Railways Bill (Third sitting)

Daniel Francis Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd January 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Laurence Turner]

I must start by slightly disagreeing with the Minister on his approach to railway puns. The shadow Minister referred to the discussion on amendment 257 as a dispute; I reassure him that this is not a case of pistons at dawn—[Laughter.] It is going to get so much worse. Before I come to the Minister’s substantive response, I will briefly respond to a few other comments that have been made in the debate.

The shadow Minister spoke about changes in passenger numbers over the years, which is a good illustration of why it is important to look across a whole time series, and to bear in mind the old maxim that correlation is not causation. After all, passenger numbers were already falling by the time that we got to vesting day in 1948. The railways were exhausted after years of war—indeed, passenger numbers halved between 1920 and 1947. In fact, the actual nadir in passenger numbers was not in the early 1990s but in 1983. I thought that Opposition Members might have wanted to take pride in the successful sectorisation experiment under the Thatcher Government, perhaps aided by some benign neglect from that Administration, which was sadly not repeated by the subsequent Major Administration.

We have some good explanations for why exactly passenger numbers rose so dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s. For a long time, I think we could have all substituted our political explanations for why that happened. However, in 2018, a very good study, led by eminent modellers and academics, was published by the Independent Transport Commission on precisely that question. It found that passenger growth was overwhelmingly driven by changes in the job market—the types of roles being created and the areas of the country in which they were being created. It was also aided by changes to tax incentives for company cars in the early 2000s, which led to an additional increase in rail traffic.

[Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. For my constituents, in the period since the railways were privatised they have twice needed to be brought back under public ownership: once in 2003, when Connex failed, and again in 2021, when Southeastern failed. However, on both occasions, there was no impact on passenger numbers; rather, the factors that my hon. Friend is describing correlated and led to those passenger numbers. Does he agree that over the last 30 years, whether the service has been under national or private ownership has had no impact on the passenger numbers on trains in my constituency?

[Laurence Turner]

I absolutely agree, and we could point to other examples where franchises being taken in-house under previous Governments led to a service improvement. The Opposition’s problem has always been that public ownership works in practice but not in their theory.

I am heartened by what the Minister had to say on my amendment. This is not an issue of dispute; this is sensible scrutiny. I welcome the commitment the Minister made to take the issue away. I recognise that this Committee is probably not the place to resolve this detailed and technical consideration. I am encouraged by his comments and on the basis that we may return to this matter at a later stage, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 1 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 2

Crown status etc