I thank the noble Baroness for her intervention. Of course, she is absolutely right. The fare system is far too complex, whether it is regulated fares or unregulated fares. One of the primary purposes of bringing train operations into public ownership is to provide the basis of rationalising that fare system without the associated complications of either compensation to private sector operators or, indeed, their saying that some of the information needed to do that is commercially confidential and hence cannot be used to rationalise the system that nobody understands.
On Amendment 19, the department already holds its public train operating companies to account for their financial management through regular review of their management accounts and business plans, as part of its routine contract management activities. That is equally true in relation to privately owned operators whose costs are funded by taxpayers. This scrutiny supports the monitoring of performance against the Secretary of State’s priority to deliver an affordable and sustainable railway. The amendment refers specifically to the auditing of publicly owned train companies’ accounts. It is already the case that those companies must publish their audited accounts annually, which
are available in Companies House, so there is already full transparency of their financial performance and management. The proposed amendment would add little value to the existing scrutiny of their financial performance by DOHL ass shareholder, the Department for Transport’s contracting authority, and their own financial auditors, as well as the public via the public audited accounts. That would be an unnecessary additional cost to be borne by the taxpayer which I cannot support.
Regarding Amendment 20, the department already publishes information on its website about payments made to operators under its rail contracts. The department’s published annual report and accounts also detail the department’s expenditure on each contract, as well as any associated year-end balances in respect of payments made in advance or still due to be paid. The Bill does not change that, so there is no need for the taxpayer to pay for an independent body to report on the same data. As I have said previously, the most significant financial impact of the Bill will be that taxpayers will no longer have to foot the bill for tens of millions of pounds in fees paid to private operators each year for the benefit of their shareholders.
Amendment 23 raises the specific question of whether public ownership will expose the Government to pension liabilities that previously sat with private operators. Under the current national rail contracts, DfT funds the legitimate actual costs of the train operating companies. For example, this includes the net operational costs of running services and the cost of leasing rolling stock and pension contributions.
The noble Lord, Lord Young, asked a specific question on Monday about how the Office for National Statistics might classify publicly owned operators in future. I cannot, of course, answer that question, as future classification decisions are a matter for the independent ONS, not for me or my department. What I can do is to confirm the current classification of the DfT contracted operators, which are all currently classified as public non-financial corporations, including the four DOHL-owned operators. I can also confirm what has happened previously when a service is transferred from private to public ownership. For example, following the transfer of services into DOHL, the ONS recently considered the classification of TransPennine trains, and concluded that they should remain classified as a public non-financial corporation. That fact that these publicly owned operators are classified in this way, along with the privately owned operators, means that their costs already impact the public finances. For example—and this is particularly relevant to Amendment 25—both private and publicly owned operators’ rolling stock lease payments already come out of the department’s resource budget.
Turning to pensions, I cannot agree with those who assert that the franchising model left responsibility for funding pension liabilities entirely with the private sector. Even under the form of franchising that was in place before the pandemic, pension costs were to a substantial extent a long-term liability for the public sector. First, this is because the franchising system meant the bidder simply priced any changes in costs into their bids at reletting, changing the amount of subsidy payable to the operator or the premium receivable by Government. This meant that the burden of any
increases in pension costs arising during the term of the contract would, at the point of retendering, be passed to the taxpayer. Secondly, in the more recent franchise competitions the department was required to share the risk of any adverse movements in pension deficit recovery payments, as that had become a risk that the private operators stated they were unable to bear. The Bill therefore does not materially change the Government’s level of exposure to liabilities.
On the noble Lord’s second amendment regarding pension liabilities, in previous transfers to DOHL the transferring staff have remained within their existing section of the Railways Pension Scheme at the point of transfer. Railways Pension Scheme contribution rates will not change when services transfer from private to public sector operation and, as mentioned a moment ago, the cost of employer pension contributions is already borne by the Government under the terms of the existing contracts.
The noble Lord may also find it helpful to know that the department already reports in its annual report and accounts the employer’s share of the net pension scheme surplus or deficit, the employer’s share of pension scheme assets and the employer’s share of pension scheme liabilities.
In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, transparency will be enhanced by public ownership. In respect of the question about the passenger standards authority, I am afraid it is too early to say what it will and will not do. That is why we are going to consult about its duties in order to make sure that it represents passengers’ interests in the best way possible.
In view of these observations, noting in particular that the costs of public sector operations are already in the public domain, I urge the noble Lord not to press these amendments.