My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 2, and to Amendment 10 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Scott. Amendment 2 was the Liberal Democrats’ Amendment 1 in Committee, requiring the Secretary of State to terminate franchises for default and to nationalise the worst-performing operators first, while allowing train operating companies that are currently working well to continue.
The Minister explained to us, both in this Chamber in response to our amendment and in private discussions, that this cannot be done without major costs to the taxpayer. The existing contracts have been written and signed by the previous Government so as to make it difficult to penalise defaulters. We accept what the Minister says and we are not prepared to cause the taxpayer greater costs than necessary in this process. So, having listened and learned, we turned our amendment around and wrote Amendment 10, which simply proposes giving the Secretary of State the freedom to enable services that are working well to have an extension to their franchise and to continue for a period of time suitable to the Government. Can the Minister explain to us the Government’s approach to this and whether existing contracts could be extended, as our amendment suggests?
Our view is that the Government are going to be hard pressed in dealing with the numerous parts of the rail systems that are failing, and they need to allow themselves a bit of space by letting the bits that are working well continue until they get around to the overall process of nationalisation. The Government’s
whole approach has been nationalisation gradually rather than one big effort, and I hope this amendment works with the grain of their intentions.