Railways Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th September 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support what my noble friend Lord Lansley has said on his Amendment 26. I had some dealings on this when the Prime Minister was the Mayor of the Greater Manchester and when Andy Street was Mayor of the West Midlands. Both of them engaged with the department on their desire to integrate the national rail network into their plans locally. They wanted to have those conversations, which worked well. In those cases, obviously, they were both mayors.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Lansley. Given the announcement this week that local government reform and the bringing together of unitary authorities, which is, in many cases, a precursor to having mayors, have been held up and there have been legal challenges, it would be much more sensible, as my noble friend says, if we made sure that GBR could have those sensible conversations and had the powers to do that with all appropriate local authorities with a strategic transport function. We should not limit that to those authorities with a mayor.

As my noble friend said, although it was at least the preference of the Government led by Keir Starmer that there should be limits to what you could devolve if you did not have a mayor, it sounds like, from what the Prime Minister said in his answers to Cornish MPs, that he is open-minded about that. Therefore, we could have some significant local authorities with transport powers without a mayor. I know from my own experience that there are a number of proposals in the Cornish area, for example, for some rail infrastructure that would bring significant benefits to the Cornish economy. It would be perverse if the Cornish council could not have those conversations with GBR or if people had to work out weird ways of having to facilitate those conversations because we had not provided for that in this legislation.

I agree with my noble friend. The Minister would be wise either to accept his amendment or, if it needs to be worded differently or other changes need to be made, at least to take it away and come back on Report with a government amendment, or suite of amendments, to achieve the same function. That would improve the position and, in fact, get to a position that I think is the Government’s intention—certainly the current Government’s intention. It may not have been when the legislation was drafted but I think that it would more accurately reflect the position now.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to speak to the amendments in my name, Amendments 298, 299 and 300, which follow on from the amendments about which noble Lords have spoken. I want to double-check that there will be consultation with the relevant authorities—whether it is Scotland, Wales or other authorities—before any change is made to access charges, timetables or anything else.

Several noble Lords have spoken about Cornwall, where I live. It may be down as a mayoral authority but, knowing the politics of Cornwall, I think that it is highly unlikely that anything credible will come out of that. Whether that is good or bad, we can debate.

There is also the question of what improvement—or lack of improvement—is needed to the railway in Cornwall and, to some extent, in Devon. We have been debating for many years whether the line at Dawlish is at risk and by how much. I know that my noble friend the Minister has said that it is all going to be fine. Rock bolts are being put into the hillside to stop it falling down, which I am sure is a good solution, but we still only have one rail line going to most of south Devon and the whole of Cornwall. It would be nice to think that the local authorities—the south-west regional authority is already doing some work on this—are able to take some of that forward with a budget to look at the alternatives and make sure that the various authorities, whoever they may be at the time, are properly consulted, especially on access, charges and things like that.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. I am particularly grateful for his suggestion that we debate this only once. I have listened carefully to what he has just said and I will reflect on it, as I said I would do on the rest of the subject. I am grateful to him for that, and indeed the Hansard record is useful in being able to cross-reference it further to this Committee session.

I turn to the proposals on Transport for London. Amendment 27 seeks to provide all mayoral authorities with the same powers as TfL. Of course, the Government support rail devolution where it can deliver better outcomes for passengers and local communities, but those arrangements should reflect the circumstances, capabilities and aspirations of individual areas rather than applying a single model everywhere. The TfL model has a distinct legislative and governance framework developed over many years, and it would not be appropriate to automatically confer all existing or future TfL powers on every mayoral combined authority. The other point worth noting is that the geography of London includes several complete railway services, unlike much of the geography of the rest of the combined authorities in England.

The Government have already published guidance on applications for rail devolution and, as I have already said, the Bill includes a route to devolved rail services for those seeking that in Clause 28. Therefore, should mayoral authorities want to pursue full devolution of certain services, as TfL has, they are welcome to use those established routes to seek it. Devolution arrangements should be considered on their merits, taking account of local circumstances and the outcome sought for passengers. A one-size-fits-all approach will not serve all local communities.

On Amendments 28 to 30, Clause 6 of the Bill requires GBR and TfL to co-operate on railway matters, including co-ordinating passenger services and sharing relevant information to help to integrate rail with the wider London network. As the directing mind for the railway, GBR will be responsible for those operational matters and how they will be discharged when collaborating with TfL. I do not believe that expanding the Secretary of State’s role further would reflect that clear division of responsibilities, but I can reassure the noble Lord that, via amendments that the Government brought in on Report in the Commons, the Secretary of State is still enabled to enter into arrangements with TfL to support the future devolution of rail services where that is needed. The Government believe that this approach is sufficient to support TfL to integrate and co-operate with the wider rail network.

On Amendment 159, I reassure the noble Lord that the Government are supportive of the success TfL has made of rail devolution, and existing devolved arrangements will continue. To that end, existing exemption orders in relation to TfL concession services do not have an expiry date. The Bill also contains safeguards governing access decisions, including duties on GBR, a requirement to have regard to the Mayor of London’s transport strategy, a requirement for GBR and TfL to co-operate in relation to all services, and an independent route of appeal to the ORR.

Likewise, Amendment 25 seeks to enable mayors to appeal access decisions if they affect services in their area. Clauses 83 to 86 already allow GBR to request advice from mayoral authorities about services in their area, require it to consult them if a decision will significantly affect their area and, if a decision will affect the local area, GBR will work with local partners weighing up trade-offs between local and national network priorities. This enables issues to be resolved through collaboration rather than requiring relevant local government bodies to challenge GBR through the access appeals regime. Despite this, all local authorities are able to appeal an access decision they are aggrieved by, under provisions already in the Bill.

On Amendments 297 to 301, Clause 83 already requires GBR to consult mayoral authorities where a relevant decision would significantly affect their local area, including the interests of the local economy or of people living in, working in or visiting the area. The amendments would therefore add little practical benefit beyond further bureaucracy, slowing down decision-making, while mayors would have to review hundreds of decisions, often irrelevant to them, before any progress can be made.

On Amendments 298 to 301, I reassure my noble friend that the Bill is already clear, through Clause 83, that GBR will have to consult mayoral authorities on its access and charging decisions where these relate to a GBR railway passenger service in the area and would significantly affect the local region.

Alongside these legislative commitments, it is the Government’s clear intention for GBR to work in partnership with mayoral authorities. I am determined that GBR will absolutely be a proactive partner of those authorities, maximising the benefits that the Bill can bring to local areas. As a result, I hope noble Lords are reassured that the Government share their ambitions on local devolution and I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, before the Minister sits down, I am very grateful for his response to my amendments, but on the relationships between local authorities and central government, we already have an example in the south-west—and, I think, in south Wales—where the train operators and the local authorities have come together and developed a new wifi system so that you can get wifi on the trains, which is quite important these days. They installed it in one train and it worked beautifully, and many of us have tried it. They asked the Department for Transport whether they, as the regional authority, could take over the procurement of improved wifi on all the trains on the GWR network and have it done more quickly. This was refused by the Department for Transport, which said that only it is capable of doing a procurement exercise on something as important as wifi on trains. Now, I hope that is just a one-off—my noble friend is aware of it—and that in the new GBR set-up, there will be more flexibility as to who does what.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

In quick answer to my noble friend, the only reason it should be procured centrally is because improved wifi is needed on every railway service in Britain. Therefore, the department is determined to deliver it on all those services, and fragmenting the procurement would lead only to increased cost and probably significant delay elsewhere. I have absolutely no intention of getting in the way of wifi for the south-west, I would just like it to be delivered in other parts of Britain at the same time.

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Amendment 86 addresses the other side of the equation: accountability for money once it has been spent. Amendment 86 would require GBR to publish an annual statement of its financial performance. It may be said that it is going to have to do this: as a company under the Companies Act, it will have to produce an annual report. But one of the issues we should be considering, given the scale of the public money likely to be going into Great British Railways, is whether an annual report, simply produced on a companies law basis, will be enough. Again, we are probing to hear what the Minister has to say about whether he intends to be more open with publishing figures on performance at the end of a financial period, rather than simply confining himself to the loopholes and dodges that are often available for those simply producing company accounts.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, briefly, the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on producing a business plan are absolutely essential because, as he noted, the railways need long-term investment. It is not just trains which need to somehow be ordered 10 or 20 years before they are needed but things such as HS2, which we have no budget for at the moment. We have no real knowledge of how much is going to be spent each year and when it is going to open, so there needs to be much greater discipline on this. I fully support these probing amendments to see what my noble friend is able to tell us.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for this debate on group 5 and will echo the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon: it is a delight to see the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, in his place this afternoon. I am sure that the rest of the Grand Committee wishes him, as I do, a very happy significant birthday for yesterday. I have also read and heard what he has argued carefully and, as he is a man of huge experience in the railway, I will reflect on what he said.

The Committee will be relieved to know that I am not going to redebate the status of GBR companies and subsidiaries. I thought I would leave it to the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Moylan, to fight that out. I think I had the same clarity as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, at the end of that debate.

I think noble Lords’ amendments are, collectively seeking, first, that the Secretary of State considers GBR’s duties, her long-term rail strategy and the wider planning considerations when determining GBR’s funding settlement; secondly, that that funding settlement is transparent; and thirdly, that it is protected. Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, seeks to ensure that it is in place two years before the next financial period.

I start by providing some explanation of the provisions. The Bill already establishes a comprehensive funding framework. Schedule 2 sets out that the Secretary of State must publish a statement of objectives for the railway. In doing so, she is absolutely bound to consider her duties and her own strategy, and she will, of course, consider wider planning and the impact of the network. Following the statement of objectives, the Secretary of State must then publish a statement of funds available, so that GBR can understand its funding parameters and produce a high-quality business plan.

Schedule 2 then provides that GBR must produce, publish and keep up to date the five-year integrated business plan across both infrastructure and passenger services. The Office of Rail and Road will advise the Secretary of State on the effectiveness of the business plan, including whether it represents good value for money. If it does, the Secretary of State will then approve the plan and issue a five-year settlement.

Under paragraph 7 of Schedule 2, as in the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, the Secretary of State is required to publish details of the five-year funding settlement she gives to GBR, including the funds agreed. She will absolutely ensure that that these published details are clear enough to allow stakeholders to understand the settlement, meeting the noble Lord’s request for transparency, while protecting key commercially sensitive information.

GBR’s business plan will also contain all its planned activities, costs and how it plans to meet those costs. This plan will be updated and published annually after the initial settlement. A clear summary of ORR’s advice through the funding process will also be published, as set out in paragraph 4(6), which means that the desires of the noble Lord for an annual report on GBR’s financial performance will be delivered. Other further reporting requirements are duplicative and unnecessary, and all this amendment would do is increase the time GBR spends on bureaucracy instead of getting on with its job of delivering.

On protecting the funding settlement, which the noble Lords, Lord Bradshaw and Lord Moylan, spoke about, I agree that when maintaining and renewing long-term railway assets, certainty of funding is critical. It provides a stable basis of planning, supports efficient delivery and helps build investor confidence throughout the supply chain. I repeat that the intention behind setting a five-year settlement is that it should endure for the full five-year period.

On the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, I can assure him that the Secretary of State must publish any updates to the settlement that are likely to have a material impact. If she wishes to make a material change to the settlement, she must also notify the ORR, which will advise on the likely impact on the railway, and that is one of its important and critical roles. This will ensure that there is transparency around any funding changes and that there will be scrutiny if material changes are proposed that will not support an effective railway.

On Amendment 55 from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, I do not agree that the Secretary of State should be restricted to changing the funding settlement only in emergencies. As the noble Lord, Lord Harper, says, the Government have a lot of priorities to deliver across healthcare, housing, transport and public safety, which all require funding. While, of course, in my mind, the railway is absolutely the most important of those priorities, I recognise that the Government and Ministers need to be able to move money in response to changing circumstances, because choices about funding priorities are ultimately for the Government of the day.

On the details of Amendments 74 to 77 from the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, the first key point is the question of which funding changes the ORR should get involved in. The Bill already requires that the ORR is notified when changes to the funding settlement are material enough to affect delivery, but not in every circumstance. This approach is proportionate. There may well be some smaller accounting-type changes to funding needed, which will not affect delivery and do not require a true statutory formal change process. This could, for example, include GBR offering to return small underspends back to the Government where efficiencies have been found but, of course, material changes, as I have said, should be notified to the ORR. This process ensures that they will be.

The Bill currently requires that the Secretary of State notifies ORR before a material funding reduction is made to the five-year infrastructure settlement. This allows ORR to exercise its independent and expert judgement when it receives notice of a potential change. I can reassure noble Lords that the ORR would absolutely act if significant funding were taken out of the railways, including by advising the Secretary of State and publishing that advice. This approach is most practical, rather than requiring ORR to respond to each change in funding in a set way. To summarise this point, certainty is crucial for the railways, the Government and the wider supply chain, but it must be proportionate and balanced against the ability of Ministers to allocate public resources.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, raised the question of rolling stock manufacturers and the Government’s answer to this is to construct and publish in due course a rolling stock and infrastructure strategy, the first for more than 30 years, in order to give that part of this market the long-term certainty it craves and which will keep the production facilities and jobs going.

Finally, I agree that, given the amount of investment on the line, it is important that funding is in place in good time to allow GBR and industry to prepare for the next settlement. Although I do not think this should be in primary legislation, because requiring funding levels to be confirmed two years before the start of a funding period would reduce flexibility and risk settlements becoming outdated before they can even take effect, I reassure the noble Lord that details of the timing will be managed by the ORR, as they have been in successive control periods, to ensure that the financial settlement is never at risk.

Schedule 2 sets out that the statement of funds available must be published early in the process and created to timelines determined by the ORR. I can confirm that in practice, as seen under the periodic review process, this information will be published significantly in advance and has to be more than a year ahead of the final settlement to work. I understand that the ORR will ensure that the process concludes fully with time for industry to prepare. I hope this is a reassurance.

I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, that the Bill leaves flexibility to fund more of GBR’s activity through the five-year settlement, once this becomes once this becomes practical and Ministers are more comfortable funding an integrated entity. If Ministers fund passenger services through the five-year settlement using the route in the Bill, all the protections we just discussed would already apply.

Turning to a related issue, on Amendment 65, I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that we are in agreement, and the outcome of Amendment 65 is already achieved by the Bill’s provisions. Under paragraph 4(3) of Schedule 2, GBR will be required through its business plan to set out its activities, the costs of those activities, and how it proposes that those costs are met. In practice, this means that the business plan must cover everything that GBR does, through its subsidiaries as well as the parent company, and must cover its revenue sources across all its subsidiaries.

I turn to Amendment 70—and once again I confirm for the Committee that the Bill already requires the full business plan to be published and kept up to date, in paragraph 4(7), and there is a commitment to update it in paragraph 5(3) of Schedule 2. However, the Bill contains slightly more discretion for GBR to redact sections of the business plan than this amendment proposes. This is because it is important that all types of sensitive data, not just commercially sensitive, are able to be protected. Personal data, security-sensitive information about stations and public places, or anything legally privileged are all examples of content which may need redaction from the final plan, and a flexible requirement can be better used to navigate these nuances. That flexibility is important, but I should be clear that GBR cannot withhold information simply to avoid scrutiny. The ORR will assess and advise the Secretary of State on the unredacted version of the business plan, and GBR’s public law duties and wider accountabilities framework will ensure that GBR will not be able to hide important information relevant to public scrutiny.

I understand that the intention of Amendment 73 is to prevent the Secretary of State circumventing the process as set out through the Bill, by restricting access to the broader funding powers in the Railways Act 2005. The purpose of paragraph 6(7) is to make it clear to Parliament that the Secretary of State can use her other funding power in the 2005 Act. This will be necessary when funding activity outside the five-year settlement, such as individual enhancement projects or one-off funding packages, are needed following a natural disaster, for example. I assure the noble Lord that this does not reduce transparency over GBR’s funded activities. GBR’s business plan, covering all GBR’s activity, will be costed, updated and published as GBR’s outputs change. The business plan will include enhancement projects and will show clearly where the funding for them has come from, therefore transparently identifying the use of the 2005 power for Parliament and others to scrutinise. I therefore hope that the noble Lord can see that the inclusion of paragraph 6(7), to allow the Secretary of State to use other funding powers, is purely practical.

Finally, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for Amendment 78. For clarity, relevant subsidy control law does not apply to infrastructure funding. However, it applies in full to passenger services funding, as we discussed in the ticket retailing debate on Tuesday. Railway infrastructure being exempted from subsidy control rules is something that happens on the current railway; railway infrastructure funding provided to Network Rail today is not subject to subsidy control law. The Bill does not change this principle but simply enshrines it for clarity and transparency.

Over many years, funding provided for the operation and management of the main national railway infrastructure has not been treated as subsidy as this market has been effectively closed for competition, because there are not multiple infrastructure managers operating on the same infrastructure. That position has underpinned the funding arrangements for Network Rail and continues to be appropriate for GBR as its successor. Removing this provision would not change the way that the railway is subsidised; it would just mean continuing to rely on previous legal interpretations, rather than the additional transparency provided by this clause.

Part 3 in Schedule 2 therefore provides clarity and legal certainty, and it makes sense for this stance to continue as there is no competitive market for the railway infrastructure that GBR will be responsible for, so there is no need to waste resources administering this funding as if there is. I therefore urge noble Lords not to press their amendments.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak on my two amendments in this group, Amendments 67 and 72. Amendment 67 is simply another opportunity, as there was in the last group, to explore and, I hope, again extract assurance from the Minister that the business plan and GBR’s statements in it will be sufficiently transparent such that we can see the financial relationship not only—as we said in the last group— between GBR and its companies but between GBR and any arrangement that it enters into with any local government bodies. So we should see what money is being paid to GBR for these purposes and how it is attributed to those activities.

I hope the Minister will say that that will definitely form part of the business plan. If he does, I would accept it, as it does not all need to be specified. In an earlier debate, my noble friend Lord Harper quite correctly referred to the dangers of specificity, which can come whenever one gets any kind of list. If there is no list at all, we all agitate as we do not know what will be in the business plan; if we try to specify too much, we start to create a statutory prohibition—or “inhibition” may be the more correct word—on what is put into the business plan. I have explained that amendment.

Amendment 72 is more interesting, in the sense that—in parentheses—I think the Minister slightly missed the point of my amendment in the last group. I was not saying that there should not be flexibility to provide for activities to be funded from different powers, in reference to Section 6 of the 2005 Act. My point is that the same activity should not be funded from two different statutory powers. There would be a particular problem if that were to occur.

Section 6 of the 2005 Act is very broad:

“The Secretary of State may provide, or agree to provide, financial assistance to any person … for the purpose of securing the provision, improvement or development of railway services or railway assets; or … for any other purpose relating to a railway or to railway services”.


While removing part of Section 6, the Government have kept the wider meaning of railway from this section, which is a pretty broad-based power.

It is interesting to contrast that power in the 2005 Act with paragraph 6 of Schedule 2 to this Bill. The power to provide financial assistance is

“for the purpose of activities … carried on in exercise of Great British Railways’ function under section 3(1)(a)”.

We recall that Clause 3(1)(a) is on the provision of infrastructure. Paragraph (b) is on the provision of railway passenger services and (c) is on determining fares, but I think we can probably ignore that, since the financial assistance is not to provide the fares but to determine them. However, I was quite interested because paragraph (f), on research and development and innovation, was also excluded.

This is a probing amendment, but I want to be clear: is it the Government’s intention with this Bill to provide financial assistance only for infrastructure and that there will be no financial assistance for the provision of passenger railway services and no money for research, development and innovation? Will all that be funded by the fare structure? The Government have given themselves a power in the Bill, through regulation, to add additional purposes for which financial assistance could be provided but, at the moment, it is just for infrastructure. If, at the moment, money needs to be provided to GBR for the provision of railway passenger services, that would have to come from the 2005 Act. I am just trying to follow the money. Where will it come from? If the Minister can tell us that it is only for infrastructure, I will stand down. At the very least, a specific power for the Government to support GBR for research, development and innovation is a power that we ought to retain.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

In response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about the subsidy, the consequence of what he is suggesting could happen is that GBR could subsidise a passenger service that was on the same route as, and in competition with, a private sector operator. To me, that would be quite difficult.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I am not sure if that is a question to me, but let us assume it is. I am not sure that I am saying that. I am saying that, as things stand under this Bill, the Secretary of State is not providing money to GBR for the purpose of providing railway passenger services. The Secretary of State has the power to do it under the 2005 Act. Nothing I am saying determines how that money is to be used.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right, actually: I am beginning to confuse myself about this. There is a danger of getting into too great a specificity. He is right that the statement of objectives will include specific standards, but that translates into the business plan.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, referring to the discussion we have had on KPIs, it occurs to me that there needs to be some differentiation between the list—whether it is the list produced by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, the list in the Bill or another one—of issues which are basically in the total control of Great British Railways and those which are not. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, mentioned freight. Freight is not in the control of GBR, in respect of how many trains run and how much money GBR makes from them directly. Of course it can fiddle around with the access, the signalling and everything else, but it is dependent upon many other people delivering the KPI, which I think is supposed to be the KPI of Great British Railways. It would be interesting to hear from my noble friend how the two different criteria are set when coming up with the calculation of who does the KPI and what it covers.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My noble friend is right that some of these KPIs relate to wider economic circumstances than the railway currently has, but we discussed on the first day in Committee the fact that the need for a long-term freight target is so that GBR focuses on its own part in growing freight. Clearly, it is much subject to what shippers want to send, how they want to send it, where they want to send it and so forth, but I do not see any conflict in GBR having a long-term freight target. It may have to take different action if the economy or the things which are transported by rail change over time. There has been no greater case of that than the case of coal and steel, which were once a significant part of railway freight but which today are virtually nothing. On the other hand, intermodal traffic and construction materials have vastly increased, and there is no doubt in my mind that the railway could contribute more than perhaps it has done in the recent past to growing those particular categories if it were minded to do so, and the freight target is designed to make it think about how it could do it.

I do not see any contradiction in that; it will be like running any other business. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to his experience at Transport for London and it is, of course, exactly the same. It is a large organisation which is contributing to, but to some extent dependent on, the economy of London; that will be true of the railways as a whole. I agree with noble Lords that there should be KPIs for GBR, and it should be held to account for meeting them. The reason we are discussing these now is because there is no doubt that, in the end, they should be in its business plan, set next to the costs that they incur and the revenue it will derive from them.

I should go back to what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said. Paragraph 5(1) of Schedule 2 says that GBR must keep the business plan up to date. We are pretty clear that that means annually; it could be more often if circumstances change. It is not unknown for businesses of this scale to have to change their business plan if the economic circumstances dictate, but I think annual is reasonable. I would not expect the Secretary of State or the board of GBR to tolerate any circumstances where it did not propose an annual business plan.

If I may, I will try to find my place regarding Amendment 66. I am glad that the noble Lord agrees that GBR’s business plan is where its KPIs should sit. However, these need to evolve over time while, by contrast, GBR’s duties are unchanging—a core list of ambitions guiding GBR over the next decades. While GBR’s business plan is where it will show both how it will discharge its duties and set out its KPIs, there is an important distinction between them. Duties and KPIs are not the same thing. KPIs need to be driven by the specific, often numerical, outcomes sought by the Government, whereas duties are behavioural expectations. Some of the duties would be impractical to even turn into measurable KPIs. How would GBR measure whether it has provided businesses with certainty or acted in the public interest? I believe it is right that the two should not be statutorily linked.

Amendment 87 proposes action about the chief executive. I hope the noble Lord understands that, primarily, the powers of the Secretary of State rest with the right, in the end, to dismiss the chair if that chair fails to do the job that the Secretary of State expects of the chair and the board. That might well be the case if the Secretary of State believed that the chair failed to challenge the executive and chief executive effectively. The Secretary of State will also have the right, as we discussed this afternoon, to issue legally binding directions to GBR, and those could be where remedial action is required. The Secretary of State could also remove accounting officer status from the CEO, effectively taking financial management of the company into the department.

Railways Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Grand Committee

Finally, whatever he says about the ownership piece, it would be helpful to know how he envisages GBR operating with the private sector on some of those non-core rail operation activities. I hope he can help the Committee with that when he responds.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I want briefly to reflect on the various amendments that noble Lords have put forward so far this afternoon. Basically, it makes me feel very concerned, because we are lacking information, as the noble Lord said on Amendment 8 but also on many of the other ones, and we do not know what is going to happen. We do not really know who will be running infrastructure or some of the train operators and, if we ever end up with any private sector involvement, I go back to what I experienced when I was on the kind of supervisory board of Railtrack a long time ago. We used to meet every three months with the board, and you could just see that the debt that Railtrack was incurring was getting bigger and bigger. In the end, I said to the chairman, “How long are the Government going to allow you to continue with this debt?” It seemed to increase by 10% or 15% every time we had a meeting. The chairman’s response was, “Well, don’t worry, I had a meeting with the Secretary of State”—none of the former Secretaries of State are here today, so I think I am safe to say this—“and he said it will be all right”. We had a nice meal and it was fine. But the sad thing was that, within a week, not only had he got the sack, but Network Rail was closed down, because the so-called shareholders did not know what they were doing. It was yet one of the many disasters that the infrastructure manager has probably suffered over the last 30 or 40 years.

It would help me and maybe other colleagues to think of some useful criteria as to whether we think all these different elements that we will be discussing in the next seven days will be beneficial or not. What I found rather interesting was a part of a speech by the Secretary of State, Heidi Alexander, on what she saw coming from the nationalisation plan. She that it,

“requires a high performing railway to … support the creation of new jobs and new homes … improve reliability, generate better usage of our trains and reduce public subsidy”.

We can spend a lot of time talking about whether this has happened in the last year or two. If it has not, what has gone wrong? It is much too soon to see what is changing. We should in mind that, in the last three or four years, most of the passenger operators have been effectively controlled by the Department for Transport, even though they are in theory in the private sector. Network Rail, of course, is funded by the Department for Transport anyway. This is something that we need to look at, in going through all the amendments and seeing whether they will meet any of those criteria. Maybe my noble friend, when he responds, will be able to say, “I have got it completely wrong and it is all going to happen anyway”. I look forward to his comments.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and his officials for numerous meetings with me and many of my colleagues over the last few months; they have been very helpful for discussing how we can improve the Bill before us.

The dislike for this Bill was very apparent in the opening words from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. The previous Government could have implemented the concession model that has been mentioned several times—it would be our preferred option—but they did not. The picture that we had painted by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, of the privatised railway does not reflect many passengers’ experience in recent years. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Harper, that I think the service started to decline before the pandemic, but the pandemic accelerated the fact that this model was not working.

The Government have a mandate for public ownership. In fact, two years ago, we debated the Act on it. I hope that we can focus in these seven days on getting the structure right and delivering for passengers, rather than revisiting the ideology behind what the Government are doing.

The amendments in this group are quite technical in some ways, and they are about the structure rather than focused on passengers. But it is important that we hear from the Government exactly why they have chosen the model that they have. The noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Lansley, in their amendments are seeking some clarity on the exact set up of Great British Railways and why this model has been chosen. It is really important to get some clarity over the status of Great British Railways’ companies, set out very clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, in some of those examples. How will these partnerships work in practice? There is also the point around civil servants and their role. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, wants clarity on the subsidiaries of Great British Railways and their potential future ownership. Whatever happens in this Bill, there will still be a huge amount of private sector involvement, because the rolling stock will still be owned by private companies and there is no plan to change that. Even if everything else is fully publicly owned, there will still be a huge amount of private sector involvement through the rolling stock.

There are many ways that you could look at structuring Great British Railways. One could have been a co-operative model. An understanding from the Minister on why this was felt to be the best way to deliver the quality of the railway service that we all want to see would be helpful. I look forward to the Minister’s response and clarification on these structural amendments.

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[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 305 in this group. Noble Lords may think that Amendment 305 is a long way away from where we started in this group, but it is here. My amendment refers to Clause 87, which provides for a charge for removing road vehicles from railway property—let us call it that before going into too much detail. It seemed to me that, if the Government thought this was a good idea, they should extend it to dealing financially with the very many lorries these days which hit bridges and cause endless delays not just to road traffic but to passengers and freight.

Network Rail’s website on what it calls “bridge bashing” says that, in the year from April 2024 to March 2025, there were 1,666 bridge strikes. Over five years, there were 8,300. Of course, some bridges get it all the time and others do not. Network Rail says that it costs it £23 million to repair every year. That seems quite cheap, but that is not really the point. Who pays? One other statistic is that it causes the equivalent of 120 days’ delay for rail passengers or freight.

It occurs to me that either the driver or owner of the lorry or truck—it is usually a truck or bus—should be required to fund not just the cost of remedial work but some compensation for delay to the rail and road traffic. This has been going on for years, and I suppose I and many others have been saying to Network Rail that it has to do something about this. It is putting up all kinds of barriers, warning signs and everything, and it is doing a great job of it.

However, I think this amendment would be very helpful. The Government want to charge people for parking on railway property. I think it says in the Bill that a road vehicle includes a “bicycle or other conveyance”. If they are even going to charge me for parking my bicycle at the station, they can surely charge the lorries or the buses which do a great deal of damage. My noble friend will probably say that the wording in my amendment needs improvement, and I am very happy to look at improving it, but it seems to me that something needs to be done to make the status of the relationship between road vehicles and trains a bit more equitable.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for that. I am at least clear about this. The functions are more like powers; the duties are the things that GBR must do when doing the functions, but it is not limited to those general functions. Indeed, we have already discussed quite extensively what it might do, for example, in property development and with third parties, which, because it is a Companies Act company, it can do. I think that is reasonably clear. I would be happy to discuss this with the noble Lord in more detail, because I think we are getting tied up in nomenclature. I think it is reasonably clear what GBR’s functions are, which are described in Clause 3; it describes running the railways. It is also clear that, in the process of running the railway and because of its activity, it is able to do a number of other things.

Let me carry on to Amendment 12, if I may. Amendment 12 would require GBR’s functions to facilitate the provision and use of railway services to be carried out in a fair and non-discriminatory manner. I absolutely agree that GBR should act fairly; however, the duties in the Bill already require GBR to act in the interest of the public, taxpayers, passengers and freight customers. GBR will act fairly in accordance with its duties, not only when exercising this function but across the full range of its statutory functions. We will no doubt discuss this more when we discuss ticket retailing and access. For now, suffice it to say, there are already protections in the Bill—and indeed in wider statutes, such as public law principles and the Competition Act, which applies in full to Great British Railways—that will require GBR to act in a manner that is fair, non-discriminatory and not anti-competitive. This additional requirement would duplicate only the Competition Act requirements, adding uncertainty and administrative burden without increasing protection for non-GBR operators.

Amendments 13 and 14 relate to the publishing of advice and standards for the railways. I thank the noble Lord for this probing amendment, and I reassure him that the ORR is the sole safety regulator for the railway. The Bill does not transfer the ORR’s safety regulatory functions to GBR, nor does it change the current railway safety regime at all. The ORR will continue to exercise its independent safety, regulatory and enforcement functions, including its ability to ensure that GBR and other operators comply fully with all safety legislation requirements.

Comparatively, GBR’s function to publish standards is a reference to technical standards, which GBR would publish and share with industry as a method of promoting best practice. This is similar to today; at present, Network Rail and the train operating companies develop and publish technical standards covering many aspects of their operation. These standards include operation and maintenance protocols, design specifications and engineering guidelines. This does not in any way prevent it adhering to the ORR’s safety regime, which it is required by law to comply with. This also does not give GBR any remit over safety regulation. The standards are non-binding and designed simply to support shared learning across the industry.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend is talking about standards created by GBR. Can he explain the relationship between what GBR does and the Rail Safety and Standards Board?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. I think I can. The RSSB, the Rail Safety and Standards Board, creates standards applicable across the railway generally on some subjects, whereas there are a number of more technical standards—for example, for pieces of machinery, trains and railway infrastructure—which GBR, as a successor to Network Rail, would publish. These are not subject to discussion at the RSSB. Train operating companies also do this with specific fleets of trains, so I think there is a difference. My noble friend is right to draw attention to the RSSB’s function to do that as well, but that does not exclude the current activities of Network Rail and train operating companies, which will translate into Great British Railways.

These standards include operation and maintenance protocols, design specifications and engineering guidelines. This does not in any way prevent it adhering to the ORR safety regime, which it is required by law to comply with. It also does not give GBR any remit over safety regulation. The standards are non-binding and designed simply to support shared learning across the industry.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

That just begs the question of why in Clause 70—perhaps we can discuss it before we arrive at that point—Great British Railways has been taken out of the definition of being an infrastructure manager for the purposes of access rights under the 2000 regulations.

While I have the Committee’s attention for a moment, my noble friend was asking what functions Great British Railways can undertake. The clause makes it clear that the statutory functions are distinct from those things that Great British Railways can do as a company. Some of the things that we are discussing, such as property development, are things that it is doing as a company. However, we have to bear in mind, and the Minister will tell me if I am wrong about this, that we go on to hear about the Secretary of State giving directions and guidance to Great British Railways. That is in relation to its statutory functions, so, by definition, it will not extend to the actions that GBR undertakes as a company. We need to be aware that there is that territory called being a company, which is outside the scope of the Secretary of State’s directions and guidance.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

It is not very well drafted at all, is it?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I refute that comment, for the avoidance of doubt and for the record.

The noble Lord is correct. It is an important distinction. As I said, let me meet him on that. He referred to Clause 70. I am not equipped to go into that just now, as he will appreciate, so I will talk to him further about it.

Amendment 18 removes the delegated power to add to the list of functions for GBR. While the functions listed in Clause 3 cover the breadth of activities that we expect GBR to undertake as the directing mind for the railways, it is sensible to provide the flexibility to add functions should the railways change significantly enough to warrant a new function being added—for example, due to technological development, such as in the artificial intelligence space.

This power is not expected to be used frequently, if at all, but it future-proofs the Bill in the event that new activities need to be brought within the scope of the functions. Bringing an activity within the functions in the Bill has several benefits, including that the function then becomes subject to GBR’s duties and ORR’s monitoring. This legislation is expected to govern the railways for a long time, as the 1993 Act did, so this is a responsible and sensible power. This power was also reviewed by the Delegated Powers Committee, which deemed it acceptable and did not draw it to the attention of the House in its report on the Bill—I welcome the report and look forward to responding to it formally in due course. The power cannot be used to change or remove functions and is subject to the affirmative resolution. It is also not unprecedented: the National Health Service Act 2006 allows functions to be added to special health authorities via regulations. I therefore hope that the noble Lord will feel able not to press this amendment.

Amendments 20 and 110 from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, relate to passenger growth. I very much agree with her that growing passenger numbers on the railways is vital. It supports economic growth, jobs and homes, encourages modal shift and can reduce the level of taxpayer subsidy required for the railways. However, GBR’s general duties in Clause 18 already include a duty to promote not only the interests of passengers but potential passengers. This already requires GBR to consider how best to encourage new users on to the railways. GBR’s business plan will also reflect the Government’s ambitions for passenger growth, including measurable outcomes against which GBR can be held to account.

GBR’s other duties, including promoting high performance, such as reliability and punctuality, will also contribute to making the railways more appealing to passengers. Transport Focus recently found reliability to be the single most important issue for passengers. GBR will be able to improve reliability by making better, whole-system decisions on issues such as the choreography of maintenance works.

As a commercially minded organisation, GBR will also be naturally incentivised to attract more people to travel by rail, because increasing passenger numbers will increase its own revenue. By contrast, there is no intrinsic motivation for GBR to increase rail freight when there is limited network capacity and freight services are in the clear minority of services. That is why the Bill already includes a freight duty and a freight target, to ensure that freight is given equal weight to passengers in a system where passengers may have naturally taken priority otherwise. A stronger or additional passenger equivalent duty or target could actually undermine our ambitions on freight. I therefore hope that the noble Baroness will agree that that would not be the right outcome.

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[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in day one of Committee. I declare my technology interests, as set out in the register, as adviser to the Crown Estate and Simmons and Simmons LLP and as non-executive director of Avalanche Foundation and Avalanche BVI Inc.

What a group to be part of. For anybody who thought that competition is not a good idea, the arrival of a second ex-Secretary of State for Transport has demonstrated clearly that competition is the way forward, as I am sure we will see in a moment when I sit down. Fundamentally, what is there left for me to say after my noble friend Lady Harding’s forensic introduction, which took apart all of the reasons for the current construction of these sections in the Bill, followed by my noble friend Lord Young’s intervention?

In many ways, my noble friend Lord Young inadvertently, but highly accurately, summed this up when he said “harm” rather than “arm”, because that is where we are at. He looked forward into the future and into, as he said, how this may develop, but I would go further. There is no crystal ball gazing going on here. This is not a potential, as he set out. This is an inevitability; this will happen.

How can we know this will happen? Because it has already happened in other departments in very recent history. We do not need to go into the details but, last year, there was a case in point where, when the growth pressure came along, a particular government department saw a piece of work it was involved in where, for years, it had worked collaboratively with the private sector to build particular solutions, but then it saw that there was a potential wedge that it could throw into the pot to put into its departmental contribution. Suddenly, a screeching change of direction was taken and a monopoly play was deployed. This is inevitable if we progress with the Bill as currently constructed.

What is the Minister’s response? The CMA knows competition—it does it every day—and its submission was conclusive. Why would the Government want to construct something so clearly and monstrously problematic at this stage, which will only cause them pain within such a short space of time, when it is so avoidable, either through functional separation, as I suggested, or through the eminently sensible alternatives offered by my noble friends? Why would the Government choose such a problematic path forward at this stage, when it is more than reasonably foreseeable that the problems will come? In fact, as I said, it is inevitable.

Competition is absolutely critical, and the other element within competition is innovation. This will not lead to optimal innovation. Let us imagine not just the potential plurality of ticket retail sellers but the kind of products that they could bring on stream. We could see tokenised tickets that could transform the passenger experience; they could contain so many details that there would not be a need for passengers to explain, for example, their needs, whatever they may be. They would all be contained in a tokenised ticket. That would be truly transformational, but it would require a level playing field, a crowding in of competition and, through that, a crowding in of innovation.

I move on to my second amendment, going broader and looking at the huge array of data already available to GBR. We have always had a huge volume of data across transport, not least in the railways, and it has never had the opportunity to truly drive the transformation that it could. We have talked tickets, but take the example of the rolling stock itself: imagine what innovation third-party, crowded-in businesses could bring if they had those data at their fingertips. The great news is that neither GBR nor this Committee has to imagine what that innovation could be; all that has to be done is to put those data out there on a level playing field, equally available through the technologies that exist. The innovation, transformation and improvement would simply flow.

For reasons of competition, innovation and taking all the advantage of these new technologies, I constantly mention the problematic nature of the Government flatly refusing to pass a cross-sector and cross-economy AI regulation Bill. We see it here and in the cyber Bill, for those who have been in Committee on that Bill. That could lay out a framework that could work in this rail context as it would in all other sections of our economy and society. If that will not be in place, how will the advantages of these technologies be felt by passengers, rail workers and everybody involved in the GBR entity coming into being? We need to see these changes if we are to feel, and be availed of, that transformational potential and the economic benefits that will flow. The Government would benefit from adopting changes set out in this suite of amendments. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate and I fully support comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, from her experience in telecom. I have suffered a bit myself from them, and what she told the Committee is no surprise.

The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, is also absolutely right that we need a level playing field. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, probably hit the nail on the head when he said that the sooner we do this, the better, so I definitely support his Amendment 48.

It is worth reminding ourselves that there is not just one big private sector retailer and all the ones that retail for the TOCs at the moment, but there are lots of smaller ones as well. The ORR will have to look at making sure that the fair competition between the big ones and the little ones is kept in line with competition policy and that we do not have one of them running away with everything else. It would be no good having one private sector company becoming a private sector monopoly—you might as well have a GBR monopoly—but we do not want monopolies. That is my message.

One noble Lord who spoke was concerned about the workload that may be coming to the ORR. I have had many experiences with the ORR over the years and it tries very hard, but it needs to be prepared for an extension to its scope. However, one thing I know is that it is capable of doing it and will be interested in doing it. I am sure many noble Lords have talked to it in the last few months. I think the ORR is also quite relaxed about the involvement of the CMA, because the CMA needs to be there as well, possibly as a second line of defence. It will just not work unless the level playing fields are separated from the great work that GBR will do in running trains and making sure the infrastructure works and things like that. Having a separation, including the accounts, as some noble Lords have said, is really important. I hope my noble friend will come back with some positive views on competition, and we maybe will even have to have a meeting or two before Report.

[Baroness Leaman (LD)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendments 208 and 339 in my name in this group. I set out the case for automatic Delay Repay at Second Reading, so I will not repeat that ground today save to say that I doubt I am alone in having abandoned a claim because the process took longer than the journey was delayed. Instead, I will use this stage to explain what these two amendments would do.

Amendment 208 would place a duty on GBR and open access operators to pay Delay Repay compensation automatically, wherever they hold enough information to identify that a passenger’s journey was delayed by 15 minutes or more and have the means to pay them. Where an operator does not hold that information, it would still have to take reasonable steps to let the passenger know they are entitled to claim, so the burden of finding out does not fall on the passenger alone. No one would receive less under the automatic route than under operators’ existing schemes, and payment would default to digital means to reflect the way that most fares are already bought and refunded today. None of this asks GBR to invent a new right. It asks operators to use data that they already have to give effect to a right that passengers already have. I am open to a different mechanism if the Minister has one in mind but the underlying case is straightforward. Whether a passenger gets money back that they are owed should not depend on which operator runs their line or on their persistence with a claim form. A right that exists on paper but which is rarely exercised in practice is not really much of a right at all.

My proposed new clause would also leave the Secretary of State flexibility to set timescales, notification methods and exceptions by regulation. Amendment 339 follows from that. As drafted, those regulations would be subject only to the negative procedure, taking effect unless the House objected. Amendment 339 would instead require debate and approval by both Houses under the affirmative procedure. Given how much of this scheme’s substance would sit in regulations rather than in the Bill, Parliament should scrutinise and approve them properly, not simply have the chance to object afterwards.

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[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for putting down these two amendments. I too have had many representations from all kinds of people and companies who already operate trains or would like to. We are not talking about the branch lines, which are on the whole private and are not covered here anyway; there are an awful lot of what some people might call excursion trains, dining trains or whatever—there is the Jacobite train going to Mallaig which, I am told, is highly successful—as well as freight, which all need access to the network. Even at the moment, there are stories of people applying to get on the network, for a pass somewhere, to be told that it is already full; then they go back to what is Network Rail at the moment and say, “Well, if you did this and that, you could get an extra train or two on”. It also covers the issue of the risks and the penalties if something goes wrong, because Network Rail at the moment will think, “We do not want this because it could muck up the service and cause delays elsewhere”.

On having the independent ORR being what you might call an appeal body, I do not look upon it as a secondary directing mind, because the first directing mind is quite often a monopoly. We spent a lot of time this afternoon talking about monopolies and how we do not want them, and the Minister said he does not like monopolies either. This kind of catch-all amendment covering all the different types of train that might want to use the network, and with an appeal body in the ORR, would be a very sensible solution. I fully support it.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I want to talk to my Amendment 22 in this group. Before I do that, I might just say so to my noble friend that I see the point he is driving at with Amendment 21, but I think it is a little more complicated. It seems to me that this is about the circumstances that apply where the Scottish or Welsh Ministers wish to use Great British Railways or a company jointly owned by themselves and Great British Railways. In effect, they are not subsidiaries of Great British Railways: we can already see in the Bill this distinction between GBR companies and a company that is jointly owned by Scottish and Welsh Ministers and GBR.

They can use that to provide services but, as far as I can see, they are not prevented from doing the following. If you look at subsequent clauses, we have seen the whole process of designation of passenger services, which those of us who did the public ownership Bill will remember. They have to designate passenger services with a public sector company, but the definition of a public sector company in a later clause is not the same. It could be a company wholly owned by Scottish Ministers or by Welsh Ministers; they are not required to use Great British Railways. They could even do the same thing that the Secretary of State can, which is exempt services from designation, and then do the same as the Secretary of State does with TfL but in Glasgow, Cardiff and so on. So I think it is a little more complicated.

In particular, I think putting “other body corporate” in here is not necessary. More to the point, if I may say so to my noble friend, is to re-enter the question of the scope of who might provide designated services, which I know he will do with further amendments at a later stage.

Amendment 22, on my part, is just to see whether there is really a problem. At the point at which Scottish and Welsh Ministers look to change arrangements that they have made with Great British Railways to provide some services, they are required to consult with the Secretary of State and Great British Railways. However, those arrangements will necessarily lead to issues that need to be governed by the regulatory functions of the Office of Rail and Road and relate to the licensing of those operators through the ORR. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to require that Scottish and Welsh Ministers, at the point of making or changing those arrangements, should also consult the Office of Rail and Road in order to ensure that there is not a difficulty associated with what they are asking GBR to do on their behalf. The purpose of Amendment 22 is to put in that consultation with the ORR.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, these are interesting amendments. I have had several representations from the rail sector in Wales and Scotland, and they are clearly quite concerned.

The first question I probably need answering is on who will be owning and operating the infrastructure in Wales and Scotland. At the moment, in Scotland, it is done by Transport Scotland, and in Wales, I cannot remember but think it is different. Of course, both those organisations may, and do, operate passenger train services. Given the scope of the Bill, which we have been discussing at length today, will Transport Scotland and the Welsh Assembly be able to let their own contracts with GBR or an independent operator to run trains? Who will be responsible for managing the infrastructure if it goes wrong or needs maintenance, and for the issue in the amendment, which is about co-ordinating with the rest of the UK? To me, it is not clear at the moment, and I would be grateful if my noble friend could clarify. I am probably being stupid, but there we are.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I just want to speak briefly about three groups of amendments within this group. Amendment 145 in the name of my noble friend Lord Moylan has quite a lot to recommend it. The Bill, as set out, sensibly says that the UK Government and the Scottish Government should have a memorandum of understanding about how cross-border rail services should work. That is very sensible, but it seems to me that you would want to have the documents published at the same time; you want them on the same timeline because you want a GB rail strategy to be produced, given the way the rail network works. The whole point about GBR bringing together track and train and having some consistency means it seems very sensible that, if you are to have this memorandum of understanding between UK Ministers and Scottish and Welsh Ministers, you want them on the same timeline. Then what you publish is, in effect, a GB rail strategy with a level of consistency.

Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Berkeley]

69A: After Clause 9, insert the following new Clause—
“Report: access to the EGNOSWithin three months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must publish a report setting out— (a) plans to improve regulatory capability for Instrument Flight Procedures including UK access to the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), and(b) a timeline for switching on the EGNOS in the UK by the end of 2026.”

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for this manuscript amendment; something went wrong with the Public Bill Office. I shall be very brief at this time of night. I just want to emphasise that we have been talking about general aviation for much of the day. There have been some really useful comments from the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, my noble friend Lord Barber and the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, and some good answers from the Minister, for which I am very grateful. However, general aviation still needs one thing that has not been mentioned so far: the global navigation satellite system, which enables people to train and do whatever they need to do in places of bad visibility.

My reason for tabling this amendment was that I received, at the end of last week, an interesting paper from the Royal Aeronautical Society called GNSS Services Supporting Civil Aviation in the UK. It is eight pages long—noble Lords will be glad that I am not going to read it all out. It gives the history of the GNSS from when we left Europe, and therefore left EGNOS, to where we are now.

Basically, it says that since then the Cabinet Office and a lot of other departments have been looking at alternative systems to EGNOS, one of which was Inmarsat, which I have visited. The House of Commons Select Committee took evidence on the UK space strategy and UK satellite infrastructure. It said:

“We urge the government to publish a National PNT Strategy and set out what ground and space-based components will be used”.


Nothing much seems to have happened, and the conclusion of this paper is that we have lost 15 years’ development by not going ahead with EGNOS.

EGNOS is still there. I am told that it can be reinstated very cheaply—somewhere between £30 million and £40 million—whereas the alternative, according to this paper, could be somewhere between seven and 10 years away. We really need this for training pilots and other people involved in navigating when the visibility is bad. It is not just for people having joy rides; it is for business, passengers and training, so why not do it? That is why I put this amendment down, in the unlikely hope that my noble friend the Minister will say yes. I hope it gives food for thought and I shall send him this paper so that he can study it in more detail. I beg to move.

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, co-signed by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. We have had discussions on this over the last couple of years.

When I was a member of the European Parliament, I was a rapporteur on GNSS—global navigation satellite systems. That was key when we were looking at how we were covering airspace and airports, et cetera. Switching off EGNOS when we left the European Union affected somewhere in the region of 27 airfields around the United Kingdom, including areas such as the Highlands and Islands, and the Scilly Isles, not just where fixed-wing aircraft go but where helicopters fly in. Therefore, it has reduced the landing limits—for landing and take-off—and the operational aspect, not just for passengers but when they are taking in goods or freight. It is an extremely important issue.

Under the last Government and this one, we have not got very far on this. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, that we need to seriously look at this and reintroduce something like EGNOS, because it is important for the United Kingdom. To have done this and then just left it has not been helpful at all. I certainly support what the noble Lord said and I hope that the Minister will seriously look at this again, because we need to reinstate this system.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, for this amendment. The Government are actively reviewing the case for access to the European geostationary navigation overlay service, or EGNOS. This includes engagement with organisations that have been affected by the loss of the service, as well as those who could benefit from it in the future. I noted in Committee the importance of the service to connectivity; for example, for outlying islands and throughout all seasons of the year.

The output of the current work is expected later this year, but any move to rejoin EGNOS would in any case require agreement with the European Union. It would not be appropriate to pre-empt that review by accepting this amendment. For these reasons, I am unable to accept it. I hope that my noble friend will withdraw it.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for that short debate and for my noble friend’s response. I did not expect anything else, but he will get a copy of this paper and I hope—indeed, I am sure—that he will be true to his word and follow it through and that we will have one or two more debates on it in the future.

Amendment 69A withdrawn.

Railways Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and hear his comments about, in particular, training on the railways, which, incidentally, has been, I think, modernised dramatically by HS2. But that is a separate issue.

I shall say a few words today questioning the point of this Bill. That may seem a bit dramatic, but I have been working on the railways for nearly 50 years, since I was building the Channel Tunnel, and I have noticed that the railway has effectively been controlled by the Government for at least 20 years, as many noble Lords have said, on timetabling, charges, ticketing, investment in the track and the rolling stock for many trains. They may have said that it is in the private sector, but in fact it is controlled behind the scenes in many instances, so I wonder whether we should be talking about ownership or control. We have control at the moment, and listening to many noble Lords speaking this evening, it occurred to me that most of the changes that they quite rightly recommend could be done without primary legislation.

I spent several decades, if not more, working in the rail freight industry, in the European industry more lately and in ALLRAIL, which is an association of companies across Europe which believe in open access and competition in passenger services. I suppose I can claim some small input into the European Commission bringing liberalisation to the continent after it was seen by me in those days, and I still think it is, as an important element here. We were telling our friends on the continent, “Why don't you follow the Brits?”. Now it is the other way round, but we will see how that goes.

I do not know why the Government are trying to go the opposite way. In my book, in many instances, they are trying to stifle competition. Many noble Lords have talked about competition. It is an important issue, so I have questions for the Minister, and many more, I expect. Is GBR going to save money by bringing efficiencies beyond what we have at the moment, all effectively government controlled? Many noble Lords have said what is wrong with the railway, but it is already government controlled.

Will GBR bring an increase in passenger numbers and freight volumes? I know the Minister says it will, but where is the evidence? On many routes, open access operators have delivered significant passenger growth. It does not happen on all lines, where the operators have tried, failed and stopped because there was not enough revenue. I got the impression that part of the content of the Bill is to prevent open access passenger and freight operators and make life as difficult as possible.

The Bill appears to me to be an attempt by the Government to implement what is, frankly, a dogma of nationalisation without looking at the alternatives. There are many alternatives, such as open access with a proper regulator. We have a good regulator at the moment, but he is going to have his hands tied behind his back if we are not careful in the Bill. He is not able to regulate access to the tracks, because he cannot decide who gets the next access to the tracks or whether it is passenger or freight because that is done by GBR, which is also going to be the operator of the trains. It seems to me that, if we are not careful—obviously, we need to dig into this a bit more in later stages of this Bill—the extent of the monopoly being created by GBR should probably be referred to the CMA. But I suspect that is not for today.

There is also a lot of criticism about Network Rail—or not, since many of the comments made by noble Lords refer to Network Rail rather than any of the train operators. Will the Minister say what evidence there is that Network Rail’s performance will improve? Last week’s report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on Network Rail’s performance on the Northern Powerhouse Rail project is hardly reassuring. Northern Powerhouse Rail is a much smaller version of HS2, which we have talked about ad nauseam. It is a very important project, and my noble friend the Minister has spoken about it in your Lordships’ House on many occasions. The PAC is

“not confident the Department for Transport … has learned all the lessons from past failures”

in its management of other rail projects. It carries on to say that there are clear risks that the full programme and its benefits cannot be delivered within the £45 billion funding cap. HS2 was a disaster, and we are all hoping that Northern Powerhouse Rail will be done properly, but the PAC’s conclusions are worrying.

Another couple of issues are the charging and compensation scheme in the Bill, which seems to suggest that operators, and therefore passengers, are not compensated for delays outside their control, which might be weather or whatever. They are compensated at the moment. Is that a good thing to change? We can debate that.

So we have a lot of work to do to talk about the future of the competition issues and the Rail Regulator. The concluding aim must be that GBR should act fairly and non-discriminatorily. Network access should remain impartial and independently challengeable—and I mean independently. Capacity should not be reserved indefinitely for unspecified future GBR services. Charging should be neutral and predictable. Existing rights should be protected. Public money should be subject to genuine value-for-money tests. We have a lot to debate, but I hope that my noble friend will be able to convince your Lordships’ House that the Bill is necessary and that most of the issues raised by noble Lords cannot be addressed without legislation.

HS2 Ltd: Consultants

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Berkeley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government how much HS2 Limited paid consultants in the last year; and on which aspects of the project they worked.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

My Lords, HS2 Ltd spent £77.8 million on consultancy in 2025-2026. This targeted advice was used to support the fundamental reset and its scope and cost. This is a significant undertaking in terms of complexity, pace and scale, and could not all be done in-house. Under new leadership, HS2 Ltd is being transformed into a simplified, more cost-effective company, with more than 300 back-office roles already removed and an absolute focus on delivery.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I express my condolences to the family of the train driver who died in the accident last Friday, and, of course, to the relatives of those who were injured. I am not going to say any more, because that is for another day.

I am grateful to my noble friend for his Answer, but my figure for how much the Government have spent on consultants is £22 million, with a further £18 million to £19 million over the next 12 months. I have to ask my noble friend, what are they doing for their money? They are on a cost-plus contract, and the design has long since been since been finalised. What are they getting for their money apart from wasting taxpayers’ money?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I should say from this Dispatch Box that the Government, too, are immensely saddened by the events in Bedford last Friday. Our sympathies are wholly with the relatives of the deceased driver and all those affected by the accident. The Secretary of State for Transport will be making a Statement later in the other place.

In respect of the spend on consultants, the spend in the 2025-26 financial year is for a fundamentally different purpose than any money previously spent on consultancy for HS2. The company was not in control of the contracts it had let or of what work had been done. The effort to find out what work had been done for the money that has been spent—roughly two-thirds of the original budget has been spent and only one-third of the work has been done—is testimony to the way in which the project was managed. Getting control of it means finding out what was done, and that is what this money has been spent on.

Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th June 2026 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Berkeley]

65B: After Clause 6, insert the following new Clause—
“Air ambulance operations: regulations(1) The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision for the purpose of supporting the operation of air ambulance services in civil aviation.(2) Regulations under this section may, in particular, make provision about—(a) access to airport and aerodrome facilities;(b) access to airspace and air navigation services;(c) the treatment of air ambulance operations in aviation planning and operational decisions.(3) Before making regulations under this section, the Secretary of State must consult the CAA, air ambulance operators, airport operators and such other persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.(4) Regulations under this section are to be made by statutory instrument.(5) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would allow the Secretary of State to make regulations supporting the operation of air ambulance services in civil aviation.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to these amendments today. Before speaking to the individual amendments, I would like to reflect on how great it has been to hear so many comments about general aviation, which tends to get left out on occasions. All my amendments in this group apply primarily to general aviation.

Amendment 65B is designed to give encouragement and support to the air ambulance team, which does an enormous amount of good work not only in places such as Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly but all over the country—and not just over the sea.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, this grouping covers resilience, infrastructure and connectivity. I begin by addressing my noble friend Lord Berkeley’s Amendment 65B. I listened carefully to the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, on this subject. The Government support the life-saving work of air ambulances and the department, alongside the Civil Aviation Authority, regularly engages with air ambulance charities to understand their unique needs. Air ambulances already operate under a special regime from the Civil Aviation Authority that allows them privileged access to airspace and ensures that they can land wherever they need to in order to carry out their life-saving work. If my noble friend or the operators have any concerns about how this is working, the Minister for Aviation in the other place would be more than happy to hear them and deal with them. I hope that reassures my noble friend that his amendment is not needed.

On my noble friend’s Amendment 65B, the Government recognise the importance of satellite navigation services to support operations in all weather conditions. As my noble friend notes from his observation of the Answer to a Written Question in the other place, the Government are actively reviewing the viability of these services, including our access to the European geostationary navigation overlay service, or EGNOS, and the output from that is expected later this year, as he said. I will not pre-empt that review by accepting this amendment. I have not personally spoken to Elon Musk on this, or indeed any other subject, but I am sure that the Government are considering the full range of possibilities to do what EGNOS delivered in the past. I hope my noble friend understands that I cannot pre-empt the outcome of that review.

Finally, I thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley for his amendment relating to an airfield advisory team. The CAA carries out extensive engagement with aerodrome operators and values the insights and feedback that they provide, which play an important part in informing policy development in this area. At present, there is no clearly established rationale for creating a statutory panel for this group of stakeholders, particularly when similar arrangements are not in place for other stakeholder groups. Introducing such a panel could risk creating an imbalance by conferring a status on one group over others. But, having noted the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Harper, I will take the issue away and inquire further about this team and the reasons for its disbandment. I hope that my noble friend will not press his amendment.

I should add clarity to my comments in Committee on Tuesday, to which my noble friend referred. I said this in my speech:

“Requiring training would not be appropriate for all airfields”.—[Official Report, 16/6/26; col. GC 114.]


I then gave some different reasons, which my noble friend quoted, for why training might not be possible at some airports. It was certainly not intended to suggest that no airfields would be suitable for training, as that would be unacceptable. I hope that that makes things clear.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this short debate. I am very grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his answers, which I shall read carefully. I still think that it would be useful if we could have a quick meeting with him before the next stage, particularly to be told a bit more about what is happening on EGNOS and whether Mr Musk’s alternative is a sensible one. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 65B withdrawn.

Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I start with an apology. I could not be here for Second Reading because I was gale-bound on the Isles of Scilly due to the failure of the air services. Therefore, it seems an appropriate time to look at the whole subject of general aviation, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, to see what can be done. I have been lobbying hard for improved navigation and improved services to the Isles of Scilly, where I live most of the time, for about 10 years; I shall come to that in later amendments. It is 10 years since we left Europe with Brexit and cancelled our membership of EGNOS, which I shall come to later.

It is important that general aviation is included in the Bill, and I support much of what the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Moylan, have said. I am not sure about the European Union amendment, but we will come on to that later. It is worth reminding ourselves that the long title of this Bill says that it is to:

“Make provision for the protection of purchasers and users of air transport and airport services”,


and it then mentions

“air traffic and air navigation services”,

all of which are part of general aviation, just as much as they are part of the rest of the aviation world. It is right to have something at the start of the Bill which demonstrates that this is an important subject which needs full consideration.

Much of what is in the Bill is really good, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, all the issues relating to general aviation need discussing, such as training, access to small airfields—on the islands or different parts of the country—and how things compare with what has been going on in Europe. I support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and certainly part of the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and look forward to discussing these issues more in subsequent amendments.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest, as set out in the register, as non-executive chair of RVL Aviation. I strongly support the purpose clause which my noble friend Lord Moylan has set out because I think most of the discussion on the other amendments will look at passengers by talking about airlines and concentrating on the experience of passengers. I draw attention to the fact that his Amendment 1 also talks about the international competitiveness of the sector, economic growth and the rights of those who purchase air transport services. My understanding of his amendment and of Clause 1 is that the definition of air transport services is not just passengers but those people who purchase freight and cargo services. I see the Minister is nodding assent.

That is important because it is critical to the growth of the economy. Air freight accounts for over 40% of non-EU trade by value, even though it is only about 1% of freight by volume. That is incredibly important to the overall economy, especially for some sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and high-end manufacturing, where we are particularly competitive, and it contributes to our balance of payments. An amendment that means that Ministers, when making regulations, have to ensure that our international trade remains competitive would be extremely valuable.

That is important, because the conversation about rights and the regulatory burden on airlines is often had while not thinking about the cost of those regulations. It does not mean that you do not make regulations if they have a cost; it just means that when you think about regulating, you have to think about the cost, look at the benefit and balance those two things. You also have to look at them cumulatively. My noble friend Lord Moylan touched on that when he talked about the Government’s target to reduce the cost of administrative burdens by 25% over this Parliament.

It is worth putting on the record—this is why the competitiveness of the sector is important—that overall, in 2024, European airlines had a net profit margin of around 3.9%. They are also expected, once all the results are in, to have had a net profit margin of around 4.4% in 2025, with a profit per passenger of around $8 or $9. I accept that that varies hugely by carrier, but it means that we have to think carefully about the costs that we load on to the industry so that we ensure that it remains competitive for both freight and passengers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, very briefly, I support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. I think he will agree that much of what he said—and it was reflected as well in the comments of many of my noble friends—came from the reaction that we both had from the All-Party Group on Aviation. It is a bit of a disaster situation. That group criticised the CAA strongly, not only on training—and everything else that noble Lords have talked about—but on the exam syllabus. The incident training syllabus has apparently not been upgraded for 20 years. This is in spite of examiners and other people asking the CAA to incorporate the charges, to no avail. My plea to my noble friend the Minister tonight is for him to put a bomb under the CAA and convert it into a new, customer-friendly regulator.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, the amendments in my name insist on statutory duties that would secure workforce resilience and international regulatory alignment, rather than leaving these matters to open-ended secondary legislation.

Amendment 103 would require the CAA to prepare an annual report on commercial pilot licence holders, including anonymised demographic data, and an assessment of workforce sustainability as a regulatory monitoring tool. The licensing authority needs to understand whether the pool of qualified pilots has been maintained at a level that supports safe and continuous operations. I thank BALPA for supporting this amendment and helping to draft it. An important point that has not so far been drawn out is the need to identify the proportion of pilots licensed to fly commercial airliners who are women—the kind of important data that ensures that there is a workforce that reflects the future.

The amendment would also require the CAA to consider the future availability of a pilot workforce. As we have heard, commercial airline pilots must retire at 65. An authoritative annual assessment by the CAA would flag issues about the future supply of trained pilots.

I feel that we are all currently dancing on the head of a very particular but extremely useful and important pin. Between now and Report, I hope that we can put some of this together—unless the Minister says in the next few minutes that he is accepting all our amendments. We live in hope.

Amendment 104 would place a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to pursue UK-EU mutual recognition in relation to pilot and engineer licensing and aircraft parts certification. This came through from one of the APPGs, which had particular concerns about this issue. The absence of recognition mechanisms can create duplicated compliance burdens. We are all familiar with this kind of thing: regulatory friction and delays in maintenance and staffing, all of which matter operationally and economically.

I will not take up any more of noble Lords’ time, except to say that I commend the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. We first served together in 2018 on the first Select Committee on artificial intelligence, so never let it be said that Peers are not sometimes ahead of the curve. Its report was entitled AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able? and he continues to pursue this issue with his usual energy. I always support and listen to him on these issues, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in the last group, I came up with a modest amendment that would have involved increasing the threshold at which strike ballots had to be passed before a strike could be undertaken—a clear consumer protection measure well in line with the purpose of the Bill. In this group, we seem to have wandered off into discussing pilot training, which I do not see as being intimately connected with consumer protection. Everyone is agreed that something should be done to interfere in the market, and that the Government or one of their agencies should take some sort of responsibility for this. It is entirely opposite to the thrust of the response I had on holding strikes. I find it remarkable.

I understand the problems identified by the noble Lords, Lord Barber and Lord Tunnicliffe, and my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. I understand that these are indeed serious problems. I am willing to go so far as to accept that the Civil Aviation Authority might want to take cognisance of them and have a sense of how extensive the problems are. But it is surely very clearly for the industry itself to solve these problems, and that is what we must insist on. I imagine that the Minister will be as firm in rejecting these interferences with the market as he was in rejecting my modest amendment in the last group.

My noble friend Lord Holmes made points of great wisdom and vision, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, rightly pointed out the assiduity with which my noble friend has brought attention to bear on these important technological issues over a number of years. I do not feel competent myself to make direct comments on them, but I applaud the notion that we should be looking very carefully at the developments that technology will bring. That will include, of course, the abilities and skills required of pilots. I do not want to push it too far, but we have planes that now practically fly themselves—I do not mean that they can do without pilots, but they can practically fly themselves. Of course, in freight, we have drones appearing everywhere and great technological advances being made. That must have an impact on a training curriculum for pilots.

I was astonished to hear the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, say that the training curriculum for pilots was several decades old. I am not sure if I heard him correctly, but if that is so, then perhaps it needs to catch up with modern technology. There are many things that an aeroplane does nowadays that it could not do 30 years ago and that the pilot ought to know about.

I want to make this point again about UK-EU alignment—

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

What I actually said was that the syllabus was 30 years old. I hope the noble Lord understood that correctly.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am very grateful, but does the syllabus not determine the content of the training? It is a matter we can take up outside—it is not something we need to detain the Committee on at the moment—but I am very grateful to the noble Lord for making it clear what he said and putting me right to that extent. I had no wish to put words into his mouth, but I was just struck by what he said.

I wanted to come back briefly to the question of UK-EU alignment on this. It would, of course, be very good if there were mutual recognition between the UK and the EU, but it would also be very good if there were mutual recognition between the UK and the US. I am not entirely sure why there is this relentless focus on the EU. In the days when we had freedom of movement—mercifully, we do not anymore, because we voted against it—mutual recognition would mean that a pilot could move from one country to another and live there and pursue his calling in those countries. That is no longer the case, any more than it is with the United States, so the argument for a specific arrangement with the European Union seems to me to fall largely by the wayside. Apart from that, I thank my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower for his contribution, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in the four minutes remaining.

King’s Speech

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to take the debate back to transport: I suppose that is no great surprise. I certainly welcome the introductory speech from my noble friend the Minister, who listed all the different Bills that we are going to be discussing in this current Session. Northern Powerhouse Rail is a great idea; civil aviation, great. GB Railways: well, we started that. But, of course, the Minister did not mention HS2, because there is no legislation required at the moment. Yesterday, the Secretary of State announced that the costs would exceed £100 billion. That was the figure I gave to the Department for Transport for several years, along with Michael Byng. The department strongly denied it and stated that they did not recognise my figure. Well, now they do.

In his speech half an hour ago, the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, mentioned that this project was started by the Labour Party under my noble friend Lord Adonis. I remember having strong arguments with Andrew at the time. He said, “We’ve got to have the best in the world. We’ve got to go fastest, it’s got to be the most comfortable, all on a straight line linking Glasgow and Edinburgh and many cities in between with London. And by the way, we’re going to start in London”. I asked why, because the existing railways outside the London area were a hell of a lot worse than they were around London. He said, “Yeah, well, the business case is better if you start in London”—and of course that is probably true, but it was not the right reason.

Anyway, it trundled on through however many years of Tory Government, and the Secretary of State finally got angry in her press release yesterday: regretting that taxpayers, communities, contractors and workers have been swindled by the failure of government. She is right. The whistleblowers, other professionals and landowners have all been silenced by some pretty horrendous NDAs. One wonders what the Cabinet Office, the Department for Transport and the Treasury have been doing, because they are all implicated in what may turn out to be a massive cover-up on costs, or even fraud.

The one thing I find particularly surprising is that Ministers are normally required to give permission for projects to exceed budgets: I think it is called a “ministerial direction”. This project is costing roughly six times its original budget, but I can find no record of any ministerial direction—so somebody has been asleep at the wheel, I think, probably intentionally.

We must not blame only the civil servants, however, because Parliament has failed too. MPs and Peers love going to London faster, regardless of cost: we are all guilty of it sometimes. Local services are used by many more people to attend school, college, shopping, visiting friends or whatever—“Yeah, but it’s important to get to London”. You have only to look at the service provided by CrossCountry trains, which must be one of the worst, to see that it does not go to London, which is a big mistake. My noble friend Lady Dacres outlined the need for better local rail infrastructure, and she is absolutely right.

There are lessons here that must be learned. Yesterday, the Secretary of State said they were going on to Euston, but I have not seen any plans. The boring machines are going, but normally when you build a tunnel you know where it is going to end up, and it is a bit unclear here.

We have had a big debate about the type of trains to be used, and there is a fellow called Chris Gibb who is highly experienced in west coast main line traffic. He suggested a much better solution, for which he has been sacked: again, that is no great surprise.

So there are lessons to be learned and I hope the new Government, when they start building the northern powerhouse and everything else, will learn those lessons, keep it small and keep everything within budget.

Trains: Punctuality

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The previous Network Rail pay settlement, which was carried out but curiously not much publicised by the Government, produced not only a one-off productivity improvement by a substantial amount but continuing productivity, so the staff involved in the pay deal for Network Rail this year are delivering increased productivity compared with that agreed at the time of the previous pay rise. This Government have been able to do that. We have settled over 50 pay deals in the last 12 months with virtually no industrial action, which is entirely contrary to the record of the previous Government.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, can my noble friend explain whether, in addition to making the trains run on time, he has any plans with Great British Railways to offer some food on the trains? My journey from Cornwall took five hours and we were offered sandwiches, but they had not arrived. It was the same last week: we were offered sandwiches, but they did not arrive. The staff are doing their best to serve customers, but if they cannot supply sandwiches, maybe that should be put out to the private sector.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Of course, the irony of my noble friend’s journey to Fowey last week is that it was the private sector train company that failed to supply the sandwiches to him. It is a serious point and his complaint has been well aired, because he wrote to me, he wrote to the managing director of the train company, I think he wrote to the Secretary of State and he has now raised in the House of Lords that the trolley did not have any sandwiches on it. It is a valid point that the customer offer which is made to people should be reliable, and a five-hour journey without anything to eat is not much fun. I hope he got a drink though.

Rail Freight

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 13th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The Government have been quite clear that setting a statutory target is in the Bill, and we have also been clear that it is 75%. In practice, that protects those freight paths that have been in the timetable for a long time but are not necessarily used other than at short notice. That is the reason for the proposed statutory inclusion in the Bill. For that reason, GBR will not be in competition for those paths. Those paths will have to be reserved in order to allow the target to be effective in the future.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister mentioned the issue of competition for rail freight. I am pleased to hear him say that the Government are keen to grow rail freight, but it is difficult to see, in the text of the Bill, how Great British Railways, which will have control of most passenger services as well as access to the track, will be able to treat fairly open access passenger operators and rail freight operators. Is this something on which the Government have consulted the Competition and Markets Authority to see whether there is any potential for conflicts of interest?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The Railways Bill is framed to give Great British Railways the authority, for the first time in over 30 years, to control access to the railway and make sure that it is fairly distributed and serves the nation’s economic and social purposes. That is in Clause 60. Clause 63 talks about GBR operating passenger services. The reason that the freight target is specified in the Bill is so that GBR will have the obligation to leave both freight paths that are used in the timetable for freight trains and those paths that are not used but will be needed for the expansion of freight services and are needed at short notice to be used by freight operators.