There is the basis of a grubby deal, I suppose, but I am sure it will be done on an equal, Dutch, shared basis.
The Minister has heard what the Committee has had to say from every corner, and he will know that his response will have left noble Lords on all sides bitterly disappointed. He has promised to combined mayoral authorities, to local authorities and to regional authorities every conceivable aspect of devolution except the right and the possibility to run their own trains, which has been done so successfully in London and, I understand although I have no personal experience of it, on Merseyside. That is now suspended; it is off the table, for a number of years at the very least, on no rational grounds at all. As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, so rightly said, we need to know the final outcome now.
For all the Minister’s talk of this being a narrow and technical Bill, its effect, in combination with his letter, is to put an end to the further devolution of rail services to local and regional authorities for the foreseeable future, and that is something the Committee is clearly not willing to accept. There is a fundamental difficulty at the heart of this Bill, and that is the commitment made so fulsomely to devolution, endorsed or otherwise by Mr Williams, whose views seem to be plastic and developing and to respond differently to every telephone call he gets from the noble Lord—it is possibly getting to the point of rent-a-quote from Mr Williams. Despite all the commitments made by Mr Williams and by the Labour Party in its pre-manifesto document on rail services, there is not going to be any meaningful devolution. Those commitments are not consistent with the Government’s other commitment to the single controlling brain. It is a contradiction at the heart of the legislation.
As for the ability of local authorities to commission services, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, so rightly said, it is all a question of money. We promise it for buses, but as we said when we discussed the Statement made on buses—on that occasion too the noble Lord, Lord Snape, was very helpful in supporting what I said —it is all very well telling local authorities they can commission new bus services, but they do not have a bean to do so. It is all very well telling regional
authorities they can commission more rail services, but unless we understand, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, who is going to pay for it and who is going to get the fares revenue, it is all pretty meaningless.
It seems to me that the great single brain is already suffering a serious headache and that the paracetamol of devolution may be what it needs to dilute the effects and to take the pressure off that brain. I think this is a point on which the Government are going to have to give some ground, and I certainly think it is one we will debate again when we return to the Bill on Report. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.