Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

My Lords, the amendment and the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Young, indicate the obvious advantages of nationalisation in terms of greater access to information and transparency; it has disadvantages, which the noble Lord set out, but it also has advantages. The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, was compelling: the evidence and information he gave us illustrated much better than I have heard before the issues that have been referred to—I referred to them on Second Reading and on Monday—regarding the imbalance between the attitude of the Government towards the speed of taking over the train operators and the fact that they are prepared to leave well alone the roscos, which can quite clearly be seen to be exploiting their situation and therefore getting excess profits as a result. I will be very interested to listen to the Minister’s explanation of why that is happening.