Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

Before I start, I wish to say that I support the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord McConnell.

I shall focus my remarks on how immigration reform will affect science and innovation and the health and care sector. The Government have often said that they want the UK to be a science superpower. Apart from funding and international collaboration, which are crucial, this sector relies heavily on our ability to attract, recruit and retain global scientific talent. Thirty-one per cent of UK Nobel prize winners in science where born outside the UK, and 50% of CRUK-supported PhD students are from outside the UK, rising to 70% of post- doctoral researchers. In part, the Government have recognised this by introducing the global talent visa, but serious concerns remain about the rest of the system.

I will focus on two issues. First, I want to talk about the significant cost of the system for employers and researchers, early-stage researchers and technicians, who will be punished by the new rules. Even researchers gaining a Global Talent visa will face costs of over £2,500. This is 10 times the comparable cost in Germany, the US and Australia, and seven times that in France. The UK will be the most expensive scientific destination in the world. Much of this cost is also associated with health costs. The impact is even greater for those not included in the Global Talent visa due to heavy visa costs, which can be as much as £8,500, and that does not include the costs related to family, which will be above that. The points-based system further disadvantages those whose salary level does not reach £25,000, such as lab technicians—a workforce crucial to science and innovation.

Secondly, I want to refer briefly to the effect that the Bill will have on health and social care workers. The mutual recognition of professional qualifications has played a vital role in enabling EU doctors to work in the UK. The legislation would remove that recognition, which applies also to other countries, and would have a significant effect on recruitment, and not just of EU doctors.

My final comment relates to the lack of any migratory route for unregistered care staff—a point already mentioned by the noble Baronesses, Lady Greengross, Lady Kennedy and Lady Altmann. The sector is already in crisis, with an estimated 110,000 nursing vacancies in social care alone. As has already been said, the classification of social care workers as low skilled devalues their contribution and their skills.

I look forward to the Minister’s comments and the opportunity to explore these matters further in Committee.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, has withdrawn from the speakers’ list. The next speaker is the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD) [V]]

When this Bill emerges, it will define our place and reputation. Will we be proud to have been here? As the verse at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty says:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”


Is that what we want to be remembered for? Or will it be: bring me those who earn between £25,000 and £30,000 per year? Or, bring me those we think of as being best for us? Is it not better to welcome those who are most in need in the world? About 200 or 300 members of staff at the House of Lords earn less than that minimum income that is required to come to the UK—those wonderful people. Need, not greed, should define us, so that people come to us because we want to welcome them. We are trying to build a world which is fit for children to live in, yet we are far, far away from that.

I suggest we look at what will happen with income in Committee, and say that we have to mend this. We have to make this an Immigration Bill with a human face. Thinking of those detained in our immigration centres, we know we are the only country in Europe that has indefinite detention. When the Chief Inspector of Prisons visited some of those detention centres in May this year, it was found that one person had been detained for three years, while another 12 had been detained for 12 months. There is something so wrong with what we are doing with our immigrants. This Bill gives us a chance, so that history will say we took a step that was humane, kindly and concerned. Let us take it.

Covid-19: Human Trafficking

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I fully support what the noble Baroness has said. I will certainly go back to the department in terms of the permanency of this, but she is right to point out that it is another indicator of what might be going on.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has now elapsed.

County Lines Drug Trafficking

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I most certainly agree with the noble Lord about this whole thing being driven by the drugs markets. The types of people who are most predominantly targeted and engaged in this are indeed vulnerable teenagers, and in fact younger. I totally agree that a multiagency approach is entirely needed, which is what the National County Lines Coordination Centre aims to do. It is a multiagency team of experts from the NCA, the police and regional crime units. I also take his point about the stopping of black people. People should be stopped on an intelligence- led basis, not because of the colour of their skin.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that the work of the West Midlands Police and West Mercia Police in Operation Ballet, led by Detective Inspector Julie Woods, has been exemplary? It led to convictions at the Worcester Crown Court last Friday of 13 individuals who had operated a county lines scam starting in London, going to Birmingham New Street station, and then spreading out, with couriers and local people in the towns of Herefordshire and Worcestershire; these towns are not normally associated with drug trafficking, but, in the present circumstances, seem to be hotbeds of this terrible anti-social activity.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord makes exactly the right point: towns and counties that one would usually not expect to be associated with such criminal activity in fact are. I pay tribute to Julie Woods for the convictions secured at Worcester Crown Court. For every one person convicted, an awful lot of young people are safeguarded from this terrible scourge.

Serious Fraud Office

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I hope that I can satisfy the noble Lord when I say that the National Economic Crime Centre will be hosted by the NCA but will be staffed by partners from across the law enforcement community: for example, the NCA, the FCA, HMRC and the City of London Police, as well as the Serious Fraud Office and the private sector. So a multifaceted approach will be taken to this, rather than the fragmented one that he suggests.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

Further to the question from my noble friend Lord Foulkes, is the Minister aware that the Scottish Conservative Party in its manifesto expressed its opposition to the devolution of the British Transport Police to Scottish police, and will her colleagues in Scotland therefore do their best to reverse this ill-judged and very dangerous move?

Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness and enforcement of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

The Government have conducted a review of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013 to assess whether it has met its intended objectives and whether it should be retained or repealed. A report of the findings of this review will be published later this year.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. Only organised criminal gangs would like to see the Act repealed. It was immensely successful initially thanks to rigorous enforcement, led by the British Transport Police, and the work of the scrap metal task force. Is she aware that in the past two years, from the second half of 2016 and through this year, the incidence of theft has been growing again, particularly of high-value items, through the work of organised gangs? The increase is due also to the rise in the value of scrap metal—for example, copper is now worth more than £5,000 per tonne. Should not the Act be strengthened and the task force reconstituted?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, in terms of thefts going up, as the noble Lord has said, between 2012-13 and 2015-16 we saw a decrease of something like 74%, which is very pleasing. We will not know the latest figures for a while, but the Government will certainly be looking at them. He is absolutely right about high-value incidents. We recognise the impact that they have, particularly on heritage assets. On enforcement, obviously the police and local authorities deploy their resources as they see fit, but certainly this type of theft has a broader impact on society, not only on those from whom the material has been stolen.

Committee on the Equality Act 2010 and Disability Report

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been almost as great a privilege to listen to this debate as it was to serve on the Select Committee. The debate has demonstrated the extraordinary range of experience that Members of your Lordships’ House bring to the subject of disability. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken and particularly those who have spoken from their own life experiences and brought that to bear on this subject.

Almost every speaker has congratulated the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on the way in which she chaired the committee and introduced this debate today. I join them in that respect as well. It was a remarkable committee, which she chaired brilliantly. She should also be congratulated on persuading the usual channels to hold this debate in prime time, so early in the Autumn Session. I did not expect to see that happen, but that is a great achievement as well.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, said, we produced a good read, which is a good epitaph for the committee’s report. It was unanimous, hard-hitting and full of recommendations which, if they were all acted upon, would make a huge difference to the well-being and life experiences of disabled people across a wide range of activities. It was therefore a pity that the Government’s response was so feeble and unambitious. When it came out on 7 July—one month and 13 days later than the Cabinet Office’s guideline of two months for responses to Select Committee reports—the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, was quoted as saying that she was “dismayed, to put it mildly”, and that it was “a really unfeeling bureaucratic response, totally at odds with a real will to empathise and make life more productive for disabled people”. I concur totally with that view, and I support the calls made in this debate for that response to be withdrawn and rewritten by the Government—I am not sure they are a new Government but they are a new sort of Administration compared with the previous one.

Other Members have spoken about parts of the report and the Government’s response where they have their own areas of expertise and knowledge. I shall concentrate briefly—because time is getting on in this debate—on recommendations 21 and 22 relating to disabled access to sports grounds, which are covered in paragraphs 245 to 249 of the report. I remind the House of my interest as a vice-president of the charity Level Playing Field.

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, my noble friend Lord Harrison and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, all referred to the Accessible Sports Grounds Bill, which I took through this House in 2015. With the exception of the then Minister—not the Minister who will be replying tonight—whose approach in that debate can perhaps best be described as lukewarm, every Member who spoke in the Second Reading debate on 17 July was strongly supportive, particularly in respect of the principle that each stadium should follow accessible stadia guidelines and improve the experience for disabled people attending their matches.

While it was evident that the Bill would not make progress in the other place without government support, it produced one very positive consequence, and that was the response from the English Premier League on 10 September 2015, which stated:

“All Premier League Clubs have agreed to make their stadiums compliant with the Accessible Stadia Guide by August 2017. Clubs also agreed to ensure the appropriate number of wheelchair bays are located in their away sections (10% of their home provision)”.

If that commitment were fulfilled to the letter, it would represent a huge step forward by the best supported and most affluent clubs in British football, particularly if the lead given by the Premier League were followed by the other football leagues in England, Wales and Scotland, and sports with significant numbers of fans attending their matches.

In the report, our Select Committee quoted approvingly the comments of Justin Tomlinson MP, who was then the Minister for Disabled People. Sadly, he is no longer in that post. He told BBC Sport:

“Most football clubs in this country are behind when it comes to disability access to their grounds. It is my belief that football should be a game enjoyed by everyone, and someone with a disability should have as much of an opportunity to watch the game as someone without a disability”.

The following paragraph of our report said:

“On provision for disabled people, he”—

Justin Tomlinson—

“similarly confirmed his view that: ‘Frankly, some of it is disgraceful. There is not provision in some grounds. Supporters are split up or are put in with the away fans. I find that totally unacceptable. We are in the last chance saloon with those football bodies, saying, “You need to get your house in order”’”.

Had my Private Member’s Bill become law, clubs which failed to comply with the accessible stadia guidelines could have lost their safety certificates and their stadia would have been prevented from operating. However, without that sanction, disabled people will have to rely on the good will of the clubs to deliver what they have promised by the summer of next year. I am afraid that I am not holding my breath. I am advised that the long-awaited report from the Premier League regarding the progress of its clubs with one year to go was sent to the Minister, Penny Mordaunt MP, in early August and copied to the Sports Minister, Tracey Crouch. I am told it says very little and contains no detail about the real progress at each club.

It appears that at least seven Premier League clubs will not meet the pledge by August 2017, as had been promised. The excuses being put forward by clubs as to why they will not meet this are, frankly, unacceptable. Liverpool Football Club, for example, seems far more interested in providing general hospitality places than in installing sufficient disabled fans’ seats to comply with football’s own minimum standards. Those seats for disabled people would ensure that the club meets its pledge, but instead, its disabled fans are expected to wait for phase 2 of the stadium expansion—whenever that might be. Watford Football Club seems to be removing disabled fans’ seats at a time when we should be seeing an increase, and Crystal Palace believes that it needs only to come up with a plan by August 2017, rather than comply with a commitment.

It further transpires that newly promoted clubs will be given a one-year extension to meet the Premiership pledge, as they had not been part of the original decision and it is felt that they should be afforded the same two-year cycle. This misses the point completely. As other noble Lords have said in this debate, it is more than 20 years since the introduction of Part 3 of the DDA: it is law that they are required to provide that accommodation, and it is disgraceful that they have not done so.

It is clear that the Premier League appears to have no intention to penalise or sanction clubs that do not meet the pledge. So what happens next? Quite recently, the noble Lord, Lord Ashton, replied to a Written Question from me in these words:

“Ministers expect all sports, and all clubs, whose grounds do not make the reasonable adjustments to accommodate disabled spectators as set out in the Equality Act 2010 to take action to fulfil this legal obligation”.

Given the vast financial resources at the disposal of Premiership clubs, which noble Lords have referred to, the time has surely come for this action to be taken and in a much more drastic way.

It is so disappointing that, in response to the Select Committee’s recommendation 21 that the Government should include provisions similar to those of the Accessible Sports Grounds Bill in a government Bill, the Government have said that there are no plans to introduce one as existing legislation in the form of the Equality Act remains untested on access to sports stadia for disabled people. That is a truly bizarre excuse that completely ignores paragraph 247 of the Select Committee report, which states:

“The Equality Act 2010 has not succeeded in giving disabled sports fans the access to stadia to which they are entitled, and new measures are needed. A particular problem … is the law’s requirement that only individuals may bring actions against institutions which are failing in their duty to comply with the Act. The nature of the relationship between a football fan and his or her own club is often deep-rooted and passionate, and makes it hard”—

I would say impossible—

“for the fan to initiate proceedings”.

This is the reason for our recommendation 42:

“The Government should consider changing the law to allow charities and other bodies which do not themselves have a legal interest to bring proceedings in the interests of classes of disabled people who are not themselves claimants”

I hope that when the Minister replies she can give a convincing reason for not allowing charities to bring class actions. I also ask her to give the Government’s response to the Premier League’s report on progress towards meeting its August 2017 accessibility commitment and an indication of what they plan to do if the clubs let them, and their disabled supporters, down.

Euro 2016: Fan Violence

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Keen of Elie]

The policing and security arrangements at Lens are a matter for the French authorities, not for this Government. Of course we have stepped forward to assist them when requested to do so, but we cannot guarantee anything in that regard.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is of course right to say that the decision as to whether the 2018 World Cup should be staged in Russia is a matter for FIFA. However, do the Government have a view on the desirability of that, should the suspended disqualification of Russia from this tournament turn into an actual disqualification because there is further trouble in France?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

That involves a series of hypotheses. It appears to me that we should await the outcome of the events, and indeed of the inquiry into the events, in Marseilles.

Hillsborough

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

The noble Lord raises an important point, particularly regarding the responsibility of the Police and Crime Commissioner. They will have an important role to play, but we will certainly be reviewing the situation. As further details emerge, I will write to the noble Lord about the steps we are taking. The important point is that there is a responsibility in the higher echelons of that police force. The noble Lord mentioned the statement put on the website which, as I said earlier, was both concerning and regrettable. There is a history of their making a statement and then retracting it. One would have hoped that, on this occasion, they would not have done so, but that is exactly what has happened.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I may be the only member of your Lordships’ House who was present at Hillsborough 27 years ago. I subsequently gave evidence to Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry and to the Hillsborough Independent Panel. I join all other Members in commending both the Statement and the contributions from all sides of the Chamber today. This House has matched the mood perfectly. I think that the victims’ families will feel that they have been vindicated, certainly as far as this House is concerned. I have just one question. Does the Minister agree that what has made the victims’ families’ agony so much more unbearable has been the refusal by the South Yorkshire police force, consistently over the last 27 years, up to and including the period of the inquest itself, to put up their hands up and admit that they were at fault?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I totally agree with all that the noble Lord has said. As for what he said about South Yorkshire Police, I think that that sentiment is reflected across the House.

High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. His modesty prevented him from describing perhaps his greatest moment as Minister for Transport, which was to resist, quite early on in his term in office, a very crazy plan from the British Railways Board and his Department for Transport officials to embark on a programme of closures of rural railway lines. I think about 40 lines were involved. He made quite clear that he would not stand for that, and more or less from that point the option of closures has gone off the political agenda. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, deserves a great deal of credit for the fact that we have a railway network of the size it is, which we are now going to build on.

I should start by declaring my various railway interests, which are on the register, particularly my chairmanship of the Great Western Railway advisory board. Other noble Lords spoke about the phenomenal increase in demand for rail travel. I will not go over those figures again but those of us who worked in the industry in the 1970s and 1980s, when cost-cutting, contraction and decay were all too frequent a feature of life on Britain’s railways, rub our eyes in disbelief at how great the transformation in the past 20 years has been. That growth has been achieved even when, for some of that time, the economy as a whole was in recession, or, as more recently, fuel prices at the pump made car travel cheaper.

Your Lordships will have seen the consequences of this doubling in the number of passenger journeys from 750 million a year to 1.5 billion in terms of overcrowding on the existing services. Each working day, 3,000 people must stand in the trains arriving at Euston, and a similar number in Birmingham. The west coast main line does not have enough train paths to accommodate the numbers wishing to use it. The railway tried to respond to the continuing increase in demand by fitting more trains on to the network, lengthening trains and reclassifying some coaches from first to second class to increase seat numbers, and so on. On the east coast, the new Azuma train fleet will add 28% more seating capacity at peak times for long-distance trains from King’s Cross. That may accommodate some years of demand growth, but on the even busier west coast main line the Pendolino fleet has already been lengthened, the busiest commuter trains operated by London Midland have had a 50% seating capacity increase, and extra commuter trains have been squeezed into peak periods by increasing the top speed of commuter trains to closer to 125 miles an hour.

That a limit would be reached by these kinds of measures has been evident to the Department for Transport for some time. In the competition for a long-term franchise for the east coast intercity service run in 2000, a bidder had suggested building a new high-speed line to accommodate an expansion of services. While the idea of a long-term franchise was abandoned on that occasion and it was let for just two years instead, the experience prompted the first serious examination of the case for high-speed rail in Britain. The study, which was carried out by Atkins, Ernst & Young and others for the Strategic Rail Authority and subsequently published by the Department for Transport, found that there was a business case for a north-south high-speed rail because the existing trunk lines—the west coast, the midland and the east coast—would all be approaching capacity limits, starting with the west coast by the mid-2020s. It took the imagination and foresight of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, as the then Transport Secretary, to get hold of a high-speed rail project idea and make a reality of it, and then, crucially, win cross- party support, so that when the Government changed the policy did not change with them.

I have to tell your Lordships that the problem of overcrowding on the west coast main line is not a new phenomenon. I came across this letter published in the Times, which said:

“Sir, I left Rugby yesterday by the 12.45 pm train which is due at Euston-square at 4 o’clock pm. We arrived at Euston-square at 5.50 … The cause of our delay was the breaking down of a luggage-train ahead of us. There is such an enormous traffic carried on what used to be called the London and Birmingham Railway that such delays (to say nothing of the danger to passengers) are constantly occurring. Would it not be a great improvement if the company were to lay down two additional lines for the sole use of luggage-trains?”.

The date of that letter, my Lords, which was signed:

“Your Obedient Servant, A Cockney”,

was 30 December 1846.

I come back to today’s situation. A number of noble Lords have talked about the impracticality of adding to capacity by further upgrades of the main line. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred to that, as did my noble friend Lord Rosser. There are other more radical solutions, two of which would be familiar to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. One is to discourage the number of people travelling by train by pricing services up so that only the wealthy could travel and by making them less attractive. You would have to accompany that with a huge new programme of motorway construction, the environmental consequences of which would be horrendous.

We have heard a bit about the Chilterns today. One has only to look at the website of the M40 Chiltern Environmental Group, which represents 25,000 people who live along the M40 corridor from junction 3 to junction 8, to understand how appalling life is for people living close to motorways. I quote:

“Day and night we all suffer from intolerable noise pollution”.

Years on after the M40 opened, they are still campaigning for noise barriers.

The third option—and the sensible option, of course —is to build a new network of high-speed railways, as has been done in many other countries in the world. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, made the point that I was going to make—namely, that no national system which has embarked on a programme of high-speed rail has regretted it or said that it would take those services out of use. Instead, they are constantly adding to the networks that they have. Compared with Japan, which opened its first Shinkansen line in 1964, we in Britain have been rather slower in realising the potential of high-speed rail travel. We have tended to assume that because the Victorians left us such a fine network of main line and secondary railways, we could somehow get by without building new ones. Perhaps that made sense when the demand for rail travel was static or even falling, as it was in the 1970s, but that is not, of course, the case now.

In November 2007, the nation’s first high-speed line was fully opened with a launch at a transformed St Pancras station, which was attended by Her Majesty the Queen, and High Speed 1 was born. After all the tribulation and all the objections to that programme, it was delivered on time and to budget. Once the Eurostar trains had to operate over the old Southern Region tracks into Waterloo, but once the new line was opened, they could run at much higher speed over the new Channel Tunnel rail link. One consequence of that was that complaints from residents about train noise ceased altogether. People in that part of the world now protest about noise from the M20 motorway.

The environmental standards to which High Speed 1 was constructed were stringent and of high quality, and the extensive consideration that has been given to these matters in the design of High Speed 2 will, I am sure, ultimately have a similarly good outcome. When the construction of High Speed 1 was planned, it was thought that only the Eurostar services would use it. However, Eurostar demand has grown to more than 10 million passengers a year, and rail now dominates the London to Paris and Brussels travel markets, where once air traffic was dominant. However, other domestic high-speed services have materialised and Kent’s Javelin services now carry a further 10 million passengers a year. Taking the two service types together, the 20 million-plus annual passenger levels are similar to those originally forecast for the Channel Tunnel rail link. Forecasting has inevitable uncertainty, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, to assume that the growth in demand will miraculously stop two years after the line is opened, is, of course, nonsense. That demand will continue and we have to plan for it well into the future. High Speed 2 has had the support of successive Governments. The Bill before us is the first part of what should be regarded as a national high-speed rail network.

Before I finish, I would like to stress a little-understood but important aspect of High Speed 2. Once it is built, the need to try to fit together “paths” for non-stopping express passenger services alongside those for freight and local and regional passenger services over the same railway is removed. Part of the capacity gain that High Speed 2 delivers arises from the new tracks it provides and from the services with longer trains they can accommodate. Another part comes from the narrowing of the speed range of services operating on the parallel routes—initially with High Speed 2, that will mean the west coast main line. This is the “capacity release” effect and it means that intermediate places on this line such as Coventry, Northampton and Milton Keynes and smaller places, too, will be able to get better services in the future. And it should be possible to accommodate more freight off our congested motorways and on to rail, especially container traffic to and from the major ports and major distribution centres. So High Speed 2 is not just a foundation stone for the national high-speed network, and for improving the links between our major cities, but it is also an essential device to overcome constraints on today’s network and allow the expansion of services at smaller towns and cities and create better pathways for freight.

I believe that High Speed 2 is very much a project for our times. I congratulate the Minister on the way that he introduced the Bill, my noble friend Lord Rosser on the way that he responded, and all the other speakers in this debate. The fact that there is so much support in this House for this Bill is remarkable and perhaps mirrors the experience in the other place, where the Third Reading of the Bill received 90% of the vote with a huge majority. I am sure that the Bill will have the same support in this House.

Railways: New Lines

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 29th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

The Government are committed to ensuring the regeneration of all railways. I will write to the noble Baroness on the details of that particular line. I reiterate that we are looking at ensuring that there is effective and resilient investment in our railways to ensure that they meet the needs of the 21st century.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is absolutely right to draw attention to the success of the community rail partnerships. They have contributed to growth well above the growth on regional railways generally and have attracted some 3,200 volunteers to help improve stations and to work generally on the railway alongside full-time railway staff. This is a great success story and it is important that the Northern Rail franchise embraces that. But does the Minister not agree that for that strategy to succeed, it will be necessary for Network Rail to look realistically at cost levels and get them down where it can, because those have been a bar to opening lines until now? I declare an interest as chairman of the Great Western Railway advisory board and, indeed, the author of a book which deals extensively with this subject.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I am sure noble Lords will be lining up outside the Chamber for a signed copy. Of course the noble Lord is quite right to point out the need to ensure best value and efficiency on our railways. That is why, as the noble Lord will know, the Secretary of State has appointed Sir Peter Hendy to look at the delivery of the investment in the railways across the board.