Lord Dykes
Main Page: Lord Dykes (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Dykes's debates with the Cabinet Office
(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
My Lords, we have not had to wait for a Labour Government to devolve major powers to, for example, Manchester and other parts of the country. We have introduced metro mayors and combined authorities. We will continue to do that. People will not have to wait for this illusory dream that the noble Lord just referred to.
Lord Dykes (CB)
My Lords, following the surprisingly interesting intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, will the Minister agree that privatisation of the railways has been an unmitigated disaster and the worst example of any large country in Europe of a very badly run system? Is it not now time for radical solutions, as we warned as MPs at the time when the noble Lord was one of the Ministers in charge of railway privatisation in the Commons in the early 1990s? What we now need is root-and-branch reform, with public ownership of the railway system itself but with private investors as well.