Railways Bill (Fifth sitting)

Joe Robertson Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Jerome Mayhew]

It is just as pleasurable to have you in the Chair today as it was last week, Sir Alec.

I remind hon. Members that clause 7 gives the Secretary of State the power to issue and publish directions to Great British Railways relating to its railway activities. It also outlines how the Secretary of State must obtain consent from Welsh and Scottish Ministers before giving directions relating to their devolved services, except where powers are used in relation to the access regime. The clause further outlines how GBR will be required to comply with directions, which are mandatory and binding, and intended to be used as a so-called

“responsive tool for necessary course correction, rather than as a proactive tool to set requirements on GBR,”

or, as further clarified in the explanatory notes, as “a last resort”.

Interestingly, although the explanatory notes state that a direction by the Secretary of State is a mechanism of last resort, the clause itself gives no indication to substantiate that. Instead, it suggests that the Secretary of State can act independently of their Welsh and Scottish counterparts’ views, especially as there is a reliance on non-legislative measures. My first question to the Minister is, therefore: why is this supposed last-resort requirement not on the face of the Bill?

When dealing with matters relating in particular to the interpretation of devolution, the risk is that any decision taken by the Secretary of State may be disputed by the devolved nations and end up as a political football, which only increases lawyers’ profits. Would it not therefore be prudent to set out in the legislation exactly what is meant? Without a clear breakdown of the procedures and directions, surely we run the risk of granting the Secretary of State a large degree of power with very limited oversight.

The clause gives the Secretary of State unrestricted power, other than for operations in Scotland and Wales, to intervene in the running of GBR. That is a step too far. While it is justifiable for the democratically elected Government of the day to set and agree GBR’s strategic objectives, key performance indicators and business plans, after those are set out, the Government’s role should be to hold GBR to account for the delivery of the targets, objectives and strategies, and not to tell it how to do so on a day-to-day basis.

A question arises on clause 8(4), and I would be grateful if the Minister could provide clarity on the oversight system outlined in clauses 7 and 8. Subsection (4) states:

“Before giving, varying or revoking a direction under this section the Scottish Ministers must consult the Secretary of State.”

Presently, GBR must decide whether a decision directly affects devolved services, but the Bill provides no statutory test, which leaves a delivery body making politically sensitive judgments, further increasing the risk of challenge by devolved nations. Clarity for Members, especially those from the devolved nations, will be extremely helpful, so I would be grateful if the Minister would address that directly.

Under subsection (5) of both clauses 7 and 8, directions must be published, but there is no requirement for them to be laid before and scrutinised by Parliament—the old trap of creating transparency without consequence. A reporting or laying requirement, perhaps through the Select Committee, would turn publication into genuine accountability. However, I am interested to hear what rationale the Minister has not to allow greater scrutiny of GBR in Parliament. Again, perhaps he will address that directly in his response. That is the rationale behind our suggested amendments to require the Secretary of State to lay directions before Parliament, in order to allow us to scrutinise the decisions in greater detail.

There is a fundamental question about leadership and who is the key decision maker. We are told repeatedly by the Minister and others that GBR is the directing mind, but will that really be the case if the clause goes through unamended? If GBR really is the directing mind, what is the necessity for the clause? It is a recipe for decision paralysis, with GBR, given the decision-making structures, undermined by guidance—we will come on to that when we discuss clause 9—and by directions from the Department for Transport in the name of the Secretary of State.

Clause 7 really does risk creating the worst of both worlds. We will have the cost of GBR and its oversight structures—we are told in the recently published job application for the part-time chair that GBR will have more than 100,000 employees; it will be an enormous organisation, with its own senior management team—and then we will have the same again, with an overactive Department for Transport second-guessing GBR’s day-to-day working and being able to give guidance and directions as a result of clauses 7 and 8.

[Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)]

As my hon. Friend describes the growing size of the Department for Transport and Great British Railways, I am slightly reminded of the Department of Health and Social Care, and NHS England. The Government talk of doubling up and so are winding back by abolishing NHS England, but here they are doubling up in the Department for Transport over Great British Railways. I wonder whether he has any reflections on that analogy.

[Jerome Mayhew]

It is not a perfect analogy, because GBR is at least intended to be more akin to a business—a nationalised business—but my hon. Friend is entirely right that where we have two organisations in competition, each one thinking that it runs the railways, that is a recipe for confusion at the least, and disaster at the worst.

This is not an idle concern, because it has happened before. We all remember the Virgin West Coast franchise debacle in 2012, when the slightly arm’s length process of franchising did not go well, causing a communal panic in the Department for Transport. The phrase, “Something must be done to prevent this from ever happening again,” was no doubt repeated many times. The result was that more and more micromanaging took place by the Department for Transport in the setting of franchises. The Department no longer talked only about outcomes that needed to be achieved, leaving how companies went about that entirely up to them, which is the appropriate way to draft a franchise agreement. Instead, that devolved into mechanisms of how a franchise should be operated.

We had that mission creep, and I fear that under the Bill we might get exactly the same approach with GBR. It will be set up with the best of intentions, and perhaps in the first two or three years all will run smoothly and the directing mind in practice might well be GBR, but then something will happen, because something always does happen in the real world, with lots of people doing their best but sometimes making mistakes, and there will be a collective gasp from the Department of Transport, because it will feel like it is on the hook, so “Something must be done to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.” We have designed into this mechanism a structure that allows the removal of GBR’s operational independence, and it does so without any reference to actions of last resort by the Government—the Bill is silent on that.

We talk about the Secretary of State, but we all know that officials in the Department for Transport will be advising the Secretary of State on what he or she should be doing in a particular circumstance, and there will be a power grab. Without amendment, the clause will absolutely allow for that. We should be alive to the real-world experience that we all have and take this opportunity to strengthen its wording in order to design out that issue and ensure that there is proper accountability—with GBR accountable to the Secretary of State and, through the Secretary of State, to Parliament—and that operational independence stays with what will be a nationalised business, rather than creating a railway version of NHS England, as my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight East mentioned a moment ago.

I have tabled two amendments to address this issue. Amendment 12 would limit directions to circumstances in which the Office of Rail and Road assesses GBR to be in breach of its statutory functions. It could be argued that the Secretary of State should have an emergency lever; that is fair enough, because bad things happen. One of our great complaints before the election, although I am beginning to hear it from Labour Ministers as well, was, “We pull the levers but they’re not attached to anything—we have no power.” When we form the Government after the next election, we will want to have levers that are attached to something, and I accept that it is necessary to have an emergency lever to pull should a significant unforeseen event occur—another pandemic, perhaps—and an intervention be required.

However, amendment 12 would still allow the Secretary of State to intervene in emergency scenarios, as the ORR would deem that such events make it impossible for GBR to conform to its business plan targets. Clause 74 sets out the ORR’s power to monitor GBR’s performance. Elsewhere in the Bill, we shall argue that the ORR needs more teeth to hold GBR to account, and this provision limiting the potential for the Secretary of State to intervene until such time that an independent regulatory body has recognised that GBR has not been able to fulfil its functions will be an important safeguard.

Amendment 11 would put the words “last resort” on the face of the Bill, and would provide that a direction may be made only after the removal of GBR’s chief executive officer. The intention behind the amendment is to treat GBR as a business, which I think we all agree is what it is intended to be—albeit a nationalised one. Where there is a board of non-executive directors, they can question the executive team, and they can challenge decisions and require the chief executive to explain and defend the direction of the company. However, when push comes to shove, and the decision is made that the organisation is moving in the wrong direction, the weapon available to the chairman is the removal of the chief executive officer.

If GBR is operating on a day-to-day basis with oversight from the Department for Transport—the Secretary of State—and concerns arise as to its direction or performance, the sequence of severity of the response should not start with guidance from the Secretary of State and then mandatory directions. They might be the final requirement, because we all need those levers, but surely they should come only after the chief executive has been challenged and then removed, just as in the private sector with an arm’s length majority investment.

--- Later in debate ---

When we took through the Health and Care Act 2022 and the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024, there were aspects that were not written into the legislation but were going to be in statutory guidance or something similar; they set out, for example, how independent domestic violence advisers and independent sexual violence advisers would operate. We did everything we could to bring forward even an outline draft so that members of the Committees considering the legislation had a chance to consider it and reflect on it. I am grateful to the Minister. He is very assiduous in correcting the record as he did, with his typical courtesy, but I gently encourage him to have further conversations with his officials about what might be within the art of the possible to publish, even on Report and Third Reading, to allow Members of our House to debate the Bill, and any amendments that have been made or could be made to it, with the knowledge of what might be in the licence.

[Joe Robertson]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Alec. My right hon. and hon. Friends have already spoken at length and I agree with them, but I will add just a couple of short points to place my disappointment on the record that not even a draft of the licence has been presented.

It is good that the Minister has clarified that it will be coming forward sooner than he suggested previously, but the reality is that it is already too late, as we heard from stakeholders last week during evidence. I urge him not to delay any further. Even an outline draft of the licence as soon as possible, rather than a more detailed one, would be clearly better than nothing. He should also bring forward the other 19 documents identified by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon—again, in draft form as appropriate—as soon as possible. As I say, it is already too late for this Committee today, as we debate this very clause and schedule. I wish to place that on the record.

[Jerome Mayhew]

I echo all the comments made by my right hon. and hon. Friends. I also thank the Minister for facing up to it with a point of order. It was obvious last week that a point of order was on its way. None of us on the Opposition Benches will hold him to his initial, rather quick, response—no doubt I will do something similar during the passage of the Bill—but that does not let the Government off the hook.

This is not business as usual for a Department bringing through a Bill of this nature. My right hon. Friend the Member for Melton and Syston, an experienced former Minister, gave two examples of primary legislation that also relied on secondary documentation. In those circumstances, the departmental teams did provide skeleton outlines for Parliament, which is what we are, to consider and do our job properly. I do not want the Minister to rush out a quick affirmative like last week, so I ask him to take time to consider, perhaps discuss with his officials, and reply later today on whether he and his officials are able to commit to some form of briefing—some skeleton outline—on the nature of the licence, at a time when we can collectively discuss and debate it, and see whether it points in the right direction.

Clause 11 simply enables GBR’s licensing to be set out in schedule 1, which we will come on to in a moment. That schedule amends part 1 of the Railways Act 1993 and sets out the detailed process by which the GBR licence will be issued and maintained. Both the Secretary of State and the Office of Rail and Road will retain the ability to grant licences to railway bodies other than GBR—for example, open access operators, freight operators and other infrastructure managers such as the core valley lines in Wales. I know we will discuss the contents of schedule 1 and the detail of the licence extensively.