Railways Bill

Lord Dixon of Jericho Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dixon of Jericho (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to join in the appreciation for the noble Lord, Lord Wilson. As a former civil servant, I want to say how much his observations rang true for me. As a new Member of this House, I want to say how much I hope to have learned from him in the short time that we have overlapped together.

I will speak on a similar issue to the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, although, as someone who spent a considerable period of time working for Citizens Advice, I will take a slightly different approach on the experience people have of things as they appear to consumers.

The Bill is welcome because, while, at their best, train journeys are a source of great pleasure, at their worst, they are a source of huge frustration. I spent last week writing parts of this speech on the floor of a carriage with inadequate air conditioning, trying to make myself as small as possible on a train that was scheduled to last 52 minutes and was half an hour late. Too many people have that experience as a rule rather than as the exception. However, I trust in the wide and deep experience of this House to solve those issues, so I do not propose to go into them. Instead, I want to focus on a small part of the Bill, on which I hope I can be both somewhat knowledgeable and constructive.

Within the last few months, it has become straightforward for anyone with access to a coding agent and a good idea to produce software that makes that idea happen with a minimum of effort and expertise and certainly much quicker than ever was the case before. Although I am not a trained software engineer, I have produced 10 applications in the last year that now work to do things. This should be a golden age for technology entrepreneurs in our country, and one choice we make here on this Bill will decide whether we have a flourishing ecosystem of world-class firms that provide a world-class experience for passengers or end up on the receiving end of technology that has fundamentally been owned and developed elsewhere.

The Bill currently proposes that Great British Railways should own its own ticketing system and provide the data and systems that third parties can use to offer competing products. I sincerely hope that Great British Railways produces a world-class, completely brilliant app—I am supportive of that and hope it works well —but we should not put all our eggs in that basket. As the noble Baroness mentioned, there are deep concerns about that from the industry and the Competition and Markets Authority. We should be wary of creating deliberately a public sector body that has both the power and the commercial incentive to stifle competition.

Having said that, I am sympathetic to the view that one particular company in the UK has a dominant market share. That is a problem, but limiting access to data and opaquely subsidising a public sector competitor will, in practice, result in bad experiences for customers, with less choice, especially for those with more complex needs, and no meaningful integration with other transport modes or the things that people want to do in their lives. The right solution is to make sure that Great British Railways has the right incentives to open up data, APIs and platforms, so that new and existing companies can compete on a level playing field, and, importantly, provide the best possible experience for customers.

We should want more British technology success stories. We should want them to start here, stay here, employ 1,000 people, more than half of whom are skilled engineers, and export products and services to many other countries. That is why the Bill needs to make it easier, not harder, for new start-ups to compete with Trainline, or to do things that Trainline would never consider.

In that, the current data architecture is a real problem. Fares, routing and availability data exists, but only in formats that reward companies that have spent millions of pounds interpreting the data and making it usable. The accreditation fees for the ticket issuing system, which is what you need to access to get the data about what is happening on our railways and what the fares are, start at £950 a day. It takes 12 months for a new provider to be accredited. You have to get bonds that are scaled to your turnover, estimated to be £400,000 for a new entrant to the market, meaning that you take on substantial financial risk and focus capital on meeting regulation, rather than on finding improving market fit, if you try to start up in this area. To make that real, a new start-up would need to sell the equivalent of 600,000 off-peak tickets from Oxford, which is where Jericho is, to London just to cover the initial regulatory costs in that market. That is a huge barrier to entry and, frankly, no small start-up is going to risk that.

We will end up with only Trainline and others—other apps are available—and the Great British Railways app, and that is before we consider the many features that would benefit passengers that are currently indefensibly locked within individual companies and not available to competitors, such as automatic delay repay, advanced passenger information, crowding information, passenger assistance, accessibility and electronic cycle booking.

To give just one example of this, on the rail data to marketplace, Avanti’s fleet accessibility data is an Excel file, LNER’s is a spreadsheet that is mislabelled as a CSV, Greater Anglia’s is a PDF, and there are, amazingly, separate differently formatted Excel files from all other operators. No two companies provide the data in a standard format, which is why no app can reliably tell a wheelchair user about their whole journey. This is not something that has to happen. Trainline has a competitive moat partly because the data is so hard to work with. The Government have made the regulatory barriers to entry too high. It is just too hard to scale and start companies in this market, let alone if you are a third sector or voluntary organisation that wants to make a good thing for a particular set of users.

I do not think this is a question of ministerial will or good faith—lots of people have tried to solve this over the years. It is a question of the economic incentives in the system. I am deeply concerned that Great British Railways has no meaningful incentive to make the data open, to be well-structured or to encourage competition. It probably has the reverse incentive. The House rightly has concerns about the threats posed by AI, but we have to ensure that we structure the fundamentals of our public services in ways that British firms and the public can use to realise the benefits of AI. Fundamentally, that means a modern and forward-looking approach to data.

I hope the Minister can confirm in his winding-up speech that the Bill will prevent unfair self-preferencing by Great British Railways in the relatively niche issue of ticketing and make sure that it is properly incentivised, and not just required, to increase the scope, consistency and openness of data and APIs in this area. That is how we will make ticketing, at least, a world-class experience for passengers. I look forward to working with him and experts across the House on this narrow, niche but in my view crucial issue.