My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who participated in this shortish debate, particularly to the Minister for the additional clarity sought by my Amendment 4.
My noble friend raised the issue of concessions, which I suspect we will come back to. It is one of those occasions where one looks at the interesting examples of what is happening in the French railway system, which is using concessions to a greater extent and is perhaps not encountering the objections that the Minister cited in relation to TfL’s concessions. That is a comparison that I am not qualified to make, but I know my noble friend on the Front Bench might pursue it.
I thoroughly agree with the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about the desirability of maintaining devolution models or perhaps extending them. The use of the exemptions under Section 24 should be considered. The Minister said that, in addition to the two routes the Secretary of State might use for securing the provision of services, that is the additional route, as it were, alongside open access, which we discussed in the previous group.
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What I have understood from this, which is curious, is that the Secretary of State is going to designate all railway services, there will be exemptions from the designation for those that are in the devolved model and it does not include those that are open-access providers—but, in so far as the designation is made for services, it will all come in under Section 30, as amended.
After this Bill is enacted, Section 30, as amended, will state that the relevant franchising authority—that is, the Secretary of State—
“shall provide, or secure the provision of, services for the carriage of passengers by railway where … a franchise agreement in respect of the services is terminated or otherwise comes to an end”.
What we have discovered in this group is that here is a railway, East West Rail, that in the course of next year—I say to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, that we are discussing this now and it will happen next year before the coming into force of any further Bill, so it is a relevant, present consideration about how the Bill will actually work—the Secretary of State is going to in effect direct into a structure that is legislatively designed, as the statute provides, so that it relates to a situation where a franchise agreement has ended. But there is no franchise agreement, so it seems to me that the legislation is just flawed. Still, they have written it and no doubt they will use it, and they will probably get away with it, because it is all designed simply to channel everything into a public sector company. So be it.
We will no doubt come to discuss how successful or otherwise wholly public sector-run passenger railway services might be in future. I happen to agree with the thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was saying about the inherent benefits of public/private partnerships in the provision of services, and I hope we will see the Government bending towards that in the future.
In the light of my rather elaborate response to that debate, for which I am sorry, it is right, as I was simply probing for that sort of information, for me to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.