Queen’s Speech

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Bradshaw told the House that I was going to talk on tourism. I rather wish now that I was going to, because so much of what I wanted to say has already been covered. No—like many other noble Lords, I want to talk about railways. It is my passion rather than my profession. I may be one of the few people in the opposition parties who was really quite encouraged by the gracious Speech. It states: ""My Government will respond to proposals for high-speed rail services between London and Scotland"." I would like to believe that that means—I think that the Minister has confirmed it—that high-speed rail has been given the green light and the Government intend that it should go ahead. This is something that many of us on these Benches, and many on the Labour Benches too, have advocated for a very long time. We did so a lot earlier than 2007, when, according to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, the Conservatives suddenly thought that it was a good idea. The other critical words were, ""between London and Scotland"." The best we can glean from Conservative policy is consideration of a high-speed rail service from London to Manchester and Leeds. Manchester and Leeds already have relatively fast and regular train services to London and a new service that takes three-quarters of an hour off the journey is very welcome but hardly revolutionary. Edinburgh and Glasgow, however, are more than twice that distance and an extra hour and a half off the present journey time would make a real difference. People like me find ourselves having to take the airplane to London because it is quicker. We would much rather go by train, but it just has to go a little faster. That brings me to another point; High Speed Two, as the advisory body for the project has been named, is in the process of considering the most practical route for the line. I hope it will decide to take a route that links up all the major existing airports from here to Glasgow—Heathrow, Birmingham, Manchester, with maybe a link to Liverpool and Leeds, Carlisle and Prestwick. This in itself would help to do away with the need for so many short-haul link flights between airports in Britain. The flight from Heathrow to Birmingham, for instance, hardly gives the pilot time to get into the air before he has to come down again. Yet, in 2007, there were more than 25 million passenger flights from one domestic airport in Britain to another. If people taking domestic flights could be served by a high-speed rail service instead, it would surely have a significantly beneficial effect on our environment and there would be even less justification for a third runway at Heathrow. I hope that the decision to start preparations for a high-speed rail service to Scotland also hails the beginning of a new golden age for railways in Britain as a whole. It has always seemed transparently clear to me that rail is the key to Britain’s future transport policy. It is the most practical and the least polluting means of transporting people and freight from one part of the country to the other. But to make this happen successive Governments must be seen to favour trains over airplanes and the motor car. Unfortunately, though, as we all know, a lot of people are going to take a lot of persuading that an efficient railway service is preferable to the convenience of the car. Of course the car will always be necessary for getting to work in the morning, particularly if you live outside a large town, and for shopping and visiting neighbours. I hope that in future it will be especially necessary for driving to your local station to catch the train. I would like to think that in the not too distant future any journey of more than 15 miles or so should be seen as the domain of the train. Of course, our existing railway service is nothing like good enough to divert the addicted motorist. We need more reliable trains, more frequent trains, more electrified trains and trains in parts of the country where trains no longer exist. We need cleaner trains and we need longer trains with more carriages and more room for luggage and more space for passengers. We need more stations, longer platforms, and more manned stations where women in particular can feel safe when they return late on dark nights. Above all, we need cheaper trains with fares that everyone can afford and are perceived to be good value for money. We are told that the present railways are an improvement on the ones we had before privatisation. But, even if that is the case, they still have a very long way to go. How, then, can we pay for all this? The answer is by diverting much of the huge sums of money presently earmarked for road building and new motorway construction on to the railways. I am certain that the noble Lord, Lord Birt, will disagree with this. We do not need more motorways and dual carriageways; we do need a better national rail service. Like many others caught in a traffic jam or a line of slow-moving traffic, my first reaction is, "Why don’t they widen the road, build a bypass or take away those annoying pedestrian traffic lights?". But what we should really be saying is, "What am I doing in this car anyway, helping to snarl up the traffic and polluting the atmosphere? I should be sitting in a train, reading a book or looking out of the window having creative thoughts as the countryside rolls by. Then I would not be going through all this stress and hassle". Somehow we have to change the public’s mindset on this—cars are bad, trains are good. But I do not underrate the difficulties of providing a totally integrated and affordable train service in Britain—not while we have this fragmented privatised railway, with a Government understandably reluctant to grant longer franchises to train operators which might, but only might, encourage them to invest long term in more and better rolling stock. One of our major lines, the east coast line, has been renationalised by default. The Government should seriously consider—maybe they already are—the gradual renationalisation of all or most of our railway network. Railways, after all, are primarily a public service; only secondarily should they be regarded as a business. In many cases rail fares would have to be subsidised, but as capacity increased, more and more people would be taking the train. A Labour Government who together with the Liberal Democrats strongly opposed the Conservatives’ railway privatisation should put their money where their mouth was and start the process of renationalisation. Of course this would be strongly opposed by the car lobby, because renationalisation could only easily be achieved at its expense. But it and all of us will have to face up to the fact that, sooner or later—maybe sooner—and for a number of reasons, we will have to use our cars much less frequently. I am hopeful though, because I believe that at last we have a Secretary of State for Transport who really does care about this subject and who has some vision for the future of the railways. I hope, though I do not know, that he may even share some of my views. However, I am fearful that after a general election, the office of Minister of Transport may go back to being a transitory post heavily influenced by the forceful car lobby. Finally, I should like the Minister’s assurance—or whatever assurance he can give us under the circumstances—that the high-speed rail project will definitely go ahead by all-party agreement, even if there is a change of Government.