My Lords, I support the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about the potential conflict of interest under the new scenario: we will have Great British Railways, with a single operating mind, carrying all the revenue risk for passenger train operations, while at the same time there will be open-access operators and freight operators bidding for a limited path on the railways.
The former Secretary of State said:
“I shouldn’t need to approve whether a passenger train ought to be removed from the timetable to allow a freight train to run instead, as I was doing earlier today”.
The question is: who is going to make that decision in the future? If it is going to be GBR, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, there is a clear conflict of interest; the company would have an interest in the passenger train operator having precedence in order to secure the revenue. That may be in conflict with government policy, which is to promote the transfer of freight from road to rail. Surely it is important that at the moment, the train operator cannot insist that he has a particular path for his train: he has to bid either to Network Rail or to the ORR. Who is going to make that decision in the future? Will it be a domestic one within GBR? In which case, how will the conflict of interest raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, be resolved in a way that is satisfactory for both the open-access operator and the freight train operator, which may find that they do not have the paths they wanted?