Railways Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th September 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, had hoped to be here today but found himself with other commitments, and therefore asked me to move his Amendment 22A, which I also support. This is a probing amendment on whether the provision in the Bill which enables Great British Railways to enter into partnerships with mayors—we will debate whether it should be mayors or others later—could be strengthened. I would be keen to hear what the Minister has to say on that.

The Bill sets out a partnership structure that enables collaborative working, local funding commissioning and other benefits, but this wording change from “may” to “must” would really strengthen the requirement for a partnership with mayors. I hope the Minister agrees that Great British Railways must treat mayors—and others, as we will come to—as genuine partners, and that the Government will consider this amendment seriously.

I take this opportunity to speak to the other amendments in this group. I think it is a very important group and that is not just because my background, like many noble Lords’, is in local and regional government. I am very aware that, for example, Transport for Greater Manchester, Transport for London and others are concerned about the Bill as drafted because it does not treat them as real partners at the table; it feels like a consultation or tick-box exercise rather than a genuinely equal partnership.

I just remind noble Lords that, when responding to my amendment on rail devolution on Report of the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill, on 6 November 2024, the Minister said:

“I can reaffirm to your Lordships’ House that the railways Bill will include a statutory role for devolved governments and mayoral combined authorities. They will be involved in governing, managing, planning and developing the railways”.—[Official Report, 6/11/24; col. 1543.]


Yet I believe—as do others here, hence all the amendments—that the Bill as drafted does not provide the statutory powers that mayoral and strategic authorities and others require. Since the Bill was introduced to Parliament, we have of course seen a new Prime Minister, one committed to devolution to mayoral and strategic authorities, so I really hope that some things will change.

I have already talked about the amendment that I am moving on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, which I hugely support as it strengthens the Bill. I hope the Government accept that. It would be useful if the Minister could set out how the Government see Clause 5 enabling Great British Railways and these authorities to develop local commissioning partnerships. I stress that this clause is particularly important for Greater Manchester, because the city region wants to take on a more meaningful role, similar to London’s, in shaping and commissioning rail services.

Many of the amendments in this group, which we will hear about, are trying in different ways to ensure that strong role for local and regional government. They include the sensible amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, which seek to bring in the term “strategic authorities” from recent devolution legislation. I hope the Government will be sympathetic to many of those amendments. In many ways, the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, is the simplest way to strengthen regional and local government’s hands.

The noble Lord, Lord Grayling, has Amendment 147, which allows for an authority to declare a service wholly within its area as a mayoral concession service, so it can be run rather like Transport for London is. I think that is interesting, as it feels like, to date, Transport for London and others have had to go with a begging bowl to government to take over metro railway services for their area. This would shift the balance, so I think it is an interesting proposal to discuss.

Amendment 159 from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would expressly forbid the transfer of TfL services to Great British Railways. This again highlights the tension between national and regional services, and concerns about the powers of Great British Railways.

I look forward to the rest of the debate on this group and the Minister’s response. Given this new Government’s agenda around devolution, I hope that we start to see a shift and, potentially, some government amendments in this area. I beg to move.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I think it might fall to me to speak next, if my noble friend does not want to speak to his amendments at this stage.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I will speak at the end, if I may.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I have four amendments in this group: Amendments 26, 64, 304 and 333. They are all on the same point, which is that, in the Bill, the definition of a “relevant local government body” is expressed as mayoral combined authorities, mayoral combined county authorities and passenger transport executives. Those first two—mayoral combined authorities and mayoral county combined authorities—are, I think, based on the proposition from some months back that, over time, all the strategic authorities would move towards being mayoral strategic authorities.

Since the original drafting of this legislation, we have completed the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act. Those of us who worked on that legislation will recall that Section 1 defines strategic authorities, and it does not do so by reference to whether or not they have a mayor; they are, basically, single-foundation strategic authorities, combined-foundation strategic authorities or county combined strategic authorities. It seems to me that, for the purposes of this legislation, the relevant local government bodies with which Great British Railways, in particular, and the Secretary of State should work would be all the strategic authorities. Why would we exclude those that do not have mayors?

I say this because, whether it takes a year or two—or three or four—there will be some strategic authorities that may not have a mayor for a very long time. I do not say this because I want them not to have mayors; I am in favour of them having mayors. It is just that we are quite a long way from that happening. From my quick survey, looking across England, we probably have two long-term single-foundation strategic authorities: Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. By my reckoning, at the moment, we have at least four, perhaps five, combined county authorities—Lancashire, Cornwall, Surrey, Devon and Torbay, and Norfolk and Suffolk—with no intention of having mayors. Interestingly, that includes Cornwall. The Minister will remember that, last week, when the Prime Minister was answering questions in the other place for a very long time, he referenced devolution in Cornwall and said

“with or without a mayor”.

Therefore, we are in a very simple position: we want devolution. We want GBR to have regard to the transport plans of strategic authorities. We want GBR to consult with strategic authorities, with the responsibilities that they have. We want statutory information sharing between GBR and strategic authorities. If we put “mayoral” in this legislation, we will restrict the availability of all the statutory consultation, information-sharing and advisory relationships between GBR and non-mayoral strategic authorities. I am sure that that is not anybody’s intention. The simplest thing to do would be to reference the definition of strategic authorities in Section 1 of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act; that would be altogether simpler and better in the long run.

[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.

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

My Lords, before we move on, I return briefly to a point raised in Committee on Tuesday on Amendment 146, regarding the long-term rail strategy and its relationship with devolved railway responsibilities. I was less than clear on this issue when we discussed it previously and thought it would be helpful to make a point of order to provide clarity and correct the record.

For clarity, the Government consider that Clause 15 is correctly drafted and accurately reflects the devolution settlement. The Secretary of State’s long-term rail strategy will cover Great Britain. It will cover all of England and Wales and will address the railway in Scotland with regard to reserved matters only. Reserved matters include issues such as cross-border services, technical standards and railway safety and security. Scottish Ministers have devolved responsibility for matters such as Scottish passenger services and Scottish funded infrastructure. Accordingly, Clause 15(3) prevents the long-term rail strategy making provisions about functions of the Scottish Ministers, who will cover those matters in their own strategy.

I hope that explanation is helpful. The key point is that there is no inconsistency between describing the strategy as Great Britain-wide and providing an appropriate carve-out for devolved Scottish functions. I also reassure noble Lords—

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I have a quick question. Why, then, is there not a similar provision saying that the rail strategy may not make provision about the functions of Welsh Ministers?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The answer is that the infrastructure arrangements in Wales are significantly different and Wales does not have its own settlement in that respect. I reassure noble Lords that engagement between the Government and Scottish and Welsh Ministers on both strategies is productive and will continue until their publication. I am grateful to noble Lords who raised this issue, providing an opportunity to place my clarification on the record.

In respect of the second point made by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, about an email from—

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

On group 1, of course this matter is of significance to this Government, with a new Prime Minister, and I firmly believe that the Bill already empowers mayors in local areas. I am clear that Great British Railways will not work unless it works for and with mayors and local communities.

In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, who quoted me, I stand by what is said. This is absolutely not a tick-box exercise.

I turn to Amendment 22A in the name of my noble friend Lord Blunkett, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, has kindly spoken today. I absolutely agree with him and with the noble Baroness that the partnership approach that the Bill sets out must be effective. GBR must engage with partnership offers seriously, and the bar for GBR to reject a partnership must be exceptionally high. As we are aligned on the intent behind the amendment, which she described as the principal amendment in this group as it covers all circumstances, I commit to taking it away and I shall see what can be done after this debate.

I turn to Amendments 147 and 156. The Government absolutely support further rail devolution where it is in the interests of passengers and the wider rail network. That is why the Bill already provides a route for passenger rail services to be devolved through exemption from designation by the Secretary of State in Clause 28. Where services are devolved, mayors already have flexibility to choose their approach to securing passenger services and may secure them via a concession contract, including to the private sector, if they so wish. The Bill does not change that. TFL, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, describes, operates on precisely this basis. There is therefore no need to duplicate the existing devolution provision in the Bill, which already achieves that intent in full.

On Amendments 23 and 24, Clause 5 is already intended to support local commissioning arrangements: it enables mayors to contribute funding where they wish to secure services or improvements that reflect local priorities and go beyond the national railway offer. This gives local leaders a mechanism to invest in additional rail outcomes for their area where they choose to do so, providing the local input that we know is so important for enhancing our communities. The details of these arrangements, including revenue-sharing options, will be agreed separately from legislation via collaborative partnerships between GBR and mayors. Work on developing this model has already begun, using Greater Manchester as a pathfinder—I am going to meet the new mayor of Greater Manchester tomorrow.

The Government absolutely support greater local influence over rail services, but allowing mayors to run rail services is a financially significant decision, with safety and public interest impacts; that is why it is right that the current process in the Bill for devolving services to local leaders remains the route that is used for this. That route is well understood, familiar to industry and proven effective. Allowing mayors to run GBR services outside of the usual process is not necessary and does not better serve local communities.

I turn to Amendments 26, 64, 304 and 333. The Bill is focused on mayoral strategic authorities to reflect their growth across England and the role that mayors can play to convene local partners and tackle regional challenges. Mayors have the most far-reaching and flexible powers; therefore, this level of authority is of the appropriate scale and capability to integrate rail with wider public transport, enabling them to engage effectively with Great British Railways.

Furthermore, as outlined in the Cabinet statement Rewiring the State, published in July, the Government consider that mayors who are directly accountable to the residents who elect them can provide the best governance for their communities. As a result, the suite of powers available to areas with mayors will be commensurately greater, recognising the role that they play as leaders in their regions. However, this is not to say that other levels of local government will be excluded from engagement with Great British Railways, and I take the point that it is important that no local authority is left out, as indeed the Prime Minister said a few days ago. The plan is for all tiers of local government to benefit from local GBR business units, and some existing authorities have collaborated well with the existing structure, including Devon, with several new stations, and, recently, Cornwall, with the Mid Cornwall Metro.

Our approach does not intend to exclude anyone from working with the railway, but we think it is sensible to use mayors as a focal point for powers, responsibilities and representation in their local areas. That said, I am happy to see if there is anything we can do outside the Bill to reassure foundation authorities that their views will be properly considered, and I will reflect on that further.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his response to my amendments. To avoid us further returning to this issue, I should say that there are other amendments to exactly the same purpose that I did not notice had not been grouped together, in Clauses 16 and 83 and elsewhere in the Bill, so I hope we will treat this as the one debate about that issue.

The route ahead, if I may say so to the Minister, is a very straightforward one: relevant local government bodies—for the purpose of information sharing, taking advice and co-ordinating with transport strategies—should be England wide, and therefore it should be all strategic authorities. If the Minister and the Government, understandably, want to go further and have a category of strategic authorities with mayors which have the ability to go further in terms of working with GBR and taking responsibilities, the route would be to put in something for that purpose in relation to established mayoral strategic authorities, which clearly have the financial basis on which to do that. Distinguishing between those two would make this work much more effectively.

[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.

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Moved by

[Lord Lansley]

32: Clause 7, page 5, line 29, leave out from “section” to “in” in line 30
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, and the amendment in the name of Lord Lansley to Clause 7, page 5, line 36, would remove the exclusion of issues including access to infrastructure, the infrastructure capacity plan, the working timetable, the charging scheme and performance scheme from the requirement to consult the Scottish or Welsh Ministers insofar as they have delegated their functions to GBR.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, there are two sets of issues in this group. Mine is terribly simple and it is by way of a question to the Minister, just to be clear.

I do not understand why, in Clause 7, at the point the Secretary of State may give directions to Great British Railways about the activities in Scotland and Wales, in each case the requirement to obtain consent from Scottish and Welsh Ministers is disapplied if those directions relate to what is in Chapter 1 of Part 3, which is access, charging and timetable capacity.

Timetabling and so on seem, on the face of it, to be tricky things where if these are directions to GBR which impact in Scotland and Wales, they should certainly require the consent of the Scottish Ministers—for reasons that we touched on earlier, a different requirement may rest in relation to Welsh Ministers. But I am surprised to see that the implication of Clause 7 is that the Secretary of State can issue directions to GBR impacting on, for example, the timetable in Scotland but does not require the consent of Scottish Ministers. Amendments 32 and 33 in my name are to probe why that seems to be the case. I beg to move Amendment 32.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendments 35 and 36, which are in the names of my noble friends Lord Grayling and Lord Moylan. Respectively, they deal with amending Clause 7, on the power to give directions, and Clause 9, on the power to give guidance to GBR. They specifically refer to some extra duties that would fall on Ministers if they were giving specific directions around fares and the fare structure. They set out that if Ministers are giving directions or guidance

“about the level or structure of fares”

they would have to set out

“the assumptions, criteria and objectives used … so decisions can be assessed against passenger growth and affordability”.

I support both these amendments, for the following reasons.

One of the important decisions that Ministers have to take about the railways is to balance the cost of running them and how that cost is split between the fare payer—and of course not just that person who actually uses the railways but, when it comes to track access charges, the other users of the railway network—and the taxpayer. It is a very important decision, given that most people in the country either never use the railways or do not use them very often. A relatively small number of people use railways frequently, and it is important to get the balance of costs split correctly.

Ministers also have to make an important decision in their negotiations with the Treasury around the cost that falls on the department—the taxpayer subsidy piece. I think Ministers signed up to some quite challenging targets in the last spending review to reduce the taxpayer subsidy. There are two ways you can do that: either you cut services significantly or you have to grow passenger numbers. If Ministers are making directions or guidance about fares, it is important to understand which model they are using. What are their assumptions and what is the evidence base for the fare structure? What will that do to passenger numbers and, ultimately, to revenue? Then there is any knock-on impact on costs, what it effectively does to the GBR profit and loss account, and therefore the balance of costs that lands on fare payers versus the taxpayer. Having that level of transparency is helpful for the fare-paying public and for taxpayers.

It is also helpful for Ministers, because it would force a level of rigour in the modelling that is undertaken and, importantly, the assumptions that are made about how passenger numbers respond to fares. It will also enable us to have a grown-up conversation about how we grow passenger numbers, given some of the innovations and service changes that I suspect will be required, particularly in offering better services for leisure travellers, because that is where there is the potential for significant growth in passenger numbers and revenue and therefore for reducing the overall cost of the railway.

These two amendments have a very sensible underpinning. They are not just helpful for taxpayers and fare payers; in the end, they will be helpful for the department, because they would force, as I said, a level of rigour and transparency in its financial modelling. They should therefore also commend themselves to our friends in the Treasury, who I think like rigour and robustness in financial modelling, because this just gets it all above board. Everyone has to be clear about their assumptions.

The amendments would also allow us to challenge the assumptions and enable us to have a much better conversation publicly about how we can drive up the usage of our railways and the flexibilities that we will require to do so. That will then, perhaps, provoke some helpful conversations with the trade unions and about the flexibilities that will be necessary to making sure that we have a financially sustainable railway for the long term, which is, in effect, what we need to guarantee secure jobs on the railway. That is the only way in which we are going to do this in the long term, because I do not think that taxpayers are going to continue wanting to subsidise the railway to the level they do now for the foreseeable future, given that many of them do not use railways frequently. I commend these two amendments and look forward to the Minister’s response.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I believe I did answer the noble Lord: the memoranda of understanding between Scottish Ministers and this Government, and between Welsh Ministers and this Government, set out the processes by which these things will be co-ordinated. Were there to be any real difficulty in the circumstances he is describing, we would not have been able to get as far as we did in drafting the MoUs, which we have done, and in the agreement of Scottish and Welsh Ministers to the provisions of it.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

We are grateful to the Minister for his explanations—for my part, on Amendments 32 and 33. The Minister explained why the Bill says that, for reason of reserve powers, the consent of Scottish or Welsh Ministers is not required. This is an opportunity to make it clear that, if we were in the exceptional situation of the Secretary of State issuing directions that impacted in Scotland or Wales, it might be reasonable that the Secretary of State would consult Scottish or Welsh Ministers. I did not hear the Minister say that such a consultation would not take place so, on that basis, I am happy to withdraw Amendment 32.

Amendment 32 withdrawn.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, I should advise the Committee that if this amendment is agreed to, I will be unable to call Amendments 39 or 40 for reasons of pre-emption.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group. The purpose of Amendments 43 and 45 is to explore the circumstances in which the Secretary of State or the Office of Rail and Road grants a licence to a person other than Great British Railways to operate railway assets in Scotland or Wales. As the Bill is structured, under those circumstances there would be a requirement to undertake consultation with the Passengers’ Council if the licence is a passenger licence or a station licence. There is no other requirement for consultation.

Let us think of a practical example. I know that licensing is not about operating the railway; it gives one the licence to operate but it does not bestow any ownership over these things. Core Valley Lines in south Wales is a significant set of 57 stations. It is not owned by Network Rail or operated by Great British Railways. Presumably, it is therefore the subject of a licence. If such a licence were to be issued, or changed, in Wales, it seems to me inherent that one would want the granting of that licence to be subject to a consultation requirement with Welsh Ministers. At the moment, there is nothing in the legislation that would require that to happen. Amendment 45 would introduce such a requirement for consultation before those assets in Scotland or Wales were the subject of the granting of a licence to someone other than GBR.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to hear from noble Lords on this group, and it is a special pleasure to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Reay.

Amendments 38 and 39 would undermine one of the fundamental principles that the Bill seeks to establish. The Secretary of State will set the overall strategic direction for GBR, and the Bill provides her with the sole ability to issue GBR’s licence. This reflects that it is the Secretary of State, not the ORR or the passenger watchdog, who is ultimately accountable for GBR both to Parliament and to the wider public. This aligns with the wider programme of regulatory reform that this Government are undertaking, where Ministers set the strategic direction and regulators are empowered to enforce against that. Regulators should not be making key strategic or political decisions for fundamentally important sectors.

However, regardless of who issues the licence, the ORR will enforce GBR’s compliance with it exactly as it does today. It has strong enforcement powers to ensure that GBR does not contravene the terms of its licence, including mandatory, legally binding directions requiring GBR to change its behaviour. It would not be appropriate to provide the ORR or the passenger watchdog with the power to veto the licence. The Secretary of State will, however, consult both those bodies and consider their views before issuing the licence.

On Amendment 38 specifically, I reassure noble Lords that safety remains fundamental to the operation of our railways and that the Bill does not weaken or alter the existing railway safety regime, nor the ORR’s role within it. No licence will be issued that is not fully compliant with safety regulations and safety law. Furthermore, we expect that GBR will have a licence condition to support the continuity of the current industry safety and standards framework to preserve our world-leading culture of rail safety. The Secretary of State will consult the ORR on the licence precisely to ensure that these kinds of conditions are fit for purpose.

I turn to Amendments 41 to 46. Currently, the Secretary of State is the ultimate licensing authority for the railways under the Railways Act 1993, and the current Bill does not change that. As it does now, the ORR will continue to issue all non-GBR licences under the general authority given to it by the Secretary of State. Not only would removing the Secretary of State from the process or requiring the ORR to consent undermine continuity and stability for the industry but it would be superfluous in practice, as the ORR already issues these licences on behalf of the Secretary of State.

Let me also clarify that railway licensing is, and will remain, a reserved matter. Scottish and Welsh Ministers are not licensing authorities under the current system, and the Bill will not change this. However, that does not mean that Scottish and Welsh Ministers are prevented from making their views known. The ORR is required under the Bill to provide notice prior to any licence being issued and to consider any representations, including any by Scottish and Welsh Ministers. We therefore do not consider it necessary to create an additional consultation requirement specifically for Scottish and Welsh Ministers.

I also note that the Government have spent long and productive hours discussing the provisions of the Bill with Scottish and Welsh Ministers and, in both cases, they are content with the licensing provisions as drafted. In fact, Scotland has already published its legislative consent Motion. I therefore ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Can I ask the Minister why, if it is not necessary to create a statutory consultation requirement, it is necessary to have a consultation requirement in relation to the Passengers’ Council? Can it not respond to the consultation on a licence in the same way as Scottish or Welsh Ministers could?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I am sure it could, but it is desirable to mention the Passengers’ Council, since we are setting it up and it is an important body. The distinction I am seeking to draw is leaving the Passengers’ Council as a consultee, rather than requiring its permission.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group: Amendments 65 and 73. Rather than the broader issues of funding, mine are much more nitty-gritty questions about the transparency of the business plan and how the funding processes for Great British Railways are to work.

Amendment 65 is to Schedule 2, which is that part of the Bill where Great British Railways shows us in its business plan how its money is received and allocated towards activities. If I remember correctly, we are in that bit where it has to set out various things. We are at line 27 on page 71:

“The plan must set out … the activities Great British Railways proposes … the costs of carrying on those activities, and how Great British Railways proposes to meet those costs”.


Strictly speaking, all the things that I am asking for in Amendment 65 might be comprised within that.

This is an opportunity for us to be clear about what Great British Railways should do. In a separate group I will come to another issue related to the relationship with local government bodies. In this particular instance, there would be important transparency in Great British Railways being required, when setting out its business plan, to show what contributions are received by GBR itself from GBR companies, presumably by way of profits or revenue remitted to GBR for this purpose, and vice versa: how much is being paid out through GBR companies and how much is being received. Amendment 65 is for that purpose: where the activity is carried out by a GBR company, the contributions received from or provided to GBR in relation to those activities. I hope that is a straightforward transparency issue when the business plan is being presented. A good plan would do that anyway; it is just a case of trying to be clear about that now.

This affords me the opportunity to say something to my noble friend Lord Moylan. We discussed on Tuesday the question of GBR companies, and he returned to this issue and chastised me, saying that I was inaccurate. I do not think I was as inaccurate as he might imagine.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I never chastised.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I would never dream of doing that. It is inconceivable that I should do that. I drew to my noble friend’s attention an email that I had received that said that he had made a mistake and that the Minister had also made a mistake. I gave no opinion myself on that. It was very well argued, and I shared it with the Minister and the noble Lord. In writing to the noble Lord—I hope he has received that by now—I explicitly said that I did not know whether it was right or wrong, but I wondered whether he wished to make a comment. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, may wish to make a comment at any time he chooses, but not a comment, I hope, that is intended to be a rebuttal of any chastisement, or even a mild criticism, suggested by me.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that correction. He has shared the email with me. I think it is worth putting on the record the point, made in that email, that it is important to distinguish between joint ventures on the one hand and corporate activities of companies on the other. However, the point of the debate on Tuesday was that I was seeking to establish under the legislation that GBR companies do not have to be wholly owned. Hansard will show that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, was seeking to establish that GBR companies are required to be wholly owned. That was the simple debate.

As I understand it, Clause 99 of the Bill makes it clear that GBR companies are a subsidiary of GBR, and a subsidiary under the Companies Act does not require to be wholly owned. If the Government had wanted GBR companies to be wholly-owned subsidiaries, they would have said so. So, as far as I am concerned, it is a subsidiary and, as we know, under the Companies Act, a subsidiary is a matter of control, not of complete ownership. As far as I am concerned, I got what I wanted out of that debate, which was my assurance that GBR companies are not required to be wholly owned.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we are now redebating what was debated the other day. However, since there was an element of confusion, the noble Lord has accurately characterised the difference in position between himself and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, but it was in the context of an important debate about whether GBR would be able to carry out partnership—I use the word loosely—arrangements with private sector developers for the development of land in which GBR had a stake, with a view to achieving things like more housing or whatever it might be. Of course a subsidiary does not have to be wholly owned, since it is a question of control, so there can easily come a point where a joint venture company might not be controlled by GBR, and the question then is whether those arrangements would still apply.

The fundamental issue in the debate as I saw it—I entirely understand what the noble Lord is saying—is whether the structure proposed by the Government in the Bill inhibits what we would all agree are desirable developments that could take place using GBR assets working with the private sector. I heard the Minister give assurance on that, and of course I accept that, but I was merely advancing this to him because the suggestion was that confusion had arisen about joint ventures, subsidiaries and wholly-owned control in the course of debate, and that the Minister had fallen into that confusion, along with others. Therefore, I was giving him the opportunity to say whether that was in fact the case, although I do not expect him to do so today because he has only just had the email.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I think that was an intervention. I can only speak for myself, but I do not think I am confused now. The Bill does not inhibit this from happening in future and that is a satisfactory position for us to have reached. That is relevant to this debate in that my Amendment 65 is about the relationship between GBR and its companies, and financial transactions—the resources provided to or the resources received from GBR companies—ought to be explicit in the business plan.

I turn to Amendment 73. Now we really are in a happy position. It is many years since I was responsible for the public expenditure of a government department. I do not mean as Secretary of State; I mean as the official responsible. Knowing what powers one is using in relation to spending money is important. Amendment 73 is a probing amendment but I have used the structure of saying that the same activity should not be funded out of both the powers in the Bill, where financial assistance can be provided by the Secretary of State to GBR, and Section 6 of the Railways Act 2005, which noble Lords who know these things better than I do will remember is a broad-ranging power to provide financial assistance to GBR. I want to establish at this point—we might return to it at a later stage to see whether it is a satisfactory position—which GBR activities will be in receipt of financial assistance from the Government under the Section 6 power that exists now under the 2005 Act, or the financial assistance to be provided under this legislation. We need to avoid the confusion of two different powers providing financial assistance to the same activity.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 54 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and Amendment 55 in the name of my noble friend Lord Moylan. Obviously, I have not heard my noble friend’s exposition of the purpose of his amendment, which I look forward to listening to shortly, but I understand why these amendments have been tabled. I think that they are both intended to make it more difficult to change funding for railways, as opposed to other areas of public expenditure, but I am not sure that that is entirely a good thing. I completely understand why that would be a good thing if you were looking at it through the railway end of the telescope, but if you look at it from the point of view of a taxpayer or a citizen, I am not sure that tying the hands of Ministers in that way is entirely helpful.

I will take the two amendments in turn. In terms of background, it is worth saying that, if I have understood the Bill correctly, in part 1 of Schedule 2,

“Funding by the Secretary of State”,

the structure for setting the budgets in the first place is broadly the position now. The Government set out a plan for funding over a multiyear period, they notify various people of that funding and the funding is set out, as are the things that are expected to be delivered by the funding, so that it is all transparent for us to see what is going on. As far as I understand it, the Bill as drafted requires the Secretary of State purely to notify the ORR if they propose to vary the financial assistance—the Secretary of State has to tell the ORR in various circumstances. It is very clear that only notification is required; there is no requirement for the Minister to await the ORR doing anything before the Minister is able to proceed with the funding change. I am content with that set of circumstances, if I have understood them correctly.

My noble friend Lord Moylan’s amendment, which I understand is a probing amendment to test this, would make it very difficult for the Secretary of State to change that funding settlement, except in two cases: if the things they required GBR to do had changed and therefore the funding was different; or there was an emergency in the country at the level of what is set out in the Civil Contingencies Act. We do not have those very often, but there are lots of circumstances in which the Government have to make changes to public expenditure, for all sorts of reasons, without the country being in an emergency situation at the level defined in the Civil Contingencies Act. It is the proper role of Ministers to have that flexibility and the ability to set budgets, make funding decisions and even to choose within the departmental allocation that they have. Even if the Treasury is not changing anything in terms of the money that the department has, it is the job of Ministers to decide how that money is allocated between the different parts of the department’s expenditure, whether it is a—

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Amendments 57, 58 and 61 are about aligning the funding of designated passenger train services with the five-year funding cycle for infrastructure. There is absolutely no point in bringing track and train together if their funding cycles are over different periods of time. For this new organisation to succeed and run the joined-up railway that we are seeking, funding—both capital and revenue—the investment side and passenger services must be provided for in a five-year funding cycle.

Critical elements of the running of the railway are included in passenger services funding—for example, staffing at stations and rolling stock maintenance depots, and of course train crew, such as drivers, guards and conductors, as well as driver and staff training, which we know is a huge issue. If you do not get this bit right alongside the infrastructure, you will not benefit from what Great British Railways is supposed to deliver. So I hope the Minister can explain how this can be addressed, and I look forward to his response to my amendments.

Other amendments in this group probe aspects of the business plan, but most striking are the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, about ending or reducing taxpayer funding for the railway. As I said on day one of Committee, the railway will continue to need investment and subsidy, and I just do not think it is right for such clauses to be in the Bill. We heard about political direction, and it is for the Government of the day to deal with the budget as they see fit. But I hope we can look forward to having joined-up funding in five-year periods to make sure that Great British Railways is a success. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[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.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 314 in my name, supported by my noble friend Lord Moylan, enters the arcane world of Treasury theology—what is and what is not public expenditure. It would require the Secretary of State to report on the impact of the Bill on public finances. This is important because the Government constantly emphasise, rightly, their commitment to the fiscal rules to contain borrowing, build market confidence and reduce upward pressure on interest rates and taxes.

One of the fiscal rules is the investment rule: public sector net financial liabilities— sometimes known as PSNFL—which is a broad measure of national debt, must be falling as a share of the total economy by 2029-30. Another is the stability rule: the Government must forecast a surplus on day-to-day spending by 2029-30, meaning that regular public services are funded entirely through tax revenues rather than borrowing.

Clearly what GBR spends is public expenditure, but expenditure or borrowing by private companies can be classified as public expenditure if certain qualifications are met. Decisions on that are taken not by the Government but by the Office for National Statistics, and it operates according to international definitions. It does not allow for consideration of political or commercial significance when making its classification decisions; they are essentially statisticians.

The Minister may not have read “UK Economic Statistics Sector and Transaction Classifications: The Classification Process”—he may not even have heard of it—but it is relevant to Amendment 314. I shall summarise: the difference between the public and private sectors is determined by where control over the organisation lies rather than by “ownership” or whether the entity is financed from public funds. Control is the ability to determine general corporate policy. I will come on in a moment to the relevance of this to the rolling stock companies where, under the new scenario, GBR will be the principal customer, but there are two relevant instances where attempts by government to circumvent these rules have come unstuck, with consequences for the balance sheet.

One that will be familiar to the Minister was Network Rail. Network Rail was set up in 2002 as a private company limited by guarantee, primarily to keep its massive debt off the Government’s balance sheet. By structuring Network Rail as a private company limited by guarantee without shareholders, the Government could then borrow large sums of money for infrastructure upgrades without adding those billions to the official national public debt.

However, in 2014, ONS reclassified Network Rail as a central government body in the public sector, and this resulted in roughly £30 billion of debt moving on to the Government’s balance sheet. The Minister will have had direct experience of the consequences of that at Network Rail. We know because we have the Hendy report, which sets out the consequences for Network Rail of this reclassification. Debt was controlled, capital was rationed, assets were sold off and upgrades were postponed. I think the last thing the Minister wants to do is to write another Hendy report, mark 2, when rolling stock is classified as Network Rail is.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I already said that one thing the Secretary of State will do is to help the ONS with its understanding of both the recent past and what will happen as a consequence of the Bill. In the recent past, the Government have specified, to the most extraordinarily detailed degree, all the rolling stock used in all franchises for probably the past 10 or 12 years. They have also determined how long it runs for and how long it lasts. In those circumstances, we are very content to wait for the ONS to do its work when it chooses to do it.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I have a question pursuant to the debate about the powers to fund the GBR business plan. I understand from the Minister’s reply, and it is a reasonable proposition, that the Secretary of State should provide financial assistance in relation to activities set out by GBR in its business plan. Indeed, paragraph 3 says that the Secretary of State should do exactly that and say what financial assistance is expected to be provided. But would it not be logical, therefore, that the powers to provide financial assistance that are specified subsequently should extend to those activities within the business plan, rather than having only infrastructure being capable of being funded by the Secretary of State using the powers? We would end up with something much more visible: specific powers to provide financial assistance in relation to the business plan over this funding period.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lansley]

59: Schedule 2, page 70, line 18, leave out “may” and insert “must”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State’s statement of objectives to include objectives as to the standards to be achieved in relation to railway services.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group. Amendment 59 looks at the statement of objectives that the Secretary of State sets out for GBR and what is intended to be achieved over the funding period. The objectives, as we can see in paragraph 2(2),

“may include objectives as to standards to be achieved when carrying on activities”

that are to be set out in the business plan. It is a simple proposition and one of those happy subjects that we always discuss in Committee: should the word be “may” or should it be “must”? The implication of “may” is that it may not be, and we are considering whether it would be acceptable for the statement of objectives not to include reference to the standards that are to be achieved in relation to these activities. One of these lists about which we are not supposed to be too specific follows, but standards to be achieved are not set out as such in that subsequent list. They tend to be objectives relating to other things.

However, my other amendment is intended to see how these things interact. Separately, in Clause 65, Great British Railways has the responsibility to consider whether it should have a performance scheme, which, as I understand it, is essentially about minimising disruption to the network and to passengers. The question is: where are the objectives in relation to minimising disruption to passengers? I do not see them in paragraph 2(3). You could argue that they arise from the carriage of passengers and goods, but I do not think it is sufficiently explicit. I am not sure whether it is included in objectives as to standards. Are those the same standards as in a performance scheme?

I see the two amendments being linked. We are looking to ensure that the objectives set out standards and are clear about what is required in terms of avoiding disruption and enabling passengers to be confident about the availability of services according to the timetable. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it may be helpful to the Committee, since I have such a large number of amendments in the group and no one else who is present has any, if I speak now, and then it will be easier for the noble Baroness to comment on the amendments I have moved.

I shall start with Amendment 63A. I have tabled it because in the last 24 hours I have been contemplating the wipe-out of 10% of the global population by artificial intelligence, which a whistleblower at Anthropic has said is a very likely prospect some time in the next 10 years. It is possible that these claims are somewhat overblown—I do not know—but it is astonishing that we have a Bill whose measures in all likelihood, as I say, will stay in place for 30 years but we are not having any debate about digital, artificial intelligence or the innovative future of the railway.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

May I just interrupt my noble friend? I think he has moved on to the next group. We are on the group led by Amendment 59, to which I just spoke.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

And today’s Committee is due to conclude with Amendment 63.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, let me turn to Amendments 94, 124, 125 and 291. I am pleased to say that I agree with many of the performance indicators set out in the noble Lord’s amendments, which will be important in GBR delivering the service the public expect. I also agree with the concept of an annual report. I reassure the Committee that, on both counts, such a thing already exists.

The Bill requires GBR to produce an annual business plan and we have already confirmed that this will include meaningful KPIs around performance. For example, the business plan will clearly have to include GBR’s progress towards reaching its statutory freight growth target and I happily confirm today that it will. The 2050 target is a long way out, but progress against it should be measured in the business plan in 2040 and in 2050. By keeping these KPIs in the business plan, we ensure that a reflection of GBR’s activities, the cost of those activities and its performance against those activities and costs are always transparent and available for scrutiny.

GBR will publish annual updates to this plan which can, and should be, scrutinised by Parliament in the usual way. GBR will need to consult with the ORR and the passenger watchdog when creating these updates, ensuring expert and independent advice. As the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, proposes, the ORR will monitor GBR’s performance against the KPIs in its business plan as part of its monitoring function. An important distinction, however, is that the ORR’s role under the Bill as drafted is not confined to looking backwards at whether a target has been met. The ORR can also recommend to the Secretary of State whether GBR’s commitment and performance measures are realistic and measurable—something not factored in to the amendment.

Linking KPIs to the long-term rail strategy, rather than the business plan, would undermine the purpose of the strategy. The rail strategy is designed to provide ministerial direction on the long-term trends that will affect the railways and, at a high level, what they expect GBR to do about them. But GBR must be independent enough to respond to the rail strategy with a self-developed, proactive and detailed activity plan covering the next five—

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Forgive me for interrupting. I cannot find where it is required that there be an annual business plan. I can see there is a provision for the business plan to be kept up to date, but nothing that says this has to be done at any specific time or on an annual basis.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Let me come to that point. I believe that there is a provision, but before I say so, let me check.

The long-term rail strategy is designed to provide ministerial direction on the long-term trends that will affect the railways and, at a high level, what they expect GBR to do about them. The business plan is clearly the right place for short and medium-term targets to be included, which GBR should set for itself and which the ORR should review and comment on.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The long-term rail strategy will set out the Secretary of State’s expectations. The business plan will set out what GBR believes it can achieve to move towards the long-term rail strategy. The business plan has to be agreed with the Secretary of State, who might well disagree with some of its targets. In the end, GBR has to satisfy the Secretary of State about the progress that it proposes to make. I do not think that is much different, as the noble Lord will recall, to the Transport for London business plan, which translated the mayor’s transport strategy into targets related to the budget of the organisation and which were agreed by the mayor.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Surely there is, between the long-term rail strategy and the business plan, the statement of objectives. Surely the question, which I think my noble friend through his amendments has explored quite positively, is that the statement of objectives needs to be quite specific. Some of them need to be performance indicators in themselves, because the business plan is GBR explaining how it is proposing, through its activities and funding, to meet, or to contribute to meeting, what is set out in the statement of objectives.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I have to say to the noble Lord that I do not see the difference, in the sense that the long-term rail strategy must express the Secretary of State’s desire, for example, for a reliable railway in terms that enable the business plan to set out the measures that would be used to decide whether it is reliable. Indeed, in the recent past, one of the things that has had to be done since this Government took office was to agree, for the first time, what the measurements are and what the target should be for expressing the performance of the railway. I do not see that conflict in the way that the noble Lord does.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Forgive me, but I do not see it as a conflict at all. I am expressing, as I think the Minister has done on a previous occasion, that there is a difference between what is long term and what needs to happen this year, next year and indeed, for the purposes of the funding period, in the next five years. The statement of objectives is specifically about the next five years. The long-term rail strategy is on a different timeframe.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I agree with the noble Lord that the supply chain is crucial. Actually, for much of the supply chain, what really makes a difference is the five-year periodic settlement. That highlights the need for this engagement to go on, both at the time when the five-year plan is formed and the rest of the time. I do not see any contradiction in those two things happening. The five-year settlement for infrastructure could not possibly be done properly without the involvement of the supply chain, but they do not go away for the next four years until the next one. The dialogue with them is constant—and so it should be. I had better make progress, if I may.

I turn to Amendment 82, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. I do not often completely disagree with the noble Baroness, but I do here, I am afraid, because her amendment would fundamentally blur accountability for the railway system and undermine the clear responsibilities in the Bill. I do not think that interposing another board between the Secretary of State and the board of GBR would be right. However, the Bill contains a number of provisions such that both the Office of Rail and Road and the passenger watchdog will have many opportunities to provide the Secretary of State with advice before she takes decisions. The reality is that she will most likely have taken advice from either, or both, of them before any performance matters should escalate to the point of requiring a direction.

On Amendment 84, as we discussed in earlier groups, the Government are dedicated to providing a steady drum beat of publications that will inform the House—and, indeed, this Committee—on progress in establishing GBR. I encourage the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, to look at the Government’s policy publication timetable on GOV.UK; indeed, I have just written to noble Lords about the publication of the draft access and use policy by Network Rail. Given the ambitious timeline that we are working to on this, it would not seem to make much sense to divert resources away from the business of establishing GBR in order to write progress reports that would largely duplicate existing information that the Government are already making available.

Given what I have said, I encourage noble Lords and the noble Baroness not to press their amendments.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who took part in this interesting debate. To my mind, we established one or two rather important propositions.

The first is that, when the Government are setting out their statement of objectives, in relation to which GBR writes its business plan, it would be helpful if it were as specific as possible about the performance indicators that are to be included in that; my noble friend made a lot of good points where that is concerned. I made, in effect, only one point: I accept that, on Amendment 62, relating it directly to the performance scheme may not be the way to do this, but, as with the question of how many trains arrive within 15 minutes of the timetable, there are standards that need to be included, and it is important that we have those standards in the statement of objectives.

The other thing that we have established is an interesting reflection on the relationship between the business plan and the funding arrangements. I draw noble Lords’ attention to paragraph 1 of Schedule 2 on funding. The ORR is setting a timetable, and we have four components to this. I do not envy the Office of Rail and Road’s process of trying to establish in precisely what relationship these four dates are, because it has to say to the Secretary of State, “You’ve got to tell us what your statement of objectives is”. Then it has to say to the Secretary of State, “You have to tell us what funding is available”, which is an interesting question because the answer might be “not much”. Thirdly, Great British Railways has to go off on a third element and give us the business plan. Lastly, the Secretary of State tells GBR and the ORR how much financial assistance is going to be provided.

I have two points to make. I am not at all sure why the fourth of those components is there in that form. There is nothing in the schedule saying that there is a requirement on the Secretary of State to provide such a notice. There is no notification requirement; it is simply that the power to provide financial assistance is there. So I would have thought that the Secretary of State might give notification of how much financial assistance there is, but looking across the whole funding period and having to notify them of what financial assistance is available seems a curious requirement to me.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

If I may intervene on the noble Lord, for once, I say to him: welcome to the five-year funding periods. We are now in control period 7, I think. The process that was described is complex, but it works remarkably well, which is why the industry and the Government are wholly aligned in wanting to carry on with it. I could discuss with him in more detail how it works, but it has generally been very effective. It relies on a lot of collaboration between the parties, which is why it has been successful.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I take that point, but, of course, that is if the financial assistance under this is restricted to infrastructure, which we debated a short while ago. If there is a requirement to notify of the financial assistance, I do not see it at the moment. The Minister might have a look at whether such a notification is required. That being the case, I have made my points.

Finally, I apologise in advance that I will not be here on Wednesday for the next day in Committee. I will endeavour to leave notes with colleagues about any amendments that are my responsibility; I will have the benefit of reading what is said. We might have the benefit of the presence of my noble friend Lord Grayling to speak to his amendments. With that, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 59.

Amendment 59 withdrawn.

Railways Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in the course of preparing for this Committee, I have had a number of meetings with the Minister and his officials, and I thank them for making themselves available for those meetings. I say that now because I shall almost certainly forget to say it at more appropriate times later on, but if I do it is not because I do not mean quite seriously how grateful I am for the contribution and effort that they have made.

We are here on the first day of the Committee to create a Soviet-style railway in the United Kingdom and to go back—and we now know explicitly that it is the Government’s and the Prime Minister’s intention—to the warm and fuzzy 1970s. The 1970s are now the paradigm of where our nation should be. Those of us who remember the 1970s—there may be a number of us in the Room—do not have such fond memories of the standard of public services then compared with what we have today. We do not today have bodies unburied, we do not have refuse piled high in the streets as a result of government folly and we have railways that run broadly on time compared to the—I see that the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, is not here to be annoyed by this—relative catastrophe of British Rail in its worst days as it trundled towards its final station. Now it is to be resuscitated. We are to get Great British Railways in place of British Rail and we are going to have it on a totally nationalised basis.

There are two separate things going on here. First, the Minister makes a case that the railways would operate more efficiently if, as he puts it, track and train were united. That argument can be debated. I do not wholly accept it, but it can be debated, but it is not necessary in order for track and train to be united that they should all be owned by the Government in a single company. We know that because the Williams review, which was warmly welcomed by the Minister when he was chairman of Network Rail and was supported by the Conservative Government at the time, gave an alternative way forward, so the decision to nationalise the whole thing is particularly spiteful. The only explanation for it—because it is not necessary for the purpose of achieving the Government’s stated objectives—is that it has been done to pay off the trades unions that made such generous contributions to Labour’s victory at the polls in 2024.

We know that privatisation has been a huge success on the railways and that passenger numbers increased enormously after privatisation. It would be astonishing if the Government nationalising the railways achieved anything like that increase in passenger numbers. New operators entered the market and competition stimulated improvements.

I have four amendments in this group, but one of them is consequential, so three that I intend to speak to. My Amendment 2 addresses a particularly vicious little clause in the Bill, which says, first of all, that the body designated as Great British Railways has to be owned wholly by the Crown. In other words, a future Minister would have to pass primary legislation to redesignate or designate a different body in the private sector to carry out Great British Railways’ activities. What is the need for that? It is simply to gratify the trades unions. A second part almost seems to impose a penalty of some sort on any Minister who makes even a suggestion that Great British Railways should be transferred to the private sector. My Amendment 2 deletes that part; it does not stop Great British Railways going ahead as a nationalised body but it allows a future Secretary of State without the need for primary legislation to redesignate a different body, not necessarily owned by the Crown, to carry out the role of Great British Railways.

Amendment 1 is addressed at sloppy drafting more than anything else. The Bill talks about a body corporate being designated as Great British Railways, whereas later, in the next clause, it is implicit that the body corporate should be a company constituted under the Companies Act. But the Bill does not actually say that the body corporate has to be constituted under the Companies Act; it only says that it has to be wholly owned by the Crown. Other bodies corporate could be designated, as long as they were wholly owned by the Crown. It is simply sloppy drafting not to say at this point that it is to be a body constituted under the Companies Act.

When I mentioned this to the Minister, he said, “Oh well, everybody knows it’s going to be a company constituted under the Companies Act”. Well, they do not, if they read the Act—it needs to be written into the Act by him that that is what the intention is. It should say quite explicitly that that is what he intends to do. We will come back to this when we discuss amendments later in Committee that relate to the board of this company. There are some from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, to which I have added my name, about the board of this company and how this corporate structure works, because the Bill is very silent on that. This needs to be done.

Finally, Amendment 8 probes Great British Railways’ organisational structure. To this day we still have no idea at all—and maybe the Minister has no idea at all—how Great British Railways is going to be structured. Let me give a couple of options. It could be that it will be structured geographically, roughly mapping the existing structures, so that one division deals roughly with the south-western main line, one division deals with the east coast main line, and so forth. It could be structured like that, but you could have a totally different structure. There might be an argument for saying that we should have one division that deals with operating the railways, one that deals with managing the major stations, another division that deals with the minor stations and another again for retail. You could have an organisation that was completely functionally based rather than geographically based. These are important questions, which I think Parliament should have a chance to have a say on, yet not only is the Bill silent about them but the Government are silent as well. The effect of Amendment 8 is to require the Government to publish their organisational structure before the Bill can come into effect.

That is enough for the moment—I understand that other noble Lords have things to say. I will just say in advance—and I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me for pre-empting her—that I have taken note of the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. They are not wholly aligned with my view of the role of the private sector and she will not therefore, I think, be surprised if I find myself not able to support them. I beg to move.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to join this first group in Committee. I am sitting to the left of the Liberal Democrats because that is where I now find myself; I always want to be sitting behind my noble friend on the Front Bench in Committee to back him up, but I cannot do that because there is no back row in this Room, so I cannot be self-effacing in the back row. Anyway, I look forward to Committee. I do not have the experience of railways that the Minister and my noble friend speaking for the Official Opposition do—I do not pretend to that intimate knowledge of the railways—but I hope to bring something of my interest in how competition should be applied in the delivery of public services to some of the issues that we will be debating.

I turn to this group. There are a number of amendments in my name which are just about trying to find out, as I was going through the Bill, whether it works in the way described or precisely what it means. Rather in line with what my noble friend was just saying, we need to be sure that we understand that the Bill is functionally correct in the way that it works. I have just two amendments in this group.

Amendment 3 relates to the question of what must be wholly owned. As my noble friend said, Clause 1 is constructed around the proposition that Great British Railways not only must be wholly owned by the Crown but cannot be anything else. That relates to GBR itself. The purpose of Amendment 3 is to test whether that also applies to GBR companies. We do not encounter GBR companies in Clause 1, but we do subsequently as a means by which GBR will undertake its activities. This is not surprising. As my noble friend said, we do not know how GBR will be corporately structured but, by way of example, we know how Network Rail is structured. It has a significant number of wholly owned subsidiaries and quite a number of joint venture subsidiaries, including through Platform4.

For example—and here I declare my interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum and others—Platform4 is a Network Rail subsidiary company that has just recently, happily, entered into an agreement with partners to develop at Cambridge North station as part of the Government’s proposal to develop around stations, with 450 homes around the station. It is a joint venture company; it is not wholly owned by Network Rail. So my starting proposition is that this prohibition on companies not being wholly owned must apply to GBR itself but cannot apply to GBR companies. I want to be sure that that is the case. If it is not absolutely clear in the statute then it ought to be, which would be the purpose of my amendment.

That differentiates the amendment from those in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, to which we will no doubt turn in a minute, who wants precisely that to be the case. For the reasons I have just explained about the many joint ventures for things such as housing developments and commercial developments around stations through companies such as Platform4, if I may respectfully say so before she has put her case, I do not agree with the noble Baroness that all GBR companies should be—

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Who does?

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Recalling Questions earlier, just because we do not agree with the noble Baroness, that does not mean she cannot sometimes be right.

The other amendment in my name is Amendment 4, which relates to shadow directors. Clause 2 tells us that Ministers are not to be construed as shadow directors under the Companies Act when they make decisions. I think it is the case that, when officials act on behalf of Ministers, exactly the same provisions would apply to them. We need to be absolutely sure that this is the case, and that it applies to the officials of Scottish and Welsh Ministers as well as to those of the Secretary of State. I am looking for a bit of reassurance on that.

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Given what I said on all these amendments, I hope that noble Lords will find their way to withdraw them.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Before we conclude, and relevant to the point that my noble friend Lord Harper was making, I am sure that the Minister will want to look at the whole structure of Platform4 and its relationship to Great British Railways, but the Mayfield Partnership, which is involved in the regeneration around Manchester Piccadilly, has one-third Network Rail or Platform4 participation in that joint venture. So, at the moment, it is not just 50:50; it can be below 50%. It would be of interest, not least to noble Lords considering the future structure of GBR, to understand precisely how some of these large-scale and really important property development issues are to be managed by GBR. The directing mind for the railways is one thing, but the directing mind for development purposes is not necessarily the same thing.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. My experience of Network Rail’s property and Platform 4 is offset by increasing age and failure to remember the details. I will not only write to noble Lords about the 50:50 aspect, but about Mayfield, which I remember vaguely is of a different percentage, partially because much of the land is owned by somebody else rather than the railway. I will write on both those points, because I think they are germane. I appreciate the point that people need to understand how this will work in practice, particularly with those areas of activity of GBR that are not the provision of passenger railway services or the basic railway.

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These amendments were tabled in the Commons and debated in Committee there, but the issue was not addressed directly in the Minister’s reply. Members of the RMT’s parliamentary group wrote asking for a meeting on this and related matters, and that meeting has not taken place. The question I ask my noble friend Minister is a straightforward one: are the Government able to end the uncertainty facing rail workers and to confirm that it remains their intention, as set out in Labour’s plan for rail, that Great British Railways will be a new single employer? If that confirmation cannot be given today, will the Minister agree to meet to discuss the matter before Report?

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I will principally refer to my Amendment 19 in this group. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, that I am not really in a position to comment on the points he makes, but I think the discussion we had previously about the corporate and organisational structure of Great British Railways gives force to his points about how the employment of the railways will be structured in future, so I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on that.

I want to make a quick point on the amendment from my noble friend Lord Moylan about creating a purpose clause for the Bill. Generally speaking, I am in favour of purpose clauses where we are not principally legislating in order to change existing legislation where the purposes are already set out. This Bill will effectively get rid of the purpose set out at the front of the Railways Act 1993 and therefore I think it is a pity that there is no purpose clause at the front of this legislation to tell us what we are trying to achieve. In my view, that is distinct, as I think my noble friend was saying, from simply a description of what Great British Railways is going to do and what it should think about.

Paragraph 13 of the Explanatory Notes sets out the view that the purpose can be defined simply by what the functions of Great British Railways are and what it must have regard to under the general duties. But functions and duties are not in themselves sufficient to constitute purpose. For my money, I would have been in favour of drafting a purpose clause up front as Clause 1 that would have told us what we are trying to achieve. I think that makes for rather good drafting these days.

I will get down into the nitty-gritty now with Amendment 19 in my name. It relates to Clause 3 where, just as the functions have been set out for Great British Railways, there is an interesting moment where the functions are replaced by a little subsection that tells us what the “statutory functions” are to be. These are all the functions that we have just been told about and the ones that the Secretary of State might give Great British Railways at any time in the future, but not anything relating to service facilities or the supply of services under the 2016 regulations. That sent me off to look at the 2016 regulations to see what the service facilities and the supply of services are. I will minimise it for the purposes of this debate; essentially, on the one hand it is provision of access to freight and international traffic by an infrastructure manager under the access rights, and then supply of service facilities is essentially service providers giving, again, freight, other railway undertakings and international access to services—things from stations, depots and so on.

Interestingly, as far as I can see, those bits relating to access to the infrastructure and the provision of services in the 2016 regulations are intended to be substantially replaced by the access policies set out in Clause 59. But Regulations 5 and 6 and Schedule 2, I think, of the 2016 regulations are not to be repealed. The interesting thing is that Great British Railways will be expressly taken out of the definition of an infrastructure manager, so it will not have the requirements to provide access to infrastructure or to provide services implied by Regulations 5 and 6, even though they remain in place.

In a sense, this is a probing issue. Who will take the responsibility for the provision of infrastructure to freight and international if it is not Great British Railways? With supply of services, for things such as stations and depots, if it is not Great British Railways which has a responsibility for providing those services and the minimum access package specified in Regulation 6 of the 2016 regulations, whose responsibility is it? It is not set out in this Bill. All we know from this Bill, as a result of Clause 70, is that it is not Great British Railways. Then who is it? Who will do those things?

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome these probing amendments and look forward to the Minister’s response to some very important general issues. It is right that the staff in all the operating companies that will be affected by this should have an early idea from the Government about what is planned for their future employment.

I am one of those who welcome the idea that we want a well-paid profession serving on the railways, but for the sake of taxpayers, who are putting in substantial grant in aid and capital money, and of fare-paying passengers, who often have to pay very high fares, we need a system for negotiation between staff and Great British Railways which is more likely to achieve the increase in productivity that could justify the higher pay for staff without imposing an ever-higher charge on the taxpayer and fare-paying passengers. This is more than a detail that can be left open; we need to know who the employer will be, what the status of the current contracts is and how they will be put into transition to new contracts for the staff when their employment changes.

Is there anything the Government can tell us about how they might—they hope—have better relations with the unions in future so that we can look forward to a better experience in getting that balance of better pay for better delivery, smarter working, adopting work practices and being willing to operate new capital investment in a way that delivers higher productivity and higher quality of service?

I also welcome my noble friend Lord Moylan’s draft of what the purposes should and could be, which may not entirely match all the Government’s aims. It would be interesting to hear from the Government which of his suggestions are intended or implied in the current legislation, so that we can have some early indication of what the mission statement of the new railway might be.

I think taxpayers and railway users are expecting more services, not fewer. That has not been the early experience of the last two years. They are expecting better punctuality and timeliness, which would also be welcome. What the new railway will definitely require is more feel for where more passenger movements are required or possible. As in the early days of privatisation, surely the early days of full nationalisation might want to achieve a trend of rising passenger numbers, which privatisation achieved very well, and the ability of companies to develop timetables and services more suited to modern travel needs and therefore fuel the continuing progress of providing more growth in passengers and revenue.

If a new railway management—the controlling mind of GBR—knows how to do that, it will make everything a lot easier if the background of the completion of these arrangements is rising passenger use, rising revenues, greater flexibility over timetables and thinking about growth rather than cost cutting and the elimination of less profitable routes. That can easily get you into a spiral of downturn, as with the nationalised railway experience for most of its time post war, until privatisation reversed those difficult trends.

I hope that the Minister will not rule out one of the modest successes of recent years, which is the ability to have a competitive challenge to the monopolist. There are times when people outside will see ways of harnessing people, talent and capital to provide additional and better service using the existing track, and for that they will clearly need fair terms for access, and that will provide an innovative stimulus to the nationalised monopoly. However, I fear that the Government will not want to do that, and so I think they will find it that much more difficult to innovate and improve the timetables without that stimulus or spur from others generating such ideas and providing such a challenge and opportunity for the growth of the railway.

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Amendment 19, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, would amend the definition of GBR’s functions in relation to service facilities. The Bill exempts the provision of service facilities for use by other train operators from GBR’s new access regime. These facilities will be things such as maintenance depots, freight terminals and sidings. They are provided in a wider market in which other suppliers may also participate. For that reason, access to these service facilities will continue to be governed by the existing ORR access regime rather than GBR’s new one so that GBR and other providers operate on a level playing field and third parties can gain fair access to these facilities. Consistent with that principle, Clause 3 makes it clear that the provision of these service facilities is not a statutory function of GBR. The Bill therefore already provides the parity of treatment that I believe this amendment is trying to achieve. However, I would be happy to meet the noble Lord if that would be helpful on this subject.

[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?

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[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I did not add my name, but there is a limit to the number of names you can add. Many of us feel very supportive of the recommendations from my noble friend Lady Leaman in those two amendments.

I simply want to give some context to the reasons for the amendments such as those from the noble Lord, Lord Young, to be considered for the Bill, or something based on them being considered, to secure a genuinely fair and free market in the retail sales of train tickets. It is worth remembering how much difference the private operators made to the price you had to pay for many kinds of journey. We have been discussing it in theoretical terms, but there was a time when, if you wanted to travel from Edinburgh to Penzance on the cross-country train which made that journey, the cost was enormous. What changed it? It was split ticket operators demonstrating that they could get four or five different tickets—including, when I did it on one occasion, a West Yorkshire rover ticket that carried me one small piece of the journey—and that this accumulation of a handful of tickets would give you a price less than half the cost that you would have been quoted originally for that journey.

Not only did that cheapen tickets for a lot of people making difficult journeys, but it also changed the attitude of many of the operating companies. Certainly when I go to the station to buy a ticket, I am now always asked whether I want a cheaper ticket by getting the next train or the one before it. There is an alertness to the customer’s need to know what the options are for a reasonably priced ticket, which has been brought into the system by the private operators. I do not advocate these amendments because competition is a good Liberal value, but because experience has proved that to be the case.

All this has to exist in a world in which very rapid change will take place. At the moment, operators issue their own tickets. The result is that there is an invisible interaction between the person selling the ticket, the retailer, and the revenue protection officer on the train whose decision it is whether that ticket will be valid on that train. If you have missed one and are getting the next one, it may well not be; if you have chosen to change your journey pattern, it may well not be. The Minister may fondly believe—we have talked about this in a very helpful discussion—that all this will fall away, because when GBR is the only one providing the trains, there will not be these difficulties. I am not convinced of that; I think that old habits will die hard. If we are not very careful, we will still have a situation where the retailer gives you the impression that he is retailing a piece of paper or an email that will enable you to travel on one of several trains, when you are actually buying something limited by the policies and practice of the operator. It may be one operator in principle, but there will still be different regions under different regional management, so we need to have methods of ensuring that. I hope to return to that second point later in Committee, but we should understand the context and value of what we are discussing.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I do not have my name on these amendments, but I thoroughly agree with pretty much everything that has been said. I especially support what my noble friend Lady Harding said in introducing this group and am entirely in agreement with my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. I do not want to get into the question of appeals, because we will come on to how the appeal process should be structured later.

Amendment 47 in the name of my noble friend about the approved document is particularly important. I assume that the code of practice that we are promised, which the noble Baroness, Lady Alexander, was talking about, is the equivalent of the approved document or some part of it. At the moment, we have this ticketing and settlement agreement. We have to know how this is going to work in future. If we do not, we should expect—indeed, we should call for—the Competition and Markets Authority to step in. As things stand, the relevant aspects of the ticketing and settlement agreement constitute part of a block exemption against a Chapter 1 prohibition under the Competition Act. It is, on the face of it, potentially an anti-competitive agreement, but the block exemption exists. The question is whether the agreement satisfies the requirements of the block exemption. We have to look at the agreement to know whether that is the case, which is why Amendment 47 is right. We have to ask the Competition and Markets Authority whether the code of practice or the approved document under the Bill satisfies the requirements of the block exemption.

The fact is that GBR will be in a dominant position. Under the Competition Act, in addition to the prohibition on anti-competitive agreements there is a prohibition on abuse of a dominant position. Much of this debate is saying that, given that we know that GBR will be in a dominant position, we should be actively looking for the Office of Rail and Road, by way of market investigations in this area if necessary, or the Competition and Markets Authority to step in, as the current jurisdiction enables it to do, to counter any abuse. We know from Clause 2(1) that Great British Railways has no Crown immunity. Under Section 73 of the Competition Act, there is a Crown immunity from the constraints, remedies and directions of the Competition and Markets Authority, so GBR does not want to be in a position where the Competition and Markets Authority comes after it to prevent its abuse of a dominant position. For all those reasons, the Government would be well advised to put into the legislation measures that will prevent GBR being tempted to abuse its dominant position and to ensure that the approved document will satisfy the CMA’s requirements for a block exemption.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I thank my noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe for her excellent opening of this group, the comprehensive way in which she did it and—I think this is a powerful point—her real experience of a similar process and what actually happens in practice. One of the values of this House is having not just theoretical debates but Members who have experience of how these things work in practice. It is no good just legislating for what we think might happen; it is about what will happen. That was particularly valuable.

In this area, unlike some of the areas in the Bill, there is broad consistency among everybody who has spoken so far. At Second Reading, in other fora and in writing, the Minister set out that the Government want a competitive retail landscape and recognise the benefits of that. So what we are debating here is not the principle but how best to achieve that shared goal in practice. I will try to add to this debate.

Practically, the suggestion in my noble friend Lord Holmes’s Amendment 182 of a functional separation —which the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, also raised—is the cleanest and most sensible solution. That means that GBR is not in a position where it is tempted to abuse a dominant market position. It has a separate retailing arm, the rules can operate in a transparent way, you avoid a lot of trouble and you do not have to set up a complicated mechanism to deal with that abuse. I understand that the Government have set their face against that, but I reinforce that that would be the best solution and would solve a lot of these problems.

If the Government do not want to do that, for whatever reason, we absolutely need to make sure, first, that there is transparency. If all this is hidden away, it is very difficult for whatever mechanisms are put in place, whether it is the CMA, the ORR or whatever legal processes the independent retailers have to do. As the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said, they are not huge companies with bottomless pits of money to be able to do this. If you do not have transparency, people do not know what is going on.

I will make a slightly different argument, bringing in our friends from the Treasury, than the one my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham made. This is one where the Treasury should be on our side. One of the important things that the Treasury wants to achieve is to reduce the subsidy paid to the rail network because, post Covid, the rail network does not send money to the Treasury; it sucks money away from the Treasury. The only way that will change on the operating side is if there is innovation and more passengers use the rail network. The ticketing retailers are one of the ways, in the innovative way they retail tickets. Importantly, if leisure travel is to be a growth area, the partnerships that they strike with providers of leisure opportunities can then be combined with travel to produce innovative packages. If you are going to do all that, you need that thriving, competitive retailing operation, so the Treasury should want that to be successful.

The other thing the Treasury should want is that the operating cost of GBR’s own ticketing operation should be as low as possible. On the cost of running that operation, I challenge what my noble friend Lord Young said. We know what the third-party retailers get because we know what the percentage commission is. If GBR’s retailing operation is not able to run its services for less money than that, it should not be in business, frankly, because it is adding no value at all and should not be running it. My hunch is it that it will not be able to, which is why, when I was Secretary of State, I said it should not really get involved in this business at all because there were lots of competing providers that were much better at it and, frankly, it should just get those to do it.

However, for reasons I do not quite understand, Ministers want GBR to be involved in this process. So, it is critical that the accounting—I declare my interest here as a chartered accountant—should be absolutely transparent so that we can see what it costs. From the Treasury’s point of view, as I said, it wants to be sure that no subsidy is going into the ticketing operation from the rest of the thing, given that there are competitive operators that can deliver this, I suspect, more cost effectively. That is an argument for the Treasury supporting some of these amendments.

On the subsidy point, I believe there is a question that is not resolved, which the independent retailers are concerned about. I understand that, in written correspondence with the Independent Rail Retailers, the department has asserted that GBR’s online retailer will not be subject to the Subsidy Control Act 2022, arguing instead that it will be governed solely by the Public Service Obligations in Transport Regulations 2023. That approach is inconsistent with the legal framework and assurances given by Ministers during the passage of the Bill so far that GBR will remain subject to public law, competition and subsidy control requirements.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, Clause 4 deals with relations with the devolved authorities in Scotland and Wales. I have a number of amendments here—five, in fact. They all appear in a sense to be relatively minor but they go to the heart of the devolution settlement. They raise the question of whether the Bill is in line with the new Prime Minister’s policy—I know he has not been elected to anything but he is the new Prime Minister—of making devolution a reality. I will run through the amendments fairly straightforwardly and leave it to others to debate them and the Minister to respond.

One of the things that can be done is that any combined authority or devolved authority has a right to request. I always find this slightly offensive, because we are a free country—everyone has a right to request something from the Minister—but apparently, this valued “right to request” is going to be given. You can go along and ask GBR if it will run a service local to you, which might even be branded your way, to which you might contribute some of the costs. That is the general idea. I can understand that in relation to English combined authorities but not the devolved Administrations.

For example, I do not understand at all why Scotland should be confined by statute to running that service using Great British Railways. If the path is available and the service can be run, why should Scotland not make its own choice about who the operator of that service should be? As I understand it, that would not be possible under the Bill; it would have to be a GBR service. I think that is a bit insulting to Scottish devolution. The same applies to Wales. My Amendment 21 would correct that and allow them to exercise railway functions through a body corporate other than Great British Railways.

Amendment 145 goes hand in hand with Amendment 146, because they relate to Scotland and Wales. They relate to the fact that, under the Bill, there will have to be a memorandum of understanding between Great British Railways and the Scottish and Welsh Governments. There is a great deal of reliance on memoranda of understanding in the Bill, but we never see them and have no entitlement to do so. I am not saying that they will not be published, but I am not sure that the Government are under an obligation to publish them. They are so much a part of this Bill, but their substance is being concealed from us in Parliament and wrapped up in documents that are ancillary to the main agreement. My Amendments 145 and 146 would require those memoranda to be laid before Parliament before they could come into effect.

Finally, I have the paired Amendments 294 and 295. Again, one relates to Scotland and one to Wales. Amendment 294 relates to Clause 82. There is something fantastically cheeky in Clause 82, which reads:

“Great British Railways must consult the Scottish Ministers before making a decision within subsection (2)”—


which would be a decision about cross-border services and additions to a part of the railway network operated by Great British Railways that is situated in Scotland—

“if it appears to Great British Railways that the decision will significantly affect the interests of Scotland’s economy or of persons living in, working in or visiting”

the area. I come back to a similar question I asked in the last group: what economic capacity would Great British Railways be employing to make disinterested decisions about whether something would have a significant effect on the interests of Scotland’s economy? Secondly, is it not more likely that the Scottish Government would be the appropriate body to make a decision about whether something will have a significant effect on the interests of the Scottish economy? My amendment would put that right by reversing it. Amendment 295 would do something similar for Wales.

There is a certain arrogance in the Bill, certainly with regard to local government in England, but the arrogance towards the Scottish and Welsh Governments is beyond the pale, given what the Prime Minister has been saying and what those Governments would accept. I hope that, when the Minister replies, he will say that the matters to which I have drawn attention are slips in the drafting that he will be happy to correct, either through my amendments or amendments that he will draft and submit to us on Report. I beg to move.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harper (Con)]

Can I just check that the rail strategy that the Secretary of State will produce will be a strategy for Great Britain, and that the memorandum of understanding will be about how that interacts? If the Secretary of State’s rail strategy is for England only, that does not make sense. What the Minister just said implies that the Secretary of State will produce a rail strategy for Great Britain, in which case there would not be any friction from ensuring that those documents were published together.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Before the Minister responds to that point, I add that I am slightly confused because Clause 15, “Rail strategy”, says that the Secretary of State “may not” include provision relating to the functions of the Scottish Ministers, so it may be a rail strategy for Great Britain, but it cannot deal with the functions of the Scottish Ministers.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I say in response to noble Lords that the long-term rail strategy is for the whole railway. The Scottish and Welsh Governments are being consulted, but Scotland will also have a strategy covering its own functions because that is the meaning of devolution. I hope that is clear.

Railways Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Blencathra. I can remember British Rail, but I do not think any of us want to go back to British Rail, we want to go to something altogether better. We need the railways to succeed. We can see that when people feel that they have a reliable, punctual and enjoyable railway available to them, they will use it. Look at the rail passenger journeys on the Elizabeth line, which is seeing something like a million passengers a day. Where we create a railway that people can rely on and use, we can succeed. We need that to happen.

On our Benches, on this side of the House, we have already arrived in these fascinating speeches at something of a consensus view, which is that we ought to have recreated the vertically integrated regional companies, but we did not. John Major may have been in favour of it, but he was Prime Minister when that was not what was put into the Railways Act 1993. It should have happened. If I remember correctly, before the 1992 manifesto, we were arguing for exactly that and the manifesto more or less reflected that, but it did not happen.

That did not mean that privatisation did not succeed. My noble friend Lord Grayling was absolutely right. Passenger numbers doubled. Investment in infrastructure went up by three or four times. Train miles increased by 30%. So there was a dramatic increase, but what was that essentially about? It is what my noble friend Lord Redwood was saying: privatisation led to substantial investment of private capital. The first question we must examine during the passage of this legislation is: where is that capital going to come from in future? Are we going to be able to sustain the investment that we need in the railway network for the future? The Bill does not tell us that. It tells us the processes, but not the outcome.

I had my days as a civil servant, and I express my appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson. We will miss him here, but I am looking forward to seeing him in Cambridge. I hope that we will continue to have that pleasure. As a civil servant, I sat in a meeting where the investment programme of one potentially successful nationalised industry was rejected in order to provide an investment into a failing nationalised industry which had a political reason for investment.

Let us not kid ourselves. If this becomes a state-controlled industry, it will become subject to state control of investment, and that may mean state rationing of investment. The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, who introduced the Bill in an admirably concise but also very helpful way, will remember that when we examined the public ownership Bill, he very skilfully enabled the Government to reverse out of franchising into public ownership when the remaining franchises ended, but he did not tell us what the long-term structure was going to be. This Bill is about the long-term structure, who the single directing mind will be and how that single directing mind will be subject to checks, balances and challenges.

In my view, privatisation can work successfully in the long run only where it is subject to competition. In my experience, monopoly always offers short-term benefits, sometimes provides short-term benefits, but always leads to a lack of long-term investment, long-term innovation and long-term consumer benefit. So if, as my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead was stressing, quite rightly, we are going to get the consumer benefits, the innovation and the investment, we have to bring the private sector on board as well.

Some of the challenges to which I will devote my attention are, for example, in creating the regulatory structure that enables this to happen. First, the rail strategy at the moment is simply what the Secretary of State chooses it to be. There is no parliamentary scrutiny. There is not even any requirement for consultation, not even with the Office of Rail and Road, before the strategy is published. I think we are going to have to look very critically at this and look at the analogy of national policy statements, which in the energy sector, for example, are subject to examination in Parliament and to scrutiny, if not to a parliamentary veto.

Secondly, there is the rail freight target. There is a target: it is that it increase. The level of rail freight in this country has increased in the last decade but, lamentably, by only 1% per year, on average. If we are to reach the target of a 75% increase by 2050, it requires a 2.5% annual compound rate of rail freight growth. Perhaps that target should be set as not less than a 2% increase per annum; otherwise, how will the Government or, indeed, Great British Railways, be held to account?

Thirdly, on the Office of Rail and Road, I will not repeat what we heard from my noble friends Lady May and Lady Harding of Winscombe. My noble friend Lady Harding is right about ticketing. We need to press hard on that, but the issue of avoiding self-preferencing is not confined to ticketing. The Office of Rail and Road may have continued concurrent jurisdiction with the CMA in relation to the CMA’s own powers, but the Bill expressly removes the promotion of competition duty from the Office of Rail and Road in relation to such important things as access, infrastructure, timetabling and charging schemes. If we are going to avoid self-preferencing, we need to ensure that the competition duty is brought back on those as well.

Clearly, the open-access operators will not have confidence that they will be able to exploit the opportunities for private investment and private competition unless and until the Office of Rail and Road has those powers. The additional power it should have is that the appeal to the ORR should not be limited to judicial review grounds. There must be elements of those decisions made by GBR which should be appealed on their merits to the Office of Rail and Road. It will not surprise the Minister that I plan to test him on some of those competition-related issues—we have happily worked on that before.

My final point is on devolution. This carries forward the opportunity for services not to be designated and therefore to be available for the metro and passenger transport executives to be able to provide themselves. However, the relationship with local government in this Bill seems to be inadequate so far. Clause 85, for example, limits the relationship with local government to mayoral combined and strategic authorities, and clearly there are many more local authorities than those which are mayoral strategic authorities.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall endeavour to be brief. I have only one amendment in this group. There is also an amendment by my noble friend, Lord Lansley, which, as I understand it, has a similar effect to my own, or at least points in the same direction.

The reason I raise this—I refer to my local government experience—is that anyone with local government experience is seized of the question of vires. We are always worried about whether we actually have the power to do that which we want to do, because, as is well known, if you do not have the power in law, you are probably acting outside your responsibilities and can be held liable for it, and all sorts of terrible things can ensue from that.

Here I am thinking ahead to the Railways Bill, which we intend to amend when it comes to your Lordships’ House so as to give certain rail responsibilities to mayors in certain cities at least. At the moment, that Railways Bill merely gives them the opportunity to be consulted and to request, and we think devolution could go a little further. Thinking ahead to that, one wonders whether the response to that from the Government might not be, “Ah, yes, but even if we were willing to give them such powers, they don’t have the vires to do it. They do not have the legal power to operate a passenger railway service, and it would be inappropriate to bring that into the Railways Bill, where it would be out of scope”. But of course it would not be out of scope of this Bill, which is about exactly that question: the devolution of powers to local authorities. So I thought we would fend off that difficulty if it arose later by making it explicit in the Bill that those local authorities had legal power to run passenger railway services.

Of course, it would not follow at all from this measure alone that they would be able to run passenger railway services. If you want to run a passenger railway service, you have to have a railway and some trains. This Bill would not change that situation at all, but it would give them the legal power should it be made possible for them to have access to trains and to rail in the future. For that reason, I think it is a very sensible measure to include here and I beg to move.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I thank your Lordships for the opportunity to contribute on this. I fear that those of us who participated during the passage of the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill, such as the Minister and my noble friend Lord Moylan, will be having our Groundhog Day moment on this group because we will be examining, as my noble friend said, the question of whether it should be possible for passenger rail services to be operated by mayors.

My amendment is different from my noble friend’s because I am setting out to examine whether the legislation needs to change to enable that to happen. There has been something of a pre-emption of this debate by the exchanges that took place on the group before last in relation to exactly this question of whether TfL and the mayor should be able to take responsibility for the Great Northern inner suburban services. It raises exactly the point that is the burden of my amendment. So I want to start by asking the Minister: is it possible, as he suggested on the earlier group, for passenger transport executives, accountable to mayors, to run passenger rail services? The Minister is nodding. I shall just explain why I think it is possible and then examine whether that is the case. Maybe we do not need to amend either this Bill or the Railways Bill in due course, but we might need to look at those issues when they come up.

It seems to me that, in the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act, it is provided that the Secretary of State, as the franchising authority, when he or she—it is a she—wishes to procure passenger rail services, must do so only by a direct award of a public service contract to a publicly owned company. A publicly owned company, as we then proceed to discover under Section 30C of the Railways Act, as amended by the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act, is a company owned by the Secretary of State. We know what this now means: it means that Great British Railways will effectively be the franchising authority in the fullness of time—I think we are looking two years ahead or so—of all the passenger railway services other than those outside the present franchising agreement, such as open access operators.

How then could Great Northern inner suburban services be handed to the mayor in any practical sense? The answer is that, under Section 13 of the Railways Act 2005, passenger transport executives may enter into agreements. Section 13(4) says:

“A Passenger Transport Executive … in England may enter into agreements for … the provision, by a person who is a … franchise operator … of … services for the carriage of passengers by railway within that area”.


So TfL could enter into an agreement with Great British Railways to provide passenger railway services extending beyond London. “How far?” noble Lords may ask. Section 13 of the Railways Act 2005 gives us the answer: “within the permitted distance”, which is 25 miles from the boundary of TfL’s area. That takes us out to Stevenage—yes, Stevenage, no less.

I am looking to the Minister to say whether any of this train of thought is not correct. Is it possible for mayors to be given not the franchising authority for the delivery of passenger services in their area but an agreement for the operation of passenger services, to the extent that that is negotiated with Great British Railways and approved by the Secretary of State under Section 13(5)? That operational control, of course, is subject to what we will discuss, no doubt, in due course: the directing mind of Great British Railways. The nature of the operational activities undertaken by TfL must therefore be entirely constrained by the agreement that Great British Railways and Transport for London will enter into. But it seems to me that it is possible to do it now. If it is not possible to do it now, the Bill should be amended so as to enable this to happen, which is what my amendment was originally intended to do.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I want to be absolutely clear in my own mind and check that my noble friend is as well. It is very easy, in London, to think that Transport for London runs those services, partly because they are branded to look like Transport for London, and that therefore, Transport for London is in roughly the equivalent position of a train operating company, but that is not its position. With those services, the Secretary of State’s role as franchising authority has been transferred to Transport for London—Transport for London is not the train operating company, but the franchising authority. All the services are run by train operating companies, which are invited to bid for them. I am not sure that that system applies in other conurbations.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend. What I am describing and think is now legal is not the arrangement that he describes as applying to TfL as it stands. TfL cannot be made the franchising authority, because that has to be the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State can procure passenger railway services only by a direct award of a public service contract to a publicly owned company and only the Secretary of State can own that company.

However, I am suggesting that this is a different arrangement. The franchising authority remains the Secretary of State, who makes a direct award of a public service contract to Great British Railways, which, under Section 13(4) of the Railways Act 2005, enters into an agreement with Transport for London as a passenger transport executive. I am agnostic as to how Transport for London delivers those services. I suspect that we may find only in the fullness of time precisely who the operators are which are accountable to Transport for London for doing this.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Under the arrangement that is struck, is it not likely that the only potential operating company that would be acceptable for such an agreement would be Great British Railways? Great British Railways would be agreeing with a mayor, “You can pay us to run services”, which is more or less exactly what the Bill envisages and which many of us find objectionable. What my noble friend is describing may be accurate and permissible—we will find out from the Minister in a moment whether it is—but it does not take us beyond the Railways Bill, which many of us would like to do. That is the purpose of my amendment.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My noble friend makes a good point. If the Secretary of State were to ask Great British Railways to enter into that agreement with Transport for London, I do not know who would be the operator of the passenger rail services concerned. It might be Great British Railways, because Section 13 of the Railways Act 2005 clearly envisages payment for this. That could be to GBR, in exactly in the same way as it has been in the past to Great Northern or any other operator.

The point is that the agreement under the 2005 legislation enables passenger transport executives to enter into agreements with the franchise operators to run those services. As far as I can see, that is not being taken away, as long as the legal authority is not transferred to the mayor. What my noble friend Lord Moylan is correctly saying about the current legal status of TfL is not what can be reproduced in relation to Great Northern in suburban services, as far as I am aware.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, these amendments from the noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Lansley, are really testing the provision for rail devolution for passenger rail services and its legal status. It has been a really interesting discussion.

The Government’s White Paper said:

“Mayors will be given a statutory role in governing, managing, planning and developing the rail network. In addition to partnerships with Great British Railways, Mayors of Established Mayoral Strategic Authorities will have a clear right to request greater devolution of services, infrastructure and station control where it would support a more integrated network”.


I am not sure that anything before us today goes that far. When we debated the public ownership legislation, I kept talking about Manchester being really keen to extend the Bee Network. I was doing my weekly reading of the rail press earlier today and there was a picture of a lovely branded Bee Network train up in Manchester. They are keen to move forward with that. In response to my amendments on rail devolution on Report of that Bill, the Minister said,

“this Government are absolutely committed to strengthening the role of local leaders and local communities in shaping the provision of rail services in their areas … I can reaffirm to your Lordships’ House that the railways Bill will include a statutory role for devolved governments and mayoral combined authorities”.”.—[Official Report, 6/11/24; col. 1543.]

Yet when I look in the Railways Bill and at what is before us today, I am not sure that the Government have gone as far as they promised at that stage of that earlier legislation. What has changed? Can the Minister assure us that they are not rowing back on rail devolution? Has there been a change of heart or are we all slightly misinterpreting it and will we see far more rail devolution across the country, whether to Manchester, London or other regions?

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. Since he asked the question, I will write to him about how the condition of the returning land is to be dealt with. In the meantime, I kindly ask him to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I am sorry to interrupt the Minister, but on that point, Section 252 of the Highways Act allows for a counter notice from somebody where rights over their land have been compulsorily acquired to seek to have their interest in the land purchased. I wonder whether the Government might consider whether the temporary possession of land might also reasonably give rise to an opportunity for a landowner to seek that the land be acquired on a permanent basis.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for that point. He makes a very valid point, and we will go away and consider it. I thank him very much for raising it. I kindly ask the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, to withdraw his amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very glad to speak to my Amendment 55 and in support of the noble Baroness’s Amendment 54. Clause 41 provides for the “Disapplication of heritage regimes”. I declare an interest as the owner of a two-star listed property and a member of the Listed Property Owners’ Club. As this is my first substantive contribution on the Bill in Committee, I also declare that I have a registered interest as chair of development forums in Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire. But, as noble Lords would expect, all the views I express will be my own and not those of any particular forum members. Like the noble Baroness, I thank the National Trust and the Heritage Alliance for their briefing on this issue.

The Explanatory Notes to this clause state that it

“would provide an alternative to an applicant having to apply separately to each relevant consenting authority”.

The consenting authorities referred to are, respectively, the local planning authority in respect of listed building consent and conservation areas and the Secretary of State—in practice, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport—in respect of scheduled monument consent. The structure of the clause is not simple, so if I may, I will explain how I think it is intended to work but raise questions thereby for the Minister.

The clause replaces Section 17 of the Transport and Works Act 1992. That section inserted a new Section 12(3A) into the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, which enabled the consenting process to be referred to the Secretary of State where it forms a part of an application for a transport and works order under Sections 1 or 3 of the Act—Section 1 being on transport and Section 3 being on waterways. Such an application is a Section 6 application under the Transport and Works Act. The assimilation of the applications for consent for listed buildings and scheduled monuments into a concurrent application is provided for in the Transport and Works Applications (Listed Buildings, Conservation Areas and Ancient Monuments Procedure) Regulations 1992.

That is why Clause 41 notes Section 12(3A) and the relevant Welsh legislation and goes on to say in subsection (4) that Section 12(3A) continues in force. To my reading, this means that if listed building and other heritage consents are required, they can continue to be included in a Section 6 application and, in consequence of Section 12(3A) of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act, would be automatically referred to the Secretary of State.

If noble Lords are staying with me, that raises the question of why Clause 41 is needed. My point is very simple. It is already possible not to send relevant consenting authorities separate applications since they can be assimilated in a concurrent application, which goes to the Secretary of State for a Section 1 or Section 3 order. Therefore, the purpose is not simply to streamline the consenting process by routing them to the Secretary of State; it is more substantial and significant. The new Section 17 will mean that where an order is made which would presently require a heritage consent, that requirement is done away with. As a consequence, the provisions in heritage legislation which attach conditions or considerations to the consenting process are also done away with.

That is why I tabled Amendment 55, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay for signing it. The key reference there, or the operative point, is the reference to Section 7 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, which prohibits

“the demolition of a listed building or for its alteration or extension in any manner which would affect its character as a building of special architectural or historic interest, unless the works are authorised”.

There will be a similar provision in relation to scheduled monuments. The latter is distinctive in so far as it also has a requirement for advice from Historic England in relation to a scheduled monument consent.

Amendment 54, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, also rightly highlights that the making of a transport and works order may involve the demolition of, or impact on, listed buildings and ancient monuments without a requirement for consent. So, when such an order is being made, where is the advice from Historic England? Where are the statutory guardrails around the preservation of our built heritage and its setting? Where are, at the very least, the “must have regard to” provisions in relation to our heritage, including all the issues set out in the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock?

I look to the Minister to use this Committee debate to tell us where those safeguards are. If they are presently linked to the consenting process, on the face of it they would no longer apply. Why, given the scope already available to bring the consents together in a single Section 6 application, is it necessary to apply the consenting regime and its safeguards for heritage assets?

In the absence of reassurances, which do not appear to be in the clause itself or available in existing legislation that I can find—indeed, they are not referred to in the Explanatory Notes at all—I hope that those protections can be inserted into the Bill on Report.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Lansley says, I signed his Amendment 55, but I am also broadly supportive of Amendment 54, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Pidgeon—I thank the former for the way she opened the debate on this important set of amendments.

My noble friend Lord Lansley set out very powerfully the concerns that many of us have about Clause 41 and its potential consequences. His Amendment 55 seeks to remedy that by making sure that the provisions regarding listed buildings and conservation areas can continue to be applied. Of course, Clause 41 also applies protections for scheduled monuments, which is why I have tabled my stand-part notice on whether Clause 41 ought to stand part of the Bill at all; my noble friend Lord Lansley asked much the same question.

Like my noble friend and others, I have discussed these amendments and this clause with organisations including the Heritage Alliance and the Heritage Railway Association, which I thank for their time and insights. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, outlined, Clause 41 would sweep away the need for listed building consent, conservation area consent, scheduled ancient monument consent, and notices for works on land of archaeological importance for projects carried out under the terms of the Transport and Works Act 1992. As she said, it makes no distinction between the sites that are protected. She raised the horrifying example, for me, a Northumbrian, of Hadrian’s Wall, which is not just a scheduled monument but a UNESCO world heritage site. I know that the present Government take a different view from the previous one on another world heritage site, Stonehenge, and the suggested changes to the A303 there, but I am sure that the Minister and his colleagues share our belief in the importance of the protections that allow people to raise their concerns about the scheme proposed in that instance.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, a lot of the discussion this afternoon has been very technical, as it would be around planning, but this group of amendments is much more practical. They are about electric vehicle infrastructure, making sure that we can easily support the next generation of electric vehicles and make it easy for people to transition to domestic electric vehicles at home, as well as in the commercial sectors. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for putting their names to my amendments in this group.

Amendment 57 would allow for cross-pavement solutions to be considered as public charge points in this legislation to ensure that such infrastructure fell within the scope of regulatory provisions governing public electric vehicle charging, to make it easier, quicker and cheaper for people to move to electric vehicles at home. Currently, EVs can be a more affordable and convenient alternative to petrol or diesel cars and they can save households up to £1,000 a year, but only if you have a driveway. Up to 40% of households in the UK do not have access to off-street parking, so they rely on public charge points, which can cost up to 10 times more than charging at home. For millions of households that is unaffordable, and it is unacceptable to expect only certain consumers to pay the price for the transition to electric.

Cross-pavement solutions have real potential to tackle that challenge, and they have been proven to be a workable solution in 38 local authority areas to date, but the current process for applying for one is lengthy and costly. Drivers report that you have to pay up to about £3,000 for the planning application, the permitting and charge point installation costs, and waiting up to 12 to 15 months simply for a decision from their local authority on whether permission to install one has been granted. So many residents have given up trying to secure cross-pavement solutions and electric vehicles because of these delays and costs.

This amendment seeks to make the transition to electric fair. It asks that cross-pavement solutions are treated in the same way that public charge points are being treated, simplifying the process for applying for these solutions by allowing them to be treated under street works permitting. This would make it quicker, easier and less costly for residents. Crucially, local authorities would still have some control over the decision on whether the cross-pavement solution is appropriate and safe for that location, and whether it can go ahead.

Amendment 58 would extend permitted development relating to electric vehicle charging points where there is an agreed cross-pavement charging solution and the charger does not overhang the footway by more than 15 centimetres. The Government have extended permitted development rights to households wishing to install charge points where the houses are close to the street and they have off-street parking. This amendment seeks to extend these rights to households without off-street parking that wish to install a charge point so that they can get a cross-pavement solution. It does not conflate the charge point with the cross-pavement solution; they are still two separate entities. It would simply ensure that those residents who are applying for a cross-pavement solution can then install a proper charge point that allows them access to the cheaper charging rates that residents with driveways are already able to use.

Electric Vehicle Association England provided me with this quote from its recent survey. One respondent commented how the council refused to consider installing a charger gully, saying, “We got a free charger and installation along with our car purchase, but we haven’t been able to make use of it, as our local council refuses to consider charging gully solutions”. Another hybrid car owner, when asked why they did not choose an EV, said it was due to the difficulty of installing a charger. They said: “Our council has no policy or provision for pavement gulleys to make it easier. There are no on-street public chargers either”.

Another quote is:

“You shouldn’t need a driveway to own an electric car. My Plan for Change is boosting funding for infrastructure to allow cables to run safely beneath pavements. That’s cheaper, at home charging”.


Those are not my words but the Prime Minister’s a week and a half ago. There is a need to make it easier for everyone to be able to move to electric vehicles through simplifying the system and allowing people without driveways to be able to move to EVs. I hope the Minister will work with me to make this vision a reality through this legislation.

Amendments 64 and 67, which are in my name, cover HGV electric charging points. Amendment 66 covers EV charging infrastructure plans. As we transition to cleaner vehicles and technology allows for HGVs to run on electric batteries, there is a need to support charging infrastructure in the planning system. The lack of adequate charging infrastructure remains one of the major obstacles to greater e-HGV adoption. According to a report by National Grid, 70% to 90% of HGVs will be charged or refuelled overnight in their depot or at their destinations, but the remaining 10% to 30% will rely on public charge stations. e-HGVs are very much a reality—in fact, we had one outside the House only a few weeks ago. There are a number of announced plans for charging stations right across the country from a variety of companies, but I know from my inbox that, where a company might want to move to e-HGVs, they find that the local authority will not grant planning permission for the necessary infrastructure at a depot, stopping the decarbonisation of this industry.

These amendments are about a clear installation programme for HGV electric charging points at key transport points, and the provision of EV charging infrastructure at freight depots and HGV facilities when they are new or substantially renovated. This amendment would future-proof the logistics infrastructure by embedding EV readiness into the design and permitting process. This supports depots and warehouses to be ready for the transition. Depot charging, as I said, is the preferred option where possible for operators as it allows trucks to charge while at a natural stopping point, not requiring additional stops to recharge in transit, which can also leave cargo vulnerable to theft. It also reduces future retrofitting costs and planning delays by integrating charging requirements from the outset.

Amendment 67 is about the prioritisation of electricity grid connections for EV infrastructure. It tackles a major barrier to infrastructure rollout: delays in grid connection approvals. Some fleet operators may face up to a 15-year wait for a grid connection to meet their need for electric infrastructure, severely hampering a willingness to invest. This amendment recognises the strategic importance of logistics infrastructure for national supply chain security and decarbonisation.

Finally, Amendment 66 is about placing a duty on local authorities to produce a local EV charging infrastructure plan to assess the demand and need for EV charging infrastructure in their area, including both private and commercial vehicles. This will ensure a comprehensive understanding of need to focus efforts. Local authorities are critical to the rollout of EV infrastructure, but often lack a co-ordinated or strategic plan. This duty empowers them to take a proactive role while ensuring consistency across regions.

The amendment would ensure local accountability and planning for EV infrastructure deployment, aligning with national decarbonisation targets. Importantly, it establishes a recurring review cycle every three years to ensure that plans are responsive to evolving demand and technology. So this package of amendments would make a huge difference to supporting the transition to electric vehicles. I look forward to the Minister’s response to these issues and all the amendments. I beg to move.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, who I thought admirably set out the importance of the case. Frankly, we are only a decade away from the point where we intend that all the new cars that are to be bought are to be electric vehicles. As she rightly said, something approaching 40% of the people who we expect in future to buy cars are in premises that do not have charging facilities, and we want to enable that to happen. It is all part of the green energy transition that we want to support. So I very much support everything that she said and I hope that we can find a solution.

As far as I can see, the clause to which this amendment refers intends to support the process of adding public charge points to the road architecture but does not necessarily allow individual householders to be able to find the appropriate cross-pavement charging solutions for this. My noble friend Lord Lucas has an amendment in this group the purpose of which is to give permitted development rights for this. I know that the Government will say, “Well, permitted development rights relate to the curtilage of one’s own premises, they do not extend out into the pavement for this purpose”. But I hope the spirit of this debate might be that we all agree on what we want to achieve—the question is what the best way is to achieve it.

I suggest to the Minister that one way we might look at this is to look at Section 50 of the New Roads and Street Works Act, which is about the process of applying for a street works licence. This clause is intended to enable those who have a street works licence to access the necessary works in the street. As the noble Baroness said, that is an expensive solution for an individual householder and not likely to be an easy route. The question to the Minister is whether we might actually find, as he is in the business today of streamlining applications, whether we can streamline applications for street works licences for individual householders, or groups of householders, in order for them to get a street works licence by what is effectively a deemed consent, rather than having to make individual applications. It is a bit like an assumption that the licence will be granted, save if there are particular exceptions or objections. That might get us to the point where householders or groups of householders can get the cross-pavement charging solutions that they require—and I think that it is urgent that we make that happen. So I hope that it is something that we can progress during the course of this Bill.

I will raise just one other point, which is about the green energy transition and the amendments relating to HGVs. I ask that we not only look at electric charging points for HGVs but recognise that HGVs—mentioned by my noble friend Lord Naseby earlier—can, very readily and unlike many other road vehicles, use hydrogen cost-effectively as a solution. But they need a network. My Japanese friends have told me that Japan is creating a network of hydrogen refuelling points for its HGV fleet. The Japanese are orders of magnitude ahead of us on this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, as we consider the challenge of water security, we all feel the urgency. Demand is rising, our climate is changing and not a single new major reservoir has been completed in over three decades, as we have already heard. Yet pursuing a one-size-fits-all solution rarely serves us well, especially regarding water storage and distribution. I particularly thank the noble Lords, Lord Gascoigne and Lord Lucas, for inspiring this discussion and debate.

There is consensus on building new reservoirs, but this cannot be done in isolation. Proper investment from water companies is essential, particularly in tackling leaks and improving demand management so that we use water more wisely, even as we boost supply. This is not either/or; it must be both. Yesterday, in the Statement regarding the Independent Water Commission, the full implication of the broken infrastructure that has led to so much water going to waste was laid down very clearly.

It is tempting to focus on grand, large-scale projects, but we should make space for smaller, locally led interventions that reflect the needs and fabric of our communities. Alongside ambitious infrastructure, a programme of carefully sited small and medium reservoirs, delivered in partnership with farmers, landowners and councils, can speed up progress, reduce environmental barriers and, most importantly, engage local people. We have heard not just from experts but from communities themselves that local schemes such as Slow the Flow projects, natural dams and catchment-based storage bring added benefit for flood mitigation and biodiversity, not just water supply. These nature-friendly solutions must be championed alongside larger reservoirs.

However local schemes alone are not enough. We must pair them with strategic national thinking. Regions with water surpluses should be able to support those facing deficit—a modern, integrated network for water transfer. I ask noble Lords to bear with me, because this is a little complicated. The National Infrastructure Commission, which was replaced by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority in April 2025, was praised by the National Audit Office for its proposals, which constituted a positive cost-benefit case for establishing a network of strategic transfers of water—a transfer system that enables us to balance supply across the country, smoothing out regional disparities and providing resilience against drought and flooding. The recent Commons Library briefing, Future Water Resources, highlights several proposed intercompany transfers, such as Thames Water to Southern Water—120 megalitres a day—demonstrating that active steps can be and are already being undertaken. Alongside large and small reservoirs, these transfer schemes are truly integral to future-proofing our water supply and reducing the risk of shortages.

Turning to the amendments before us, Amendment 59, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, proposes removing the size and complexity test for new water infrastructure to focus solely on the value for money test. But, as Ofwat’s current regulations set out, that test ensures that projects do not threaten a water company’s fundamental service to customers. Given the sector’s current state, we should tread carefully before removing this safeguard. A more prudent path may be to consider government co-funding models, such as that now being used for nuclear, if projects exceed what companies can realistically deliver and are in jeopardy of providing a poor or totally broken service—or further broken, should I say—to consumers.

Amendment 61, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would hand powers to the Secretary of State to dictate timelines and, crucially, permit bypassing planning controls. While there is much in the amendment that we read with interest, I worry in particular about proposed new subsection (3)(b), which is a significant centralisation of power. Yes, there has been an unacceptable delay in reservoir construction, but concentrating such powers is unlikely to foster better outcomes. Proper local engagement, as we all made very clear in our Second Reading speeches, and scrutiny need to be balanced and are vital partners to each other.

Amendment 62, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, aligns more closely with the objectives on these Benches. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the compelling arguments that were made on the noble Baroness’s behalf.

Above all, we must ensure that interventions, whether mighty reservoirs or smaller, community-scale schemes, work for people and for nature, and are delivered with transparency, accountability and genuine urgency. I hope the Minister will clarify the Government’s support for small reservoirs and for a robust water transfer network, so that every region and every customer in every region can feel protected, valued and heard.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I intervene in this group to flag up a couple of points. I thank my noble friend Lord Gascoigne for introducing Amendment 59, which makes an interesting point.

In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, the size and complexity threshold test is about assessing whether an infrastructure project is of such size or complexity that the water undertaking cannot manage it or, if it attempts to manage it, it might prejudice its financial ability to meet its obligations to customers. Actually, under current circumstances, we have reached the point where many water undertakers may not have the capacity to undertake infrastructure projects in the way we expected in the past. We know that there was a substantial period when they did manage investment and they increased investment in the water industry, but in more recent years they have not done so and there is considerable risk to their ability to undertake the infrastructure projects we are looking for.

We should not be surprised that that is the case. Take Anglian Water, which is not among the most prejudiced of the water companies at the moment. I was very interested to attend a presentation about Anglian Water’s proposals for the Fens reservoir. It was fascinating, positive and optimistic. Then, in response to a question, Anglian Water mentioned that it is not going to own it. Somebody else will own it, and we do not know who.

So we have to be aware that there is substantial uncertainty about how we will fund much of this infrastructure, but the most important thing was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne in moving Amendment 59. The amendment is about which projects should go out to competitive tender. That is all it really tells us. The answer ought to be: if it will secure value for money—indeed, if there is potential for independent financing which, as he said, can be more cost-effectively delivered, and we know that the risk premium on the water undertakings themselves is making their borrowing more expensive than what may well be available through other sources of financing —then we should go down that path. The size and complexity threshold test is unhelpful, gets in the way and creates serious impediments to getting on with infrastructure projects.

Of course, the amendment is not deliverable. It does not deliver the objective in its own right. One would have to substantially change Section 36 and other sections of the Water Act 1991 to achieve the objective, because the regulation derives its power from the primary legislation. We need to look at the Water Act 1991 in substance to achieve that on Report.

What my noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendment says is helpful. When one looks at what it is that governs the delivery of reservoirs, as far as I can tell the Reservoirs Act 1975 basically says that it ought to be done by an appropriately approved construction engineer. That is pretty much it. There is a great deal that should be added to what is required in order to secure reservoir development.

I have two other points to make. The first is that Amendment 62 from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, raises a more significant point than the amendment itself says. We are aiming to secure what we need in terms of water supply. I remind noble Lords of my interests in the Cambridgeshire Development Forum and the Oxfordshire Development Forum, which of course means that two reservoirs—the Fens reservoir and the Lincolnshire reservoir—are relevant, as well as the Grand Union Canal project and related activity to try to supply the east of England. We are in a position at the moment where, by 2050, we will have a deficit in water supply equivalent to a third of our present use. That is the degree of stress that we are looking at and therefore need demand management to be substantially improved and the supply to be improved.

European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I always feel that I learn things by participating in debates with him and following him in debates, but I am also grateful to him for raising this interesting issue.

I wanted to participate in this debate not because I profess to any expertise in aviation matters—I defer to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower in that respect—but because I want to explore the relationship between programmes in which the United Kingdom has participated in the past and those in which it may wish to participate in the future. EGNOS is not the only one of those; there is also, for example, Galileo, which is distinct from the Copernicus project that we rejoined two years ago.

I have an interest as a member, this year, of the UK Engagement with Space Select Committee. The noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, is also a member. However, I emphasise that any view I express is entirely my own and not that of the committee.

In our discussions, one of the questions we are trying to devil away at is whether some of these programmes are accessible to the United Kingdom if we wish to join them. There are two parts to that. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, says that he thinks we probably do wish to and there is a benefit in doing so. My question is different: is it accessible to us if we want to join? He may say it is a service agreement, but, from the European Commission’s point of view, it may be a political decision, and there are difficulties that may be associated with that. I suppose that part of the issue that I want to explore with the Minister is whether the circumstances and the political circumstances have sufficiently changed that it may now be accessible to us and we should therefore have exactly the debate that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has initiated—and, I would say, about not only that but Galileo.

I will not dwell on Galileo, but EGNOS is a good example. We were involved at the outset. National Air Traffic Services was one of the co-funders of the original design scheme through the European Space Agency. The whole point is that, once it was all set up, it was then operationally transferred to the European Commission. Where it stands at the moment is that, as far as I can see, it is funded and operated by the European Union, so it is not available to us through the European Space Agency. We are members of the European Space Agency and ESA programmes are entirely available to us, but this is not, in that sense, available to us in the same way as the ESA programmes are.

I hesitate, because I know the Minister replies for the Government, and this will definitely be the Space Minister bit, as it were, which is in DSIT, but there is definitely a question here that I want to put. Insofar as EGNOS is a good example, we may have a valid use for it, and there may be alternatives. EGNOS is not fully developed, as I understand it, for all the civil aviation purposes for which it might be developed. There are other issues; for example, the extent to which we could use it with other satellite-based augmentation systems, because it is interoperable with them. We could perhaps use others, although I do not think the coverage in Europe is available for those. We have the two ground stations, as it were, in Swanwick and Glasgow, so we are in this system; the question is whether we can use it. Really, the question is this: it accessible to us? If I can, I attach to this, although it is not EGNOS itself, the question to the Minister of whether Galileo is accessible to us.

From my point of view and, I suspect, the Government’s point of view, there is a bigger issue: GPS. We have access to it and, for military purposes, have access to the military codes for it. None the less, GPS is one system for position, navigation and timing. As I know from a visit I made to NATO headquarters last week and discussions I had, there is always a question of whether there is a genuine security requirement for backup systems, and Europe might see a benefit in having the development of Galileo as a backup system to GPS. Galileo has certain technical advantages, and GPS has certain advantages from the resilience point of view, so there is a trade-off; it is not obvious that we would want to be in Galileo. I am just using this debate, if I may, to ask that question: if we want, now, in changed political circumstances, to examine the practical case for these two programmes—Galileo and EGNOS—and can see that there may be potential advantages in access to these systems, would they be accessible to us? I do not think they form an obvious part of an industrial strategy for space, since the Galileo contracts have pretty much already been given, and I do not see that there is likely to be any chance of any of the EGNOS operational activity being additionally undertaken in this country: it all seems to be in the hands of a French company in Toulouse—which, for those people involved in space matters, is not surprising.

If I may, my question to the Minister is this: are these programmes accessible to us if, taking the well-argued points by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, we wished to join them?

--- Later in debate ---

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

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on securing this debate. This has been an important discussion, and I welcome the opportunity to respond. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, I was not aware of EGNOS until recently. I am afraid that I have also concluded that it is imperative to use acronyms in this speech because I cannot spell it out every time over 12 minutes, which is a shame. The topic has been amply explained by noble Lords and I do not need to explain it again. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Berkeley for setting out the history of EGNOS, with which I concur. It understandably attracts interest, particularly from the aviation sector and those with an interest in its future success.

I begin by reaffirming this Government’s unwavering commitment to maintaining a safe, modern and innovative aviation system. I welcome the noble Earl’s endorsement of those principles, too. In answer to the question of why this department is here and why I am speaking, the Government recognise the importance of positioning, navigation and timing technologies for our security and prosperity. That goes much wider than EGNOS and aviation, impacting all parts of our lives. DSIT is leading on this wider work with the Government’s framework for greater PNT resilience, but my department is working across government to understand the requirements for transport.

We recognise the value the sector places on services such as EGNOS in supporting aviation safety and reliability, particularly during difficult weather and at smaller aerodromes. Since the UK’s withdrawal from the programme as a result of leaving the EU, as noble Lords have heard, flights have continued to operate safely with no degradation in our overall safety regime. We are carefully examining all available options for supporting the continued operation of safe and reliable flights, which could well include membership of EGNOS. My noble friend Lord Berkeley is right: we are talking to the European Union and a better relationship will enable us to participate if we choose to. That answers the question of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about whether we could join if we so wished, but it depends on whether we choose to or not. He also made a point about Galileo, which I am not equipped to answer, but I will speak to my noble friend the Technology Minister so that he can have an answer in due course.

It is critical that any solution is based on clear operational needs and a strong value-for-money case for both users and taxpayers. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that, if the previous Government had considered paying for the system, they could have done so during their time in office. This Government are continuing this work and we will continue to work closely with industry experts and stakeholders to find the most effective and sustainable solution. If noble Lords have further evidence to contribute to a value-for-money case, my department will be pleased to hear it. I note the suggestion from the noble Earl that we should ask the aviation industry whether it would be prepared to contribute to the costs of joining.

On safety, we must be clear that we have a highly robust safety regime in place in the UK supported by navigation aids and procedures that remain fully compliant with international safety. The Civil Aviation Authority continues to ensure that all procedures are managed appropriately. We recognise that EGNOS or a similar SBAS could have operational benefits for small, regional and general aviation airports. It would provide greater resilience in poor weather and support access but, as the noble Lord Davies, said, ILS is used at larger airports which are not affected and this would not be useful to them.

The Government appreciate the frustration of those facing delays and disruptions to their flights from poor weather as well as the importance of reliable connections, especially for those living in more remote areas of the United Kingdom. Since I took office, I have heard several times from my noble friend Lord Berkeley about the needs of residents of and visitors to the Isles of Scilly, and I respect his continuing advocacy on their behalf. The Government are already taking important steps to support the connectivity of communities, and we are continuing to look closely at this issue to see what more can be done.

It is also important to be clear that emergency medical and search-and-rescue operations have continued safely and effectively since our withdrawal from EGNOS. These services have access to a range of procedures and capabilities, such as point-in-space approaches, which greatly assist in increasing the utility of air ambulances and helicopters in poor visibility conditions. SBAS services, such as EGNOS, are not currently widely used across Europe to support operational capabilities. We are determined to ensure that the UK’s aviation safety regime remains world-leading, which is why we are continuing to consider the best option for the United Kingdom. This work is continuing, and no decision has been made.

It is clear that noble Lords who have contributed today, and others, deeply care about having an SBAS such as EGNOS, and we fully recognise that it can have benefits. However, it is also important that every penny of taxpayers’ money, particularly in a time of tight finances, is spent responsibly, efficiently and wisely and that any decision made represents value for both users and taxpayers. We are continuing to consider what an effective, impactful and deliverable solution that works for the UK could look like, and no decision has been made.

The Government recognise the importance of positioning, navigation and timing technologies for our security and prosperity. That is why we are implementing the policy framework for greater PNT resilience and developing proposals for a national timing centre and enhanced long-range navigation systems. The work around UK access to a satellite-based augmentation system is an important part of that, which is why we are continuing to consider the best option for the UK’s specific requirements.

I turn to the future of flight because there are constant developments in emerging technologies—

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Before the Minister moves on to another subject, given the particular circumstances in Scotland, which the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, referred to, and the many islands, if the Scottish Government wished to make a service agreement with the European Union for this purpose, but the United Kingdom Government had chosen not to, do they have any scope to do so?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. Rather than filibustering for a few minutes while I refer to the knowledgeable officials behind me, I think I had better write to him about that. I can see an answer coming: it says, “Not sure. We’d need to check”. That is very wise.

I turn to the constant developments in technologies, particularly in drones and uncrewed aircraft. This is an important, evolving area, and the full range of requirements are still being mapped out. There may well be applications where SBAS and EGNOS could be useful. As the Government have ambitious plans for the UK to be a global leader in creating a future-of-flight ecosystem fit for the future, ensuring that we can fully realise the social and economic benefits of new and emerging aviation technologies, we must continue to think about this work. It could be said that I am saying that we are just not doing anything, but we are doing something. These rapid developments, particularly in drones used beyond the line of sight, may well provide an increasing case for this technology and for EGNOS in future.

Cambridge South Station: Car Parking

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I respect the noble Baroness’s views—she has had a more detailed view of the design of the station than I have—but that will alter as a consequence of her question. I thought I might have got away from that sort of thing after my last job. But, of course, it will be reviewed, because if you have no car parking, access via public transport is completely essential.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, and, of course, Cambridge South Station is in my former constituency. Does the Minister agree that the object is that Cambridge Biomedical Campus is a major destination, we want people to get there by public transport and we want to reduce traffic congestion in south Cambridge and not see it increase with cars trying to park at the station? What is key is to continue the investment in sustainable transport in south Cambridgeshire. To that effect, will the Government look at approving the second gateway review for the Greater Cambridge Partnership for projects such as the Cambridgeshire south-west and the Cambridgeshire south-east travel hubs?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I certainly agree with the noble Lord that good public transport is vital for a growing, developing city such as Cambridge. But, of course, he will not expect me to endorse any particular use of public money in advance of the current spending review.

Great British Railways

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to have this opportunity, which my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham has afforded us, to further consider the role of open access operators. Many of us were participants in the debates on the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill, where we had at least two opportunities to talk about this—from my point of view, always in the context of the role that open access operators have played and can continue to play in enabling the passenger railway system to have competition as an element in its activity. As I said during the course of that Bill’s passage, privatisation has not always worked. In particular, it has not worked where there has been an inability to secure competition. The key to privatisation is the link to competition. Where competition can be achieved, it is the most effective potential outcome.

In this particular instance, while the Government are, effectively, taking back into complete public ownership those areas that they regard as not susceptible to competition, it would be a serious mistake to remove opportunities for competition, because they drive innovation and better passenger outcomes. Indeed, in their briefing for the King’s Speech, the Government more or less said exactly that. The question is: are the Government now committed to that?

Only a few weeks after we completed the passage of that Bill, we found that the Secretary of State was sending a letter to the Office of Rail and Road—the Minister kindly sent it to us, to remind us—in effect saying that she had priorities. When I read the letter, I find that her priorities are not the same as what the Government said in their manifesto and King’s Speech briefing. They are particularly focused, and are intended to focus the Office of Rail and Road on what she regards as the difficulties associated with it not covering the cost of fixed-track access, which my noble friend talked about. She said that her expectation was that

“you give due consideration”—

to these priorities—

“whilst respecting your statutory duties. I wish to see the impacts on the taxpayer and on overall performance for passengers—such as potential congestion on the network—given primacy”.

This is clearly in order to say, “Don’t consider all your statutory duties. Don’t consider the statutory duty on competition”.

During the passage of the Bill, the Minister very kindly responded, saying that it was not the Government’s intention to remove the statutory duty for the promotion of competition. There is a real risk that the Secretary of State has put herself in a position where she has asked the Office of Rail and Road not to undertake its statutory function in balancing its statutory duties in considering open access applications.

Happily, the Office of Rail and Road issued its guidance at the end of January and made it very clear that it will continue to balance its statutory duties, and rightly so. I cannot see that it has any option to do otherwise. In my view, the Secretary of State’s letter was wholly inappropriate and should not have been issued. If the Government want to change the decisions being made in the interim by the ORR, they should have issued new guidance. They had the power to do so, but they chose not to.

When we see the Great British Railways Bill and changes to the Railways Act, I hope we will continue to see competition, and the benefit that open access operators can give to the network in promoting competition.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 6th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to fire the starting gun on Report with my Amendment 1. In doing so, I express my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Moylan for his support with this amendment. I also thank the Minister for taking the time to meet me the other day. I very much appreciated the opportunity he took to address my many questions in his usual cordial way.

This amendment today flows from my first amendment in Committee. Everyone wants the trains to improve. That is a given. As I said in Committee, and when I met the Minister recently, the reason I care about this is that we need the whole rail reform package and we need it not to be piecemeal. Personally, I would like to go down the route proposed under the Williams-Shapps review, but I recognise that that ship has probably sailed. That said, the overall goal is the same: to make it more efficient; to make it easier to travel; to make it more punctual and, ultimately, to improve the passenger service.

In Committee I used the word “Ronseal”: making sure that the Bill delivers what it is intended to, so that it does, in effect, what is on the tin. While I will not repeat word for word what I said, there are three technical points I want to address following on from Committee, for the benefit of the House today.

First, is this Tory language being inserted really a sort of Trojan horse, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting Minister in the Labour Government once they have welcomed it? No. In Getting Britain Moving: Labour’s Plan to Fix Britain’s Railways, published during the campaign, the then Shadow Secretary of State said in the foreword:

“We need a modern rail system—with improved services for passengers and better value for money for taxpayers—to serve as the backbone of a modern Britain”.


Later, she said:

“Labour’s challenge is to put our rail system back on track to sustainable growth and improvement”.


This was followed by:

“Labour’s vision is to deliver a unified and simplified rail system that relentlessly focuses on securing improved services for passengers and better value for money for taxpayers”.


Indeed, in just the foreword alone, there are eight references to either “improve”, “improving” or “improved services”, not to mention countless others in the rest of the document.

The Government and Labour may argue that those references are about the whole suite of rail reform: it is only then that you will get a better service after everything has changed. However, after the election, at Second Reading, in response to questions, the Transport Minister in the Commons said:

“Let me begin by dealing with the issue of public ownership. According to the shadow Secretary of State ... we have no proof that it will improve outcomes for passengers, but that is clearly not the case. We know for a fact that this Bill will save tens of millions of pounds in fees, and if that is not a good start, I do not know what is”.


A little later he went on to say:

“I am confident that public ownership will provide the right foundations to drive forward improvements for passengers”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/7/24; col. 1135.]


I could read out plenty of other quotes which all use the same terminology and the same rationale for this Bill, but, as I hope noble Lords can see, this is not about me inserting language into this debate: it is already there from the Labour Party, both in opposition and in government.

Secondly, are we not overlapping existing commitments? My noble friend made the inspired observation in Committee that similar references are made in the Railways Act 1993. He is, as ever, correct that the obligation to improve services is used elsewhere and is not altered by this Bill, so why cannot it, or a reference to upholding that element of the 1993 Act, be put in this Bill?

Thirdly, from a technical point of view, do we need a purpose clause given that this Bill is focused on how nationalisation will take effect? I have said before that some will question whether a purpose clause is needed, given that this is a tightly focused Bill. I will suggest later why it is needed in general terms, but, from a purely technical point of view, in Clause 2 the Secretary of State will have to take a view and make a judgment of the virtue or otherwise of a franchise when deciding whether temporarily to extend the said franchise. By inserting this purpose clause at the outset, it is a necessary barometer setting out exactly what this Bill is seeking to do and what should be the Secretary of State’s overriding concern when making a decision.

This is not about stopping the Bill, nor is it about inserting assessments, reports or tests before anything can happen. There is no bureaucracy being created here, I am pleased to say to my friend the noble Lord, Lord Snape. It would not be costly—indeed, it would not cost anything—and I am not saying that it would lead to cheaper fares, although that is what people want to see and expect. It would not add anything onerous or new. As I said, this is language used elsewhere in legislation. It does not issue specific demands or expectations about cleanliness, the number of guards, ensuring decent toilets—or toilets that are open, which they absolutely should be. My amendment could talk about access and address some of the shocking things we heard in Committee about the experience of disabled people when travelling, which I know will come up later. But it merely sets out what the goal of reform is, to ensure that everyone from top to bottom knows what the Government are doing this for. We wish them to succeed in improving the service. It is language that Labour has used, and which is used elsewhere in legislation, to make it clear what the Bill will deliver. I beg to move.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend on his Amendment 1 and will speak to Amendment 14 in my name. My noble friend very kindly referred to our debate on the same amendment in Committee. I note the reference in the Railways Act 1993 and that I see two merits in my noble friend’s amendment.

First, it is always a good thing for Bills to be clear about their purpose. Unless I am mistaking something, this amendment accurately reflects the Government’s purpose in this legislation. We may debate whether it will be successful or otherwise, but the purpose seems to be straightforward, and to have that in legislation is always helpful.

Secondly, because this Bill is essentially about amending parts of the Railways Act 1993 and nothing else, it is clearly subsidiary to the existing provisions of that Act, as amended. There are 10 general duties in that Act. The first is in Section 4(1)(zb),

“to promote improvements in railway service performance”.

My noble friend has accurately reflected the first of those 10 general duties, one of which we will come to debate in a subsequent group in relation to my amendment.

It seems to me that one of the abiding issues for public agencies, often including government departments, is the multiplicity of duties that are imposed upon them and the risk of conflict between those duties. Here, for these purposes, that would be clarified if it were made very clear that this important change to the way in which the provisions of the Railways Act are structured and to be used is to improve railway service performance. To raise that general duty in importance above the others would be helpful in clarifying the balance which the Government and the other agencies should take. I support Amendment 1 for that reason.

Amendment 14 refers to the new subsection of Section 30 of the Railways Act, inserted by the Bill, which provides that the provision of railway services can be made only via

“a direct award of a public service contract to a public sector company in accordance with regulation 17 … of the 2023 Regulations”.

Noble Lords will be aware of those regulations. Subsequently, the requirement for pre-award publication is disapplied by this legislation. However, paragraph (2) of Regulation 17 states:

“Where a competent authority makes a direct award of a public service contract under this regulation, the competent authority must, within one year of granting the award, and while ensuring the protection of commercially sensitive information and commercial interests, publish a notice on its website”.


The information required about the contract and the contractor is then listed in the regulation. Is one year right? Is it desirable that we should, in any circumstances, wait so long to be given information about the direct award of these contracts, given that they are instrumental to an understanding of whose responsibility it is to provide passenger railway services?

I have discussed my amendments with the Minister, and I am grateful for his time and that of his officials. I hope he has had a chance to think about my amendment and that, if he will not accept it, he will at least be able to tell us that it will be the Government’s intention to make new regulations quite soon, and in those new regulations to reduce to as little as three months after the granting of an award of a contract of this kind the publication of the notice and details. To assist later consideration, I say that it is certainly not my intention to press Amendment 14 when it is reached.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendment 16, which is in this group. I am, as ever, grateful to my noble friend for sparing the time to talk about this. My amendment is designed to be helpful. It is designed from experience of previous railway legislation, in which we got bogged down in massive detail, with hundreds of amendments; we may get somewhere, but it takes longer.

Given the discussion that we had on a large number of subjects in Committee, and will probably have today on Report, I thought it would be useful to probe the Minister’s view of how long it will be before what I call the definitive Bill is published. If that is going to take until spring, as some of us have been told, it might be useful to publish a draft Bill or a draft Command Paper that we could read several months before and have the opportunity to debate. That might help us resolve what the real problems are and how to deal with them, rather than on the Floor of the House for many days in Committee and on Report.

That is the purpose of my amendment, and I look forward to my noble friend’s response. I am not going to press this amendment, but it will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

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Moved by

[Lord Lansley]

3: Clause 2, page 2, line 6, at end insert—
“(1A) In section 4 (general duties of the Secretary of State and the Office of Rail and Road) omit paragraph (1)(d).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment probes when - and in relation to which services - Ministers expect to meet their duty to promote competition.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, the purpose of Amendment 3 in my name is to explore the question of when and under what circumstances it is the Government’s intention to meet their duty in Section 4(1)(d) of the Railways Act

“to promote competition in the provision of railway services for the benefit of users of railway services”.

It was prompted by a very brief exchange that took place in Committee, where the Minister confirmed that it is not the Government’s intention to remove that duty. However, it is clearly their intention, in relation to passenger railway services, very substantially to reduce competition and perhaps to exclude it altogether. There may well be other areas of activity in the provision of railway services which are open to competition, and I want to examine where those should be. Of course, I approach this not with the intention that the duty to promote competition should be removed from the Act, but with the view that it should be exercised.

I am in favour of competition. I might say, in this context, going back many years, that where privatisation is concerned, we have found that competition between private organisations yields benefits. In the railways, in some circumstances, we have found that the absence of competition has been at the heart of the problem: that the performance has not been exposed to competition and therefore has not improved in the way we would have wished it to. So, competition works, privatisation does not necessarily work, but the combination of privatisation and competition, in my view, has worked in the past. However, we are not here to discuss privatisation; we are here to discuss competition, and there is a continuing role for competition, in my view.

I am not planning to talk at length about Amendments 13 and 17 in this group, I will leave that to my noble friend on the Front Bench, but Amendment 17 is directly relevant. One of the principal opportunities for competition would be with open-access operators. In Committee, we touched upon but did not find out whether, and to what extent, it was the Government’s intention to continue to permit open-access operators or indeed to promote them. In my view, promoting them can be a very effective way of stimulating competition and innovation, which are often—as Schumpeter would have said—very intimately linked together.

My contention in this amendment is very simple: to explore where competition will be available. Clearly, it can be done with things such as the provision of rolling stock and services to railways, and maybe, to some extent, in relation to rail freight. As far as passenger railway services are concerned—and we are dealing with that here—the Government’s intention appears to be that every aspect of the passenger railway services should be subject to the “directing mind”—as the Explanatory Notes sets out. Therefore, it will be very difficult for there to be any substantial competition, except if that can be achieved by the role of open-access operators. I hope, when he responds to this debate, the Minister will be able to say they will have a continuing role, or even that they might be encouraged to bring the innovation and competition that would enable us to avoid the downside of a dominant provider.

We have seen this in other circumstances. For example, in France, the dominance of SNCF has led to abuse such as anti-competitive pricing or the overbooking of train paths to restrict competition from other providers. We do not want to see the dominance of public sector providers, on passenger railway services, to lead to that kind of abuse. Still less do we want to see monopoly activity on the part of public sector companies in passenger railway services lead to an elevation of the interests of the companies themselves over the interests of the users of railway services. The general duty to promote competition is for the benefit of the users of railway services because, very often, they are the ones who most see the benefit of that.

I will just tease the Minister, finally, by saying that in this legislation he has the opportunity to move in the opposite direction to the fourth railway package under the EU’s transport legislation. Here is an uncovenanted Brexit bonus for the Government, in being able to move in the opposite direction to the thrust of legislation in the European Union. With that teasing moment, I beg leave to move Amendment 3.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 13 and 17 in my name, but also to respond to my noble friend Lord Lansley in relation to Amendment 3. We come now to the heart of a considerable confusion that exists in the Bill, one that the Government have done their very best to avoid and that needs to be flushed out.

My noble friend Lord Lansley refers to competition. In fact, he refers to the abusive practice by monopoly railways in France. That, of course, is in response to European Union legislation, which has had to mandate access to competition in order for it to flourish in the European Union. It is going in the direction that we went in, somewhat later than us. We are now going back to the Attlee Government, basically, and moving away from that. It is a Brexit bonus, as I think I said in an earlier debate.

The matter is made worse because the Government have not been clear about their view on competition. It has been made much worse by the Government’s confusion and blank refusal to address the question: who is going to make the decisions about competition? Who is going to decide, in relation to open access, which providers will have access to the service? I refer, as I was encouraged to do by the Minister, to the Labour Party document Getting Britain Moving. In its section 7 on “The role of open access”, beginning on page 22, it says clearly:

“The ORR will continue to make approval decisions on open access applications”,


but that is not confirmed by the Minister. Instead, we have the spectre of Great British Railways making open access decisions. That appears to be part of the great controlling brain: one of its functions is that it would make those decisions about open access. But in doing so, it will be making decisions directly about competition with itself.

We are very concerned that the sort of abusive monopoly activity seen in France, which my noble friend has referred to, is exactly what we would be exposing ourselves to if we allowed this measure to go through without having appropriate safeguards in place in advance. That is the thrust of Amendment 17, which simply calls for a report. In Committee the Minister made fun of me for calling for so many reports, but he should understand that we are doing this as a way of drawing attention to an issue of serious concern without trying to hobble or wreck the Bill. He has not given us any assurance in response. He has taken no notice of our very genuine and serious concerns.

Amendment 13 relates to a similar topic, in relation not to open access for passenger railway services but rather to access for freight services. They too compete, so to speak, for paths on the railway; they need access to the railway if they are to operate. The previous Government had an informal and non-statutory target of seeing the volume of freight on the railways increase by 75% by 2050 from a base of, I think, two years ago. This amendment would effectively put that target into the Bill.

Nobody in the Labour Party, either in opposition or in government, has resiled from or rejected that target. If anything, I think they want a more exacting target. The Minister, if pressed, would probably say that it was a perfectly respectable target, one that he would want to sign up to, so there should be no objection to seeing it in the Bill. It would give some assurance that Great British Railways, in its operations, would not simply favour its own activities at the expense of freight operators. Ideally, we would also want some sort of assurance that it would not favour its own passenger activities at the expense of open access operators.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords for their amendments in this group. In response to Amendment 3, from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—and I thank him for our discussion a few days ago— I will highlight two important ways in which this Bill promotes competition.

First, there will continue to be huge opportunities for competition between businesses in the supply chain which publicly owned operators and Network Rail will continue to depend on. I was speaking this morning at the Railway Industry Association’s conference and it welcomed clarity about the Government’s intentions with enthusiasm, because it knows as well as we do that the railway, after six years of being promised reform, needs to understand what reform might look like in order for its businesses to prosper. Public ownership and our plans for GBR to provide long-term strategic direction for the whole railway will give greater clarity and certainty to businesses in the supply chain and so will support healthy competition.

Secondly, in relation to competition between train operators, the Bill preserves the existing arrangements for open-access operators. Open-access services are the only source of meaningful competition between operators on today’s railway, and this Bill makes no changes to the way in which open-access applications are treated by either Network Rail or the independent regulator, the Office of Rail and Road.

Having set out how the Government’s approach is consistent with a duty to promote competition, I also note for completeness, referring to the propositions of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that the Section 4 duty applies to the Secretary of State only when she is exercising certain functions under the 1993 Act. It does not apply to the exercise of her functions under Sections 23 to 31, which are the franchising functions that are amended by the Bill. As such, there can be no question of this Bill impairing the Secretary of State’s ability to comply with the Section 4 competition duty.

Turning to Amendment 17, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, open-access operators are a valuable part of the system and will remain so following this short Bill. Looking ahead to the wider railways Bill, we see a continuing role for open-access services where they add value and capacity to the network. I will say more in a moment about how their interests will be protected. In the meantime, I reiterate that the current short Bill has no impact on open-access operators, the services they provide or the process by which they can secure rights to operate on the rail network. For this reason, the report required by this amendment would serve absolutely no purpose; the Bill plainly has no impact.

Requiring this report—not just once but every single year in perpetuity—would simply place an additional reporting burden on Network Rail and the Office of Rail and Road, and potentially also on open-access operators themselves if they were each required to provide information about their services to inform each report.

Finally in this group, Amendment 13 deals with freight. My noble friend Lord Berkeley is a staunch advocate of the rail freight sector and I hope that I can reassure him and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, about the Government’s intentions. The Government hugely value the rail freight sector and recognise the importance of its contribution in reducing congestion on our roads and in helping our transport system move towards net zero.

I entirely agree that the Government’s plans for reform under the railways Bill must ensure that Great British Railways promotes growth in the freight sector and must provide suitable protections for freight operators. We will set out our detailed plans in the consultation I have already referred to as soon as we are able to.

In the meantime, I am very happy to reassure noble Lords on three fronts. First, our proposals for the railways Bill will include a statutory duty on Great British Railways. I have reflected carefully on the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, in Committee, and the remarks just made by my noble friend Lord Snape, and as a result I now confirm that this duty will be not merely to enable the growth of rail freight but to promote it. My noble friend Lord Snape referred to variable access charges. I very much agree that we would seek more of that in the future to encourage more freight traffic.

Secondly, the Secretary of State will set a specific freight growth target for Great British Railways. I cannot confirm today the specific detail of what that target will be, but we will set out our plans for that in due course.

Thirdly, I thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley in particular for his comments on the importance of a fair system for the allocation of access. As discussed with my noble friend last week, I have confirmed today that there will be consultation on the Government’s reform proposals, and that the consultation will set out the proposed role for the Office of Rail and Road in the access decision-making process. Any changes will then be set out in the railways Bill itself, so noble Lords will have ample chance to debate these matters before changes are implemented.

I also reassure noble Lords that our proposals for allocating capacity and granting access to the network will include safeguards to ensure that both freight and open-access operators continue to be treated fairly. As I have already said, I would be delighted to meet with my noble friend and other noble Lords with an interest once the consultation has been published, so that we can discuss the details and continue the very helpful conversations we have started here.

Turning to the specifics of the noble Lords’ Amendment 13, the statement required by this amendment would be very short and sweet. There is no need to wait six months after Royal Assent for me to provide this statement; I can give it to the noble Lords now. The Bill is narrow in scope. Its purpose is simply to allow the Government to transfer the operation of franchised passenger services to the public sector. It does not make any changes to the arrangements under which freight services operate. This means that the Bill will not, and cannot, have any adverse impacts on the freight sector or on freight growth.

I have clarified the impacts of the Bill on competition, open access and freight, I have confirmed that we will soon publish a consultation document setting out our proposals for the railways Bill, and I have reaffirmed that these proposals will consider appropriate protections for freight and open-access operators. In light of what I have said, I hope that noble Lords will agree that there is no need to pursue their amendments further today.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this short debate. It has raised a number of important issues, and I am grateful to the Minister for the clarity that he brought to the subject—partly from my own point of view, in understanding how the legislative provisions work, which is always helpful. I have to confess that I know much less about railways than the noble Lord, but I try to find out how legislation works, since that is part of our job, and what he said was very helpful.

What he had to say about there being no changes to the legislative provisions and the arrangements in relation to open access was important and I will come back to that in a minute.

I do not think there is any merit in pressing the amendment now, because when we come to look at the role of Great British Railways in the major Bill to follow, we will look at issues such as the one my noble friend raised—the relationship between Great British Railways and the control of train paths. That is exactly the problem that occurred in France, and I think my noble friend Lord Moylan also discussed the abuse of a dominant position. We will need to look at how that kind of scrutiny and competition can be sustained, notwithstanding the monopoly aspects of Great British Railways. However, in light of all those helpful points, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 3.

Amendment 3 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lansley]

4: Clause 2, page 2, line 12, leave out “only”
Member's explanatory statement
This probing amendment seeks to understand the circumstances where Ministers may provide services other than by direct award of a public service contract to a public sector company.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, this is the last group on which I plan to speak. My amendment was prompted by a debate in Committee that gave rise to the question of how the new legislation would work. We have established, including during the previous group, a number of things that do not change, including the licensing of railway services and the prohibition on operating without a licence. The relationship with open- access providers therefore does not change, since they can make applications to the Office of Rail and Road for that purpose—I am paraphrasing, but that is, broadly speaking, how it works.

Where we have a change is in the process for franchising, which is to be removed. The Government have chosen to change the franchising provisions in the Railways Act, in Section 30 et cetera, and to replace that text with what we see in the Bill. I really want to explore this question: to what extent will all designated railway services be brought under Section 30, from new Sections 30A to 30C? I want to explore the consequence of the use of the word “only” in that provision. It says that a service must “only” be provided by

“a direct award of a public service contract to a”

wholly owned public sector company. In effect, it will be wholly owned by the Secretary of State—not, as we have discovered, other public sector companies.

The removal of the word “only” would, in the way in which the text works, as far as I can see, create an opportunity for the Secretary of State to provide or secure the provision of services by routes other than the direct award under Regulation 17. Clearly, that is not the Government’s intention. I will not return to the debate I promoted in Committee, but it would be good legislation to leave that option open to the Secretary of State, even if it were not the Government’s present intention to use it, because they may find it valuable to be able to do so in future.

Let us look at a practical example. Imagine that the Government thought it desirable to say that a service such as the one from Fenchurch Street to Southend and Shoeburyness should form part of the Overground services under the operating control of Transport for London. As far as I can see, as things stand, if that service is designated under Section 23 of the Railways Act—the designation requirements—it will have to be run by a public sector company wholly owned by the Secretary of State, unless it is the subject of an exemption under Section 24. In Committee, I think we heard the Minister say that the Government have no plans to extend the exemptions under Section 24. That raises another question for the Minister. Would he entertain that there may be circumstances in which it would be desirable to extend Section 24 exemptions? While London is a straightforward example, will the Government be open to that possibility, if it were a practical mechanism of securing the best operation of those services?

To what extent is the language of the Bill very deliberate, in that it requires that the Secretary of State may secure the provision of these services only through a direct award, but it does not say that the Secretary of State may provide or secure the provision of these services only by this route? I am making the distinction between “provide” and “securing the provision of”. This is customarily seen in legislation as a distinction between a government department doing it itself and doing it by means of a contract.

Where in this does the Department for Transport’s operator of last resort holdings company sit? Does giving an award of a contract to OLR Holdings Ltd constitute securing the provision of a service, or does it constitute providing the service? Is it regarded as part of the department for these purposes, or is it part of a wholly owned public sector company? There would be something rather odd now about treating it as part of a franchise agreement, since these franchises have already ended. Bringing it under a regime that is about the ending of franchise agreements seems odd.

My second example concerns East West Rail. We are not far away from the point when East West Rail will be running services itself on its new rail services. That will be very welcome—not least from my point of view, living in Cambridgeshire—when it reaches, as the Budget told us, all the way into Cambridge in due course. It will be running services quite soon in Oxford and Bletchley. It has not had a franchise; clearly, it will not now be given a franchise. It is a wholly owned public sector company. Is it the Government’s intention that it will be brought within the scope of Section 30? If so, this is odd, as this is an arrangement for franchises, but it has never had a franchise.

Of course, on the face of it, the Government will continue to designate railway services. Presumably—and here is a question to the Minister—there will be a comprehensive designation of railway services under Section 23, and that will, as a consequence, bring them all under Section 30 because of the way the legislation is now to be phrased. Therefore, is the intention, in effect, to bring all designated railway services under the scope of Section 30 et cetera, other than those exempted under Section 24?

I am sorry for asking a range of questions to explore how this works. We did, as the Minister has kindly mentioned, have the opportunity to discuss this a few days ago, so I hope he will have had the opportunity to think about explaining precisely how these interactions in the legislation will work. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Lansley for posing those very interesting questions. I am sure that the Government have answers to them, but they illustrate that this legislation is essentially very rushed and that they have not properly considered it.

I promise not to repeat what I said in Committee, but I cannot resist referring back to the final impact assessment, produced by the Department for Transport. It said that the purpose of the Bill is to meet a manifesto commitment, so it has not undertaken the normal practice of looking at alternative methods by which the same objectives might be achieved, because they are all in a terrible rush as the Government want to have a headline, essentially, and want to get ahead of the franchises as they expire. Therefore, I appreciate what my noble friend Lord Lansley has said, and I look forward to the Government’s reply.

Amendments 5 and 6, standing in my name, are linked. If Amendment 5 were to pass, I understand that there has been discussion with the Government Front Bench that Amendment 6 would pass without a Division in order to avoid having two votes on the same topic.

In Committee, I referred to two different models by which the private sector might be involved in the running of railways. One is the franchise system that we are currently discussing, which is the main subject of this Bill, but the other, generally dubbed the concession system, is the one used by Transport for London for the operation of all its services other than the London Underground, which is directly provided by Transport for London. All the other services—the buses, London Overground, the DLR, the tram and so forth—are provided under a concession system; that is, they are run by private companies on a contract.

The key difference between the franchise system and the concession system is that under the franchise system, as envisaged at privatisation, the fares risk rests with the operator. That was the model that was set up back when privatisation was introduced. If the fares went up and the companies generated more fares income, they would keep it; if they lost money on fares, it would be their problem that they did not make money because the fares were not good enough. Companies had the incentive to generate more fares, principally by generating more passengers, through all the clever things that they would do.

I was frank and straightforward in saying at Second Reading that that aspect of privatisation has never worked well because, essentially, private operators are not in control of fares income, which is closely correlated with the economic cycle—which of course they cannot control, manage or in any serious way mitigate. That aspect has never worked well, and Covid put an end to it in any meaningful sense. It has never recovered from that, nor, given this legislation, is it ever going to have the chance to recover.

The concession system is different, in that the fares risk remains with the franchisor. In the case of Transport for London, it is the franchisor of the services I referred to and it retains the fares risk. The obligation of the private sector operator is simply to have the trains and equipment in the right place, pointing in the right direction first thing in the morning, properly staffed, cleaned to a certain standard and so forth. If it fails to do those things, it will suffer financial penalties. The important point is that all those things are within its control. It receives a fee for that, but, in practice, because of competition, it is a modest fee given that risk is very limited. The risks are all things that are just a matter of it doing its job properly; if it does it properly, it will get that modest fee without penalty.

The purpose of Amendment 5 is to open up an option. It makes no obligation on the Secretary of State. When a franchise is terminated, the Secretary of State would have the option of awarding it not only, as the Bill is currently drafted, to a public sector company that is a subsidiary of the Department for Transport but to a private sector entity on a concession basis. The reason for it is simply that we know that it works. We know from Transport for London that the system can be made to work very effectively. We know that some of the best services on the Transport for London network—some of the best modes—are provided under this system. Why should it be that the Government would want to rule that out? Of course there could be a role for the private sector operating on that concessionary basis.

My noble friend Lord Lansley’s amendment gives the Government more options than mine does. My amendment gives the Government one extra option, but he would give the Government effectively limitless options by deleting the word “only”, whatever options might be available. It would give the Government more flexibility in dealing with circumstances that they may not have foreseen when they drafted this Bill.

Amendment 6 goes with Amendment 5 simply by defining in a separate clause what I mean by concession. Amendment 5 opens up the choice to do something on a concession basis and Amendment 6 says what a concession is. Despite every effort on my part and that of the Public Bill Office, we could not quite combine these into one amendment, so they stand on the Marshalled List as two amendments which, in practice, are closely linked, as one amplifies and clarifies the other.

I would very much like to hear from the Minister why Amendment 5 would not be acceptable, except to a control freak. That appears to be perhaps the Government’s vision for the railways.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Moylan, for their amendments in this group. I will speak first to Amendment 4. Following enactment of the Bill, there would be just two routes by which the Secretary of State could secure the operation of passenger services. The first option, and this is the option we plan to use, would be to make a direct award to a public sector company under the amended Section 30 of the Railways Act 1993 and in accordance with the Public Service Obligations in Transport Regulations 2023.

The second option, which is a very limited option, would be to use the power to continue an existing private sector franchise temporarily under new Section 30A. This power is deliberately limited only to circumstances where the Secretary of State is satisfied that a transfer to a public sector company is not reasonably practicable. This means the Government would expect to use it only as a last resort, for a short period, to avoid a transfer causing disruption to passengers or staff. Apart from this very limited power in new Section 30A, the Bill leaves no other route by which the Secretary of State could contract with a private sector operator to run either existing services or new ones. This is entirely consistent with the Government’s very clear policy in favour of public ownership of services that form part of the national railway network.

On the point from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about DfT OLR Holdings Ltd, I confirm that award to it is securing the provision. All services currently designated under Section 27 will be provided under Section 30 by a public sector operator as existing contracts expire. The noble Lord also asked about the Secretary of State’s power to secure the provision of new services through a public sector company if those services had never been provided under a franchise agreement. Regulation 21 of the Public Service Obligations in Transport Regulations 2023 allows the Secretary of State to vary the terms of a public service contract to include additional services, and so would provide the necessary statutory basis for her to secure the provision of new services from a public sector operator.

The noble Lord asked whether the Bill will leave an option for the Secretary of State to procure East West Rail services from a new private sector operator, and the simple answer is that it will not. The Government have no plans for long-term private sector operation of the new East West Rail services, which will commence operation next year, nor any other services that the Secretary of State is responsible for procuring.

There are—and, after this Bill, there will remain—two ways in which other parties might operate or secure the provision of services on the rail network. One possibility is that a third party might operate them as an open access operator, as is the case with Hull Trains, for example. Another possibility is that a mayoral or combined authority or other local authority might secure the operation of services either by running them itself or by procuring a third party to do so. As I will explain in relation to the next group of amendments, the Secretary of State can facilitate this by granting an exemption under Section 24 of the 1993 Act, which takes the relevant services out of the scope of the surrounding provisions of that Act.

I noted with interest that my noble friend Lord Liddle remarked about involvement of developers, for example. I echo his sentiment that there will be ways of getting private capital in, particularly through development, that have not really been explored so far.

I hope that my explanation reassures the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that the Government have carefully considered the implications of the Bill and the options it will and will not leave open, and I hope he will feel able to withdraw this amendment.

Amendments 5 and 6 from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, deal with competed concession contracts. As I set out to the noble Lord in Committee, these amendments would remove the opportunity to deliver the benefits of public ownership, which a clear majority of the public support and which was a specific commitment in the manifesto on which this Government were elected. For the following reasons, I cannot agree to the amendments.

First, a concession model would mean the taxpayer continuing to fund substantial profits for private sector operators. A concession model along the lines of Transport for London’s contracts would expose operators to more financial risk than today’s contracts, where government bears virtually all the financial risk. Under such a model, train operators would price their bids to generate even more profit than the £110 million to £150 million per annum that they can earn under the current contracts. Our plans for public ownership will eliminate those fees and profits entirely—in the Government’s view, continuing to line the pockets of private shareholders is not a good use of taxpayers’ money.

Secondly, TfL concessions are a relatively inflexible form of contract which is not well suited to the needs of the national railway network. For a concession contract, the procuring authority has to define the service levels and standards at the start of the procurement process, and those levels and standards then endure for the life- time of the contract. Changes to the service specification can be achieved only through costly negotiation and agreement with the operator which already holds the contract.

That is very different from the London bus market, for example, which we discussed in Committee, where the concession model is much more suitable because there is a large number of small individual contracts. For the London Overground, much of which is heavily constrained by the geography of the railway network and the other services that run on it, it might be satisfactory, but the whole of the national railway network requires greater flexibility to adapt to changing patterns of demand. Finally, and most importantly, a concession model would not resolve the fragmentation of the current system, nor would it deliver on the Government’s commitment that rail services should be run by and for the public.

The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, referred to devolved Administrations and local mayoral authorities. We will come to devolution further in the next amendments.

I urge noble Lords not to press their amendments.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who participated in this shortish debate, particularly to the Minister for the additional clarity sought by my Amendment 4.

My noble friend raised the issue of concessions, which I suspect we will come back to. It is one of those occasions where one looks at the interesting examples of what is happening in the French railway system, which is using concessions to a greater extent and is perhaps not encountering the objections that the Minister cited in relation to TfL’s concessions. That is a comparison that I am not qualified to make, but I know my noble friend on the Front Bench might pursue it.

I thoroughly agree with the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about the desirability of maintaining devolution models or perhaps extending them. The use of the exemptions under Section 24 should be considered. The Minister said that, in addition to the two routes the Secretary of State might use for securing the provision of services, that is the additional route, as it were, alongside open access, which we discussed in the previous group.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 34 in my name, which would allow franchises to be led by local authorities. It goes a little further than one of the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lord Moylan, who wanted partnership boards, and is more in line with what the noble Lord, Lord Snape, wants to do with his Amendment 43.

We need to be clear about what new Section 30C does. Basically, it says that the only people who can run a railway in future are a public sector company owned by a Secretary of State. Unless the Minister is going to repeal that in the forthcoming Bill, it means that for ever and a day, as we have heard, we are going to have a central monopoly for all franchised rails.

My noble friend went to the Labour Party document on transport to inspire his speech. I looked at the document published in March this year, Power and Partnership: Labour’s Plan to Power Up Britain, which pledged to devolve new powers over transport, employment support and energy out of Whitehall. That was followed up by the manifesto promising “landmark devolution legislation” to transfer power out of Westminster and into communities across the UK. So we could have expected the first pieces of legislation in the new Parliament to fulfil that ambition of devolving power out of Westminster, particularly in the field of transport, where there has been significant devolution of powers in rail, as we heard in earlier speeches. Like my noble friend, I was surprised to read in the letter from the Minister—and I got a slightly different wording—that:

“The Government has no current plan to devolve responsibility for further services to local authorities”.


As we have heard, Transport for London has taken over services that used to be run by British Rail, and then by South Western Railway and the other TOCs, and it now runs the Overground. I think that has worked well, and it has enabled TfL to integrate the Overground with the Underground and provide a better service to Londoners.

Outside London, many local authorities have successfully introduced light rail lines. There are 11 light rail systems in the UK. Manchester Metrolink is probably the best known, with 99 stops and 64 miles of track, run by Transport for Greater Manchester. We have also heard about the smaller West Midlands Metro, run by Transport for West Midlands. So local authorities are perfectly capable of building, maintaining and running serious rail systems.

The Minister’s statement seems to preclude the sort of arrangement that works well in London from happening anywhere else. All that local authorities are promised in the letter is a statutory role governing, managing, planning and developing the rail network, but not taking it over and integrating it with the system that they already have.

I think the Minister is in some trouble on this issue. We have had a powerful speech from his noble friend Lord Snape, and there is a feeling in the Committee as a whole that the commitment to devolution is simply inconsistent with new Section 30C as it stands. I do not think this is the landmark legislation that we were promised, so I hope the Minister thinks again about the implications of new Section 30C.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 36 in this group, which has exactly the same purpose as the amendments from my noble friend on the Front Bench and my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who has just spoken. All their points and those made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, demonstrate the potential value and benefit of having the legislative opportunity for publicly owned companies responsible to devolved authorities to be able to run rail services. If we do not have this, it can be only a public sector company owned by the Secretary of State. I was going to instance examples, but I think we have had so many that it is very clear.

The only difference between my amendment and others is the kind of authority appropriate to own a company which runs rail services. I fixed on mayoral combined authorities simply because of the relative capacity and their importance in the Government’s devolution agenda, and because it might commend that thought to the Government.

From my own experience, not least from being a Member of Parliament in a mayoral combined authority, I think it is increasingly important for the Government to recognise—which clearly they have put at the front of their argument—that the co-ordination of the railways is of the first importance, including ticketing, timetabling, provision of services and so on. In many of these places, as was amply demonstrated by earlier speeches, the co-ordination of transport services and of transport with planning and spatial development is equally important. If the Government go down the path of central control by the Secretary of State for every aspect of rail services, I am afraid that they will severely impede, in many significant areas of the country, transport and spatial development being conducted in the way that we would prefer it to be.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Snape’s Amendment 43 and will speak to many of the other amendments in this group. I support most of the statements that have been made from all parts of the Committee in this debate.

We have been talking about devolution for years. It started off as levelling up—and we can debate whether it was levelling up or levelling down—with the last Government. But the Labour Party has been very keen on what I would call devolution for a long time and has supported the mayors of Manchester, Leeds and the West Midlands in trying to get control of their transport services, as the noble Lord just said. It is equally important to be able to decide what services are provided and who pays for them.

One of the key things which we have been debating for some time is these so-called regional authorities being given a lump sum, if one likes, and told that they can spend it on transport and then be allowed to get on with it—let them decide, on the basis of local elections and local politics, what they want to provide. Everybody’s objective would probably be to see in the north and the Midlands a general quality of service compatible with and just as good as that provided in the south-east, around London. It is not all provided by TfL—although much of it is—and I think most noble Lords would say that it is very good. I do not understand why the Government do not go the whole hog and say that they will give these regions a lump sum, to be negotiated, and let them get on with it.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, asked whether Manchester could deliver. The answer is that it cannot deliver if Whitehall is in control. We have quite a serious problem here and I do not know what the answer is, except to say that I am convinced that some of the clauses we are debating tonight are counterproductive to what I thought the Government were trying to achieve.

What is the point of taking certain rail franchises into the public sector and turning them into something else if, next year, a Bill will give them a new franchise or concession? The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has not mentioned the word “concession” yet today, but I expect he will. Concessions are very good in some places, but the key is this: what is the point in making this massive change now and then coming back in a year or two to say that we will let the West Midlands run all local services—it can put them out to tender, and have the money to provide the service with the frequency and fares that it wants—and ditto in the north west and north-east?

We really need to know the final outcome planned by the Government before we can know whether the Bill will be helpful or not. If we make a change now and then another change in two years, the people who will be damaged are the passengers on the railway.