Railways Bill (First sitting)

Edward Argar Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Smith]

Q I spend about four hours a week on a train with a toddler, so I know well that inclusion on our railways is not just for those with disabilities, although that is incredibly important. I am interested in whether you think that the provisions in the Bill around accessibility are strong enough and will go far enough to ensure that we have a railway that truly works for everybody, as it needs to if we are to persuade more people out of their cars and on to the railways, and as is right given the endeavour around net zero and the Government’s wider ambitions.

Richard Brown: Yes, I do. There are clear duties placed on the passengers’ council, for instance, to produce standards for accessibility. Those can then be enforced by the ORR or by persuasion with GBR. The improvement of accessibility is mentioned at several points in the Bill as a duty or responsibility or something that is important, and as something to be taken fully into account in planning and developing investment schemes. I think the Bill actually provides greater impetus on that score, but this is a long-term thing. There are railways with platforms and track such that you have to cross over the track to get from one platform to the other, and there has been a long-term programme of investment to try to improve accessibility with things like lifts. This needs to carry on, and ideally at a faster pace.

Keith Williams: One of the disappointing things for me, when I did the review, was that we did not really know what accessibility was. We actually had to do an audit to look at where we had accessibility to begin with, and I would encourage you to keep the pressure on that one. It is one thing to have an audit of what does and does not exist, but the next thing is to prioritise what really needs doing going forward. I think that is part of the longer-term strategy for the railway, which is in governmental hands.

[Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)]

Q I have a couple of quick questions, following on from some of the comments that you have just made. Do you think that a 30-year strategy, or whatever, is a realistic proposition, given that the Government can change every five years—it may be more than that, but there is the potential for that—and a new Secretary of State may want to draft their own strategy, which may be completely different from the previous Government’s? That is a factor of politics. By adopting the approach taken here, do you think we bring that political risk even more starkly into this space than it is currently?

Richard Brown: Unless you have a long-term strategy, you will always be condemned to short-term decision making. If you are running a business, you might have a 10, 15, 20 or even 30-year strategy, and you will need to change and adapt that according to circumstances at the time.

What I think is very important—Mr Williams has highlighted it—is that the railway assets are long-life. The trains have 30, 35 or 40-year lives, and the signalling and track last even longer. If you do not have that long-term strategy for investment and the sorts of things that you are planning to buy, taking account of new technologies, you are condemned to short-term decision making, which, to an unfortunate extent, is too often where we have been.

[Edward Argar]

Q Thank you. Mr Brown, I think it was you who mentioned the integrated business units and accountability, and you also mentioned communities and passengers. How will the Bill provide direct accountability to individual communities? How will it ensure that those integrated business units are directly and meaningfully accountable to individual passengers or an area, and that the director or MD of a particular integrated business unit is directly accountable to them rather than upwards to the chief executive of GBR?

Richard Brown: In terms of governance, they have to be accountable to the chief executive of GBR, who has to be accountable to the Secretary of State. You could say that one of the complexities of the Bill is that there are a number of accountabilities. If you are running a regional or local railway, such as Southeastern trains in Kent, particularly given GBR’s responsibility to consult with and take account of local transport plans, you cannot avoid developing a relationship with the towns, communities and mayoral authorities on your route, as well as the passenger groups. If you do not, GBR will move you on to another job, or even get rid of you.

I have run business units like that within British Rail and in privatisation, and I think the local focus is a really important feature. That is why I am really encouraged by what is happening: as each franchise comes to its end, where it can be merged with the local route management of Network Rail, it is being done very quickly. That can happen across the piece when GBR is fully up and running.

[Andrew Ranger]

Q I want to build on the points about mayors and the mayoral authorities, in the context of the devolved nations. There is a really complex picture there, particularly with cross-border travel and the different ownership of companies that may operate across the border. Do you think the Bill covers that adequately and can cope with the challenges?

Keith Williams: It is a great question. The issue, of course, is cross-border; for example, trains go from London into Wales, and similarly into Scotland. Giving total devolution was something that we looked at. There is so much cross-border traffic that you need to take that into account, so we left the devolved positions largely as they were.

Richard Brown: The Bill is pretty clear in setting out the roles and responsibilities of the Secretary of State and the devolved Administrations. In practice, these things will always need to be based on collaboration between the different organisations, which is the way you run a railway. There are inherent tensions between, for example, what the Welsh Government might want in terms of cross-border services and what might actually be affordable and in the interests of passengers, competition for capacity use, and so on. All of that will be within GBR to, not adjudicate, but work its way through, produce solutions and, where there are options, put those to the Secretary of State and the Welsh Government, for instance.

Out of that will possibly come a compromise, because not everybody will get what they want from the railway. There are too many competing people wanting different things from the railway. The great news is that all of that responsibility to co-ordinate and produce a plan for the most effective use of capacity for the different users is put on one body rather than being split between the Department for Transport, ORR and Network Rail, as it is now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baggy Shanker]

Q If those targets are in the business plan, they cannot just be ignored, can they?

Alex Robertson: Absolutely not. The ORR will have a role to play in highlighting progress against that. We would have a role in being consulted—we have to be consulted in the development of the business plan—and our duty to reflect the interests of disabled passengers would be at the forefront of our mind as that happens. Obviously, GBR will be accountable to the Secretary of State for how well that plan is delivered in practice. I have said before that a very important change that we will need to see through the creation of GBR is how GBR is held to account in public. Those targets will be public, and it will have to account for how well it is delivering against them.

Michael Roberts: I have a lot of sympathy with where Emma is coming from. When one thinks about the experiences of disabled travellers, which are regularly reported in the media, you can understand why there is a wish to have as much certainty and traction over whatever commitments are made. Having said that, I think that the arrangement that you have indicated could be made to work. I am mindful that in London, the mayor has a transport strategy. In that, he has set out targets that TfL are delivering against for improvements to the number of step-free tube stations. For example, the strategy includes a target to reduce the difference between the time a journey takes for somebody with reduced mobility and the time it takes for somebody who does not have those impairments.

It comes down to making sure that there are the resources to back up the targetry in the plans, that there is an energetic passenger watchdog ensuring that GBR and the industry more generally are doing what they are expected to under the plans, and that the ORR is ready to enforce if and when necessary.

[Edward Argar]

Q I want to pick a little further at the accessibility point, particularly on step-free access. By way of example, last week I got a letter from the Minister—neither of the two excellent Ministers in the Committee—saying that Sileby station in my constituency, which can be reached only by very steep steps, along with 40% of other stations in the current programme, was being cut from works to improve accessibility on the grounds of funding pressures.

The reality is that there will always be tensions between what is desired and what is affordable—that is in the nature of government. Building on what you have already said, how can those tensions be resolved to meet the duties envisaged in the Bill and the aspirations that all parties in this place have for improved accessibility, while recognising that there will always be a funding tension in anything the Government do?

I was a Health Minister and wrestled with such issues when deciding what to put in primary legislation, in secondary legislation and in statutory guidance. I would argue they have greater weight than, for example, a business plan, which is vaguer, less enforceable and less tangible than each of those other layers. You have to strike a balance of proportionality. Where do you think the specific obligations on accessibility would best sit in that hierarchy, from primary legislation in the Bill, which is right up at the top and cast in stone, to a business plan, which is much less enforceable, vaguer and can be changed?

Alex Robertson: That is a good question. You have set out the challenge and the dilemma that is true for this aspect of public services, as it is for many others. I will try to answer it in this way: wherever you put it, it must allow for the consideration of the ambition to significantly—it must be significantly—improve the service that disabled passengers receive, with decisions about funding. If you separate those two, you will get into a position where you have set a target, but it is not realistic and has no plan behind it.

You have to do that and, as I have said before, do it in a way that involves disabled passengers in the decision making. Whatever the scale of the ambition, it is perfectly possible to spend good public money inefficiently and ineffectively, and not on doing what is in the best interests of disabled passengers. It is about doing it right, as well as the amount you do.

Emma Vogelmann: From Transport for All’s perspective, as has been picked up by many others, unless accessibility is enforceable, it is treated as an optional and a nice to have: “We will get to it when we get to it, or when there is a surplus of money,” which of course there rarely is.

We have seen initiatives to make changes in the name of affordability; I am thinking particularly about the proposals to close ticket offices at stations in England a couple of years ago. That was very much an economic argument about staff not being confined to the ticket office, but in practice, for disabled people that meant that the network would become increasingly unusable and a completely unviable mode of transport for some.

I agree with what was said about needing a balance between ambition and the reality of how far those ambitions can go, but we need to be ambitious. We need to make sure that we are not accepting a slower rate of change because it is more economically secure.

Ben Plowden: Going back to a point I made before, I think the Bill should set the strategic intent that accessibility should increase over time, not just that it should be taken into consideration by GBR and the Secretary of State. The Bill should also set out how that increase is delivered. To Alex’s point, that could be done in a number of different ways, such as through service provision, infrastructure investment and so on, that would then be set out in the subordinate documents such as guidance, the licence and the business plan. The intent in the Bill would clearly be that, over time—in a way and at a rate to be determined by those other processes—accessibility would increase, not just be taken into consideration,

Michael Roberts: You have exposed exactly the difficulties in trying to navigate through all these challenges and priorities. At the risk of motherhood and apple pie, I think co-creation with the disabled community is extremely important in trying to find a way of managing these different priorities that carries the confidence that that is being done with the full consideration of the needs of the disabled travelling public.

I also think legislators ought to think, “What are the mistakes that we want to try to avoid next time around?” and then think about what levers can address those mistakes. It is extraordinary that the industry is spending over £1.5 billion building a new station at Old Oak Common, and there is no level boarding for the Elizabeth line, which is the busiest railway in the UK. I am not sure that legislation is going to fix that—that is as much about the quality of decision making within the industry—but thinking about what good looks like and then working back and thinking, “Right. What are the ways in which we can best promote that?” seems like a good way of trying to think around the problem.

[Laurence Turner]

Q I have a follow-up about passenger growth targets and freight growth targets. This question is not new: the freight growth target is inherited and was included or announced in the Williams-Shapps plan for rail White Paper. Mr Plowden, I am conscious that this was before your time in your present post, so perhaps this is for other witnesses. Given that we cannot question the previous Government in this Committee, based on your conversations and representations, why did the previous Government decide not to bring forward a passenger growth target alongside a freight growth target?

Alex Robertson: I do not know—I mean, I really do not know. We never got as far as having the Railways Bill in Parliament; we are fundamentally redesigning the railway, and that creates a different framework and a different set of responsibilities. I do not know; I have struggled with that question a little.

Ben Plowden: The Government did say, in their response to the consultation, that there are two reasons why, having considered the possibility of a passenger growth target, they decided not to include one. One reason was that GBR would be sufficiently incentivised through a whole variety of other means to increase passenger demand. The second reason, which I think is less convincing, is that it might lead to infinite growth over time in principle. Clearly and logically, that is possible, but the point is that the Secretary of State would set a growth target that would seek to strike a balance between what is feasible and practical, and what could be afforded in terms of taxpayer investment. It seems to us that neither of those arguments necessarily stands up, and that logically you would want to include a passenger growth target alongside the freight one.