Railways Bill (Third sitting)

Rebecca Smith Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd January 2026 Public Bill Committees

The Government will also provide an update on our GBR implementation plan in due course. As a result, the new clause is not necessary. There will already be a lot of parliamentary scrutiny as GBR is established, and rightly so. I therefore urge the hon. Member to withdraw it.

[Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse.

I completely appreciate what the Minister is saying. However, I suppose that the outstanding question is this: how will the general public come to understand what GBR is going to mean for them if it is not going to be established for 12 months and if there is not a fixed timetable for reporting back to MPs on how it is going? There has already been a fanfare about delivery; I am sure that there is going to be another fanfare from the Government once the Bill is passed. However, if we are going to take passengers on this journey, so to speak, we must ensure that there is an opportunity for us, as Members of Parliament, to be able to report back, even if it on an issue relating to our own constituency. I think the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland and Fakenham is actually quite sensible.

[Keir Mather]

May I draw the hon. Member’s attention to the fact that so far I have not made a single rail pun in the course of this debate—and I intend to keep it that way?

The hon. Member made a really important point about both parliamentary accountability and the general public being able to understand more about how GBR works and what it constitutes. Throughout the establishment of GBR, there are concurrent process that will allow the Secretary to State to outline more properly the long-term future of the railway and GBR’s role in it, including the long-term rail strategy, as well as work that we are already advancing on the accessibility road map and the rolling stock and infrastructure strategy.

Existing parliamentary structures in our Westminster democracy provide ample room for us to hold Government Ministers and the Secretary of State to account on the establishment of GBR. We have oral questions for Transport, as well as the ability to ask urgent questions on GBR’s establishment. Through both Lord Hendy in the other place and Ministers in this House, we have a real ambition to explain GBR’s provisions and ways of working to the general public, because we are confident in its ability to revolutionise how the railway runs on behalf of passengers, but I take the hon. Lady’s point.

Establishing GBR is the primary purpose of the Bill, and clause 1 provides the Secretary of State with the power, by regulations, to designate a body corporate as GBR. The clause enables wider provisions in the Bill relating to GBR to apply to a body corporate, such as the statutory functions and general duties set out in it. Following Royal Assent, a company will be designated as GBR, and it will consolidate Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd, DfT Operator, train operators and parts of the Rail Delivery Group into one organisation to ensure that GBR can be mobilised as quickly as is practicable.

The clause is essential for the Government to deliver our manifesto commitment to reform the railways by establishing GBR as the directing mind, bringing track and train together. I commend clause 1 to the Committee.

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[Olly Glover]

I have not made an assessment of it at this moment. But that is not unique: at this stage in the parliamentary cycle, the right hon. Member will find that a number of the Conservative proposals that are debated in this place have not yet been fully costed—

[Rebecca Smith]

I beg to differ: they are all costed, because we are the official Opposition.

[Olly Glover]

I look forward to hearing all the figures. The point is that it is not always about coming up with the exact cost for absolutely every measure. There are plenty of things that are the right thing to do, and that can earn a return on investment. The number of young people who are not in employment, education or training is a significant barrier to economic growth. This measure, by making it easier for young people to use the train to access jobs, is likely to earn a significant return by getting more people into employment and paying taxes.

Before I accepted the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention, I was saying that we want a tap-in, tap-out method of ticketing across England, Wales and Scotland. If that sounds absurd, the Netherlands has it at this exact moment—and there is much that we can learn from that example. We want a guarantee to be issued that whatever ticket passengers purchase, via any means, is the best value fare. There should be no inequality in fare for the same ticket purchased via different means, which can be the case now because of the proliferation of ticketing platforms.

We want a national railcard to be introduced across the country. Many other countries, including Germany and Switzerland, offer national discount cards, but it is a bit of a postcode lottery here, with the network railcard in the London and south-east England area and a number of other regional or local railcards. We want open-source access to Great British Railways’ ticketing systems and rate databases for third-party retailers. That would build on the useful example demonstrated by Network Rail about 15 years ago, when it made the data feeds for its performance and train running systems available for the public to use. That created a wonderful ecosystem of useful train running and disruption apps that were much better than the official ones provided by train operators.

We also want to see greater collaboration with local and regional transport authorities, so that we see much more multimodal ticketing between railway passenger services and local bus, light rail and other public transport networks. That would help us to get the integrated transport system we need to deal with the first and last-mile issues that are often a barrier to people deciding to take public transport over the car. Where a single journey involves travel on multiple rail services, or at least one rail service and another form of public transport, we want steps to be taken to simplify fares and remove barriers to travel.

We believe that our new clause makes a number of proposals that would put our fares and ticketing system on a much better footing. It would deliver value to the taxpayer as well as reduce cost, because it would stimulate many more people to use our railway and therefore increase revenue. I look forward to the Minister’s comments.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I am always slightly concerned about speaking after my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage, who has a justifiable reputation as a train expert—I will not say “train nerd”—so I am slightly circumspect.

Rail users, both regular and irregular, have many gripes about the rail system, but the most frequent I hear from constituents undoubtedly concerns the cost of tickets. New clause 9 is about requiring fare increases to be capped in line with inflation. At time of a sustained cost of living pressure for working families, that would provide a long-term guarantee that rail fares will not continue to spiral up unpredictably, which would drive down usage.

The new clause would also mean that children aged 16 and 17 who are still in education would not be charged adult fares simply because of an arbitrary age threshold. In rural West Dorset, this is another issue that comes into my mailbox all the time. Children who are still in education hit the 16-year-old threshold and have to get across the constituency to colleges in Weymouth, at astronomical cost. Extending the 50% discount for under-18s who are in full-time education is sensible and fair, and will be especially good for people in rural communities.

The new clause would also address long-standing inconsistencies in ticketing. As mentioned, a national railcard system would end the postcode lottery whereby some areas benefit from low fares while people in other constituencies, especially rural ones, are left paying more.

[Rebecca Smith]

I appreciate the heart behind the hon. Gentleman’s proposal, but can he explain a bit more about why we need a national railcard? There are already all sorts of other railcards, as he rightly points out. There is one for the south-east, and I know there is one in Devon and Cornwall, but they are for specific sets of people doing specific types of journey. If there was a national railcard, would it not incentivise everybody to possess one, so that nobody ever paid a full rail fare?

[Edward Morello]

At one point, going through all the amendments that had been tabled to the Bill, I concluded that accepting them all would mean that the only people who would pay for a full-price ticket would probably be working-age men aged 35 to 45—they would have to single-handedly fund the entire rail network. I am not sure that that is a desirable long-term system, but a simplified system is ideal. I accept the premise of the hon. Lady’s intervention: the regionalised or localised railcards have their own benefit. But invariably we are just creating more and more carve-outs, and a simplified national system may be fairer and easier to sustain over the long term.

A move towards a national tap-in, tap-out system would modernise the network and make it far more user-friendly. In West Dorset, passengers too often step off a train only to have to wait 45 minutes for a bus, because timetables are poorly aligned. Enabling multimodal ticketing would allow rail, bus and other services to work together, making journeys smoother for residents and visitors.

New clause 9 would require Great British Railways to report on and plan for fair fares, modern ticketing, innovation through an open-source system and integration across all transport nodes. Like new clause 8, it would allow us to advocate for passengers, which should be the central theme of the Bill.

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[Rebecca Smith]

I thank the Minister for the clarity on the code of practice, which has also been echoed in some written answers I recently received from him. While we are talking about open access, what thoughts have the Minister and the Department given to working with independent retailers who have probably spent billions of pounds developing an app and a website that do a particularly good job? What work will they do collaboratively with those organisations, rather than viewing themselves as competition?

[Keir Mather]

The hon. Lady is right to point out that there are certain areas where GBR will operationally have to work with third-party retailers to ensure that they have the information that they need to continue to discharge their service.

However, another important point is that there are lessons to be learned about existing functions—where they work and where they do not work—in providing value for money for passengers and ease of access to the railway network. That is certainly something that we can take forward as part of the discussion on the Bill. I know that the Rail Minister consistently meets with stakeholders across the breadth of the railway industry, and it should be incumbent on us all to ensure that competitive measures, where they serve the interests of passengers, are incorporated into the way GBR works.

[Rebecca Smith]

The point I want to come back to is about value for money for the taxpayer. I want some reassurance that GBR will not go right back to the beginning of the journey of creating a ticketing app and website, which would effectively cost the general public an inordinate amount of money, when we already have a lot of platforms that could be brought in-house rather than having to be separate businesses.

On the value for money point, call me a cynic, but my understanding of computer programming is that it is not very cheap. I assume that that is something that GBR will have to factor in. Perhaps using some of the existing independent retailers might be a better value for money option.

[Keir Mather]

Of course, those independent retailers can continue to operate. GBR also has, as part of its duties—the things that it is required to follow by law—an interest in promoting the efficient use of public funds. We also think that there are significant economic benefits that can be realised through consolidation when it comes to aspects of ticketing.

As has been so ably pointed out, taxpayers and railway passengers are the same people. To that extent, people being taken in different directions by a vast variety of ticketing apps, not being able to realise the potential savings that are in place, does them a disservice economically. We believe that consolidation can offer them a smoother experience of ticketing and, hopefully, access to benefits that otherwise they might not be able to realise.

To return to the code of practice, it will be fully consulted on before its introduction, so it would not be appropriate for the Bill to pre-empt the specific provisions that it will contain. However, I can confirm to the Committee that the principles I have set out today, which I believe are consistent with some of the concerns that amendments 2 and 117 and new clause 3 seek to address, will very much guide ongoing work in this area.

On that point, I turn back to one of the comments made by the Opposition spokesperson about his concern regarding the setting of fares. I would like to make clear to him that it is not for the Secretary of State to interfere in day-to-day fare decisions. The Secretary of State will be limited to setting high-level strategic parameters to ensure that fares remain affordable for passengers and sustainable for taxpayers. GBR will make all of the operational decisions within those parameters and changes to those parameters would occur only to reflect GBR’s financial settlement, or in exceptional circumstances. That is, in my view, a necessary and proportionate safeguard to protect passengers, taxpayers and Government money. Therefore, as we are already taking significant and sufficient steps to deliver what the amendment envisages, so I urge the hon. Member to withdraw it.

I turn now to new clause 9 an amendments 131 and 132, which are dependent on it. New clause 9 would mandate the publication of a report covering various elements of GBR’s fares, ticketing and retail functions. Many of the items that this report would be required to cover relate to affordable and accessible rail travel—causes to which the Government are steadfastly committed. Affordability for passengers will be a key consideration when the Secretary of State sets strategic parameters and guardrails for GBR to follow on fares. As the Committee is by now aware, the Bill ensures continued statutory protection for concessionary discounts for young, older and disabled passengers.

Elsewhere, new clause 9 covers matters such as tap-in, tap-out payment and integrated ticketing, as well as third-party retailers’ access to systems and products. On integrated ticketing, we are already working with local authorities to integrate rail with local transport modes—and to trial or expand pay-as-you-go travel where appropriate. We are also progressing evaluations of how different pay-as-you-go schemes impact passengers, and the final reports will be published in due course. This work, which has not required additional legislation, is consistent with the ambition set out in various parts of new clause 9.

In summary, a legislative requirement to publish the envisaged report is not needed to deliver the outcomes that we want to see going forward. With that reassurance, I hope that the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage will agree not to press new clause 9 to a vote. Amendments 131 and 132 are dependent on new clause 9 and, for the reasons set out, the Government do not believe the report that new clause 9 would require is necessary, so I hope that the hon. Member will also agree not to press these amendments.