Transport (Wales) Bill

My Lords, as is obvious, I am not Welsh, but I have worked in several places bordering on Wales and Cardiff. I hate to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Conwy, but the revolution in railway services which he mentioned is about to start in Wales in December. There will then be a much more regular service—one of two hours—between Holyhead and Cardiff. There will be regular-interval services over a great many of the lines in Wales. Much attention is being given to providing good connections at Chester, Shrewsbury, Hereford, Newport and Swansea with mainline services. Better rolling stock will be employed in the services. There will be a 28 per cent increase in daily services and they will rise from 800 to 1,000. That is not at the expense of the taxpayer; it is all within the existing franchise. Therefore, let us realise that without the intervention of the Assembly and the powers sought in the Bill, great improvements are already taking place. It has taken the rail industry nearly seven years to recover from the havoc to which the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, was party in dragging our railway system apart. Arriva Trains Wales is following South West Trains and other train operators in at last putting together railway timetables. There is, however, an important point for the Government to note. The incentive systems included in franchise agreements work against providing connections. So much is put on the trains being punctual that the question of whether the passengers make a through journey is entirely lost. When a transport system depends on connections for its efficiency, the efficiency of the transport system will decline. While something of a revolution is at hand—Arriva Trains Wales has produced a standard-pattern timetable, including through trains—there remains a lot to do about the train services. We need only go to the valleys to see rolling stock which is, together with that of Northern Rail, totally unacceptable in the south-east of England, or anywhere where people regularly come to this place and complain. Yet the franchise, which has 13.5 years to run, does not provide for the replacement of the rolling stock. The Assembly might have been given powers at least to ask the franchisee what would be involved in obtaining some suitable rolling stock to work on the valley services. Last year, the valley services gained 10 per cent in patronage with the most rotten rolling stock. If that rolling stock were replaced, the service would be revolutionised with more passengers. Some of the people who the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, says must use their cars might be attracted to the train services provided. I ask the Minister to consider whether the Assembly’s powers enable it to alter the Wales franchise without going on bended knee to the Department for Transport in London to deal with something which is essentially a Welsh matter. Although the trains serve the stations between Chester and Shrewsbury and Hereford, which are in England, as they must, they are basically Welsh services and they ought to be dealt with by the Assembly. There is another threat on which I hope the Minister will be able to comment or, if not, write to us about. The whole of the service has been predicated on the timetables which apply along the north and south Wales coast. Yet 18 months ago First Great Western introduced a half-hourly service between Cardiff and London and the franchise is about to be relet. Letters have been sent out by the Strategic Rail Authority in its dying days threatening to reduce the service from Cardiff to London from half-hourly to hourly. Those of us who travel on these trains know that many of the existing trains are full and cutting the service in half will increase dissatisfaction and increase the load on the M4. It seems nonsensical and it will probably save little rolling stock. The Minister should give urgent attention to the matter because the whole of the new timetable is predicated on those services being available. In many other ways the Bill is strong on setting up new bureaucracy. It sets up procedures whereby the Assembly will look at local transport plans. It provides the setting up of a regional transport authority and the arrangements for a new transport users’ committee. Those all cost a great deal of money but they do not improve the transport system that people have available to them. The Welsh were extremely clever when they introduced the new old people’s bus pass in Wales, because unlike in England it applies over the whole of Wales. Although the local authorities in Wales issue the bus passes and they have their badge on them, they are available over the whole of Wales, so the same system applies everywhere and one can go anywhere in Wales on it. That is an extremely good thing. The other good thing about the Welsh system is that it agreed that for each passenger carried there would be a single system of reimbursing the operators. That is a great difference from the system that applies in England, where every local authority negotiates with the operator so over the whole country there is a patchwork of agreements. People are usually confined to the district council that issues their bus pass, so they can go a little way but not very far. In providing a decent bus service, one of the most important things—which was referred to the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Conwy—is that bus services need to be co-ordinated. There are two ways of co-ordinating them; we can have the Assembly saying that a bus will be run from here to there and someone else will run it from there to the next place; or we can encourage the bus operators to co-ordinate the services themselves. Unfortunately, the Competition Act 1998 made it extremely difficult for bus operators to work together to provide just what passengers want: through services and through tickets; an integrated service with the through timetable, because all those things are disallowed under the competition law, which was aimed more at big industries, not small bus services. Bus operators are frightened to even go and talk to other bus operators about the co-ordination desired. A great deal could be done if in Wales it were possible for bus operators to co-ordinate their services together, because whatever powers we give to the Assembly to co-ordinate them, that piece of legislation would almost certainly need repealing. The appointment of a traffic commissioner in Wales would have been advantageous in this Bill. At present in Wales one must go either to Birmingham or to Manchester to a traffic commissioner. There is no traffic commissioner in Wales, yet there is a great deal of need. I am sorry to say that in Wales we have probably some of the worst abuses that exist. On the A55 between Chester and Holyhead the North Wales Police have pulled in large numbers of lorries that are breaking all the rules, particularly those related to drivers’ hours, many of them working as long as two or three days without proper rest, yet there is no disciplinary body in Wales that can deal with those people. Similarly, in south Wales there are some of the most irresponsible passenger operators in the country. I will not name them, but I am sure that they will be known to some noble Lords present. It would be useful if there was a traffic commissioner in Cardiff who had responsibility for Wales and got to know intimately the operators instead of depending on someone several hundreds of miles away who has plenty to do as things are. The Bill is an opportunity lost. It does not acknowledge what has been done; it does not go so far as to make impossible other things that it might have done. My noble friend Lord Mar and Kellie will reflect on some of the things that are being done in Scotland that might have been done in Wales if further powers were available to the Assembly, because the Scottish example is one that I would have hoped Wales would follow.