Railways Bill

My Lords, it is a pleasure to present the Railways Bill for Second Reading today. Before turning to the substance of the Bill, I would like to acknowledge that today marks the 21st anniversary of the 2005 attacks on London's transport network. As a former commissioner of Transport for London, my thoughts are with those who were, and continue to be, affected by that day. I also pay tribute to the extraordinary courage and resilience of Londoners, including those in emergency services, transport staff and members of the public who responded in the face of events which were completely shocking. This Bill has been a long time coming and it is my absolute privilege to speak to it today. I look forward to the debates to come on the detail but, for now, I will speak to the Bill in general terms. The need for reform of our railways is clear. Parliament, including noble Lords in this Chamber, regularly draws attention to service shortfalls, poor and inconsistent customer service and very substantial costs for the taxpayer—all realities that I and this Government accept and which stem from the fragmented system that has been in place for decades which leaves no one but the Secretary of State ultimately responsible. No one takes responsibility when things go wrong. Indeed, it was the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, who first commissioned the independent review by Keith Williams that would lead to the recommendation to create GBR—Great British Railways—after the timetable fiasco in 2018. The issues are myriad. Passengers are consistently faced with a confusing ticketing system, where seeking the fairest price and a valid ticket are often a trial. The timetable, and performance against it, is also a source of disagreement and chaos, meaning that disruption and cancellations are far more frequent than they should be. Thanks to reforms that this Government have already made via the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act, which your Lordships’ House passed in 2024, we are already beginning to see progress. Nine passenger train operators are now in public hands and performance among public operators is outstripping those still in private hands. More operators are continuing to move into public ownership regularly. Once all these services are in house, the taxpayer will save up to £150 million a year in fees that would otherwise have been paid to private franchise owners. Passengers will also find more money in their pockets, due to the first rail fares freeze in 30 years. But these measures are not enough; much more work still needs to be done. There is only one solution to fix these problems—fix the railways, put the customer first and restore the industry to a place of national pride—and it is this Bill. The Bill builds on and replaces the public ownership Act. That Act was a vital step that allowed us to bring passenger services into public ownership and proceed with some degree of integration. This Bill goes further and will give the Secretary of State the powers to create Great British Railways, one public body that will act as the directing mind for the railway. GBR will bring together 17 different organisations involved in the day-to-day running of the railway, harmonising track and train and seizing opportunities that would not be possible under the current system. The Bill does far more than just establish GBR. One essential element is a powerful voice for passengers, in the form of the passenger watchdog. The watchdog will set consumer standards for the railways, investigate poor service and provide an independent ombudsman service to resolve disputes between passengers and operators, including GBR and its subsidiaries. It will have a specific duty to consider the interests of disabled passengers, and it will have tools to act where there are repeated issues affecting passenger experience. The watchdog will be a champion for passenger interests, ensuring that the reformed railways deliver on the promises to passengers that we make here today. I would like to speak about accessibility, and I underline that it will be at the heart of what GBR is and does. I know that passengers with accessibility needs often find railway travel challenging, frustrating and distressing. I know that, all too frequently, facilities and assistance do not meet expectations, so accessibility will be part of GBR’s DNA. For the first time, an accessibility duty will apply directly to a body responsible for both the operation of passenger services and the management of railway infrastructure. Information, fares and ticketing have in many ways become the face of the industry’s problems, with many different websites offering conflicting information and fares. The Bill enables GBR to simplify the customer offer. A new GBR ticketing app and website will make it easier to plan journeys, purchase tickets and access a range of support consistently in one place. GBR’s online retailer will charge no booking fees and will enable disabled passengers to book passenger assist in the same place as their ticket. This means that, in the future, passengers can better understand the fares system and be confident that what they are getting is correct and good value. The railway has not had the ability to plan ahead for many years, leading to much less than optimal spend on railway enhancements and higher project costs. That is why the Bill also requires the Secretary of State to publish a long-term railway strategy. The strategy will be the first of its kind. It will give GBR clear direction on the Government’s priorities for the railway over the next 30 years. It will guide the long-term choices that GBR makes, ensuring that the railway is aligned with wider government goals, such as economic growth, jobs and homes, and the environment. The railway undoubtedly faces challenges, ranging from climate change to technological change, and from demographic shifts to financial sustainability. That is exactly what the long-term strategy will examine and consider. The Bill gives GBR and its stakeholders the tools to solve these challenges, placing them on the front foot from the very beginning, and obliges GBR to consult on and publish a business plan setting out how it will meet the strategy. I turn to network access. The existing process of allowing access to the track—the valuable infrastructure owned by the nation—does not work. Currently, Network Rail designs the timetable but the Office of Rail and Road takes access decisions, and both organisations suffer from not having sight of the wider context of the network. Applications to run trains on the network are, in effect, considered on a first come, first served basis, rather than by reference to any long-term plan for how to make the best overall use of the network, and no one is considering which services are best for the public. That is bad for passengers, bad for freight users, bad for taxpayers and bad for the economy. A single directing mind is the only answer to this problem. In future, GBR will be able to strategically plan access to the network and implement a reliable, achievable timetable to make best use of our limited capacity. This improved co-ordination will reduce delays and costs and improve reliability. It will stop nonsenses such as the ORR prohibiting the 0700 Manchester Piccadilly to Euston from carrying passengers, and me, as rail Minister, having to authorise the east coast main line timetable. Crucially, the ORR will hold GBR to account for taking fair and even-handed decisions on access, ensuring that it acts lawfully, fairly and reasonably. I am sure we will discuss this at length during the debates on the Bill. On devolution, the Bill is not about centralising power; in fact, quite the opposite. It brings a whole host of benefits to the devolved nations and regional governments across the country. In Scotland and Wales, the Bill enables further collaboration with the Scottish and Welsh Governments, through Transport Scotland and Transport for Wales, and includes further potential for the integration of both operations and infrastructure, which could lead to improved services and co-ordination within and across our shared borders. In England, the Bill empowers GBR to work locally in a more integrated and accountable way, and to address the place-making and economic and spatial development plans of strategic authority mayors. This means a statutory basis for structured partnerships with mayoral strategic authorities, and a duty for GBR to have regard to their local plans. The approach enables a full range of partnership options, ensuring that GBR can reach agreements that are suitable for the ambitions of mayors. This includes the ability for mayoral strategic authorities to directly fund GBR activity. There will be clear expectations for GBR to meaningfully engage with all local authorities, including those with and without mayors. In any case, GBR will be more locally focused, with its local business units directly involved with the areas they serve, and with local management engaged with local people and their elected representatives, meaning that the needs of the community are never ignored. I highlight and underline the benefits the Bill will bring to rail freight, which is, and will remain, a commercial activity critical to improving economic growth and meeting our net-zero targets. GBR will have two statutory duties regarding freight. The first is to promote rail freight, and the second is to have regard to the statutory rail freight target set by the Secretary of State and any freight target set by Scottish Ministers. As the single strategic body, GBR will be well placed to fulfil our ambitions for freight, and it will have the levers to drive progress towards our targets. Before I close, I would like to say that I am looking forward to hearing the valedictory words of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, later. He has dedicated his life to public service, and I am pleased that the Bill’s Second Reading provides the opportunity to hear his remarks. The Bill is a major step forward. While a detailed scrutiny of its contents—something I am looking forward to taking on—will undoubtedly be required, I know I have the support of the general public in sponsoring it. Public ownership of our railway continues to be popular, with over three-quarters of the public consistently supporting public ownership since this Government were elected. As I open the debate to the Floor, I will leave noble Lords with a final thought. The fragmented nature of the railway industry is plain to see and needs to change. That fragmentation began with the last major railway legislation in 1993, which resulted in over 100 companies being formed. This Bill establishes just one: a single directing mind that can get to grips with the mess, mismanagement and misery that so many rail users have experienced for years. Together, we can rebuild the railway so that the public can finally have a railway they can be proud of. I beg to move.

My Lords, first, I declare my interest as a member of the GWR stakeholder advisory board, ably and knowledgeably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester. I add my voice to the Minister’s remarks on the 21st anniversary of those terrible attacks on our transport system. I also reference the fact that this is the debate in which the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, will be making his valedictory speech. He and I have not overlapped for long in this Chamber and did not overlap in government, but I know that he brought to this House his experience as a distinguished public servant, and he will be missed. When I became a Member of Parliament, I did not expect to spend so much time dealing with trains. I did so not just as shadow Secretary of State for Transport for a period, but also because a lot of my constituents were commuters and the train service mattered to them. But I had the advantage of dealing with those issues in an era of privatisation. I remember British Rail. I always used to say that British Rail was run for the interests of those who enjoyed playing trains, rather than the interests of passengers. Privatisation changed that because, for the companies, the service to passengers mattered. As a local Member of Parliament, I was able to work with the train operating companies—first, Thames Trains then GWR—to ensure that services were improved, timetables were changed and new trains were put on in the interests of local people. That ability is going to be wiped away by this Bill and by the creation of Great British Railways. It is an issue I argued with Keith Williams when he was producing his report, and I recognise that on this side of the House, our hands are not entirely clean in relation to the concept of Great British Railways, albeit with differences from the Bill that this Government are introducing. But what is being created here is not something that puts the customer first; it is a centralised bureaucracy that will determine all the issues that matter to passengers—fares, train times, and the timetable. I say to the Minister that it is not putting the customer first; I fear that it is, in fact, putting the passenger last. That relates to my second concern with the Bill, which is about accountability and interference. First, I worry that the Bill is removing yet further the powers of the Office of Rail and Road to hold the railways and Great British Railways to account. I remember when Tom Winsor was the Rail Regulator, and a rather determined Rail Regulator he was too, but after him, things got a little mushy. The teeth were drawn from the Office of Rail and Road, as it became, and I fear that the teeth are going to be further drawn in this Bill. That matters, particularly because of an aspect to which attention has been drawn by the Transport Select Committee in the other place, which fears micromanagement of the railways by the Secretary of State. The Bill gives considerable opportunities for the Secretary of State to interfere with Great British Railways and to make determinations which otherwise should be being made in the interests of passengers. My third concern is this. Last week, the new Member of Parliament for Makerfield, who it is widely assumed will soon be our Prime Minister, made a speech in which he applauded and spoke up for the interests of place, of locality, of that sense of belonging to an area, of local identity. This Bill sweeps away the idea of local identity in our railways, because it centralises those decisions. It sweeps away the traditional historical names, regional concepts and structures from our railways. The Minister will not be surprised to hear me say this, because I have said it to him on a number of occasions and obviously, I am concerned about this issue. The symbolism of this is perhaps best seen in the fact that suddenly, all the trains are going to be repainted in the colours of the Union Jack, and the traditional liveries will go. Not only will that cost the taxpayer money, completely unnecessarily; it is as if somebody in the Department for Transport—maybe the Minister, maybe a civil servant, or perhaps a special adviser—has suggested, “Actually if we’re going to make a change, people need to see there’s a change, so let’s repaint all the trains”. People will know there is a change when their services are no longer as good as they should be. They will know there is a change when they can no longer raise their local voice, and their MP and others can no longer take that up and work with the companies to bring about a change and an improvement in their services. So, what does this Bill do? Far from prioritising passengers, it prioritises government. Far from increasing accountability, it reduces it. Far from creating independence, it creates dependence. Far from localising, it centralises; and far from respecting local identity, it destroys it. In this Bill, the passenger interest is given less priority, the regulator’s ability to challenge is reduced, and the Government’s ability to interfere is increased. That bodes ill for the future of our railways.

It will perhaps not surprise the last speaker that I find her remarks so far from the truth about what is really happening on our railway. Before and since the Bill was published, I have been approached by a number of lobbyists and companies seeking to inhibit Great British Railways organising a railway which works for the majority of users. The aim is for a railway that operates express services to and from the capital; fast inter-regional services; local services planned together with regional mayors; better connections; an ambitious freight growth target; and some elbow room in the timetable to cater for the occasional aberrations, together with some engineering work. All this can be achieved and still leave room for open-access operators which are able to pay a fair price for access, and that abstraction of revenue from other operators must be compensated for. Paths in any timetable, particularly on our congested network, are a scarce commodity, and running short trains on busy routes gives rise to opportunity costs, which means, for example, that running two short trains coupled together over the busiest sections may commend itself. I hope the Minister will underline the fact that this does not give the regulator power to determine the basic structure of the railway, as that was what nearly caused the crisis in compiling the 2025 timetable, to which he has referred, and was resolved only by executive action, leaving many loose ends behind it. The regulator may hear claims of unfairness which are clearly demonstrated and recommend that these be corrected. It will be for Great British Railways to demonstrate that it has been fair, bearing in mind the pressure on a constrained network. Great British Railways will have many other aims, and among these is to keep one major route open between important hubs so as to avoid, as far as possible, the need for bus substitution. People prefer to stay on a train on a diversionary route, provided that they are informed in advance of a longer journey. We want to see faster Anglo-Scottish journeys and internal journeys by air and freight reduced, in the interests of reducing congestion and improving air quality. If we add desirable features, such as a passenger growth target and incentives to use rail more, this will require faster, larger and more frequent trains and better freight facilities and depots. All this can be achieved by the early 2040s, which, in railway terms, is where we should be aiming. We need vision to achieve this, not a lawyer-driven nightmare overseen by a legalistic regulator. There is one issue on which I shall press the Minister to provide an answer. As I understand it, the future Great British Railways will have a five-yearly allocation of funds. This will be contained in a statement of funds available set by the rail regulator after considering the proposed expenditure submitted by Great British Railways. My question concerns the words which permit the Secretary of State to reduce the amount of money set aside for the railways. Railways and their supply chain are a long-term industry that needs some certainty about future levels of investment. If the Secretary of State interferes with the process, he should refer the matter back to the regulator so that he may be advised how the industry will be affected, particularly the operation and maintenance of the railway and the likely effect on the agreed business plan. I remind the House that the two major developments which have affected the railways in recent years concern HS2 and the intercity express programme. Neither of these were carried out by railway professionals but were dictated by government and have proved costly and have vastly outrun their timescales. Great British Railways needs to start with a clean sheet and be able to make its own decisions about how the money is spent.

My Lords, I start by drawing the House’s attention to my registered interests. I am chair of the Accessible Transport Policy Commission and a board member of Active Travel England. The Disability Discrimination Act was passed in 1995. It was the bare minimum of what it was possible to get through Parliament at the time. I sat on the National Disability Council, which oversaw the implementation of the DDA. That said that all trains would be step-free by 1 Jan 2020. In 2020 we were told it would be 100 years before I could get on the majority of trains in the UK without the permission or support of a member of staff. I need to live only another 94 years. I look forward to working with the Minister, who has extensive knowledge in this space, but all Governments for the past 30 years have allowed derogations. Basically, they have kicked the can down the road, and a very simple question is: are we as a Parliament going to keep doing that? We should acknowledge the transport gap for disabled people. Some 2.8 million people are locked out of the workforce because of inaccessible transport. Making it accessible could boost the economy by £176 billion. IMechE has said that investment of between £20 billion and £24 billion could generate another £10 billion to £34 billion in revenue. So this is just a political choice. The disability tax—the extra time for planning, lifts not working, et cetera—for me is a personal cost of two to three hours every single week. The Transport Select Committee in its Access Denied report has highlighted many of the issues. Getting on and off a train in a timely manner is not exceptional; it should be the norm. I have had some great experiences and many that were not. I have been asked many times, “Tanni, what is it that you want?” Most people were expecting a technical answer, but it is simple: I just want the same miserable experience of commuting as everyone else. I do not have that; I aspire to that. At one mainline train station I am known as “the woman who tweets”. However, I am optimistic, because there is a chance that this Government can make a change that will have a significant impact. Passenger and disability rights need to be strongly established through the Bill, and rights enforcement should be given greater weight than duties for cost-cutting and competition. This means that legal rights such as in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and data protection legislation should be the basis for all standards. The accessible travel charter needs a defined review point and legislative force behind it. We must ensure that the Equality Act 2010 duties are strictly adhered to by transport providers, requiring them to anticipate accessibility needs rather than waiting for formal complaints. Change comes in different ways and collaboration works. I thank Tony Jennings, who led on the work to change the discriminatory scooter policy in Scotland. Mobility scooter users do not automatically have the same legal rights as wheelchair users on public transport. While wheelchair spaces are guaranteed by law under the Equality Act 2010, bus, train and tram operators can set their own specific policies for mobility scooters. Further enforcement of the wheelchair space—for example, not filling it with luggage—should not be left to disabled people to police. I welcome the DfT’s consultation on micromobility—I have an attachment and it has revolutionised my travel—but recently a staff member, who did not know their own accessible transport policy, tried to stop me taking it on board. As a disabled person, you have to be an expert in all aspects of policy, procedure, ticketing and access. Multimode assistance failures cannot keep being passed between train companies as part of a blame game. No one would design a system the way that we have it. Years ago, my photo was sent to all members of staff at a particular train station; they were told to get me off the platform as soon as possible. That was great for me—it worked for a while—but that is simply not possible to do at scale. Level boarding should be a priority. It should be mandatory that all procurement for passenger trains touching any Network Rail track is low floor. One company that did that—well done—did not design the inside of the carriage to be accessible. We were told, “Don’t worry, you will be in sight of the café bar”. In all my years of campaigning, being in sight of a café bar was not on my list. Being able to see it but not buy anything from it was not what we really wanted. I try to book assistance, but it is exhausting to negotiate. I cannot remember the number of times I have to say, “Turn up and go is a legal right”. When assistance fails, the question is, “Did you book?” Well, if I am on a train, someone put me there; I did not magically teleport on to the carriage. Every time I book, I receive at least five emails per journey, with questionnaires about the process—but often I am asked about the actual journey only weeks or months later. When I book, I get an email telling me that the booking is unconfirmed and then another saying it has been confirmed. I then get various emails from the train company. However, I have had assistance confirmed with stations that are completely inaccessible. It is essential that we have up-to-date information on lift and toilet availability, or on where lifts that are turned off because stations are not staffed. Disabled people have been told to return to their home station before 6 pm because the lifts are turned off when no staff are there. Disabled people should not have a curfew. An example of a horrendous experience of lifts is at St Pancras station, which has seemingly been out of service for months. People have been told that the mitigation is to go to Farringdon, but last week all the lifts were out there too. I will give a recent experience to illustrate the reality of my week. I was a “turn up and go” passenger at a station. The assistance desk could not check whether the wheelchair space was free. I was told to go to the ticket office, where usually they can check that, but they were not able to do so at the time. They could sell me a ticket, except the train was technically sold out, so they could sell me only an open ticket, which is much more expensive. The wheelchair space is not even on the ticketing system, so I could buy a ticket for a train on which I did not know whether there was space nor whether someone could help me on it. This system just has to change. The complaint process is too hard. Train companies often try to bat people away and make them believe that it is a one-off. The only time some companies wake up is when you mention Vento. We should not have to raise compensation to get a complaint sorted. Some disabled people decide to sue, but it does change as much as it should. Some disabled people who sue successfully are often derided and mocked in the industry. But we should look at this in a different way: the industry should quite simply do its job and stop making it possible for the courts—not some random friends—to make judgments in favour of disabled people who are failed on the network. I welcome the words from the Minister on the app, where we will be able to buy tickets and get assistance at the same time; that is another issue that has been kicked down the road for a little while. I have at least seven apps, and six of them show different prices for every single journey. Ticket vending machines need to be accessible. I can use most of them only if I put my hand in the air and turn my thumb upside down, because they are not designed for people who are sitting down. We also need better understanding of the ramps on the network. I have heard that there are 56 different ramp types on the network. I am not sure whether that is the right number, but the rail delivery universal ramp project seems to have stalled. We should have ramp-trained staff on every platform, or staff absolutely should do a walk-through of a train. What do we really need? We need legislative deadlines for level boarding and step-free stations. We need an accessibility charter, which should be the floor, not the ceiling, of our aspirations. We need to promote and protect the rights and interests of disabled passengers. I go back to a simple question: will this Government be different from every other Government since 1995 and commit to accessible transport, or are they going to keep kicking the can down the road?

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, I am going to start with a personal anecdote, but it will not be either as moving or as consequential as the ones we have heard from her today. I pay tribute to her campaigning work on this issue; I am sure that sentiment is shared by other Members of the House. On a Friday, when I get to Euston and am heading north, I yearn for the toilets to work, effective wifi and a quiet coach. By the time I get back to London on a Monday, as a commuter, I am looking at “Am I going to get a seat? Is it reliable? Is the price fair?” Of course, a top-class railway that is spending £22 billion annually—with more than half of that taxpayer subsidy—arguably can and should provide all these things and more, and I have not even mentioned the other neglected priorities of electrification, extreme weather resilience, modal shift, new services, safety, speed, fresh sandwiches and so on. All these competing ambitions make a wider point in that they concern the choice of priorities, yet the essence of the claim in the Bill is that the delivery of future policy priorities can follow only from getting the basic underlying structure right. The Bill is a fresh start. It legislates for an outcome that the Conservatives recognised the case for but did not act on: the need to end the fragmentation and to bring track and train together. The noble Baroness, Lady May, graciously hinted at the value of bringing track and train together. I share her concern for passenger voice as a live issue and regional influence, but I am mindful that I am to be followed by the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, who I anticipate having a slightly more ideological engagement about the merits of privatisation versus nationalisation; I promise to say a word on that later. I think that the public’s first concern is simply a service that works. The Bill builds around an evidence case that fragmentation is holding our railways back. The Minister noted that we have 17 different bodies, so unifying track and train under a single organisation is designed to work for passengers, freight and the taxpayers. For the first time in a generation, we will have a single arm’s-length body that is unambiguously accountable for making the railways work. Of course, a new structure could potentially drive out the very large existing inefficiencies, and it is the prerequisite for dealing with the prevailing culture, which is one of blame, then negotiation and then compensation. Despite those vital changes, the trade-offs between affordability and reliability, and between subsidy reduction and network upgrades, will remain, so I welcome that, when it comes to setting priorities, the Government have given us a flavour. They are about to publish a long-term rail strategy that will have five core objectives, two of which will deal with long-term economic growth and reducing regional inequality. We need to reorientate our railways to our long-term ambitions for the nation. Two hundred years ago, railways were the new general-purpose technology of their day. Today’s general-purpose technology is AI, and quantum will follow. Again, we face as a country the creative destruction that is changing our economic geography in the same way as railways first shaped our economy, our geography, our leisure and our landscape. Great British Railways should be tasked with supporting a faster-growing economy. This is a time of profound change. We need it to break down barriers of opportunity, reduce journey times, improve connectivity and stimulate regeneration and housebuilding next to stations. Let me come beyond the rhetoric, to the relief of the other side, to the challenges that come with establishing a single organisation. Great British Railways, when it is fully established, will employ 100,000 people. It will be the country’s largest arm’s-length body. The stakes are high. On the plus side, public ownership avoids the siphoning off if dividends and profiteering. However, we must also mitigate the known risks. Monolithic organisations can be deaf to key interests, captured by other interests, slow to innovate and risk averse. These are not insuperable challenges. Many nations manage to have fast, reliable, successful railway systems, and so should the nation where it all began. The structural changes will need to be coupled with political and organisational leadership. To meet public expectations, we will need better regulation rather than more regulation. To encourage the self-sufficiency of the system and manage the burden on the taxpayer, the House of Commons Transport Select Committee suggested that we should be setting a passenger growth target to incentivise commercially minded improvements. When it comes to nurturing innovation, the Minister will be aware of the ongoing anxieties, notably from the open access operators. They account for only 1% of services but they are responsible for 19% of the new train orders in recent years, so we need to make sure that they find their place. They have been successful in securing modal shift on the Edinburgh to London route and elsewhere. In my few remaining minutes I come to the issue of devolution of decision-making, clear accountability and speed of decision-making. This touches on some of the anxieties that the noble Baroness, Lady May, raised about regional input. Britain’s devolution landscape is complex, highly varied and very fast evolving. Others have referenced the new Member for Makerfield. I welcome that the Bill provides for the devolved Governments in Wales and Scotland and the combined mayoral authorities to have a statutory role in the rail network, but I would welcome reassurance on how this will work in practice. Can we expect to see any of the mechanisms for clear accountability, locally and nationally, during Committee? As a signal of intent of their commitment to working with the devolved Governments and mayoral authorities, will the Government look at developing shared evidence bases that will allow for the stronger business cases that will allow us to move over time to local commissioning? Finally, on ticketing, I will say only that it must be right to consolidate 55 million different ticket types that are allegedly available and make it easier for the passenger to find the most affordable fare. In conclusion, I say that this Bill is a bold statement. That is important. It is not always that Members on this side can stand and say, “This is a bold statement about the way forward”. We as a Government have been accused of timidity. This is a bold statement to fix a problem that has frustrated passengers, railway staff and the railway industry for too long. It begins a process of evolution from today’s semi-privatised rail network to a nationalised railway, but the essence is to bring track and train together and end 30 years of experimentation, unlocking growth and delivering efficiency in the network. I commend the Bill and look forward to Committee.

I agree with the Minister’s three main aims for railway improvement. He is right that punctuality is insufficient. Last year, under 85% of trains arrived within three minutes of timetable and over 4% of services were cancelled altogether. He is right that we need to improve the quality of the passenger experience. That will require innovation, new services geared to people’s lives and their travel demands, and delivering them a travel offer at an affordable price, an acceptable fare. The railway is too detached and is running far too many nearly empty trains around to fill a timetable. This is interspersed with, at popular times, too few popular trains, with 169,000 people standing in very cramped and unsafe conditions on a typical day. A lot of work needs to go into getting into the modern world and understanding travel patterns. Above all, the Minister is right that there needs to be a revolution in value for money. We are paying far too much as taxpayers, in some cases far too much as fare payers, and in other cases travelling on heavily subsidised fares, in relation to the amount of work that the railway is able to do. Last year, taxpayers had to put in £21.6 billion to this railway system, and fare payers were persuaded to put in only £11.5 billion. So limited was the offer that was made available on this vast network that taxpayers were paying twice as much as fare payers—general taxpayers twice as much as the more limited number of people who were actually using the railway. So we do need a revolution. I share some of my noble friend Lady May’s scepticism about whether the right revolution can come from nationalisation itself. The Government need to describe more accurately to the public the nature of the railway that they took responsibility for some two years ago. I am the first to confess that the Governments I supported did not get it all right and that there were many failings that needed to be corrected. But the Minister should be honest with the public and remind them that all the track, all the signals, all the structures and all the stations were taken into public ownership by a previous Labour Government in 2002. He should also point out that many of the problems, delays and interruptions of service have, in recent years, been created by failings in the nationalised part of the system, as well as some of them, as he will rightly point out, being created by the train operating companies which the predecessor Government were gradually getting rid of—and it is also his policy to complete that task. However, this great, controlling mind they are going to find—I trust that this lady or gentleman exists—is going to need a lot of vision and drive to get value out of this extraordinary network. All these thousands of miles of track that go into the very hearts of our cities and towns are not being used properly and nearly enough. They are far too empty. If you see a bird’s eye view from a camera, or a plane with a camera, of our country at morning peak—there still is a bit of a morning peak on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, although Covid has made a bit of a difference on Monday and Friday—you see inadequate roads, increasingly reduced in scale and size by Liberal Democrat councils, with huge traffic jams and queues, making it very difficult for people to drive to work or to the shops or do what they want to do. You see largely empty, fabulous, straight trackways into the centres of our cities, with trains spaced out at two-mile intervals, or whatever it is, because the signalling is pretty primitive and for safety reasons they are very worried about running more trains on the same track, even though they are all going in the same direction on that bit of track. You would have thought that, with modern digital signalling, if we are going to get it, you could actually run more trains safely on that track to take more of the strain of travel. The travel opportunity for the railway is enormous because its market share has sunk so far. If you look at trips in the last year, you see that only 2% of people’s trips were by train and 59% of their trips were by car, and then there was walking and cycling and so forth. Even if you take miles, where the railway does rather better because people tend to go on trains for rather longer journeys, people are still travelling seven times as much in a car as they are on a train. This is the business opportunity. So my suggestion to the Minister is that this piece of legislation needs some quite big tweaks in order to make it more likely that a controlling mind can come up with a way of selling all that empty rail and track space to enough people and organisations that can run trains to service the true travel needs of the public. The first thing this controlling mind is going to need is access to private capital. If nationalisation means no more private capital then the railway is going to be even shorter of capital than it has been to date. I urge the Minister to allow for private capital, which must mean allowing challenger companies to offer services and facilities on the properties or the tracks to bring in the innovation and extra capital capacity that will be needed. Given that we are going to need a lot of innovation, a vital part of that package is open access. Once the Minister has completed his great train set under nationalised control, he must allow others to say, “I can do it better”, “I can do it differently”, or “I can make proper use of this track which the nationalised industry is not using properly”, in order to bring in the innovation and extra service quality that we will need. I hope that a nationalised industry will want to take more pride in the railway than Network Rail has taken to date. When I go on a rail journey, I am often absolutely horrified when I look out of the window and see the rusty old rolling stock in the siding just wasting away, the old sleepers piled up as if nobody owns them, the brambles and the weeds growing out of the parallel track that is not used very much, and the uncared-for look of the whole place, with peeling paint on the stations and rusting iron on some of the very old stations. It is a mess, with graffiti over everything. I say innovate, allow contestability, bring in new services and clean the place up. Let us be proud of it, then the public might want to use it.

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing this Bill. I start by acknowledging his deep knowledge of our railways. Few in either House are better placed to steward legislation of this kind. I hope that expertise will make him receptive to the constructive scrutiny that these Benches intend to offer. It is an honour to speak in the same debate as the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead. I am sure she will not remember but, nearly 20 years ago, after speaking at an event to encourage more women to stand for elected office, she discovered that her train home from Temple Meads had been cancelled, so I had the pleasure of giving her a lift to Bristol Parkway that evening. She was kind and generous enough not to remark on the pile of leaflets on the back seat of my car, which let us just say were not entirely complimentary about the Conservative Party. This Bill will be judged not by the structures it creates but by the difference it makes to passengers. For most people, railway reform is not about the machinery of government; it is about whether the train arrives when it should, whether disruption is explained clearly, and whether, when the service fails, passengers are treated fairly and swiftly, without having to fight for what they are owed. That should be our starting point. Great British Railways is being created because fragmented accountability has failed passengers. If it is to command public confidence, GBR must do more than bring track and train together; it must rebalance the relationship between the railway and the passenger. Nowhere is that imbalance clearer than in Delay Repay. In principle, the scheme is sound—passengers delayed by 15 minutes or more are, in most cases, entitled to money back—but in practice, too many never receive it. The latest joint research from Transport Focus and the Department for Transport found that nearly 45% of passengers with an eligible delay actually claimed what they were owed—a figure that has fallen since 2023. Of those who did not claim, nearly half either did not know that they could or wrongly believed that they were not eligible. That is a remarkable failure. The problem is not the absence of a right; it is that the right is hidden behind process. A passenger must know that they are eligible for Delay Repay and know which operator to claim from; find the correct form; find their reference number, their ticket type, the time they should have departed and arrived, and how late they were; and then upload images of their ticket, along with their bank details. Even if they manage all that, the passenger must submit it within a certain time limit. If they do not, the money simply stays with the railway. If Sainsbury’s fails to deliver my milk, it automatically reimburses me. If a concert I have booked is cancelled, I receive an automatic refund. If I switch energy providers and the process falters, I am automatically compensated. Why must it require such a Herculean effort to get a partial refund from London Northwestern when the 7.47 am from Leighton Buzzard is delayed for the third time in a week? This is not a passenger failing; it is a system failing. Compensation that depends on knowledge, persistence and administrative skill is not good enough for a modern railway. The creation of GBR gives us the chance to fix this. GBR will know when a train was late, which services were cancelled and which journeys were affected. Increasingly, through digital ticketing and online accounts, it should also know which passengers bought tickets for these services. The burden should no longer sit with the passenger; it should sit with the railway. Where GBR has the data to identify an eligible delay, compensation should be automatic—not advertised more clearly, not placed behind a better form, but automatic. If a passenger books online, the refund should go straight back on to their card or into their account. Where automatic payment is genuinely not possible, they should receive a proactive notification with a simple route to claim. The test should be this: if the railway knows it has failed, it should not wait for the passenger to complain. There are of course practical questions. Paper tickets will still exist and not every journey will sit in a digital account. We must not design a system that excludes those who are less digitally confident. But these are reasons to design automatic compensation properly, not reasons to avoid it. GBR should provide one clear, universal and accessible compensation scheme, with one standard and trusted process, and a single route for claims, with the complexity of the industry resolved behind the scenes rather than left to the passenger to navigate. This is not merely about money. The sums involved are often modest, but the principle matters enormously. When a passenger has had a bad journey, the compensation process is the railway’s opportunity to restore trust. If that process is slow or obscure, it compounds the original failure. It tells the passenger that not only were they delayed but now they must chase the railway for what they are owed. This is exactly the culture that this Bill should end. Delay Repay should become one of the clearest tests of whether GBR is truly passenger-first. It is concrete, measurable, visible and goes directly to the question of accountability. I therefore ask the Minister to address four points. First, will the Government commit to automatic compensation as the clear direction of travel for GBR? Secondly, will the passenger watchdog have the power to monitor not just whether Delay Repay exists but whether passengers receive what they are owed? Thirdly, will GBR be required to publish regular data on eligible delays, claims made, compensation paid and rejected, and the proportion paid automatically? Finally, will the Government consider placing a duty on GBR to make the compensation process simple, proactive and passenger-centred from the outset? If we do not measure this properly, we will not fix it. The public should be able to see whether the new system pays passengers fairly or whether millions of eligible claims are still going unclaimed. The railway asks a great deal of its passengers. They are asked to tolerate disruption, engineering works, cancellation, overcrowding and rising costs. When things go wrong, the least they should expect is to be treated with respect. Great British Railways has the potential to end the buck-passing and fragmentation that have made the current system so frustrating, but that potential will be realised only if passenger rights become real in practice. I hope this Bill will be strengthened to make automatic, simple, transparent compensation a central duty of the new railway. If GBR knows a passenger has been delayed, GBR should pay. That is fair, modern and the kind of railway that passengers deserve.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, who made some very apposite points about passenger rights. I declare an interest as a member of the UK and Ireland leadership team of AtkinsRéalis and as an adviser to Hutchison Ports. For me, this is somewhat of an endpoint, since, as the Minister rightly said, I started the process back in 2018 through the Williams review, which was intended to address the issue we will all touch upon tonight. I never believed that separating track and train was the right thing to do. It was right, in my view, to move away from a state-run monolith, and it distresses me enormously that we have ended up going back to a state-run monolith, but it was absolutely not right in the end to fragment the railways as much as happened.