My Lords, in moving Amendment 6 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, I will speak to two other amendments in this group, including Amendment 41, to which the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has added his name. It is so good to see him in his place again as one of our real rail experts in this House, and I look forward to his remarks.
This amendment is about rail freight, largely. As noble Lords may know, I was chairman of the Rail Freight Group for some years. It is designed to put a requirement on the Government to report on the rail network capacity used by rail freight and to confirm a target of at least 75% growth in freight carried by rail by 2050 compared with 2019.
I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his quite long letter, which we received over the weekend, explaining different parts of this Bill. I welcome the letter; there are some good points in it and he answered my question, as he has not done so far today, about open access passenger services. The letter is there, so I do not need his answer again, and I am grateful to him.
However, what we have here is a Government who, as the Minister states in his letter, are clear on open access passenger services and want to encourage rail freight. The letter says that
“to enable the growth of rail freight … the Secretary of State will set an overall freight growth target to ensure that it remains a key priority”.
That is good. My question is how this will be achieved. Within the Great British Railways envelope, we have GBR itself, freight operators and the freight sectors. We also have the Office of Rail and Road, with “rail” apparently to be defined in the next Bill, and we have open access operators. All these groups will be vying to get capacity on lines or tracks that, as many noble Lords have said, are congested at the moment.
It is not just a question of how we get capacity on the track. I am told that, on the east coast main line, the current LNER service apparently wants to have five trains an hour running more-or-less non-stop from Edinburgh to London—I hope they find the passengers from somewhere. That is going to cause serious problems to the regional services which might want to cross that line at York or Doncaster or somewhere else. It puts into question the Government’s priorities: getting to Edinburgh every 10 minutes, or so, or getting across the main line from the Humber to Leeds, or similar places, on a service which may only run once an hour because there is no capacity.
The capacity divide between the long-distance passenger services and local services is something that we will need to explore in the future, but capacity also affects freight. One of the issues with freight which we have heard for many months, if not years, is that it needs a different speed of train because it cannot accelerate that quickly, and therefore needs electrification—which I am not going to go into. Something that has come up in your Lordships’ House so often is the improvement of the railway at Ely on the route between Felixstowe and Nuneaton or the north. Improvements there would enable many more freight trains to use that route, saving them from trundling along the North London line and places like that. Such improvements would also enable the capacity for freight; it just needs electrification.
Great British Railways will be in charge of the budget for railway investment and infrastructure, as well as the budget for keeping the passenger trains going. It will therefore effectively be in competition with the private sector operators and freight companies, and very careful work will be needed to ensure the allocation of capacity is fair and transparent. In my book, it is pretty unfair if one of the major operators, which will be GBR, in line with the infrastructure manager, which it will also own, will have control over how much capacity is available for freight—which is in the private sector—or open-access operators.
I am making this point because, while I think that producing a report after the first year—which my amendment would mandate—and looking for targets is a good start, we will need from the Minister, now or in the future, much firmer commitments on how much capacity will be needed on the main intercity or congested routes, and how the Government will allocate it. I look forward to further discussions with the Minister on this at some stage, but for the moment I beg to move.