Railways

My Lords, I congratulate the Government—I do not often congratulate the Government, but I do on this occasion—because this is a really good document. It sets out the investment required for growth in capacity, which as my noble friend has said is what is needed. In my experience, this is the first time that a Government have ever given a financial commitment for five years. In time past when it was a nationalised industry, it was usually one year if you were lucky and two or three years if you were very lucky. This time it is five years, as required by the regulator, who can set a Network Rail specification and set how much Network Rail will have to reduce its costs or increase its efficiency. For the railway industry, which is always long term, having a five-year financial commitment is terribly important. It is very nice to have a longer term commitment, or strategy, on the back of it. So I congratulate sincerely my noble friend and his colleagues on this. As chairman of the Rail Freight Group, I particularly welcome the investment in Reading station and the strategic rail freight network, which the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, mentioned. However, on a day when Oxford, where I live, is surrounded by water and all the railway services are cut, will my noble friend say whether part of the investment planned on the strategic freight and passenger network, of which I believe Oxford is part, takes into account the increasing likelihood of flooding? The line between Didcot and Oxford gets flooded about once every two years for several days—and it will be for about a week, this time. I notice in the environmental section of the White Paper that Network Rail is developing a climate change hazard map on infrastructure that is vulnerable. I hope that that includes such things as raising embankments, if that will keep the trains off the floodwater. If we do not keep our strategic infrastructure going in times of flooding, although it is of course not only the railways that are affected, they will suffer because they were designed 150 years ago, whereas the roads were designed more recently, so there have been fewer problems with them. We have heard about electricity, sewerage and water as well, in that regard. It is very important that more effort and investment are put into keeping the strategic infrastructure going. As regards Network Rail developing a climate change hazard map, hotspots and all that, and the Government ensuring that the specification of future rolling stock requires suppliers to take account of these factors, I assume that we are talking about wet hazards. Are we talking about trains that will operate under water? That is a new idea. It may be necessary but I do not know whether it is part of the investment plan.