If the noble Lord will forgive me, I am asking the questions in this scenario, and I do not feel I necessarily have an answer to his question about wartime. I might pass it on to the Minister, who once arranged for me to go and see deep in the bowels of Mayfair, under the former Down Street Underground station—I am sure that if the noble Lord, Lord Snape, has not been, it can be arranged for him to see it too—the wartime headquarters of the railway operations executive, including what is claimed to be, although I think with no historical foundation, a tin bath in which Churchill once took a bath. I will say no more about the war than that.
On the former question, I do not know the answer, but I would like to know. Why was it that the then Government, having published what they called the Williams-Shapps review written by Keith Williams—I think he is correct in saying that it was in 2016—and having promised a transport Bill in the King’s Speech one but last, did not come forward with the measures they thought they could offer in that regard? I do not know the answer to that, but I am willing to have a guess and it is relevant to what the Government are embarking on now and to whether they are going to meet their 12 to 18-month deadline of delivering us with this massive Bill that is going to transform the railways. My guess is that the then Government found that grappling with the intense difficulties of reforming the railway on such a large scale meant that, try as they might, they found considerable difficulty in putting together that Bill. It may be that is exactly what the Minister finds as he comes to address these difficulties. This only adds further to my point that the shadow arrangements we are setting up today could be with us for a very long time.
I come to the first amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. The Government say they have a purpose—they are not doing this for ideological reasons or at the behest of the trade unions—which is to improve passenger services. At Second Reading, I pointed out that in the final stage impact assessment produced by the Department for Transport, given the opportunity it had to say exactly that, it said something completely different. It said that the Bill had been
“prepared to enable swift delivery of a Government manifesto commitment”—
not to improve matters for passengers—and that was why it had not looked, as it normally would, at the alternative options that might be put forward to achieve a similar purpose. That is another reason why it is incumbent on us in this House to look in great detail at what the Government are putting before us. They are in effect asking us to buy into an article of faith. They are simply saying, “Well, it couldn’t be worse than it is at the moment”—that is simply untrue; there are problems with the railways, but they could be a great deal worse than they are at the moment—“so it is bound to be better if we take it over and run it ourselves as part of a national enterprise”. But they have not provided any evidence for that; they have simply stated, “This must be the case and you’ve got to believe us”. As I say, that is one of the reasons why our job is not to do so.
4.45 pm
My noble friend Lord Gascoigne seeks in his amendment to make good the deficiency pointed out by the Department for Transport: that the Bill has no purpose other than the delivery of a government manifesto commitment and that no alternatives have been looked at to achieve that purpose. He has tried to clarify, and state on the face of the Bill, why we are doing this, and he has put this forward in words that the Government themselves have been using. When the Minister comes to reply, there really should be no problem at all on the part of the Government in stating, “Yes, this is our purpose and this should be on the face of the Bill, so that everyone who looks at this Bill”—I do not mean passengers but those involved in implementing it, from the Secretary of State down—“knows exactly what it is should be guiding them as a principle when they come to make their decisions about how to put it into effect”.