My Lords, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said that he thought that the Government’s determination to trammel itself in the way that Clause 2 does was ideologically driven—a commitment to a certain vision of the railways based essentially on a political ideology. I would not be so bold as to disagree—he may well be right—but there is another way of looking at this, which I referred to at Second Reading. What is really driving the Government’s approach to this is that they have absolutely convinced themselves that the only way in which the railways can operate is if there is a single controlling brain, so that every train run in this country for passenger service purposes is run by Great British Railways, and that this body will be the sole provider of railway services.
This is a truly ideological obsession. It is almost a psychological fixation that appears to have gripped the Government, and it needs to be tested. Questions are being asked from every side of the House about its practical effects, and we are getting no answer except, “It’s in the manifesto”, which really is no answer to a passenger standing on a platform waiting for a train that was operating perfectly satisfactorily under private ownership and is now simply not arriving.
I turn first to Amendments 4, 10, 14 and 15 in this group standing in my name. If I had written the explanatory statements rather better, Members would understand—perhaps they do—that these four operate as one. They are consequential on each other and have a single effect, which is to say that the Secretary of State in awarding new services must put them out to tender but on a “concession” basis. Amendment 14 defines a “concession” as
“a contract under which the franchising authority specifies rail services to be provided by a private sector entity and retains the risk of fluctuations in the receipt of fares”.
In other words, this amendment does something that Transport for London has done with great success in relation to buses, London Overground rail services, the Wimbledon tram and the Docklands Light Railway. They are all operated on this basis and although there might be complaints from customers about this, that or the other, there are no complaints about the basis on which the services are operated contractually. Of course, TfL has chosen to brand them all under its own branding, so members of the public and passengers are often not even aware that they are operated on this basis. We have a system that works and that we should consider very seriously by contrast to the determination of the Government that all these services are to be taken in-house and run by a single employer with a great, single, controlling brain.
Amendment 14 does something else: it is in conformity with the Williams review, which I thought was the plan that there was, generally speaking, consensus that we should operate to. There is no other plan or document of any weight or substance that has been produced as a result of an independent review for the future of the railways. When I drew attention in our last debate to what is said on page 55 of the Williams review about the concession model being the pattern taken from TfL that should be used nationally, there was a slightly astonishing intervention from the Minister in which he said that Mr Williams no longer thought that, because he had rung him up and said that we need to have it nationalised. How much else in the Williams review has been vitiated by random phone calls made by the Minister to its author? How much is left of the Williams review, if it is capable of being rewritten by the Minister on the basis of claimed phone calls with Mr Williams?
It happens that Mr Williams and I served together on the board of Transport for London when the Minister was its commissioner. I have to tell him that if I were to look into the contacts in my telephone I think I would find that Mr Williams’s telephone number was in my telephone as well. It is perfectly possible that we could pursue this debate on the basis of various individual and private phone calls that we had had with Mr Williams about what he actually meant, what he thinks now, and whether his view has changed —and then what will be left of this report? Without this report, there is no plan. The Government are, it turns out, now inviting us to take a step completely into the dark. It is not just an act of faith, as I said on an earlier group, that they can run the trains better. It is a belief that they are going to give us a better plan for the future, but that they cannot tell us what the
plan is, whereas at least previously they had some basis for saying what it would be. The whole thing really is turning into the most dreadful shambles.
I would like to know why concessions do not work, why something so successful in London will not be allowed, and why what was recommended by Williams is not allowed. I do not, I am sad to say, expect to hear the detailed explanation from the Minister that those questions deserve. The other amendments in this group have similar effect.
My noble friend Lord Lansley would like the Government to have the power, where they choose to, to go out to tender and allow some of these wicked private entities to submit tenders. I may myself be wicked when I say that many of these private entities are not very private—some are the subsidiaries of our great European railway friends. They are state-owned bodies from Europe. Who knows whether the Prime Minister, as he creeps towards a great reset and love-in with the European Union, would not find it quite useful to be able to say that the Italian railways, Deutsche Bahn and Renfe could bid for services running on our railways—just as they can at the moment—and that they are not going to be kicked out of Britain? “Mrs von der Leyen, we are going to let them back in.” Would not that little bit of flexibility that my noble friend Lord Lansley would like to be able to give to the Government possibly be rather welcome in the future?
My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham made a good case for his amendments. I echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, who said that it is a great pity that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is not here to speak to his very intriguing amendment. To a large extent, the argument for it was made very well by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham.
The possibilities of collaboration with the private sector—indeed, with community groups and, when we come to later amendments relating to devolution, local authorities and local government—are all worth exploring if we are going to reform our railway. All of these are being shut off and closed down now by the word “only”, which the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and others are effectively suggesting be deleted.
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The Government are going to allow public service contracts to be awarded “only” to public sector companies. How much better things might be if they had the flexibility that would allow us to head towards a better railway and one for which we might have a plan. I now realise, having carried this weighty and valuable document around in recent weeks to prepare myself for this debate, that it is as nothing, it is as writ in water, a mere telephone call, and a ghostly intervention from outside the Chamber can rewrite it at any moment. We have no direction. We have no idea where we are going. The train is setting off and we are completely adrift.