Railways Bill

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Olly Glover]

My hon. Friend is quite right to point out that some of the more sparsely populated parts of our country have been neglected in their rail offer. It is important that the spending recognises that and does not just follow large towns or cities or inter-city routes.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Surely improving our railways should include the ambition of making our public transport cleaner and greener. In Bath, dirty diesel trains are still running through the city. Surely one of our first steps should be an ambitious electrification plan, reversing or addressing the years of failure of the previous Conservative Government.

[Olly Glover]

I shall have to ask my office to initiate an investigation into the leak of my speech—I will go on to say why we do indeed need a rolling electrification programme, which is something that has hitherto been missing under Governments of all colours.

Nevertheless, we Liberal Democrats have some concerns about the Bill in its current form. First of all, though, we certainly welcome the Government’s recent embrace of a seven-year Lib Dem call for a freeze on rail fares. It is very welcome, but it would be entirely wrong to suggest—to be fair, the Secretary of State has not yet done so—that GBR is needed for such things. This is all about influence and persuasion with the Treasury and making sure we make coherent choices about fares and the cost of motoring, so that we encourage the transport choices we wish to see.

The legislation as drafted will not in and of itself bring better value for money for customers in the form of affordability, reliability and improved access to the network. It is not just me who thinks that; the Secretary of State herself stated in May that she could not promise lower fares under renationalisation. One of my biggest concerns is that GBR currently sounds like a railways version of NHS England—something that the Government themselves have decided to abolish—rather than an organisation given real autonomy, following a clear vision and long-term plan for the industry, that is likely to create customer focus and commercial flair, which is what our railways really need. What they do not need is even more state control and micromanagement, which, to date, has not produced good outcomes. The capacity duty for GBR laid out in the Bill is another big concern here; in just three short paragraphs, it sets out a very broad and draconian basis for rejecting applications to access the network that are not GBR.

Let me give some examples of how state control and micromanagement has hurt us to date. It was the Department for Transport, not any failing train operator, that specified the inter-city trains currently in service with LNER and GWR, which, as I am sure the Secretary of State will know from her own travels, have been replete with problems and concerns about suboptimal internal comfort and design. Indeed, the current significant rolling stock shortages—a result of problems that GWR is facing with those trains—were confounded by a DFT decision to withdraw high-speed train rolling stock from the west country after the pandemic without a replacement, which has led to frequent overcrowding on trains serving my Oxfordshire constituency of Didcot and Wantage, partly because five-car inter-city trains designed for journeys such as London to Bristol and London to Penzance are currently operating stopping services in Devon and Cornwall.

It was a Department for Transport decision to appoint Chiltern Railways to operate East West Rail phase 1 between Oxford and Milton Keynes. The new railway has been ready for more than a year and we still have no passenger services running on that line. We have had 20 years of Department for Transport-specified timetables, with relatively little improvement to connections between trains and non-London journey times. When I used to work at Southern, the timetable specification document given to us by the Department for Transport had 200 pages of detail as to exactly what should be followed.

There is a real lack of clarity on how open access passenger and freight will be effectively regulated and protected in the new structure. That is especially important for freight, which the Government have decided not to nationalise. There is no requirement in the Bill to set a target for passenger growth, which may suggest a lack of ambition. The Bill is very vague on the criteria for calculating things such as network access charges. The Bill gives GBR the power to apply discounted or elevated track charges, but it is totally unclear as to what criteria will be applied in deciding the charges. It is also unclear how the ORR will be able to police and enforce that effectively, given its reduced powers. The Bill seems to imply that appeals against GBR access decisions will require judicial review-level criteria, making them very inaccessible to most parties that may wish to make those challenges.

We hope that some of those concerns will be addressed through further scrutiny on the Bill Committee—in the miraculous event that the Bill passes later today. We hope that, with an open-minded approach from the Government, we will be able to set a specific time definition for “long-term rail strategy”. The Liberal Democrats believe that it should be 30 years rather than a short period of 10 years or 15 years. We hope to see a clearer definition and some bounds put in for the many references to the Secretary of State’s powers to override, and we want to see greater ambition for both freight and passenger growth.

We need more recognition of the importance of competition and open access for both freight and long-distance passengers. Rail freight remains in the private sector and therefore needs protections, given the Government’s clear preference for state ownership and operation. Open access has driven up ridership and customer satisfaction on the east coast main line but is now at risk. The real question for the Government is whether something as innovative as Hull Trains, which has transformed the inter-city passenger offer between Hull and London, would even be possible under GBR?

We desperately need competition on the west coast main line, given Avanti West Coast’s outrageous fares and performance. There is no guarantee that when Avanti returns to the public sector those fares will come down. There are many positive examples of private sector tendering and operation—particularly the Spanish high-speed network, the original LGV Sud-Est in France, which is the busiest high-speed line in Europe, and French and German operating contracts procured by regional governments. Although the Passenger Standards Authority is welcome, we need an even stronger and louder passenger voice on it.

What would the Lib Dems do instead or additionally? [Laughter.] Well, I am going to address that in case anybody wanted to accuse us of being negative without articulating our positive vision. We need to make sure that as well as making the structural changes it intends to, the Bill, and whatever follows, addresses the real problems on our network.

Successive Governments have failed to set out a clear, long-term vision and set of objectives for the railway that cover passenger and freight growth, customer satisfaction and punctuality. They have failed to accompany that with a long-term funding settlement and infrastructure plan, which should include incentives and rewards for contractors and suppliers for hitting quality, time and cost objectives when it comes to enhancements to the network. They should be based on a vision for a regional or national timetable designed around convenient and reliable connections between trains at well-designed major interchange stations, as is the case in Switzerland.

The Bill should limit future fare increases to no more than the rate of inflation, which would deal with the arbitrary approach that has been taken up until now. We need value for money and quality guarantees for passengers given the high fares we have. In particular, the Bill does not guarantee that my Oxfordshire constituency will get the improvements that we really want to see, such as electrification between Didcot and Oxford. The equivalent part of railway to Cambridge was electrified in 1986 under that hardly well-known pro-rail Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. We need a clear, long-term rolling programme for rolling stock. We need accessibility improvements at stations, including Cholsey, and new stations such as one to serve Grove and Wantage. I am desperate to see that for my constituents.