on its existing services. Of course, Chiltern Railways is now part of DFTO. Where on earth is the evidence that the Government are going to be capable of managing industrial relations, keeping all this under control and addressing the issues that my two noble friends mentioned? Where is the evidence that they will drive productivity on the railways and that the cost of failing on both those counts is not going to be cutbacks to planned spending and investment that will mean that targets such as the 2040 target for rail freight are even less likely to be met?
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
I hope that noble Lords recognise that the strike record of passenger services in recent years has been rather worse than the record of open-access passenger operators and indeed freight operators. There have been very few strikes in the freight sector. I recall that years ago one of the reasons for privatisation and the franchising process for passengers was that Ministers—not any of the Ministers who are here now—said that if we had half a dozen or a dozen different franchises, each with their own ability to negotiate terms and conditions with the trade unions, it would be much more difficult for the trade unions to hold the whole country to ransom. If we are going back to that, there is a downside. I only hope that we can get it right this time and do not go back to what it was like 20 or 30 years ago when the strikes seemed to be going on for ever.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
The noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Harper, have set out their concerns around workforce productivity and industrial relations. Some of the debate reminds me of debates we used to have at City Hall around London Underground. However, the key issue for me is exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, set out. It is something that I mentioned in an earlier debate and, when we debated the first legislation on the public ownership of the railway two years ago, my noble friend Lady Randerson also raised it. It is to understand fully whether staff will remain in separate Great British Railways companies or become employed by one company. As we have heard, they are all on different terms and conditions, with great variation, and of course the unions’ role is to try to bring everyone up to the highest level. However, the idea of an all-out rail strike looms ahead if we do not have clarity on this and if everyone ends up working for one company—Great British Railways. In some ways, this is comparable to the NHS. A number of years ago a change rolled out, standardising pay grades and terms and conditions right across the NHS, and buying people out of their contracts. We have had a lot of rail disputes, but I would look back to the absolute pain of the dispute with Govia Thameslink Railways—Southern railway—when the Government were trying to push it to remove guards on its trains. That went on for at least nine months around 2016-17. It was absolutely painful and damaging to the economy, with businesses going out of business in places such as Brighton. There was uncertainty every day as a passenger of not knowing whether you were going to be able to catch a train to pick up your child from nursery or whether you were going to face being fined. There was that stress every day, and for people you spoke to it was huge. The idea that you could have that on a national scale is worrying indeed. It would be helpful if the Minister could give us clarity on this point, because as we move forward with the Bill this is a serious consideration.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
My Lords, I turn first to Amendment 96 from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. Noble Lords heard him use what I think are some inappropriate and wrong allegations about the present level of efficiency from the railway workforce. In his lifetime, the railway workforce has become significantly smaller and is far more productive than it used to be. I wish very much that, in the recent past, any of the franchisees, or many of them, had taken any steps to drive productivity, because the railway might be in a better place today than it is, but largely they did not do that and I suggest that the Government are doing better. As regards the long-term rail strategy, it will set out the objectives for the railway over a 30-year period and consider long-term challenges such as environmental and demographic changes and technological development. Very few companies manage their workforce via long-term, vision-setting documents, and I am sure that noble Lords who have run companies, as I have, will agree with me that they did not and do not do that. Making it impossible to offer pay increases to staff unless productivity improves is not an appropriate amendment for primary legislation, but I agree with the noble Lord’s general point that railway productivity must improve to create a better experience for passengers and the public. It is how you do it that matters—the noble Lord, Lord Harper, is right. In my time at Network Rail, we—principally the chief executive—managed to get a satisfactory deal with some substantial changes in the way in which the work was done. However, the noble Lord should know, as will other noble Lords, that there was no legislative obligation to do that. That was the management talking to the workforce and the trade union and reaching a bargain about what needed to be done by them in order to be able to give the pay rise that they got.
Lord Harper (Con)
On that point, the Minister is right that there was not a legislative obligation, but I am sure that he will be clear that he and the chief executive were under very clear direction from the Secretary of State—namely myself—about the financial envelope and about the way in which they could reach a settlement. I made it very clear that I was very happy for them to reach a settlement, but it was one that did not have an infinite amount of money attached to it. However, as I said in my remarks, he and the chief executive did a great job and came up with a very good deal, and that is what I want to see replicated.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
That is exactly the mechanism that will be used in GBR and by the Secretary of State in her management of it, to get better deals across the sector. You do not need legislation to do that; you need some clear objectives. For example, we are already taking steps to secure a genuine seven-day railway, working with staff, management and unions across the railway to identify the best way to achieve it for passengers in a collaborative way. I wish that that had been done in the recent past. Coverage on Sundays, particularly from drivers in some companies, has long been a problem, but nobody sought to deal with it, and we are starting to deal with it. In the present series of pay deals, the delta between CPR and RPI has been paid for by real productivity. The delta is fairly small, but the productivity is worth having. It includes not only the use of modern technology but improvements in things such as route learning, and it gives genuinely better availability of staff to run the train service. I assure noble Lords that pay decisions in the future will reflect the Government’s determination to have a motivated, empowered and productive workforce. Indeed, creating GBR will help with this. It will bring an end to the fragmentation and short-termism that have characterised rail workforce management practices for 30 years—for example, the systemic reliance on excessive overtime and rest-day working, leading to cancelled services when volunteers are not available—which will allow productivity to be increased over time. We have that issue well in hand. I do not support Amendments 315 and 316 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Harper. The Government passed the Employment Rights Act 2025 to remove restrictions on lawful industrial action because they believe that collective bargaining rights are key to tackling problems of inequality and discrimination across sectors. We want to foster co-operation between trade unions, employers and the Government. In doing so, we will support employers to amicably resolve disputes with their workforce and reduce disruption and costs overall. Frankly, we are not revisiting the Employment Rights Act in this Bill. That improvement is what we have seen in the rail sector. The Government have improved relationships with the trade unions, and the collaborative approach has meant that the number of rail services lost due to strikes has more than halved compared with the number under the previous Government.
Lord Grayling (Con)
If that is the case, why is East West Rail still idle?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
If the noble Lord would really like to know, the previous Secretary of State who is not present in the Committee might want to explain why in 2022 we knew that the infrastructure was going to be finished in 2024, yet when the Government took office in July 2024 there was no contract in place for the operation of the service. We had to start that contract again and we are only now in the position that probably we should have been in two and a half years ago in terms of procuring a train service that actually works. I do not feel that it is very productive to talk about the first pay settlement, which solved the long-running issues which cost around £850 million in forgone revenue over 2022 to 2024. But it is probably worth saying that, at the time the Government took office, there was no productivity on the table. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Harper, might prefer to forget that one of the issues was that the owning groups were not prepared to release such proposals, because they did not have an agreement about how much their cut of those proposals would be. The solution to that issue did passengers a huge favour by resolving the industrial disputes and putting the railway back to some form of reliable operation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, said, people rely on the railway every day and need it to work every day, and the intermittent strikes that took place for two and a quarter years were hugely damaging in that respect. We know that the trade unions support the creation of GBR and recognise what making GBR a success will require. Of course, no one wants to see a return to industrial action that disrupts passengers and customers and which, as I said, was rather too commonplace in the recent past. In respect of Amendment 316 specifically, I reassure the noble Lord that secondary industrial action between GBR subsidiaries, which his amendment seeks to prohibit, is already prohibited under Section 224 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. All the rest that he and the noble Lord, Lord Young, postulate is conjecture. The noble Lord, Lord Young, is right: as rail operations transfer into the public sector currently, they will remain in their separate negotiating groups. In the history of the nationalised railway since 1948, there has never been a single rate of pay for any job. Drivers’ jobs were linked with very different earnings as a consequence of what the individuals did, and there are also some significant geographical differences. I will not talk in this forum about what negotiating position we would adopt with the trade unions. If there is a bargain to be had and they know there is a bargain to be had, it will be established through the normal arrangements between management and trade unions. In fact, the Rail Engagement Group is the forum in which we are engaging at a high level with trade unions to inform them and their members how this will progress and to establish between us what they might want out of such a deal, and what the Government might want, too.
Lord Harper (Con)
Before the Minister moves on, might I check the reassurance that he has attempted to provide to me and my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham that the subsidiaries will remain as they are and it is not possible to have a single strike? Is it the Government’s intention that that will remain the position and do they have no plans to bring any of those operations together? That was the thrust of what my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said. Is it the Government’s intention that they remain as separate legal entities for the foreseeable future or do the Government have a different plan?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
I am sure the noble Lord will know that TUPE, at the time the employees move into public ownership, prevents such changes for the immediate future. I am not saying anything about the future other than that we need to have a serious discussion with the trade unions and the employees going into GBR. If there is to be a change, we need to understand their aspirations for such a change, and we need to know the conditions of making that change from a management point of view. For the moment, we are where we are. More than 40,000 employees have transferred into public ownership, and I think that largely they are very pleased to do so. We will take it from there in the forums that we have and the forums that we might need to establish if we are going to do something different. I turn to Amendment 324. As I said, what collective bargaining agreements will cover and what they will require of the parties under GBR has still to be determined and will be subject to discussions with the trade unions. The noble Lord’s proposed clause is inappropriate and would prejudice those discussions. It is not necessary to legislate to restrict what those discussions can cover. As we have discussed, there is clearly a philosophical disagreement between this Government and the previous one over how to treat trade unions, but our approach is collaborative and focused on getting the right outcomes, and it is working. On Amendment 327, I absolutely acknowledge that many people rely on train services to go about their daily life. That is especially the case for those with disabilities, some of whom, as the noble Lord said, cannot drive or may find the use of private hire vehicles or other means of transport unaffordable or impractical. For those reasons, rail service disruption and cancellations due to industrial action or any other reason affect all these people, some of them disproportionately. There are of course duties on all trade unions to give employers notice of industrial action. This means that rail employers can assess the likely impact on passengers should there be such action, which enables them to plan for and communicate the details of any industrial action in good time. The Bill places accessibility at the heart of the future railway by ensuring that the key organisations must actively consider the needs of disabled passengers when making decisions, and therefore GBR will have a responsibility to ensure that it has taken account of disabled passengers in any preparation for industrial action. The Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee is the Government’s statutory adviser on the transport needs of disabled people. It would not be appropriate for that committee to carry out an assessment of the operational impacts of each instance of industrial action on disabled people. That is very much for the organisation that will be in charge of the railway, GBR, to think about in accordance with its duties. Accordingly, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I am not saying anything about the future. That is what the Minister just said—in relation, admittedly, to one particular issue—but I suggest that that applies to almost all the issues raised in this debate, and it is increasingly a motto for the Government’s approach to this Committee. The thrust behind the Government’s argument is increasingly clear: “You give us these extensive powers, and you will trust us to know how to carry them out in a way that is effective and appropriate”. We have severe doubts about that, and we are entitled to those doubts. We are entitled to see the Bill amended so that GBR and the Government are made accountable for delivering and we understand clear objectives, clear lines of accountability and clear means of addressing, or redressing, success and failure. I will not pursue the debate we have had any further than that just now because noble Lords have set out very clearly what their concerns are. I am confident that we shall return to this debate on Report. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Amendment 96 withdrawn.
Amendments 96A to 100 not moved.
Clause 15 agreed.
Amendments 101 and 101A not moved.
Clause 16: Duty of Great British Railways and ORR to have regard to strategies etc
Amendments 102 to 105 not moved.
Clause 16 agreed.
Clause 17: Rail freight target
Amendments 106 to 109 not moved.
Clause 17 agreed.
Amendments 110 to 114 not moved.
Amendment 114A
Moved by
114A: After Clause 17, insert the following new Clause— “Passenger modal shift target(1) The Secretary of State must, after consulting the Scottish Ministers and the Welsh Ministers, set and publish a target, specifying a date by which it is to be achieved, to increase the overall distance travelled by passengers by railway.(2) In setting the target, the Secretary of State must have particular regard to—(a) increasing the distance travelled by passengers by railway relative to travel by private car and domestic air services, and(b) increasing the distance travelled by passengers by railway where railway travel forms part of a journey involving active travel, bus, tram, metro, coach, ferry or other public transport services.(3) The Secretary of State must, in respect of each year, prepare, lay before Parliament and publish a report setting out progress towards meeting the target, the steps taken to meet it and the steps proposed to be taken in the following year.(4) The Secretary of State must review the target at least once in every period of five years. (5) The Secretary of State may revise or replace the target only if the revised or replacement target is no less ambitious than the target it revises or replaces.(6) Before revising or replacing the target, the Secretary of State must consult the Scottish Ministers and the Welsh Ministers.(7) Great British Railways must, when exercising its statutory functions, have regard to the target set by the Secretary of State under this section.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment requires the Secretary of State to set a target to increase the distance travelled by passengers by railway.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, observant noble Lords will have noticed that I am not my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. She apologises that she is currently occupied in the Chamber with the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, although I hope she will rejoin the Committee shortly. My qualifications for taking part in this Committee are that, over 14 years, I have travelled an enormous number of train miles across these islands and I am passionate about greatly improving the reliability, affordability and practicality of train travel. I just looked at my diary and, in the next 10 days, I have journeys to Kidderminster, Manningtree, Sheffield and Manchester. I have my fingers crossed. In moving Amendment 114A, I will speak primarily to all the other amendments in this rather diverse group, described as “general duties”. I briefly express sympathy with Amendment 118 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. I have heard the noble Lord on the subject of heritage railways many times, and I look forward to hearing him again. Amendments 114A and 118B are about the role we expect Great British Railways to play in getting people on to rail, given the climate and environmental crises. At the moment, the Bill downgrades the role of the environment, at a time when we absolutely cannot afford to do that. Transport is the UK’s highest polluting sector, and a modal shift duty is an absolute must. There is a reference in Clause 18 to the effect that railway services have on the environment, but it is a relatively narrow formulation. It is essentially about minimising the harm caused by the railway. We should ask for something much more ambitious: how can the railway itself be a tool in reducing emissions and car dependency, which could have positive cost of living impacts for families and communities, as well as helping us respond to the climate and nature emergencies. There are demonstrations of what is possible across these islands. Wales has put clear numbers on this. Its transport strategy aims for 45% of journeys to be made by walking, cycling or public transport by 2040. Its net zero Wales commitments include reducing car mileage per person by 10% by 2030, from a 2019 baseline, and increasing journeys by sustainable modes to 39% by 2030. Scotland has also recognised the importance of reducing car use. It previously set a target to reduce car kilometres by 20% by 2030 from a 2019 baseline. The Scottish Government have since acknowledged that this target is off track and are revising it according to a longer-term target aligned with their climate objectives, but the policy commitment to reduce car use is still there. There is another important difference. Under Section 44 of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009, Scottish public authorities already have a statutory duty, when exercising their functions, to act in a way best calculated to contribute to Scotland’s climate targets and programmes. But Great British Railways, the Office of Rail and Road, and the Secretary of State will not have an equivalent overarching statutory climate duty under this Bill unless changes such as those proposed here are made. If Scotland and Wales can do this, why not us? Amendment 127 is on affordability. It is obvious that, if we want people to choose trains over cars and planes, trains have to be affordable. I can cite many examples of where this clearly is not the case. Which? found a return journey from Edinburgh to Bournemouth costing £127 by train—I think I have made that journey, and it is not a great pleasure—compared to £38 by plane. Glasgow to London was £101 by train, compared to £67 by plane. At times, I am sure we could find even worse examples. We cannot seriously expect people to choose rail if it costs two or three times as much as flying. Affordability is not just about the cheapest ticket you can find online. People have to travel when they need to travel. People on low incomes, shift workers, young people, passengers with disabilities and people living in rural and coastal areas, where there are few alternatives, are often faced with simply impossible costs. We need a clear duty on the Secretary of State and Great British Railways to improve the affordability and fairness of fares, with particular regard to those groups. I therefore explicitly ask the Minister: what is the Government’s ambition for affordable fares under Great British Railways? Will they consider putting that ambition into the Bill? I come, finally, to Amendments 330K and 334A on the regulation of licences. These are about the relationship between the general duties of the Bill and the licences that will govern the railway. Under the 1993 legislation, licence conditions must have regard to the general duties. These amendments would make sure that this same connection is carried throughout the Bill. As I understand it, with the way the Bill is currently drawn, that link is being removed. This seems important, because the Bill gives us a set of general duties for Great British Railways, but then the licensing framework is no longer required to have regard to them. What will guide the conditions that are put on the licence if the Government are indeed taking away this duty? That is another direct question to the Minister. More broadly, where do these general duties sit in the hierarchy? If they are not reflected in the licences, while competition law and other regulatory requirements continue to have strong legal force, the duties could become more of a statement of intent than something that shapes how the railway is regulated. I beg to move.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for anticipating my Amendment 118, and to my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, who has signed it. He, like the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, is currently in the Chamber on the Public Office (Accountability) Bill and unable to take part in our debates here as a result. Our Amendment 118 relates to the general duties of Ministers, Great British Railways and the Office of Rail and Road. We submit that these should be exercised “in the manner best calculated to preserve a sustainable role for heritage rail services”. We know that the Minister wants to preserve that sustainable role; as I have said before, he is a great champion for heritage rail and transport heritage in general. If we are to approve and enact the Bill, we want to ensure that it withstands any changes of Minister or Government and would operate in a scenario where we are not so fortunate to have such a supportive and knowledgeable Minister, or indeed supporters in other areas of rail life. I should note as well our gratitude to and appreciation for the Office of Rail and Road for the work that it has undertaken since the passing of the Employment Rights Act and on the publication of guidance this summer, which makes clearer the role that young volunteers can play on our heritage railways. We are grateful for the support that there is presently, but we want to make sure that that is sustained. Our amendment is modest. It would give discretion to Ministers, GBR and the ORR in how they do it, but simply seeks to preserve a sustainable role. It reflects a number of concerns and questions that heritage rail operators, particularly those operating on the main line, have raised with us. I outlined those in my contributions at Second Reading and on my earlier Amendment 90, which relates to the clauses concerning the long-term rail strategy. I will not rehearse them at length here, but they relate in passing to the question of capacity constraints, which we already see affecting many operators that run either exclusively main line services or a blend of the two. The North Yorkshire Moors Railway, which runs to Whitby, is already running on lines that have capacity constraints. If we are to see this in the future, it is important that we give the steer to Ministers, GBR and the ORR, so that they take these into account. They should also do this in the decisions that they take in relation to infrastructure. In the 1980s and 1990s, we saw how decisions that reduced the number of things such as passing loops and stabling sidings had an effect on those who operated charter rail services. So, as with our amendment that looks at the long-term rail strategy—as well as the amendments on the access and use policy, which we will touch on later in Committee—we are looking for opportunities to ensure that everybody involved in the future of the railways continues to pay attention to the important role that the heritage of our railways has played in getting us to where we are and that it continues to inspire the future generations of people who will shape our railway network.
Viscount Stansgate (Lab)
My Lords, Oscar Wilde once said: “I can resist everything except temptation”. I hope the Committee will understand that the temptation to support the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, on this amendment is too strong to resist. It is a very important point. This is one of the occasions when, in speaking in Committee, it is quite right that I declare an interest. I was recently elected a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Heritage Rail because of, sadly, the death of our friend Lord Snape. I am not here as a substitute for my noble friend Lord Faulkner, who would speak with much greater authority than I can, but it is important for the Committee to know that one of the reasons for all-party parliamentary groups is to bring together people from across parties with a common cause. I have no financial interest whatever in the railways, but I am a strong supporter of the heritage railway industry. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, said that she was looking forward to the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson. So was I, and I have not been disappointed. I endorse all the major points that he made. The railway is one of the major attractions, of one kind or another, in this country. It has been through difficult times and has had to adjust to changing circumstances, such as the issue around the supply of coal. Take this year, 2026, which has been a record-breaking year in terms of heat. I know for a fact, having discussed it with the all-party parliamentary group, that railways of different kinds have had problems of one kind or another relating to the sheer heat. Indeed, I think—the noble Lord will correct me if I am wrong—that greater moves are now being made by the heritage railway industry to develop winter-related events because, sadly, this year showed that you cannot run steam railways, for example, because of the risk of fire. The noble Lord has already mentioned volunteers, who are crucial, and I welcome what he said about the guidance that was issued, capacity restraints and infrastructure. These are all very worthwhile points to make. I simply wanted to contribute briefly in Committee by saying that I endorse them and hope that, when my noble friend the Minister, who also has greater knowledge of this issue than I do, comes to reply, he will feel able either to accept the amendment or, at least, to reassure the Committee to a great extent that the needs of the heritage rail industry, which is a major benefit to this country, will be protected in the new era towards which we are moving.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, it is good to have a new—or recycled—colleague in the railway market or, as I might call it, the gricer market. It is really good that he supports all the amendments from other days in Committee, as well as those today, on the heritage sector, which is a big problem but is something on which we must continue to press Ministers. We will, I hope, get some support; I am sure that we will. I have a number of amendments in this group, including Amendments 119, 123, 185 and 205. I do not think that we need to discuss them now because, to some extent, we have already talked about this issue and about making efficient use of, as well as getting value for, money. With all these amendments, I am keen to make as strong an argument as possible. I shall say just a word or two about Amendment 126 in my name. It is intended to be a catch-all to ensure that GBR operates in a totally non-discriminatory manner. Of course, we have talked about this in many earlier amendments, but I felt that it was useful to have something that would, I hope, catch anything that we have missed and recognise that discrimination covers a multitude of things—which we do not need to go into now. It is important to have a duty here for this great big monopoly that is being created to recognise other players in the market, be they private, passenger or freight, and which ensures that non-discrimination comes top of the pile, so to speak. I am sure that when it is necessary, the ORR will be involved as well.
Lord Beith (LD)
I want to make just two points, the first of which relates to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, which in turn reflects an amendment I spoke to in a previous group, to which I felt we had a disappointing reply from the Minister, about the co-ordination of rail travel with buses and other modes. Multimodal travel is still, in the minds of many people, a gamble. There may be a gamble about whether the train arrives, but the idea that the bus will connect with the train and will exist when you get there is one surrounded by uncertainty and not protected by any great area of policy or provision by the operators. Until we address that, multimodal travel will not be the norm. That is important when we are trying to get more people out of the car for commuter services, even for the distance from their home to the railway station. It is important when we want to encourage longer-distance travel but significant parts of the country are not readily—or at all—accessible by rail, when there is this dependence on multimodal travel, which, as I say, is far too often seen as too risky a gamble, with people thinking it would be better to take the car. The other point I want to make relates to heritage rail, and it is simply to show support. I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Aln Valley Railway. There are many circumstances now in which the interaction between heritage railways and the main railway industry has important features, especially as a number of lines—some already and some, we hope, in the future—run into main line stations. It is obviously quite a challenge for the relationship between the railway industry and the heritage railway industry, but it is a challenge that is also an opportunity, and I hope that the Minister will continue to be supportive and encouraging in that respect.
Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con)
My Lords, my amendments in this group relate to value for money, but I say to begin how pleased I am to see my noble friend Lord Parkinson’s amendment, which I wholeheartedly support. There is a feeling that there is widespread support for ensuring the sustainability of the heritage railway. Let us hope that if the Minister cannot accept my noble friend’s amendment as a whole, he might reassure the Committee that the Government take the heritage railway industry seriously and will give direction that it ought to be preserved—that is probably the right word—and nurtured as part of our very important national heritage. My Amendments 119A and 122A aim to achieve a similar outcome to those tabled by several other noble Lords, including Amendment 119 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Berkeley, namely, the strengthening of the duties on Ministers, GBR and the ORR with regard to delivery of value for money—a perennial problem when you take the market out of an operation. It is of course right that those in charge of our railways have to balance numerous duties and goals—and noble Lords would agree that having a punctual railway is important—but noble Lords may remember that during the pandemic the punctuality of the railway soared because there were very few passengers travelling. I am not suggesting for a moment that minimising the number of passengers travelling is a desirable goal; I am merely illustrating that when one part of the balance moves, so do the others, and that it is important that we aim not only for punctuality but for widespread use. As the noble Baroness said in introducing this group, of course we all want to see greater use of the railways, but we do not want to see crowded trains, so where does the balance come in? That is where the definition of “value for money” is important. I would contend that the current wording in the Bill on financial efficiency is too vague and open to being interpreted in too many different ways and therefore loses its clarity. What is the context of efficient use of public funds? Does it mean in a specific fiscal year? Does it mean in the five-year control period or in the multi-decade horizon of the envisaged long-term rail strategy? Perhaps the Minister could enlighten us as to the thinking in that. We all know that in a constrained fiscal environment and in public hands the railways will be even more subject to these pressures than at present. In a constrained fiscal environment, spending and investment will have to be prioritised. As the Minister has said many times, our railways consume many billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money every year and somebody has to be accountable for that. My amendments therefore seek to require Ministers, GBR and the ORR to apply a more comprehensive value for money test and to be accountable for it in determining how we invest in our railways. It will require those in charge to look beyond a vague efficiency test and consider whole-life costs, the opportunity cost of investing in one specific project at the expense of another, a quality risk-management test to avoid unnecessary gold-plating of standards, and the knock-on costs from infrastructure spending on the operation of services. Let me draw as an example on the analogy with PFI contracts, which illustrate my point rather sadly. In the short term, PFI contracts to build new schools and hospitals could be regarded as an efficient use of public funds as they enabled the assets to be built much earlier and at a much lower cost to the public purse than would have been the case had they been funded in a more traditional manner. But as we now know, in the long term these contracts have saddled the public purse with exorbitant long-term costs that, taking a longer-term perspective, cannot possibly be regarded as efficient. If the longer-term perspective had been put into the balance when the crucial decisions were made, the question of efficiency might have been held in the balance rather differently. Similarly, new rolling stock may have an attractive purchase price, but if the contract comes with hefty maintenance contracts with the OEM, does the whole-life cost represent value for money? I am sure the Minister will be able to enlighten us as to how he sees these matters.
The Government proudly announced a few weeks ago the procurement of a new fleet of battery electric trains to run on the upgraded trans-Pennine route, for example. On the face of it, it is a good deal that would pass a broad efficiency test. What we need to know is that procurement in the context of the infrastructure investment is the best value for money. There is an apparent mismatch between the specifications of the trains and those of the infrastructure upgrade. The trains will have a lower running speed than the new maximum speed for the line and are considerably shorter than the length of extended platforms. There may be good reasons for that, but we need to know whether the project as a whole represents value for money in the way it has been designed and delivered, and we need to know that there has not been overspecification or underspecification of infrastructure.
It is a question of where all these matters are put in the balance. I am not pretending for a moment that it is an easy balance to achieve, but it would be helpful for the Committee to know from the Minister just where the Government think they can strike this balance and with what accuracy.
Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)
I have tabled Amendment 120, and I thank my noble friends Lord Grayling and Lord Moylan for their support. I add my support to my noble friend Lord Parkinson on his heritage rail amendment. Growing up in the north-east, I used to visit the North Yorkshire Moors Railway as it was developing back in the 1970s very often, and it is heartening to hear that it is now extending its service to Whitby, which it did not at the time. That must necessarily bring a lot more tourists and a lot more users on to that rail route than were available previously. Amendment 120 seeks to expand and improve Clause 18. Clause 18(2) lists six duties for GBR and the Minister to work to, and Clause 18(3) lists four more by seeking to define words such as “public interest” and “railway service performance”, which are necessarily vague in Clause 18(2). My amendment would add six more duties to that subsection. They would be numbered from g to l and line 9 would need to be amended to reflect that. The first of these would be a duty to increase passenger numbers. One of the great successes of railway privatisation over the years has been an increase in passenger numbers and use of the railways. That is something we all want to see, and I do not think the Government would disagree with that proposition as a priority. The second would be to drive economic growth. I appreciate that there are different definitions of economic growth. All I am really asking for here is that whatever the Government decide are their economic priorities are also supported by the railway network. That seems sensible. The third and fourth additions would to be to prioritise attracting private sector investment and reducing public subsidy. We have already heard this afternoon about the tight financial situation that the Government find themselves in. It is an unfortunate truth, and it certainly was last time the railways were broadly in public ownership, that taxpayers’ money tends to go to other projects instead. In addition to health and education, which were always seen as priorities, we now have the need to provide defence for our country, which will not come cheap. The fear that we have is that the railway network will come a long way down the list of priorities when it comes to taxpayer funding, so seeking additional private sector investment and trying to limit the subsidy seem to be sensible things to do in these circumstances—indeed, in any circumstance. The fifth addition would seek to bring in improving passenger satisfaction as measured by the Passengers’ Council. This would give greater strength to the proposed Passengers’ Council. I have a number of later amendments on that council, and we will discuss those in some detail, but perhaps a better measure of satisfaction will be what the Passengers’ Council determines is important to rail users. Right now, it is reliability and the mitigation of overcrowding, as Clause 18(3) rightly highlights, but in future these things may change. I look in later amendments at wifi connection on trains and the availability of electric sockets for people to plug into—the sorts of things that you would not have considered important in the past. Given the way that technology is developing very fast now and outpacing our ability to legislate for it, I can see there will be other services that passengers will think are important on trains in future but which are not included in the legislation. We can include those sorts of things by having the Passengers’ Council keeping abreast of developments and by putting the Passengers’ Council’s requirements into the duties, as this amendment would. The final extra duty would be to improve efficiency and productivity. We have heard a lot about productivity today and I think everyone agrees that it is a good thing; perhaps we have not had enough of it in the past and certainly we will want more of it in the future. I recognise that in legislation such as this you can carry on putting new priorities into it until you fill several pages, and I suspect the Minister will suggest that these are not necessarily of as high a priority as others. If that is the case, though, I would like to hear his justification for that, because none of the six important issues that I have set out here is any less important than the ones already identified in the Bill. I believe my amendment would improve the quality of this part of the Bill.
Lord Grayling (Con)
My Lords, I support my noble friend in his remarks about his own amendment, to which I added my name, and will speak to the two further amendments that I have tabled in this group. I will not go through them line by line, but I would describe this as the “Please do not go back to British Rail” group. The reality is that British Rail did some good things, but it also did some bad things and failed to deliver in many respects. We have to avoid just going back to what was there before. All of us grew up with British Rail and, as I say, it did say some things well, but an awful lot of things were not done for passengers. One simple example is the changes to the Chiltern line, the line I grew up on, which pre privatisation was, frankly, being lined up to become a coach route. Marylebone station was going to be closed, there were serious discussions about not running trains any more and services were more limited by far than they are now. Post privatisation, with innovation, the service was completely transformed. Quality improved in every respect, and the range of services and the stations improved. I have a big concern about what the Government are doing. I supported the reunification of track and train wholeheartedly. I started that process. I never intended us to end here in this particular structure, but we are where we are. However, the Government must not allow the new Great British Railways approach to exclude the private sector in a variety of different ways. My amendment, which would require them to look for value for money for the taxpayer, is based on my concern that I can see more and more just being taken in-house. On maintenance, we have already had the unions saying, “Well, let’s just take DB Cargo back in-house as it’s up for sale”. The reality is that the private sector can and does offer innovation that the public sector generally does not to the same degree. My concern is that there has to be a clear duty on Great British Railways to look for the best option, and it must look for that best option in a way that genuinely benefits passengers. I go back to British Rail: it was to some degree unfair but, in common parlance and discussion about British Rail at the time, it was about running a railway rather than delivering a service for passengers. Great British Railways must not do that. We know that the public sector has never been great at delivering a high-quality service for its customers. I am not sure I understand why Great British Railways in the public sector will be any different. It is therefore beholden upon us to really challenge the Minister and those who will be running Great British Railways to demonstrate why they will do the things set out in these amendments and how they will constantly seek best value to try to deliver for the taxpayer—and also, frankly, for the railway and passengers. The best value they get, the more likely it is that there will be some funds available in the future to do some improvements of, for example, the rail freight that we discussed earlier. I am therefore looking for reassurance from the Minister that Great British Railways will still kick the tyres on getting best value; that it will still look at doing innovative things to improve quality for passengers; that it will not simply be subsumed each year in the Budget round where other parts of the public sector take precedence for the funding that is available, as always happened in the past; and that we will not go back to the world where, when that happened and the pressures came in the Budget rounds, the response was to put up fares, close services, close lines and strip out sections of double track and turn them into a single-track railways—all things that have left our rail network today much less substantial than it should be and much less able to adapt to the needs of the moment. I am simply looking for reassurance from the Minister as to how he will make sure that none of that happens.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, I will speak briefly in this group. There have been many good points made, but I want to focus on Amendment 123 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. The purpose of Amendment 123 is to remove from Clause 18 its final subsection (4), which says, in effect, that, in so far as Great British Railways applies its capacity duty from Clause 63—noble Lords will remember the capacity duty is about GBR protecting itself and its ability to maintain its timetable and its access to infrastructure—it is to control the capacity from anything that might impede it providing its own services. This clause now says that these general duties where GBR is concerned are not to have effect if the Section 63 capacity duty is being applied by Great British Railways. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for drawing the attention of the Committee to this important point. I looked at the capacity duty and asked myself, “Under what circumstances would Great British Railways do something, using the capacity duty, that would be contrary to any of these general duties?” It seemed to me that it would not do it, and could not justify doing so, if it did not promote the interests of the users of railway passenger services, since that it who it is meant to be looking after. It should not be able to do so, so as not to promote high standards of railway service performance—clearly, that could be doing something in the short run but benefiting in the long run. It should not be doing something if it cannot be demonstrated to be best calculated to be in the public interest. It should not be doing it if it cannot justify that it is within the need to make efficient use of public funds. We are therefore left with two general duties which might be prejudiced by the application of the capacity duty by Great British Railways. Those are: to enable persons providing railway services to plan the future of their businesses with a reasonable degree of assurance; and promoting the use of the railway network for the carriage of goods. It seems that we are left with a provision that allows Great British Railways to invoke its capacity duty for its own purposes to the prejudicial interests of freight and, indeed, others such as open-access operators which are providers of railway services. I do not think that we should permit that to happen. When the time comes, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, will persist in Amendment 123 and that we support it.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of two amendments in this group, starting with Amendment 118 in the name of my noble friend Lord Parkinson. Shamelessly, I want to use it as an opportunity to advertise the Dean Forest Railway, which is the steam railway that operates in the Forest of Dean. It has four and a half miles and five stations, and it interacts—this is the important point—with Network Rail at Lydney. It also interacts, probably not always helpfully, with the ORR on a number of occasions, including, for example, where there have to be level crossings and so forth. Therefore, it is important that this amendment is supported, as my noble friend said, to make sure that GBR’s interaction with heritage railways does not depend on a particular Minister who is a fantastic supporter of heritage railways, but will withstand a change of Minister. Even if you had a Minister who did not like heritage railways at all, the legal duties would be there to protect them, which I strongly support. The second amendment I support is Amendment 120, in the name of my noble friend Lord Evans of Guisborough. He alluded to the fact that adding all these duties in might create quite a long list, and I suspect that the Minister will say that everything cannot be a priority because if you have a very long list nothing is a priority, so I will make what is perhaps a helpful suggestion. I was particularly attracted by the proposed new paragraph (j) that Amendment 120 seeks to add to Clause 18(2), which would require exercising functions “in the manner best calculated to remove or reduce the need for public subsidy of the railways”. It would be helpful if the Minister inserted that into the Bill instead of paragraph (f), because “taking into account the costs that will need to be met from public funds and the need to make efficient use of those funds” is a bit weak and does not have a strong enough impetus to drive down the cost to the taxpayer. The Minister ought to be able to accept that because it is my understanding that in the last spending review—I am sure this was done entirely voluntarily by the Department for Transport and the Treasury did not put the thumbscrews on at all—the department signed up to a significant reduction in the public subsidy over the spending review period; I see the Minister is nodding. As I said, given that the Government do not seem to have any significant plans for doing that and have increased the cost of the railways, as well as the points made by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who is no longer in his place—
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
Ahem!
Lord Harper (Con)
Oh, he is here, but now in a different place, which is what threw me. I beg the Committee’s indulgence for not noticing that he had moved. All that is driving up the cost, which will increase the subsidy required for the railway rather than reduce it. It is important to reduce the cost of the public subsidy because otherwise, the temptation for Ministers is to keep prices down but dump all the cost on the taxpayer, hide it away somewhere and hope that nobody notices. Replacing paragraph (f) in Clause 18(2), which is a bit weak and is arguably inconsistent with what the department has already signed up to do, with the much more robust paragraph (j) in my noble friend’s excellent amendment, would put an impetus on the department to drive down public subsidy, which is much more in keeping with what the department has already signed up to do. I therefore hope that, when the Minister responds, he will be able to say that he can accept not the whole amendment—that might be going a bit too far—but at least one part of it, replacing what is in the Bill, because it is consistent with what the Government have already said they intend to do. I look forward to hearing him say such words shortly.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, there is such a wide range of amendments in this group, all focusing on value for money, fares and some additional duties, some of which we covered in our debates on other groups. For example, we discussed the passenger growth target on a previous day. The noble Baroness’s point at the start about reducing emissions and a modal shift is really important, and my noble friend Lord Beith talked about multimodal travel being a gamble. It absolutely is in parts of the country. I recall turning up somewhere many years ago by train, assuming that there would be a cab rank where I ended up, and there was not. I was in the middle of a forest somewhere, trying to visit someone in a hospital. I just made an assumption, because I was used to that level of service in the capital city. My noble friend is absolutely right on that. We had a strong reminder again about the importance of the heritage sector, which should be considered in all decisions, where appropriate, by different parts of the rail industry, as it were. That was set out clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. It is such an important part of our tourist offer. I hope that is supported. The noble Baroness, Lady Laing, talked about value for money, productivity and best value. It is really hard to define that. I sit on the Public Services Committee, and we have looked at that sort of work and how we define it. It is really important that we do, but it is hard to do that. But I would expect any company, private or public, to look at how it can operate in an increasingly tight financial envelope, looking at how to innovate and use technology and being mindful of the cost base. I am sure that Great British Railways would be no exception to that, but we need confirmation of this. I look forward to the Minister’s response to this broad group.
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.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
My Lords, this is a very varied group, and many valuable points have been raised. My belief is that the Bill addresses the majority of the points raised, but I am happy to discuss any of them further if I do not cover them in the speech that I am about to make. Turning first to Amendments 114A and 120, these proposals are duplicative of GBR’s duty to promote the interests of not only users but potential users of railway passenger services, which already requires GBR to consider how best to encourage new users on to the railways. Considering the interests of potential users will incentivise GBR to think about underutilised markets and their interests. For example, we know that older people on average travel less. To meet this duty, I would expect GBR to be thinking about what it can do to attract this group to use the railway. As I have explained before, I do not think we should have an additional or stronger passenger growth duty, as I am concerned that it could push the duties out of balance and undermine the incentive for GBR to promote freight. As GBR’s revenue already comes from passengers, and there will naturally be pressure to increase that revenue, there is already an inherent risk that GBR might seek to prioritise passengers to the detriment of freight. The Bill seeks to address this by having two freight duties and only one duty designed to address passenger growth. I will address Amendment 114A in slightly more detail, as I appreciate that it also includes explicit modal shift and intermodal elements, as does Amendment 118B. I can confirm that the long-term rail strategy will reference and encourage modal shift and connectivity between modes. The noble Lord, Lord Beith, and other noble Lords are right to emphasise this. GBR will include in its business plan how it will work towards the modal shift objectives in the long-term rail strategy. It will also need to take account of the strategies of Scottish and Welsh Ministers, which the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned. The long-term rail strategy is also being developed in tandem with, and will be informed by, the Government’s integrated national transport strategy. The discussion document published last month on that strategy outlines how encouraging modal shift by increasing the attractiveness of rail is key to the Government’s sustainability objective. The Bill also supports this objective through the inclusion of the public interest duty at Clause 18, which explicitly includes the effect on the environment in its definition. This ensures that GBR is bound by this duty not only when making key decisions but when responding to the long-term rail strategy via its business plan, meaning that modal shift is actively considered throughout. I recognise the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Evans, about the other duties that he proposes, but, as he said, although these things are important now, times may change. I will address with him separately how the six issues that he raises will all be addressed. Turning to railway performance on Amendment 122, we have known from passengers for a long time that the main issues affecting their journeys are reliability, punctuality and overcrowding. That is exactly why we have specifically referred to these issues in the definition. However, the definition is not exhaustive or limiting: GBR and the ORR will be able to consider any other factors of railway service performance that they assess as relevant. Specifically, passenger comfort would already be considered as part of the interests of passengers and potential passengers and so is already accounted for by the duties in the Bill. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, that notwithstanding the comments about the reputation of British Rail, which are now more than 30 years old, it is interesting in the current situation how the reputation of LNER is so much better, despite it having been in the public sector for quite a long time and, conversely, how poor the position of Avanti is, despite it being in the private sector.
Lord Grayling (Con)
I have a simple question: can the Minister explain to the Committee why, prior to privatisation, the number of passengers was falling steadily, while post privatisation the number of passengers started to rise steadily?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble Lord is right, and of course I can. At that stage the railway did not have many trains on it, and one of the principal benefits of the post-1993 situation was the ability of franchisees to run more services. However, we are not dealing with the railway in that circumstance now; we are dealing with the post-Covid railway, in which very few actors in the operational space have any interest in developing the passenger market. That is why the Government are in the position we are in and why public ownership is now the right thing to do. I contend that the way in which we propose to manage the railway, which is people in charge of the railway on a route and regional basis, is the way in which you see innovation encouraged and the way in which you seek to develop the passenger market.
Lord Harper (Con)
I was not going to intervene, but I cannot let the point that the Minister has just made about the private sector having no interest pass. He will know perfectly well that during the pandemic the Government basically took control of the profit and loss account for the railway industry. We were trying over time to move back some of the financial incentives for operators to grow the number of passengers they had on their services. I accept that we could perhaps have done that faster, but that was the direction of travel. That would have been a more successful strategy than simply nationalising all the operators. That is the choice that the Government have made, but it was not the only choice available. There was a range of choices and the Government have chosen the one that they have chosen. I happen to think that the alternative—more opportunities for private operators to grow revenue—would have been a more successful one.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble Lord raises an interesting point. Although the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, says that I have clearly not learned much in the past three weeks, within the past three weeks I have reread the Williams report. In effect it proposed the concession model for providing passenger train operations, but sadly, despite the fact that the report was substantially written in 2021, although not published until 2022, the previous Government took absolutely no action to enact it, which is why we are where we are now.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, it is disingenuous for the Minister to say that. Whatever criticism he may level at that Government for trying in a post-Covid environment to implement the Williams review and not implementing it fast enough—of course one can say that—it is not the case that that is why we are nationalising the railways now. It might be why we had not implemented the Williams review in 2024 when the general election was called, and that might be a point of criticism, but he cannot say we are where we are now as a result of that. The Williams review and the concession model, which we would tend to support, is a perfectly valid and realistic way ahead for reforming the railways. We admit that there is a need for reform; I did that when we spoke on the rail passenger services Bill. There is a need for reform and change, but there is absolutely an ideological commitment, largely dictated by union funders, that we should have a nationalised railway on this model. It is not because of anything the previous Government did.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
That is right; the previous Government did nothing about it. The Government’s commitment to the public ownership of passenger train operations has been consistent since the lead-up to the last election, and it was then and still is very popular with the public. On Amendment 126, as I have said, a duty on fairness and non-discrimination is unnecessary because this requirement will already apply to GBR. These matters are protected through the Competition Act 1998. GBR will be subject to competition law, which prohibits anti-competitive behaviour and the abuse of a dominant position, and the Office of Rail and Road and the Competition and Markets Authority will continue to provide independent enforcement in the rail sector. Turning to the general duties about value for money, I contend that the intention of these amendments is already achieved through the duty to consider the effective use of public funds. All bodies subject to this duty will need to consider carefully how resources are used. This will naturally mean that these bodies must consider all options available in both the public and private sectors when assessing value for money, which I know is a particular concern of the noble Lord, Lord Grayling. I would say it is essential that GPR leverages the best of the private sector to provide the best service for passengers, which is why it is being set up in this way. Nothing in this legislation prevents that, and the duty to consider the efficient use of public funds is crucial and will include looking for innovative approaches and private sector providers. Our estimation—I have used this statistic before—is that about 60% of GBR’s total expenditure will be in the private sector, even following the public ownership of passenger train operations, and I expect that to continue. Many of the tests of value for money suggested by the noble Lord are those that I would expect a body such as GBR, with a long-term outlook, to be able to consider. In fact, it should be able to consider them more easily than at present. The duties proposed by noble Lords in these amendments and those already contained in the Bill are, for all practical purposes, seeking the same outcome and I therefore urge noble Lords not to press them. On Amendments 118B and 127 on affordable fares, I appreciate the concerns raised here and agree that GBR has to get fares right. We have a group later on about fares, but the Government have been clear that GBR will have a greater level of autonomy and flexibility over fare setting than train operating companies do today. It is crucial that we allow GBR to simplify fares, ensuring that passengers have clearer choices and can get better value for money on their tickets. The Secretary of State’s absolute priority is getting the railways back to a place where people can rely on them. We have frozen regulated rail fares for one year from March 2026 to help with the cost of living. We have also made changes to the 16-17 Saver Railcard, meaning that 18 year-olds will now benefit from half-price travel on most train services. Noble Lords should be assured of our genuine, committed intention to improve affairs across the country, and I hope that I can see at least some evidence that we are working towards that. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, spoke to the amendments about transparency and reporting concerns tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. The Government are committed to interacting with GBR transparently. I am happy to reassure her and the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, that we will publish our assumptions, objectives and criteria related to fares. We will publish the parameters set out for GBR on fares, and GBR will ultimately publish its fares policy. However, this is just good government. It does not need legislation. On Amendment 123, tabled by my noble friend Lord Berkeley but spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, we have a whole section on access later on. In the meantime, GBR determines the best use of the network by proposing the optimum allocation by type of service—freight, open access, heritage and GBR. It records this in its infrastructure capacity plan which is dealt with at Clause 60. When GBR determines best use by designing its infrastructure capacity plan, it must not unreasonably favour its own services and the duties at Clause 18 apply in full. The capacity duty does not apply at all. The purpose of Clause 63 comes after the determination of the best use of the network. That capacity duty exists to ensure that GBR maintains sufficient capacity to operate the passenger services that it previously determined it should be allocated and which it has therefore been funded to run. That is because taxpayers are contributing billions of pounds each year to support the railway, and it is right that the Government have a mechanism to protect that investment and ensure that GBR runs the trains that it has been funded to run. The capacity duty is not intended to influence the best use assessment or to exclude other operators from access to the network. I am sure we will come back to that in the access section.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his comments, but do I understand from what he has just said that if there has been a major investment in infrastructure by GBR, then GBR passenger trains will automatically, so to speak, be given priority when it comes to sorting out capacity? I am sure he did not mean that, but that is the way I understood it.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
With respect to my noble friend, I do not think that is what I said, and certainly not what I meant. That is why we have separated the infrastructure capacity plan from the operation of trains by GBR. One of the purposes of this Bill, which I hope the Committee would accept, is that we have invested quite a lot in railway infrastructure capacity and found ourselves in the past unable to utilise some of the capacity allowed by that investment, simply because the structures were not there to use it in the best way for the railway. The investment in the infrastructure should allow the determination of the best use of the network by optimum allocation of the type of service. The subsequent duty in Clause 63 is designed to make sure that GBR operates the passenger services which it is allocated under Clause 60 and is therefore funded to run. I am very happy to explain further when we get to the access group, but I hope that I have explained the basic principles. Turning to Amendment 118 from the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, supported ably by my noble friend Lord Stansgate and other noble Lords, heritage railways are of course an essential part of tourism, cultural and educational life in this country. No Government would be interested in allowing the decline of such an important and thriving sector. I am assuming that the noble Lord is referring to those heritage services on the main line and charter operators, including the operation of heritage locomotives on the main line, because he will also know from my discussions with him outside this Committee that we are attempting not to use this Bill to unduly or adversely influence heritage railways in their own regard, only as much as they interact with the national railway network. We know that today’s access system of contractual access rights and timetabling rules provides the heritage and charter sector with a clear process to follow to secure paths in the timetable, in respect of regular operations—for example, both the British Pullman, at one end of the luxury band, and the North Yorkshire Moors Railway to Whitby, at the other, have regular operations which have paths in the timetable—but we also know that there are many one-off charter operations. In 2025, there were 1,155 bids for paths from charter operators—I think I have used this statistic with the noble Lord before. Some of those were subsequently withdrawn by the operators, but only eight were withdrawn because Network Rail was unable to offer suitable paths. GBR will, as I said, have in Clause 60 a clear remit to allocate capacity fairly, taking into account the range of users including passengers, freight, heritage, charter and open-access operators, while GBR’s function under Clause 3 to facilitate the provision and use of railway services will apply to all providers of railway services, not just those provided by GBR itself. The future access framework is intended to build on, rather than replace, many of the mechanisms familiar to heritage and charter operators today. Charter operators will continue to be able to secure access to contracts, including capacity commitments. I can say to the noble Lord today that the specialist team within Network Rail that currently supports heritage and charter operators, and in particular facilitates one-off paths, will continue under GBR, ensuring continuity of expertise and a clear point of engagement for the sector. Finally, GBR will have to ensure that heritage and charter operators have the certainty they need as part of its duty in Clause 18 to ensure that businesses can plan their future with a reasonable degree of assurance. This will make sure that these operators have the stability they need to continue enriching the lives of both passengers and the community with the experiences they offer. On Amendment 115 from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, Clause 18(1) explains whom the duties apply to. They must be discharged by Ministers, GBR and the ORR when they exercise their statutory functions as outlined in Clause 18. This is designed to ensure a common set of incentives and objectives for all the key players on the railway, to reduce conflict and fragmentation and to create a railway in which everyone is pulling together towards the same goals. On Amendments 330K and 334A, what I have just said on Amendment 115 means that the Secretary of State will be bound by these duties when issuing GBR’s licence and that the ORR will be bound by them when issuing licences and statements of national regulatory provisions for other operators. The ORR will also be bound by them when enforcing GBR’s licence. There is no loophole for GBR to avoid the duty for its licence, and the two mechanisms are already joined up. I thank noble Lords for this debate and I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, to withdraw her amendment.
Lord Moylan (Con)
I am sorry to be pernickety about this, but I feel that the Minister ought to have answered my amendment, however nerdish it is. He told us what Clause 18(1) says, but he did not answer my point about how Clause 18(2) might be amended to address the drafting. He told us only what subsection (1) said, which is uncontroversial. In fact, in a stumbling way, I read it out myself, and then he read it out rather more clearly. We are all agreed on what it says.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
Perhaps I should have a discussion with the noble Lord separately because I think that, as set out, the Bill is clear enough. I thought I had answered him but, if he does not think I have, I will have a meeting with him tomorrow to discuss further whether my interpretation works or his does.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I thank the Minister and everyone who took part in the debate on this long and varied group. Noble Lords will be pleased to know that I do not plan to run through all the amendments. I will, however, make a couple of points. I have to respond to the noble Lords, Lord Grayling and Lord Moylan. The noble Lord, Lord Grayling, said that the public sector often does not deliver good value for money or a good value of services. Of course, many people in Britain have suffered over the past decade from the poor-quality and poor-value-for-money services offered by the private sector, in railways, water companies and many other areas. So the public sector should not be singled out here. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, for her interesting thoughts about value for money. I do not know whether this is still the case, but I have been on the two-car train from Newport in Wales to Hereford a number of times. I have seen people being literally shoved in the door. It might be good value for money in terms of cost per passenger mile, but it is not a great way to travel. That was what the noble Baroness made me think of. The noble Lord, Lord Evans, referred to cutting public subsidies. Of course, it is important that we consider the value from those public subsidies in terms of encouraging public health and in terms of the climate and nature issues that my amendments raise. This is a cost, but there are benefits that go beyond the benefit of the actual train journey. I will respond briefly to the Minister’s response to my noble friend’s amendments. In a number of these cases, when talking about modal shift and about climate and nature, the Minister referred to strategy as being the alternative approach that the Government plan to use, but a strategy is not the same as having something in the Bill. That also applies when we are talking about issues of affordability and the flexibility that Great British Railways is being offered with the simplification of fares. As the Minister was speaking, I was thinking of many train journeys that I have made, particularly to Manchester and Liverpool, where I have paid well over £100 for a journey that I might expect to cost £40 in continental Europe, and have sat on a train that was, at best, perhaps a sixth or a seventh full, while thinking what an awful waste it was that lots of people were undoubtedly making that same journey in their cars because of the cost of the rail fare.
Lord Harper (Con)
It is worth saying that it is not that those other countries have cheaper rail services; they just hide the cost and dump it all on taxpayers, most of whom do not use the rail services. We are just more transparent here and have a fairer share of the cost between the rail user and the taxpayer. That is the bit that the noble Baroness is missing in her argument.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
The noble Lord, in saying that, might like to look at the cost that road travel imposes on all of us in terms of air pollution, noise and the cost of maintenance of those roads. Those costs are borne by all of us. Indeed, with the comparative measures that have happened over the past couple of decades, we have seen car travel transport costs, in real terms, go up far less than rail transport costs have gone up. That is the historical reality. I have no doubt that my noble friend Lady Jones will want to look very closely at what the Minister has said. I am afraid that I do not think that we have got to where we need to be, particularly on climate, nature and affordability. In the meantime, however, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 114A withdrawn.
Clause 18: General duties of Ministers, Great British Railways and ORR
Amendment 115 not moved.
Amendment 116
Moved by
116: Clause 18, page 10, line 37, leave out “including, in particular, the needs of disabled persons,” and insert— “(aa) so as to secure and advance the statutory rights of disabled passengers, ensuring access to all rail services, infrastructure, and station environments,”
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.
In 2024-25, 11% of passengers who booked assistance received none according to the ORR’s first annual benchmarking report. With over 1.6 million pre-booked assists requested in that period, an 18% increase on the previous year, this represents approximately 176,000 failed assists annually, and that does not take into account our legal right to turn up and go. If we look at some other figures, on Northern Trains, 18% of respondents reported receiving none of the assistance that they booked. The ORR found that Northern’s initial response,
“did not reassure us that it understood its own performance, the cause of its failings or that it had robust plans in place”.
In 2025 the ORR identified significant gaps in Northern’s delivery of disability awareness training, with around 800 passenger-facing staff having not completed the disability awareness training. The ORR has now opened a formal investigation. West Midlands Trains provided limited and inconsistent evidence of its capability to improve, with gaps in data analysis, unclear feedback loops and training weaknesses. I accept that reliability varies significantly by operator, but this system is way too ad-hoc.
I now move to Amendment 186A on the Passengers’ Council. It lacks the enforcement powers necessary to protect disabled people’s rights. Transport for All said:
“A watchdog without enforcement powers is fundamentally limited in its capacity to protect passengers’ rights or drive accessibility improvements”.
When the council
“identifies accessibility failings, it must refer the matter to the ORR, which retains full discretion over whether to investigate or take enforcement action. Disabled passengers already face disproportionate obstacles when raising complaints, and this indirect model appears to add another layer of bureaucracy without increasing accountability. We worry that it will create further delays, weaken enforcement, confuse passengers, and result in inconsistent redress”.
The Transport Select Committee recommended that the Bill should be amended to require that at least two members of the Passengers’ Council have lived experience of travelling as a disabled person. That is a start, but we cannot rely on just two people being the voice of everyone. What is needed is to understand and act on the problems that we see.
On Amendment 220A, it is well understood that co-production leads to better outcomes. The National Centre for Accessible Transport has highlighted this, raising the important point that lack of co-production means that accessibility is treated as an afterthought. Sustrans/Transport for All research, a national survey representative of over 1,107 disabled adults, recommend paying disabled people to be part of these access panels and advise on transport decisions. Expecting disabled people to hand over their knowledge for free does not feel very fair.
On Amendment 220C—this is another iteration of that—inaccessible decisions impose enormous economic costs that evidence-based decision-making could avoid. I raised much of this at Second Reading. Lack of accessibility, according to research by Motability, costs the UK economy £72 billion every year. One in four disabled people says that inaccessible transport limits their job opportunities. One in 10 reports that it affects their education, and 39% of people with learning disabilities did not go out in the past month due to concerns about public transport. Disabled adults take 25% fewer trips than non-disabled adults in England.
On Amendment 220P, the UK is failing to meet its international legal obligations under the UNCRPD and statutory involvement is required to comply. Article 4.3 requires the UK to consult and actively involve disabled people. Article 9 requires the UK to take appropriate measures to ensure that disabled people have equal access to the physical environment and transport. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has found that, despite some improvements, disabled people continue to face difficulties in accessing public transport and that further measures are needed.
Very briefly, Amendment 336 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, is important in terms of accessibility. The Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 made train operators fully subject to the public service equality duty. However, this status seems to be weakened by this Bill, listing only the parent company, GBR, in the Equality Act 2010’s PSED schedule. We need to ensure that not just GBR but all the companies underneath it comply.
Finally, I have some questions. I completely understand why the Minister might not have these figures to hand, but they are the real crux of the problems that disabled people face and how much money, I believe, is being spent in the wrong areas on access and the many compensation cases we are seeing. How much has been paid by each operator in the last five years in compensation or redress for passenger assistance failures? This is not “Delay Repay”; this is failure to help people off a train. How much has been spent on legal costs defending or settling those claims? How many claims have operators successfully defended and how many have been lost or settled? Does the ORR capture complaints through social media and, if not, why not? It is maybe not the best place to resolve some of those issues, but a lot more issues are discussed on social media than ever get through to the complaints process. Will His Majesty’s Government require or at least consider quarterly operator-level publication of compensation, legal costs and claims outcomes? I suspect a lot of money is being spent on failure rather than investing in infrastructure.
On a more positive note, I thank the Minister and his team for meeting the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and me this morning. As we discussed, it would be very useful to have another meeting once we are through the accessibility amendments to see what we can change to make things far better for disabled people. I beg to move.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. This is possibly one of the most important parts of this Committee and it is crucial that the Government listen to what the noble Baroness has to say; it is in the interest of people with disabilities, but also in the interests of all of us. If we make the railways more accessible, safe and reliable for people with disabilities, it is better for all of us. To give one practical example of that, last week I lugged a very large suitcase full of books down the steps at Rugby train station because the lift was out. This matters to many people under many different circumstances, so we would all be better off. I also want to pick up on the noble Baroness’s point about co-production, particularly noting that when co-production is being engaged with it is crucial that people receive appropriate remuneration for their effort and their knowledge. Far too often we expect people to volunteer for those roles when they should receive some return for putting in that contribution and sharing their expertise, knowledge and time. Having said that, I want to specifically address Amendment 336, which the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has already addressed. As she said, this ensures that the public sector equality duty applies not just to Great British Railways itself but also the GBR companies. The 2024 Act extended this duty to public sector train operators by adding them to Schedule 19 to the Equality Act 2010. However, the provisions in this Bill appear to leave a gap because the existing reference is to legislation that will no longer exist. The Bill adds Great British Railways to the schedule but does not explicitly include GBR companies. That matters because the new rail structure could involve different companies carrying out important functions, from operating train services to potentially managing ticket retailing and functions currently undertaken by the Rail Delivery Group. Quality protection should not depend on which part of the new structure is delivering the service. By explicitly including GBR companies, this amendment would provide clarity and legal certainty, ensuring that the public sector equality duty continues to apply across the new rail system. I hope the Minister will agree that this is a necessary clarification to preserve the existing protections and ensure consistency as Great British Railways takes shape.
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.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Brinton is in the Chamber today, leading for our party on the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, so she gives her apologies to the Grand Committee. My noble friend had signed Amendments 116, 121A, 144A, 186A, 220A, 220C and 220P, proposed by either the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, or the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, two respected disability champions in this House. My noble friend also supports Amendment 336 but did not manage in time to add her name to that. In the previous group, my noble friend Lord Beith talked about multimodal travel being a gamble. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has described travelling as a disabled passenger, even in one mode, as, effectively, a high-risk sport. The figures that she has outlined for us today are astonishing and really rather frightening, to be honest. The level of poor service that disabled passengers receive—if any service at all—is quite astonishing, especially in this day and age. There is a key issue of principle in this group of amendments. First, I thank the Minister and the Government for recognising that the rights of disabled passengers need to be strengthened and clarified, but that is only half of the compact that needs to be corrected in order to ensure that disabled passengers can travel safely, on time and with the service that is available to all other passengers.
If the organisations that must deliver the services to disabled passengers have no formal responsibilities, it does not matter what rights disabled passengers may have. Disabled people see this mismatch in many different parts of their lives; it is understandably infuriating. We have an Equality Act, a public sector equality duty and human rights but, if the service has no specific responsibility to deliver those things, it is unlikely to do so—or to do so consistently—because there will always be other priorities. That is why Amendments 116 and 121A set out the need for bodies to secure and advance the statutory rights of disabled passengers, ensuring access to all rail services; why Amendment 144A would give Great British Railways and the ORR a statutory duty; and why Amendment 186A would give the Passengers’ Council a duty.
However, this will not work if those bodies do not work closely with disabled people and co-produce, as we have discussed. Importantly, Amendments 220A and 220P specify that. Amendment 220C also proposes that Great British Railways must consider “accessibility evidence” in key design and delivery decisions so that, for example, the shameful delays by previous Governments in ensuring level boarding will be a thing of the past.
Lastly, Amendment 336 specifies that Great British Railways and its companies would have to follow the public sector equality duty because, in reality, this has not been happening. That may seem like too much detail to go into the Bill—I am sure that we will hear from the Minister on that—but disabled people feel, quite rightly, that they do not receive the service they need. This is because, across the board, railway organisations and bodies do not automatically include disability and access at the heart of their design, contract and delivery decisions. That is why things go wrong.
This matters because, every day, without that statutory responsibility, disabled people cannot get a ticket easily, there are no staff to help them on a train, or a wheelchair space is filled with cases. This absolutely ruins their days, and it happens again and again—day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. Warm words without the relevant statutory duties will never change anything, but these amendments would, so we on these Benches really support them and the spirit in which they were written. We hope that the Minister will respond positively to this group.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)
My Lords—
Lord Moylan (Con)
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.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this group. Of course, I completely agree with noble Lords on the importance of making our railway more accessible. In the spirit of collaboration, I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harper, that there are benefits for everyone in this. He mentioned signage. Having station names in the same typeface written in black on a white background would be a huge benefit for many partially and poorly sighted passengers. I have in my office one station name expressed in 18 typefaces with different colours and backgrounds and, even with my freshly done cataracts, I still cannot read some of them. We can do a lot better by being consistent. I listened to the noble Baroness: too often, the railway has let down disabled passengers, and it needs to change. Under the Bill, GBR, Ministers and the ORR all have a statutory duty to promote the interests of passengers “including, in particular, the needs of disabled persons”. That is a significant step forward. For the first time, the railways’ major players will be bound by a specific accessibility duty. This will make a huge difference. At present, no equivalent duty applies to train operating companies or Network Rail, meaning that accessibility is all too often an afterthought, as we have heard. Under GBR, it will become a core responsibility, shaping decisions about services, stations, rolling stock, investment and the overall passenger experience. Amendments 116, 121A and 144A seek to strengthen the accessibility duty, so I will take them together. The duty has been drafted broadly so that it applies across the full range of GBR’s functions, which means it will not be treated as a secondary issue but will be considered in each and every decision that GBR takes. Promoting the interests of disabled passengers can and should include the consideration of how services can be improved over time, how barriers can be removed and how access to the railway can be expanded, just as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, proposes in Amendment 144A. That is why the duty as drafted covers both current and future passengers by including the wording “users and potential users” in our duty. We require GBR to consider how decisions can remove barriers and enable more people, including more disabled people, to travel by rail. The Government therefore believe that the duty already encompasses the full range of ways in which the interests of disabled passengers can be advanced, including through the continuous improvement of services, as the noble Baroness highlights in Amendment 121A. GBR could not fulfil its accessibility duty if it did not take measures to improve things continuously for disabled passengers across all aspects of accessibility. The change to the accessibility duty to make it a proactive duty means that it promotes the interests of disabled passengers rather than just having regard to them, as characterised by the quotation from Transport for All that the noble Baroness used. On the topic of disabled rights, the drafting of the accessibility duty ensures that disabled passengers’ interests are actively considered even where no specific legal right is engaged. For example, on trains with a catering provision, it is in the interests of disabled people for staff to offer at-seat catering. There is no legal right to at-seat catering, but providing the service is precisely the kind of operational decision that I want GBR to take with disabled people in mind. Indeed, a few train operators do that, while some of them could but do not. That is what the duty in the Bill will require GBR to do. The duty in Clause 18 does not exist in isolation; rather, it sits alongside wider protections. I reassure noble Lords that, unlike the privatised train operators, GBR will be subject to the public sector equality duty, as provided for in Schedule 4 of the Bill, and that will require GBR to give proactive consideration to the rights of disabled people across everything it does. The duty to protect the needs of disabled people is complementary and additional to the public sector equality duty, meaning that disabled people’s rights, interests and needs are all enshrined in the Bill. With reference to the reporting proposal in Amendment 144A, I reassure the noble Baroness that accessibility outcomes will be subject to robust transparency and scrutiny. She has rightly mentioned failures of Passenger Assist in particular. As later amendments address this issue directly, I will return to that topic in more detail in subsequent debates. For now, I will say that it is clear to me that there is significant scope for GBR to improve those services. Action is already under way, with £11.5 million in funding and the delivery of a national training package. GBR will publish assessments of its performance, including its delivery of accessibility commitments, as part of the business planning process. In practice, these assessments will form part of the business plan’s annual update. The updates will also report on the outcomes of GBR’s compliance with mandatory accessibility standards. If those plans are not good enough or there are failures, the watchdog, the ORR, and the Secretary of State will ensure swift redress using their respective levers, up to and including mandatory directions for GBR to change its behaviours. I hope this clarifies the rationale for the drafting of the duty in Clause 18 and reassures the noble Baroness and other noble Lords that Amendments 116, 121 and 144A are already captured by the Government’s plans in the Bill as drafted. On Amendment 186A, I should mention that the Bill contains two accessibility duties. The first, which we have already discussed, applies to GBR, the ORR and UK, Scottish and Welsh Government Ministers. There is a separate duty on the passenger watchdog, which is the subject of Amendment 186A. I completely agree with the noble Baroness that the passenger watchdog should protect the rights of disabled people, reduce barriers to accessibility and promote independent travel. The Bill requires the watchdog to consider the interests and needs of disabled people in all its decisions. As the passenger champion, it could not fulfil its accessibility duty without promoting accessibility and addressing the barriers that disabled passengers face. In fact, I confirm that we expect the watchdog to develop new accessibility standards in consultation with disabled people as one of its first priorities, and I am pleased to discuss with the noble Baroness outside the Committee what these standards might entail. We will certainly return to the subject of the watchdog in later debates, but for now I hope I can reassure noble Lords that we share the same aims, although in my view the drafting of the duty does not need to be changed to achieve them. On Amendments 220A , 220C and 220P, I absolutely agree that better accessibility benefits both passengers and the wider economy. Ensuring that decisions are informed by the evidence and the lived experience of disabled people will help remove barriers to opportunity and support economic growth. I commit to the Committee that my department will publish a new accessible travel charter by the end of 2026. It will require the operators and railway organisations which sign up to it to commit to regular and meaningful engagement with disabled people, and to record how lived experience has informed decision-making, training and service delivery. I commit now that GBR will be a signatory to it and, once again, I hope to discuss the contents of the charter with the noble Baroness ahead of Report.
Through our Roadmap to an Accessible Railway , published last November, we have committed to strengthening the role of disabled passengers in decision-making by 2027 through enhanced regional accessibility panels, overseen by a national accessibility panel, which will be stood up in the near future. This marks a cultural and structural shift, moving beyond consultation towards a meaningful, system-wide partnership with disabled people at every level. In addition, as I agreed with accessibility stakeholders, the GBR licence will require GBR to engage actively with accessibility groups. This requirement will be monitored and enforced by the ORR.
In summary, I wholeheartedly agree that accessibility is most effective when it is developed with disabled people, not somehow done to them. That is why we have implemented a number of measures to involve disabled people in running the railway. I hope the noble Baroness is reassured by these actions and will feel able not to press her amendments.
On Amendment 336, I can confirm that the public sector equality duty will apply to all GBR companies and subsidiaries whenever they are carrying out their public and railway functions. I am rather shocked to hear the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, say that his own party’s policy might be to abolish it but, in the meantime, this Government are respecting it, and what I have just said is the consequence of that.
The Government have not included GBR companies in Schedule 19 to the Equality Act 2010, because this would apply the duty to all their activities, including those of a purely commercial nature. That might include, for example, property development or consultancy services. These activities are not relevant to supporting disabled people to travel, nor to the other public activities that GBR will undertake. I hope that will allow the noble Baroness not to press her amendment.
To sum up, I have listened carefully to the points raised by noble Lords and, of course, I listened very carefully to the noble Baroness, with her eloquent but very disturbing descriptions of people’s practical experience on the railway. They have rightly highlighted areas where the current system does not deliver the experience that disabled passengers deserve. The creation of GBR is an important opportunity to address those challenges and improve accessibility across the network.
I look forward to returning to those issues in subsequent debates and hope that I have reassured noble Lords, for now, that the accessibility duties in the Bill are robust and will support the improvements we all want to see. This is a matter of huge importance to me and I am committed to ensuring that our reforms make a meaningful difference for disabled passengers. To that end, as the noble Baroness knows—she referred to this earlier—I will be happy to meet further with her, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and any other noble Lords with an interest in the topic to discuss in more detail the meaningful and proportionate adjustments that GBR should make.
Finally, I am not going to bother the Committee with a precise explanation about whether the lifts at St Pancras work but, from what the noble Baroness told me this morning, I could give her an accurate description of when they were working and what was done to fix them—or rather, when they were not. More practically, she asked me some questions at the end of her opening speech, which I will of course answer, so far as I am able, in writing. I understand the point of her questions and, like her, would much rather spend the money she refers to, which goes on compensation and legal proceedings, on accessibility. That is obviously much better and completely the right thing to do.
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, I thank everyone who contributed to this short debate, and I will be brief. I understand that there is a lot of pressure on the network—not just money, as the Minister says—if we cannot even get station signs to match up. There are big things that we have to address, and we absolutely have to make it better for everyone. We just need to work out what those specific things are. The current barriers that people face are infrastructure, working and accessible toilets on the platform and on board, and the number of staff who are ramp trained but who manage to get themselves exempt from ramp training so that they do not have to get a wheelchair user on or off a train. That is even before we get to the aspiration of having level boarding. There is a conflict between the duty as listed and what actually happens. This comes back to how hard it is for disabled people to complain; it can be quite exhausting. I am glad that the Minister raised catering provision. It might not be a legal duty, but these are the things that matter to disabled people when they travel. The two companies that I use most, LNER and Grand Central, offer this. Lots of good stuff happens on the network. But, back in 2020, one train company that had just bought new trains was getting very excited about it. I will probably very badly quote what happened on social media—I was trying to look for it, but I do not have it in front of me—but, when the new trains were pictured on social media, we quickly realised that, as a wheelchair user, you might have the accessible space in your carriage but you could not get to the café bar. When lots of questions were asked about it, someone from the social media team posted back and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll be in sight of the café bar”. I tweeted that, in all my years of campaigning, I had dreamed of being in sight of a café bar. The disability rights campaigners had quite a lot of fun with it, calling it “Egg and Cress-gate”. Sometimes you need a sense of humour to get you through. On a serious note, it was so close and yet so far, which comes back to thinking ahead about these things. The great advantage of having some time between Committee and Report is that it will be an opportunity for us to think creatively about how we can improve the system and what in reality needs to be in the Bill. I will take the Minister and his team up on his offer of a more substantive meeting with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and anyone else who would like to join. For disabled people, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I have been talking about accessible railways since 1995 and I probably do not have another 40 years of my life left to keep doing it. So this is genuinely an opportunity to do something really important. I will bring amendments back on Report—I have to work out which are the best ones to bring back—but for now I beg leave to withdraw.
Amendment 116 withdrawn.
Amendments 116A to 118 not moved.
Amendment 118A had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.
Amendments 118B to 123 not moved.
Clause 18 agreed.
Amendments 124 to 130B not moved.
Clause 19: Safety duty of Ministers and ORR
Amendment 131
Moved by
131: Clause 19, page 11, line 31, insert— “(aa) the exercise by Great British Railways of its statutory functions, and”Member's explanatory statement This amendment adds Great British Railways to the parties with safety duties under Clause 19.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, what a pleasure it is to be back on the Railways Bill with a dozen transport nerds. It is such a wonderful way to spend my Monday evening. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, that I have been talking about climate change for 38 years, and I am barely closer to what I was talking about at the very beginning. I have Amendments 131, 132, 144 and 338 in this group. I want to explore the tension between safety and competition in the Bill. As the Railways Bill retains the competition law framework established during privatisation—in fact, it extends it further—we can call it the ultimate legal framework for the entire Bill. The concerns go beyond the duty to promote competition. Under Section 67(3) of the Railways Act 1993, the Office of Rail and Road has significant powers to enforce competition law alongside the Competition and Markets Authority. These are much stronger powers than simply encouraging competition. The problem is that the Bill gives these competition functions priority over several other responsibilities, including the ORR’s general duties and, in some circumstances, its safety duties. It also limits the guidance that UK and Scottish Ministers can give the ORR on competition matters. In effect, competition regulation is being given priority over wider public interest decisions and democratic oversight, and we have to ask whether that is appropriate for a publicly-owned railway. Why should we carry forward and even extend a competition framework inherited from privatisation rather than putting the public interest at the centre of how our railways operate? There is some reassurance in the fact that safety functions are protected in several of these provisions, but that does not resolve every potential conflict between safety and competition regulation. Wherever those responsibilities could pull in different directions the Government need to explain how that conflict will be resolved and why competition should ever take precedence over safety. That is my Amendment 131. On Amendment 132, the new safety duty on Ministers and the ORR in Clause 19 is quite shocking: they “must take into account the need to protect all persons from dangers arising from the operation of railways”. This clearly has an exemption for competition regulation, which can only mean that, in a trade-off between competition and public safety, competition will win. That exemption should be struck, and we need a proper explanation of why it is present in the first place. Clause 19’s safety duty does not currently apply to GBR, only to the ORR and Ministers. I would like to know the reason for that. Is it also in any way competition related? Amendment 131 would explicitly add Great British Railways to the safety duty in Clause 19 so that it applied not just to Ministers and the ORR. As we move to a new rail structure, it should be clear that Great British Railways has a responsibility to put safety first when carrying out its functions. It is difficult to see why decisions about competition should be exempt from a duty that exists to protect passengers and railway workers. Competition decisions can have wider consequences for how the railway operates, and safety has to be part of those considerations. More broadly, I am concerned that the Bill gives too much weight to competition rather than putting public interest at the core of our railways. The purpose of our rail network should be to provide safe, reliable and well-integrated services for passengers, not to create more opportunities for commercial operators. On Amendment 144, ultimately the ORR’s safety function should be above all other duties. This is a railway, one of the most potentially dangerous industries there is. It is not satisfactory even if safety is formally equivalent to competition. Rather, safety must take precedence over competition regulation. That is why Amendment 144 proposes a priority of safety functions clause, ensuring that there cannot be a trade-off between competition and the safety of the public and rail workers under any circumstances and that this parity is made clear and distinct in law. Taken together, these amendments would strengthen the safety duties on Great British Railways and the ORR and make clear that safety must come first. Public ownership has to be about more than just changing who runs our railways. It should mean putting passengers, railway workers and public interest ahead of competition. That is why I have called for Clause 20 to be removed from the Bill. We do not believe that a statutory duty to promote competition belongs in this Bill. It puts competition at the centre of the regulator’s responsibilities rather than focusing on what passengers need from their railway. Plus, there is already too little in this Bill about tackling the climate crisis and making rail travel affordable. We should be looking at how to get more people on to public transport, reduce reliance on cars and make sure that taking the train is a realistic option for people on ordinary incomes. Those should be central priorities for our railway.
On to Amendment 338, there is the question of the status of the ORR’s safety duties under the Deregulation Act 2015, inserted by the Economic Growth (Regulatory Functions) Order 2017. This is not mentioned in the Bill as it stands, but this probing amendment suggests that the ORR be removed from that order. The reason is not, in this case, anti-growth. It is because, as few people seem to be aware, it relates to the ORR’s safety function specifically requiring it to consider the importance of exercising the regulatory function in a way which ensures that
“regulatory function is taken only when it is needed, and … any action taken is proportionate”.
Although this, in itself, does not override safety duties, it is clearly intended to influence decisions about what to investigate, when to intervene and whether to use formal enforcement. It is fair to say that it fundamentally has the effect of putting safety enforcement below competition regulation in a hierarchical sense. I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I find some of the comments by the noble Baroness very interesting, but to try to legislate to balance the needs for safety and anything else means that we have to put a value on safety. Taken to its logical conclusion, that means that the safest railway in the world is one on which no trains run. That may be fine for people who want to be 100% safe—if they are going to walk the track and not get run over by a train, so be it—but there has to be a balance. Then it all comes down to cost. I just cannot see how you can have a railway where safety comes first on everything because it will mean that there will be no trains running. If you go down on the Underground in London and stand on the platform, you are very safe—until somebody tries to push you—if there are no trains there. If a train comes, you get on it and you hope that you are safe. I just do not understand the benefits of this because the logical consequence is that there will be no trains.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, I am very glad that the Public Office (Accountability) Bill has enabled the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, to rejoin us in Committee. Sadly, it continues to detain the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, with whom I have brought Amendment 133, which is a probing amendment relating to the heritage rail safety and standards board that we would like to see come about. Sadly, improvements to the operational safety of railways have often been forged in the wake of tragedy. The story of Britain’s railways is one not just of engineering prowess but of constant learning, adapting and improving not only in terms of speed and service but of safety too. Since the days of William Huskisson, the Tory MP and statesman who was sadly struck down and fatally injured by Stephenson’s “Rocket” at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, we have known how accidents have focused minds and driven improvement. It was the Armagh rail disaster of 1899, in which 80 people lost their lives—many of them, very sadly, Sunday school children on an excursion—which prompted Parliament to pass the Regulation of Railways Act just two months later. The devastating rush hour crash at Harrow and Wealdstone in 1952, which involved the death of 112 people, accelerated the adoption of the automated warning system across our railways. The Ladbroke Grove crash in 1999, in which 31 were killed and more than 400 injured, and Lord Cullen’s inquiry into, it led to the creation of the Rail Safety and Standards Board and the Rail Accident Investigation Branch. The Croydon tram derailment of 2016, which involved seven fatalities and more than 60 injuries, led to the creation of the Light Rail Safety and Standards Board. Both that and the Rail Safety and Standards Board are publicly funded and have driven many improvements to our railways across the country. Mercifully, the heritage rail sector has not had a comparable significant incident, thanks in large part to the diligence and high standards of those who work and volunteer in it. But they are operating old technology, built and designed for a different age, with a skills and knowledge base which is always changing and needs to be passed on to new generations, so they are acutely aware of the dangers involved in all forms of rail travel. In the wake of the Croydon tram derailment and the RAIB report, the then Chief Inspector of Railways, Ian Prosser, recommended the establishment of a safety and standards board dedicated to heritage rail. In the absence of public funding, as we have for the rail and the light rail safety and standards boards, the Heritage Railway Association, of which I am the chairman and the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, is the president, has on its own initiative established a volunteer-run safety and standards board. This has led to the publication of one very detailed standard for the sector, with two more nearing completion, but it is a painstakingly slow process and not really what I think the chief inspector had in mind. The noble Lord, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, kindly gave us some time ahead of this Committee and I am most grateful to him for it. He and the Minister may argue this is not an issue for this Bill; neither the rail nor the light rail safety and standards board needed to wait for legislation to come into existence. Our Amendment 133 perhaps puts the tender before the engine in an effort to find a way to raise this issue in Committee. But I hope they will understand why, 10 years on from the Croydon derailment, we want to ensure that the very highest standards can be maintained, and to reassure all those who enjoy visiting and travelling on heritage railways and tramways that they can continue to do so safely and securely. I would be very grateful if we could continue the discussions on how we can see the establishment of a heritage rail safety and standards board in line with those which have been established for other parts of our rail sector.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this group. Before I speak to Amendment 210 in my name, if we are in the business of talking about heritage railways, I should speak about the Great Central Railway in Loughborough and, as the founding chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Heritage Rail, support the amendment just spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson. I also want to add my support, and have added my name, to Amendment 207 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. It is ironic that I am looking at the timing of this debate and wondering what late-night train I am going to have to get for an hour-and-a-half journey. The point of that amendment is both lighting and transport infrastructure that works. As the noble Baroness already said, there being a taxi when you arrive somewhere if you have not got a car is something very much on my mind. On Amendment 210, I am grateful for the support of my noble friend Lord Moylan, who has added his name. I am sorry that I could not speak at Second Reading. I thank the Minister for his engagement on this issue. I am sorry that he is not here at the moment, but I know that the noble Baroness will respond to the points that have been made on this group. This is an issue that he has written to me about and he has made clear his support. As we have already heard, I am sure, in Committee, millions of people rely on the rail network. It brings people together and allows them to get to work and participate in education or leisure activities. It contributes over £36 billion annually to the UK economy and provides around 600,000 jobs. There can be no question that our rail network is the backbone of an equal opportunity society. It is vital for independent social mobility, especially for women. But we also need to remember that millions of people rely on their public transport being safe, and there are still huge issues regarding safety on our trains, especially for women, BAME members of our society and disabled passengers, as we heard on the previous group. These have not been addressed. According to the ONS, 58% of women aged 16 to 34 years old reported feeling unsafe using public transport alone after dark, 34% have witnessed assault or harassment and 19% report themselves having been assaulted or harassed. Sexual offences specifically have risen by 10% and harassment is up by 6%. It is no surprise therefore that violence against women and girls is seen as a national emergency according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council. The solution is not that nearly two-thirds, 63% of women, avoid traveling alone. It is also not for them to have to undertake “normalised” behaviour, such as being very choosy about where they sit or assiduously avoiding eye-contact with anyone. Instead, more innovative solutions need to put in place to help assure their safety. In speaking to this amendment, unfortunately I cannot not point to the recent horrific case of Simon Levy, a man who murdered two people and raped another while on bail for two years. He had previous convictions for 13 sexual offences against women, including 10 assaults on London’s transport network between October 2023 and May 2025. Sadly, it is no surprise that he was allowed to be free when only 3% of cases of violence against women and girls on the railways resulted in a charge or summons. I understand that the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, has written to British Transport Police about their track record on issues relating to violence against women and girls. I ask him, through the noble Baroness, whether he will publish that correspondence for the benefit of noble Lords, as he and I have discussed. It is true that Network Rail states at the very top of its website that the safety of its passengers is paramount. We know that Network Rail, the train operating companies, Transport for London and the British Transport Police support White Ribbon UK’s campaign. The Government have stated that nationalisation is an opportunity to improve safety. The trouble is that safety on the railways is often not seen in the context of violence against women and girls specifically. There is little guidance about how this nationalisation, which provides an opportunity to improve safety, is going to happen in a practical sense, so I hope that Amendment 210 offers a path forward. I think it fits in well with what the Government are trying to achieve in this Bill. With nationalisation, the Government have the perfect opportunity to reset the standard. Following Royal Assent to the Railway Passenger Services (Public Ownership) Bill 2024, the department instructed DfT operators to assume responsibility for train operators’ ownership in England and to provide “safe, secure and sustainable” transport. It later clarified in response to a Question asked by me in the House recently that the department “will have increasing control over the design of trains and, in particular, standards of lighting and closed-circuit television”, as “designing out opportunities for such violence to happen is a real priority” ”.—[ Official Report , 24/2/25; col. 1456.] I note that the recent rolling stock and infrastructure strategy for GB Railways very briefly—I found one reference to it—mentions violence against women and girls and related rolling-stock design. Amendment 210 would therefore mandate GB Railways to record data around violence against women and girls on trains, to be responsible for safety and security, to consult the industry regarding innovation and technology that could help reduce violence against women and girls, and to develop guidelines for rolling stock operators that would lay out a gold-standard technology, which should be implemented to improve safety issues and standards on trains. By embedding all considerations into planning and transport guidance, it would ensure that the safety of over 50% of the population, at least, is built into the fabric of our public rail network. It would also ensure that the Government could have true oversight of this issue and engage with those organisations specialised in developing the technology and innovation needed to help drive confidence in passengers, particularly women. They would ensure that manufacturers are subject to a gold standard.
For as long as rolling stock manufacturers can continue to have the option of failing to include extra specifications related to the safety of female passengers that cost money but do not seem to bring them any financial return, they are less likely to install such measures, especially in an economic environment where the industry is under pressure. The innovation is there, as I am sure Ministers are aware, but companies are for ever looking to new markets and new ways of improving life.
Companies specialising in innovation within the rail sector are no different. Belvoir Rail is developing innovative lighting and call-to-aid solutions to help operators move beyond reactive measures towards proactive prevention. These and others are thoughtful, passenger-focused innovations, which can and should be integrated with the physical design of the rail network, contributing to the wider industry effort to make Britain’s railways safer for all. There is a precedent for this. Jenny Gilruth, who served as the Scottish Government’s Minister for Transport between 2022 and 2024, identified that there needed to be an upgrade in lighting for all transport services and said that it was down to the Scottish Government to,
“work with transport operators and stakeholders to carefully consider these recommendations and how we can implement them quickly and effectively, to ensure our transport network is safer and more secure for all who use it”.
In conclusion, we know, and it is accepted, that the issue of violence against women and girls is a national emergency. Women and girls often feel unsafe on our trains. If the Government legislated to ensure that matters highlighted in subsection (2) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 210 were introduced, things would improve and it would send a very clear signal to the whole rail sector about the focus on this issue from the top of the department. A gold standard on safety should not be negotiable. It should be implemented by Ministers and be a requirement on GB Railways.
Viscount Stansgate (Lab)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 133. In the light of the remarks made by the noble Baroness, I point out that, like other parents, I have first-hand knowledge of the way in which young women feel unsafe. My own daughter used the rail network regularly to get back from school, and there were times when she asked me to go to the station to meet her to make sure that she could get home safely, so it is a very serious issue. Amendment 133 was ably moved, if I may put it this way, by my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, supported by my noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester; I apologise to both for not having added my name to their amendment. These short debates related to heritage rail have given Members the opportunity to mention their favourite heritage railways. The noble Baroness herself just mentioned the Great Central Railway, the noble Lord, Lord Evans, referred to the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, and the noble Lord, Lord Harper, just referred to the Dean Forest Railway. These are all, of course, substantial railways but I just want the Committee to know that they are not all like that. This weekend, I drove past the Mangapps Railway in the Dengie peninsula in Essex. It is a very small heritage rail centre that is family owned, which makes it extremely unusual, but it does a valiant job with the resources that it has, and it has no prospect of ever being connected to a main line. I say to my noble friend the Minister that I know that Governments can sometimes resist amendments and that their officials urge them to resist amendments they think are unnecessary—I understand that that can be at work—but this probing amendment is very modest, necessary and sensible. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson—I will continue to refer to him as my noble friend in this context—raised the issue of some major accidents. It is true that in the history of the railways, major disasters have been the occasion for change. He mentioned the crash in 1999 on a railway that I took regularly at that time, and the Croydon Tramlink. I journeyed to the House this morning on the Croydon Tramlink and passed the very spot where that terrible accident occurred. I can at least report to the Committee that the speed restrictions in place are very severe and obvious, and I have every hope and expectation that it will never happen again, but it is a constant reminder. Everything that my noble friend said is worthy of serious consideration by the Minister and I look forward to what is said. Surely, it should be possible to have the equivalent for the heritage rail industry of the measure that applies to the other two listed in the amendment.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to speak in this debate, and I look forward to the response of the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres. I will make a couple of points. The first concerns the central and important point made by my noble friend Lady Morgan about designing out crime as far as we can. Some of that is about the physical layout of stations and rolling stock, some of it is about CCTV and things like that and some of it is about how the services operate. That is welcome. There was a period when we successfully designed out—not entirely, but very significantly—the ability of people to steal cars. We made it much more difficult, and that was very successful. The thrust of her amendment is welcome, and I support it. I want to talk about a specific issue about the British Transport Police that was raised with me at the weekend. I am a big fan of the British Transport Police and I had a lot of dealings with Lucy D’Orsi, its fantastic chief constable, when I was the Secretary of State. She has been a leader in the police service in weeding out bad officers who have no right to be police officers, and has taken significant steps in improving the standards of integrity in her force. I know that she also has a personal and clear priority for dealing with violence against women and girls; she takes it very seriously and believes in robust policing. Whatever correspondence the Minister has had, he would absolutely be pushing at an open door in terms of the leadership there. I have also seen for myself the very successful work that BTP and its officers do at some of our busy transport hubs. I have seen the work that it does at stations in London in dealing with people carrying weapons or trafficking drugs. It is very effective at dealing with that, particularly when using some of its dogs. I have also seen some of the work it does—remembering it is a national police force—in Wales, for example, in combating county lines gangs and the movement of money using the rail network. That is all the good stuff I have seen. My specific question arose from talking to a train manager on a recent journey on GWR. We were having a conversation and I happened to mention the British Transport Police; I cannot remember the context. Based on his experience, he was a bit less positive about it than I was. I made the point that I have just made about the work it does in some of our busy transport hubs. His point was that on more isolated, less busy services, he has had the experience of having to deal with people committing violence and break up big groups of drunken people—men, I suspect—and when he has tried to get support from the British Transport Police it has either not been forthcoming or not come quickly. How do we balance the priorities with the funding that goes to the force? We have to look at the numbers of people, and clearly we have to recognise that we cannot police our less busy stations and services to the same level that we police the busier ones, but how do we balance the resources and deliver effective policing? The reason why I mentioned that in this context is because—my noble friend Lady Morgan put her finger on it in her amendment—this is about design and technology. Clearly, you cannot have infinite numbers of police officers everywhere, but it is about how we can use technology, first, to deter crime, and then to respond to it quickly and spot it coming so that police officers with the appropriate powers, skills and training can support railway personnel who do their best but who are, whatever training they have, not the right people to deal with people committing serious criminality on the railway. That requires officers who are properly trained and properly equipped with both the powers and, if necessary, the ability to escalate the support that they have if they face people committing serious violence or people with serious weapons. That is my question for the Minister, really: how do we balance that across the network? I will be interested to hear her reply.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, at the start of our debate on this group, we were all described as transport nerds. I prefer the phrase “transport enthusiasts”, which is more inclusive.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Or “experts”.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
Exactly.
Lord Moylan (Con)
I am happy to be a nerd.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
This is a really important group covering safety and security on the railway, as well as making rail an attractive option for everyone. As I mentioned at Second Reading, a recent survey published by Transport Focus showed that personal safety and security on trains and at stations is an increasing priority for passengers. Some 12,000 rail passengers ranked various aspects of travelling by train. Concerns around safety came second and third behind trains running on time and trains not being cancelled. So, although the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, does not see the need for this group of amendments and clearly feels safe travelling, for some—including women, disabled people and passengers from Black and minority-ethnic communities, as we have already heard—personal safety and security on trains top their list of what matters. Passengers feel that increased staff visibility, including checking tickets and challenging low-level anti-social behaviour—as well as the use of CCTV in the moment, not just to provide evidence—will help. I want to put my remarks in the context of that passenger research. My Amendment 207—I am delighted that a number of noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, have kindly added their names to it—would require the Secretary of State to undertake “a comprehensive review of railway passenger safety” within six months of the Act being passed. It also says that this review should consider women and disabled passengers in particular and should look at the things we have discussed, such as staffing levels at stations and on trains—particularly late at night—as well as CCTV, lighting and real-time reporting. The review would also look at staff on trains routinely patrolling and walking up and down the carriages. The current passenger experience around the visibility of guards, conductors or other staff on trains is not consistent. I travelled up in the Lake District. The member of staff went and hid himself in his little cabin at the end of the train, rather than walking up and down and seeing passengers, yet this could be a straightforward way to provide the assurance and support that passengers need. A visible presence can offer peace of mind, particularly for those who may feel anxious or unsafe while travelling, and can build confidence in people using the rail network. My noble friend Lady Brinton and I are supportive of Amendment 210 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, which aims to strengthen the safety of women and girls; as with our debate on the previous group, my noble friend Lady Brinton sends her apologies as she is currently in the Chamber. This amendment follows the Government’s welcome strategy on the reduction of violence against women and girls. I felt that the noble Baroness’s speech was comprehensive and specific about the duties that the railway sector needs to deliver in order to ensure that we understand the scope of the incidents against women through data collection, as well as what the sector must do to reduce incidents and protect women. Data collection is critical to understanding the size of the problem. It will also help station staff and train staff be trained far better. Vitally, it will help rail companies and Great British Railways ensure that there are enough trained staff to minimise incidents and call for help from either the British Transport Police or the police nearest to the next station, as appropriate. My noble friend Lady Brinton told me of an incident that she witnessed on a train a couple of years ago, where a group of young men had surrounded a young woman and she was frightened by their increasingly aggressive behaviour. The conductor came into the carriage and used the skills that he had learned to defuse the situation. He remained in the same coach until the next station, where he had asked staff to help him to remove the men from the train. But my noble friend has also witnessed very unpleasant behaviour where other passengers have had to try to intervene because, sadly, there are not always staff on hand to help before things become aggressive and violent. We also need to reduce the opportunity for attacks on women and girls through the future design of trains and stations, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, outlined. This amendment would set sensible and practical routes for reducing violence against women and girls on the railway network and, from these Benches, we really support it. I look forward to the Minister’s response to this important group of amendments and hope that she is supportive of the aims in them that I have mentioned.
Lord Moylan (Con)
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.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Dacres of Lewisham) (Lab)
My Lords, I start with Amendments 207 and 210. I thank the noble Baronesses for their commitment and the work they have done continuously over a number of years on safety, particularly of women and girls. The Office of Rail and Road has led responsibility for independently reviewing, monitoring and enforcing railway safety across Great Britain. It is right that this role sits with an independent regulator rather than the Secretary of State, as the ORR has the right expertise to ensure high standards across the network, which will allow for a degree of consistency. Understandably, passenger safety has been in the spotlight recently, following the devastating situation in Bedford and the subsequent derailments over the summer. A number of incidents have been mentioned this evening. However, I reassure the Committee that the ORR’s annual health and safety report, published on 14 July, found that passenger safety and the overall risk of harm remain at historically low levels on British railways. It found that Britain continues to have one of the safest railways in the world on which to travel as a passenger, as mentioned by colleagues this evening. However, the report also identified areas where further improvements are needed and set out priorities for that, including tackling violence and harassment and strengthening the management of key safety risks. These improvements are of particular importance as the ORR’s data shows that, while the risk of harm remains at a historically low level, the number of passenger assaults on railways has increased over the past year. To be frank, one is one too many. That is why the Government, industry, the ORR and the British Transport Police are already working together to act on those findings and drive further improvements in safety performance. For example, measures are being taken across the network to increase visible policing, strengthen intelligence sharing, expand the use of body-worn video and improve support for front-line railway staff. These are vital measures, with studies showing that body-worn video in particular reduces the risk of staff assaults by 47%. It is also important that railway staff feel safe so that they can interject and step in when they see things occurring. Operators continue to invest in station and onboard CCTV, customer help points and visible staff presence across the network, as helping passengers to travel with greater confidence is a priority. The Department for Transport has been looking into the funding for the British Transport Police and announced that it will provide an additional £63 million. It has announced £17 million of funding to help connect existing station CCTV to policing and authorised rail staff, so that evidence can be accessed quickly and securely, helping to identify offenders. I confirm that the Levy case correspondence will be shared with noble Lords. Further measures include the introduction in June 2026 of railway behaviour notices, which strengthen the railway’s ability to exclude repeat offenders from stations, and new intelligence systems with database integration to support industry-wide reporting. I think that answers some of the points raised regarding drugs, county lines and anti-social behaviour. On the safety of disabled people, I assure the Committee that the Government are determined to leave accessibility in a much better place than they found it. Passenger Assist must get better. Any mistake is a mistake too many, and no one’s safety should ever be compromised by a failure of staffing or organisation. A new national training package is already being rolled out, with online learning modules for all staff, backed by regular refresher training, to ensure that Passenger Assist is delivered consistently, regardless of which train company a customer is travelling with. This will improve the quality and consistency of support for many passengers whose journeys involve more than one operator, and it will be delivered alongside the wider programme of improvements set out by the accessibility road map. I want to touch on violence against women and girls on our trains. I know that my noble friend Lord Hendy was grateful to meet the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan of Cotes and Lady Pidgeon, to discuss this recently; as I said earlier, they have been long-standing champions in this field. In May, we launched the Safer Railway Scheme, which requires rail operators to appoint a named senior executive who is responsible for security and safeguarding in their organisation. For the first time, the new scheme introduces mandatory commitments for rail operators to make their services safer for women and girls. As an operator, GBR will be expected to meet those same requirements, including having accessible, credible and formally agreed safeguarding and security strategies. Additionally, the recently published rolling stock and infrastructure strategy makes it clear that the Government’s wider ambition to tackle violence against women and girls will be an important consideration in future train designs. As has been mentioned, there is great merit in building to design out crime and to make it safer. As I mentioned earlier, £17 million is going to the British Transport Police, enabling them to connect to CCTV, ensuring real-time access by different services, be they rail staff or police services, so they can respond quickly and have the evidence to secure prosecutions. That will definitely be beneficial when we are trying to tackle violence against women and girls.
Lord Harper (Con)
Before the Minister moves on, can I take her back to her point on the BTP budget, since she has mentioned it again? She may not have all the details to hand and this is a bit dull for everybody listening, so I would be very happy for her to write to me, but can she set out over what period the £63 million increase will be and whether that will be revenue or capital? She seemed to suggest that it was also for paying for some of the extra connectivity. I am interested to know whether the British Transport Police Authority and the BTP itself have set out what they are going to do with the money. I think that noble Lords would be grateful to know the extent to which it is going to help with the issues of the day on violence against women; I would be very happy for the Minister to write to us if she needs to do so.
Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)
I would be very happy to write, but what I can say as a top line is that the £17 million that will go towards CCTV cameras and connectivity is separate from the £63 million. Among the top lines is increasing the number of staff, including having around 36 staff members who are focused on violence against women and girls in particular; we can send out any further details that we have at present if that would help. Additionally, the recently published strategy on rolling stock and infrastructure makes it clear that this Government’s wider ambition to tackle violence against women and girls includes working closely with British Transport Police, passengers, their representatives and other partners to identify opportunities for train design technology and operational practices to reduce risk, improve confidence and support rapid response when incidents occur. For example, as laid out in the strategy, Northern Trains is currently trialling onboard video systems that are designed to enhance operational visibility, increase timely interventions and create a reassuring environment for passengers. I hope that it is clear, therefore, that passenger safety is already prioritised and is supported by a substantial programme of continuous improvement across government and industry. There is also a process already in place for regular reviews of safety by the ORR, with action taken to implement the proposed changes each year. I hope that this reassurance will allow the noble Baronesses not to press their amendments; the Government would be very happy to continue working with them on this important issue outside of the Bill. I turn to Amendments 131, 132 and 144. Nothing in this Railways Bill will change the current safety regime. This is exactly why Clause 19 replicates the existing safety duties under Section 4 of the Railways Act 1993, which applies to the ORR, the Secretary of State and Scottish and Welsh Ministers. Additionally, the ORR’s general duties, including the duty to promote competition, are already specifically disapplied from the ORR’s safety function in order to ensure that the existing comprehensive legal framework around safety is not compromised by anything in the Bill. However, the duty to promote competition is distinct from Section 67(3) of the Railways Act 1993, which enshrines the ORR’s role as the competition regulator for the railways; it carries that out alongside the Competition and Markets Authority. To ensure that regulation is effective and enforced consistently, the Competition and Markets Authority and the ORR must be working under the same rules. This is why the ORR’s existing duties under Section 4 of the Railways Act 1993, including its safety duties, do not apply when the ORR is exercising competition functions under the Competition Act 1998. This is right because, when the ORR and the Competition and Markets Authority are acting as competition regulators, they must apply competition law rules to all operators fairly and must assess compliance objectively. Enforcement should be based on whether operators are compliant with the rules, not on other priorities that may lead to further unfair outcomes. That said, I do not dispute that safety is of paramount importance in all cases. That is why the ORR explicitly states in its competition guidance that, should anti-competitive conduct be objectively necessary for health and safety reasons, that would be considered as part of its overall decision. Noble Lords have mentioned having the right balance, and that is something that we should all bear in mind. I turn to GBR. We have deliberately not applied the general safety duty to GBR as it will already be subject to extensive legal requirements under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Railways and Other Guided Transport Systems (Safety) Regulations 2006. These obligations include duties to manage safety risks, maintain appropriate safety management systems and comply with regulatory oversight, including the separate duties of GBR, which would only duplicate existing requirements, creating potential unnecessary overlap and confusion. I must rush on now to Amendment 133, which has stirred noble Lords this evening. First, I recognise the support of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, for a heritage rail safety and standards board and the benefits that it could bring to the sector. That is a view that we in government share, and any organisation that furthers safety in the sector is welcome, but it must be integrated in the existing safety structures, processes and forums that ensure that British railways remain among the safest in the world. The ORR already has a strong relationship with the heritage sector and will continue to engage with it effectively. I am also happy to meet the Heritage Railway Association to discuss this further as I appreciate that this is an important issue for the sector, but legislation is not needed to guarantee the development of a heritage rail safety and standards board or for discussions around its benefits to take place. It should be noted that the Rail Safety and Standards Board is not a statutory body established in legislation. I hope the noble Lord agrees with me that the heritage rail safety and standards board similarly does not need to be established in legislation. As I mentioned, I am more than happy to meet him and others who are interested in this area so that we can look into this matter in further detail.
Lord Harper (Con)
There is something the Minister said that I was a little concerned about because I have seen the impact of this locally. She is absolutely right that we need to make sure, when heritage railways are operating, that they are operating safely. However, when she talks about the imposition of all the safety rules of the industry, we have to be mindful that these are often smaller organisations, with volunteers. Yes, they need to be safe, but we also need to make sure that we do not smother them and, in effect, put them out of business. Again, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, there is a balance to strike, and that is something that I know my noble friend Lord Parkinson wants. We just need to get that balance right.
Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)
The noble Lord is right. I thank all the volunteers who work in these areas and indeed other areas; I am sure this country would not run as well as it does without volunteers in various sectors, from football, which we have spoken about in previous debates, through to heritage railways. However, it is also important that in the Bill we should not be looking to legislate on what that looks like. We need to take this outside the Bill so that we can have conversations about what is appropriate and what smaller groups can do. That is why it is important that this conversation continues.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I thank the Minister for that response and the offer of a meeting. We would certainly welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation in that way. To echo the point that my noble friend Lord Harper made, what we are seeking here is not legislation; as I noted, neither the Rail Safety and Standards Board nor the Light Rail Safety and Standards Board is set out in in statute. The difficulty that the heritage rail sector has, as my noble friend says, is that it is smaller and run by volunteers, and many of the organisations are charities or small businesses that make a loss. If we are able to continue the conversation with that point in mind, as I think the Minister is indicating, that would be most welcome.
Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)
Yes, we can absolutely continue the discussion. As I said, we recognise the work that volunteers do but at the same time we do not want to make things too onerous. It has to fit right, and that is why these conversations must continue. On Amendment 338, it may be helpful if I clarify that the growth duty contained in Section 108 of the Deregulation Act 2015 does not require the ORR to prioritise economic growth over its existing responsibilities; rather, it requires the regulator to consider the impact of its decisions on economic growth when exercising specified regulatory functions. As I have mentioned, the ORR remains the independent rail safety regulator and continues to be subject to extensive statutory duties and powers in relation to rail safety. The growth duty does not override these; it sits alongside them. The ORR must continue to meet the existing statutory obligations, including its responsibility in relation to rail safety. I draw the noble Baroness’s attention to the fact that the growth duty has applied to the ORR’s safety functions since 2017 and there is no evidence that it has compromised the ORR’s approach to safety. Rather, it encourages the ORR to deliver its safety responsibilities in a way that minimises unnecessary burdens on investment and growth without affecting its ability to meet statutory safety duties. The Government’s view is that the regulator should be able to consider the impact its decisions may have on investment growth and innovation while continuing to uphold the protections and safeguards found in legislation. I therefore urge the noble Baroness not to press her amendment.
Lord Moylan (Con)
Did I hear the noble Baroness respond to Amendment 289 or did she mean by silence to accept it? It concerned the Rail Safety and Standards Board.
Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)
I should have mentioned Amendment 289 when I mentioned Amendment 133. The Government believe that we need legislation for this but are happy to continue having those conversations. I also confirm that we are preserving the important statutory role of the Rail Accident Investigation Branch in preserving that legal duty. Did the noble Lord want me to mention a specific point?
Lord Moylan (Con)
It was the Rail Safety and Standards Board not the Rail Accident Investigation Branch. The Rail Standards and Safety Board is the body that produces recommendations and the proposal in the amendment is that GBR has to implement those recommendations. While I fully expect it would, it would not be left to its discretion; it would be something it would be obliged to accommodate. I appreciate that the noble Baroness is doing a sterling job but she may want to write to noble Lords with a more formal response afterwards, unless she finds it in her notes.
Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)
I do have it in my notes. Industry bodies such as the Rail Safety and Standards Board have made important contributions to the railway’s strong safety record, and nothing in this Bill prevents GBR from continuing to engage with it and draw on that expertise to consider how best to improve its safety standards. I hope what I have just said will satisfy the noble Lord regarding his amendment.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I will leave the matter now. Clearly, nothing prevents it from engaging—that is taken for granted—but the question is whether it should be obliged or under some sort of duty to implement its recommendations so that it does not remain as a matter of discretion, bearing in mind the tension expressed earlier in the debate by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I probably will not get very much more now, but I think it is fair to say it does not address the point.
Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)
I will be more than happy to write to the noble Lord, but I would just add that the role of the ORR is to take on board any concerns when it comes to safety and standards. It engages with people and, if something were to come to light, it would work in collaboration with either them or the specific rail provider—GBR or otherwise—to ensure that safety standards are met. We will write to the noble Lord.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I would like to make a couple of clarifications. First, I was including myself in the “nerd” category, although I would accept “expert” or whatever the other word was.
Lord Harper (Con)
Enthusiast.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Yes, definitely.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
Everybody is an expert on the railway.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I want to complain about this man next to me who is muttering. Who could disagree with heritage railways, even if they do burn copious quantities of coal? They are a treasure. To the comments from the noble Baronesses, Lady Pidgeon and Lady Morgan, about violence against women and girls, I say, “Absolutely. Take any measures that are necessary”. We live in a misogynistic society. Apart from trying to educate men and boys, we have to put in all the other structures that keep women safe. I would like to repeat a short story of my own; some noble Lords may have heard it already. I was travelling home on the railway to Sherborne, and five railway workers got on. I think that they were conductors—they were all wearing a uniform of some sort—and they scattered themselves around me. I was sitting in a corner seat minding my own business, and they completely ignored this little old lady who was sitting on her own. They then began the most misogynistic conversation. I sat there staggered. I should have taped it; I do not know why I did not. After a bit, I stood up and said, “You should be ashamed of yourselves, blah blah blah”. I suggest that staff need to be trained thoroughly. Obviously, I spoke to the CEO of the railway line, but I had not taken their names and, in the end, I did not want to make a complaint. My point about safety versus competition is a crucial one because there is a tension between those two things, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, pointed out; I did not support a word that he said, really, but it was kind of him to say it. I feel that we are sometimes in danger of tipping the balance the wrong way. That is my concern: competition becoming so important that safety has a lower station. When I first read Amendment 289 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, I thought, “Yes, that’s reasonable”. It then talks about implementation where that is “reasonably practicable”, which goes back to my original point about balance. What a lovely way to spend one’s evening this has been; I have really enjoyed myself so far. I am trying to speak until 8.45 pm so that we do not move on to the next group, but I am failing.
Lord Harper (Con)
I am always happy to support a colleague. More seriously, the story that the noble Baroness recounted makes a very good point. It may not be 100% true but it is almost invariably true that violence against women and girls is perpetrated by men. There was the kernel of a very solid point in there about educating men to behave differently, but also encouraging people, when they see bad behaviour on the rail network, to do something about it. That does not mean that everyone should intervene themselves, because that can itself be dangerous, but they should do something, such as draw it to somebody’s attention or report it to the British Transport Police. I must be one of the few people who thinks “See it. Say it. Sorted.” and the number are a good thing because you can remember them, which is the point. The noble Baroness made a solid point. The Government should perhaps reflect on how we can educate everybody to behave in a way that makes women and girls, disabled people and people from Black and minority ethnic communities feel safer and therefore be more likely to use the train than they would otherwise.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I thank the noble Lord for his comments; that is very kind of him. The point about that incident was that I was so shocked that I did not take their names. I could have taped it, but I was shocked that it happened at all. I regret that I did not do more about it; in future I will. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Amendment 131 withdrawn.
Amendments 132 and 133 not moved.
Clause 19 agreed.
Clause 20: Competition duty of ORR
Amendments 134 to 140 not moved.
Clause 20 agreed.
Amendments 141 and 142 not moved.
Clause 21: Duty of ORR to have regard to Secretary of State’s guidance
Amendment 143 not moved.
Clause 21 agreed.
Clause 22 agreed.
Amendments 144 and 144A not moved.
Clause 23: Memorandum of understanding: Secretary of State and Scottish Ministers
Amendment 145 not moved.
Clause 23 agreed.
Clause 24: Memorandum of understanding: Secretary of State and Welsh Ministers
Amendment 146 not moved.
Clause 24 agreed.
Amendment 147 not moved.
Committee adjourned at 8.38 pm.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5413512.