My Lords, I will be brief. As the focus of this is on passenger travel and the noble Lord’s desire to put that at the centre of the objective of the Bill—which is a laudable objective shared, I am sure, by the Government—I cannot help pointing out that one of the major decisions by the last Government, which will of course affect the capacity of the railway network to deliver first-class passenger transport, was their in my view crazy decision to truncate the HS2 programme.
That programme was introduced by a Labour Government, supported by the coalition Government and by Conservative Governments over a period of about 15 years in total and at two strokes—first, getting rid of the Leeds link and, secondly, getting rid of the Manchester link—so much planning, expenditure and work was wasted. I am sure my noble friend the Minister will agree with a lot of this. It means that,
among other things, the service to passengers, which is at the heart of the noble Lord’s amendment, is bound to be diminished from what it could have been. The network was there to provide passenger transport, freeing up space on the west coast mainline, which is close to, if not beyond, capacity, and helping freight as well, of course, which is a very important part of what the rail network delivers. It would have enabled that by freeing up the west coast mainline, the old mainline, if you like, built by the Victorians and still doing remarkable work, and improving the network overall.
So, when he winds up, I really would like the noble Lord to take the opportunity to apologise on behalf of the Government he served for making those nihilistic decisions to scrap that section of the railway. Ironically, in an attempt to justify the action they took, they claimed that somehow several billion pounds would be saved and one of the ways the “saved” money would be spent—I think the figure was £9 billion—would be on filling potholes. Now I am strongly in favour of filling potholes, but it will not help passenger services on the railway—which the building of the two northern legs of HS2 would have done. So, as welcome, in many ways, as his emphasis is—I do not know whether it is on behalf of the Opposition or not—on supporting and improving passenger services, that has a long way to go to make up for the damage it did by the cancellation of HS2 north.