Railways Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Olly Glover and Laurence Turner

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd January 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. I wish to speak to new clause 15. In doing so, I must ask the Minister for his assistance with either a medical or a political problem—I am not entirely sure which it is, because I cannot get a GP appointment in Didcot as we do not have a GP surgery on Great Western Park, but that is an issue for another time. In the absence of a GP appointment, I really hope that the Minister will be able to save me from sullying my reputation. In speaking to this new clause, I find myself at risk of having to say something positive about the Thatcher Government, which is obviously somewhat politically embarrassing.

New clause 15 proposes adding a rolling programme of electrification to the Bill. The reason that I may need to say something nice about the Thatcher Government is that according to figures that I have looked at, nearly 3,000 km of railway was electrified under that Government during the 1980s, to which the just 170 km electrified under the 1997 to 2010 Labour Government compares very unfavourably. That perhaps comes as quite a surprise, given that there was significant economic growth during that later period, at least compared with today—[Interruption.]

[Laurence Turner (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)]

I think we just heard an Opposition Member ask, “What were they doing?” in respect of the 1997 to 2010 Government. The answer, of course, is that capital investment had to be directed to safety in the aftermath of Hatfield and other disasters. When we look at where exactly that money was spent, it was on the safety improvements necessitated by some of the disasters caused by privatisation. I am a strong supporter of electrification, as I know the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage is, but I thought it was important to place that on record.

[Olly Glover]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I will say two things in response. First, I hope that his Government and the Minister will support the new clause, because, given the strong state of railway safety today, there should not be the same limits on electrification expenditure that he suggests. Secondly, the problem with his point is that very few electrification schemes were authorised between 1997 and 2000, the period before the Hatfield rail disaster, which led to the period of safety recovery that he quite rightly highlighted.

The direction that the Government are taking is a big concern. They have yet again cancelled the midland main line electrification, a scheme that would have happened 40 years ago in any other European country. Our stop-start progress on electrification compares very unfavourably with other countries in Europe. Germany has delivered a steady 200 km a year, or thereabouts, on average for many decades, and in so doing delivers significantly lower unit costs than our boom and bust approach to electrification. It is not just Germany. We often hear excuses about how electrification is too difficult for us because of our limited gauge clearance or our scenery, but that does not explain the fact that the entire Swiss rail network is electrified, including railways in UNESCO world heritage sites and more than 3,000 metres above sea level.

With the exception of the trans-Pennine route upgrade and a couple of other very small schemes, nothing is committed at the moment. That is a real shame, because the benefits of electrification are significant. I feel that we have perhaps lost our way in this country. We have become very focused on electrification as a means of decarbonising our railways, but that is a small part of the enormous benefits of electrification. Electrification delivers more reliable, lighter trains that have far less impact on the track and are also cheaper, because pure electric multiple units are the standard off-the-shelf product across the European rolling stock market. What wouldn’t any other sector—whether it is shipping, which I know the Minister has a keen interest in, aviation or the car industry—give for the ability to provide constant electrical power to get the amazing power-to-weight ratio that electrification delivers?

We constantly talk about the lack of freight on our rail network. A big part of that is that rail freight tends to be diesel hauled, which has far worse acceleration and consumes far more track capacity. On a recent journey across Germany and other parts of Europe, I did not see a single diesel-hauled freight train; they were all electric. That enables so much more to be squeezed on to the network, and would support private sector investment. For example, GB Railfreight has invested in a fleet of locomotives that can haul both diesel and electric. Having visited its Peterborough headquarters a few months ago, I know that it would like to run under electricity far more than it is currently able to because of our electrification rate. We are in a very poor state, and not just compared with western European countries; Poland and India have significantly higher percentages of electrified railways than we do. At the moment, I see no hope of that changing.

Our new clause 15, requiring a rolling programme of electrification, would also significantly reduce unit costs, because the supply chain would get used to doing it, we would become experienced at structures clearance, and so on. That is not my opinion; that is what Sir Andrew Haines, former chief executive of Network Rail and now chair of DfT Operator, said before the Transport Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laurence Turner]

I thank the shadow Minister for the constructive spirit of his intervention. Indeed, in the days of cross-party consensus on High Speed 2, I worked with members of his party exactly to address some of the capacity challenges on the network. I just say to him that the two are linked. As he was alluding to, the length of the trains is related to the signalling blocks and the safe distance between trains, so that they can be run together. If he is right, we should be looking to put on more carriages. When waiting for a CrossCountry train, I can certainly remember the collective groan on the platform when another short formation appeared. There is a hard limit, however, to what can be applied without providing more caps on the network. That is where the passenger versus freight dilemma comes in, because sometimes hard choices just have to be made. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point that this is not always either/or, but sometimes it is. Sometimes one has to be prioritised over the other, and freight has historically been the loser.

[Olly Glover]

I am trying not to make too many interventions or to be tedious, but I cannot resist the temptation of that. Where the choice is either/or, does that not suggest that that particular route line requires an upgrade to provide sufficient capacity for both?

[Laurence Turner]

The hon. Gentleman and I are members of the same Select Committee and we tend to agree on most things, and I think that I agree with him again. In the here and now, however, and in the circumstances in which the Bill will start to apply, I share the fear that if the freight growth target is accompanied by an equivalent passenger growth target, in effect the freight growth target is neutralised; it is no longer the essential correction to the tendencies that have sometimes seen freight services being squeezed off the network. I say to the shadow Minister that the previous Government put in place a freight growth target and not a passenger one at the same time, presumably for exactly the same reason: at times when the two are in tension, freight can suffer the detriment. I thought it was important to put that concern on the record.

Railways Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Olly Glover and Laurence Turner

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Olly Glover]

Q You have both been very clear, and so has Lord Hendy, that a key intention of the Bill and the creation of GBR is to better integrate infrastructure and train operation. If that is the case, why has funding for passenger services been excluded from the periodic review process of GBR’s infrastructure costs? Does separating those funding streams undermine the goal of a truly integrated railway?

Keir Mather: That is a really important point. I hope that you feel that the human side of the equation, in terms of furthering the interests of passengers through the duties, is embedded in clause 18, but I take your point about the funding envelope, and the way that passenger services are funded via the spending review period set by the Secretary of State, as opposed to infrastructure more broadly. The reason for that in the immediate term is that the procurement and delivery of passenger services is a far more complex and changeable process to work through than the delivery of long-term infrastructure, or other functions that sit under GBR.

In the future, we can certainly get into a debate about whether passenger services should be funded in a similar way to other aspects of GBR’s operation, but for the moment, and after GBR is stood up, which let us remember is in quite short order after the passage of the Bill, in around 12 months’ time, the Secretary of State needs to be able to determine that passenger services offer value for money. It is therefore right that she retains more control over the funding envelope for those services at that stage. We can certainly take the debate on how that should change in the future forward as part of this Committee. I would be very keen to explore it further.

[Laurence Turner]

Q I must say, I think I must have been listening to a different set of evidence today than the shadow Minister, but there we are.

I want to raise devolution, and specifically clause 5. There is a lot of history to the clause, and a line of continuity with the old section 20 of Barbara Castle’s Transport Act 1968. A lot of great things were accomplished under that legislation, including the creation of a cross-city line in Birmingham, but then privatisation came along. There was an attempt to do something similar under section 13 of the Railways Act 2005, which frankly did not work; there was never a single agreement signed. What lessons have been learned about what went right in the past and what went wrong with the 2005 legislation, when it comes to clause 5 of the Bill?

Keir Mather: I suppose that, in the 2005 Act, section 13 was not only really narrow in scope, in that it covered only franchised services, but represented a significant watering down of relationships between the rail industry and passenger transport executives. The difference with clause 5 of the Bill is that it is significantly wider in scope, to ensure that partnerships under GBR cover the full rail offer, rather than focusing only on services.

There is an important point around corporate structure. It is right that the corporate structure is not laid out in the Bill—no piece of rail legislation in 113 years has done that—but what has come out quite consistently in the testimony of the mayors, and in the broader points made around devolution, is that, whether it be on the MCA basis or on the local authority basis more generally, people want GBR’s structure to be flat, and responsive to dynamic changes both in demographics around housing and your ability to get to Everton stadium when the rugby league is on, which is of personal interest to me.

I think the point is very well made, and it is certainly taken by me as the Minister, that democratic accountability means that the operational reality of GBR should be diffuse wherever possible. People do not want to see a replication of a centralised model of the past.