My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 34 in my name, which would allow franchises to be led by local authorities. It goes a little further than one of the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lord Moylan, who wanted partnership boards, and is more in line with what the noble Lord, Lord Snape, wants to do with his Amendment 43.
We need to be clear about what new Section 30C does. Basically, it says that the only people who can run a railway in future are a public sector company owned by a Secretary of State. Unless the Minister is going to repeal that in the forthcoming Bill, it means that for ever and a day, as we have heard, we are going to have a central monopoly for all franchised rails.
My noble friend went to the Labour Party document on transport to inspire his speech. I looked at the document published in March this year, Power and Partnership: Labour’s Plan to Power Up Britain, which pledged to devolve new powers over transport, employment support and energy out of Whitehall. That was followed up by the manifesto promising “landmark devolution legislation” to transfer power out of Westminster and into communities across the UK. So we could have expected the first pieces of legislation in the new Parliament to fulfil that ambition of devolving power out of Westminster, particularly in the field of transport, where there has been significant devolution of powers in rail, as we heard in earlier speeches. Like my noble friend, I was surprised to read in the letter from the Minister—and I got a slightly different wording—that:
“The Government has no current plan to devolve responsibility for further services to local authorities”.
As we have heard, Transport for London has taken over services that used to be run by British Rail, and then by South Western Railway and the other TOCs, and it now runs the Overground. I think that has worked well, and it has enabled TfL to integrate the Overground with the Underground and provide a better service to Londoners.
Outside London, many local authorities have successfully introduced light rail lines. There are 11 light rail systems in the UK. Manchester Metrolink is probably the best known, with 99 stops and 64 miles of track, run by Transport for Greater Manchester. We have also heard about the smaller West Midlands Metro, run by Transport for West Midlands. So local authorities are perfectly capable of building, maintaining and running serious rail systems.
The Minister’s statement seems to preclude the sort of arrangement that works well in London from happening anywhere else. All that local authorities are promised in the letter is a statutory role governing, managing, planning and developing the rail network, but not taking it over and integrating it with the system that they already have.
I think the Minister is in some trouble on this issue. We have had a powerful speech from his noble friend Lord Snape, and there is a feeling in the Committee as a whole that the commitment to devolution is simply inconsistent with new Section 30C as it stands. I do not think this is the landmark legislation that we were promised, so I hope the Minister thinks again about the implications of new Section 30C.