My Lords, it was a real pleasure to hear the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. We overlapped for
eight years on the London Assembly, and I guarantee your Lordships that they have seen the softer side of her today. When I was introduced to the House, they found it difficult to find anyone who knew me, because I was a London representative, but the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, spoke up for me. She warned the House that I take no prisoners, and I think that that applies to the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, as well. That is a real asset to our debates here, so I look forward to her next contribution.
I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, who is not in his place at the moment. I will have a quiet chat with him about the fact that, if you had fewer tourists, you would need less nature recovery—but that is probably a job for another day.
On this Bill, I support the idea of public ownership. It is excellent that Labour has gone slightly back to its roots, and I think that it is doing the right thing by taking back control as each of the railway contracts comes up for renewal—that is good. The Green Party opposed privatisation in the first place, and we do not have much criticism of the mechanics in this Bill, given that it seems to be heavily based on the rail renationalisation Bill championed by our former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas more than a decade ago. I thank the Government for picking up Green Party policy, albeit 10 years later.
These contracts are expensive, and the train companies are already discredited. When rail was nationalised, we had 15% of trains running late, but at least the fares were rated as among the cheapest in Europe. Since then, the percentage of late trains has doubled, and rail users are paying the highest fares in Europe. Plus, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, pointed out, each franchise does its own thing, with passenger confusion over ticketing, websites and delayed compensation. Before finalising plans, perhaps the Government could think about taking some advice from the people who actually pay their way and buy tickets on a daily basis: for example, The Man in Seat Sixty-One might have some very useful advice on how to make things easier.
Alongside that rise in fares, the taxpayer subsidy has grown from under £2 billion to around £12 billion. Both taxpayers and fare payers are thoroughly fed up with their money going into the pockets of shareholders rather than improving the service they get. Public ownership makes sense, but I do not understand why this impeccable logic applies only to railways; surely the Minister’s comments also apply to all other forms of privatisation of essential services. In the next five years, for example, nearly all the big NHS contracts are up for renewal, so will Ministers apply the same logic to them and save this money by bringing them back in-house? The NHS is paying £2.1 billion per year on PFI schemes. The NHS budget is expanding, and yet we are getting less back because of the growing role of the private sector. I have heard a lot from this Government—and from the previous one—about value for money, but those rules go out the window when we look at PFIs. Taxpayers have spent £80 billion on NHS PFI schemes that only got £13 billion of actual investment; that does not seem like a good deal.
Public ownership of rail is a good thing, but what difference will it make to passengers? I hope it will enable Ministers to directly reduce fares and have a real impact on traffic reduction. In the years between climate change becoming a recognised issue in the early 1980s and the husky-hugging era of Prime Minister Cameron, the cost of motoring fell while rail and bus fares rose rapidly. Season ticket fares are often 80% higher than they were before privatisation, and longer-distance fares can be twice as high as they were. This is not the record of a country serious about climate change, and we have failed to reduce emissions from the transport sector.
This Government, like the last one, tell us that there is no money. However, during my time on the London Assembly, which other Members of your Lordships’ House might remember, we worked with the mayor on promoting the congestion charge and the ultra low emission zone. That generated the extra revenue that helped to keep fares lower and provided some of the money needed to build new Tube and rail lines. Politicians of all parties knew the value of having a public transport system that worked and was fairly cheap to use, but only a few of us were willing to raise that money for investment by saying that the polluter should pay more. In fact, there was a classic comment from the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who said that the only people supporting his congestion charge were businesses in the City and the Green Party.
Portugal has just introduced a £20 monthly rail pass for all its services. That is the kind of vision we need here in the UK from a publicly owned rail system. It would take ambition and money, but we could make the polluter pay by finally taking the brake off the fuel duty escalator that new Labour introduced.
The Government have taken positive steps to give local authorities the power to regulate buses, so the next logical step is to give the metropolitan mayors a big say in how rail works with bus and tram services, to be the better option in large areas of the country. We need democratic control of the railways, not decisions driven by Whitehall and, even worse, the Treasury.
Privatisation of rail has given us higher fares and generated a fat profit for all the state-owned German and French rail companies, which took advantage of UK taxpayers. I congratulate Labour on bringing this to an end. But why not end the disastrous mistake of water privatisation that will cost £12.5 billion in this Parliament alone, only to pay shareholders and creditors, but which will still result in waterways full of faeces, agricultural run-off, other chemicals, drugs, paint, bleach and plastic? If water companies collapsed, we could buy them for pennies and run them ourselves.
On public ownership of the energy system to deal with the huge jump in household bills, we could end the scandal of record-high standing charges that do nothing to discourage energy use and which hit the poor really hard. Rail companies have made a good profit, but British Gas has made a tenfold profit over the last year, and the likes of BP and Shell have doubled and trebled profits. Public ownership could end those excess profits and bring down prices for consumers.
The public can see these injustices and the way this system of privatisation eats up taxpayer cash and consumer monthly payments. It holds back public investment in our economy and, instead of new hospitals or railway rolling stock, our money buys new private jets for the super-rich. The public want more public ownership, and I hope the Government start listening to voters rather than lobbyists and party donors.
To sum up, my speech is a mix: “Well done, Labour, but why stop there?”
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