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Railway Safety Levy Regulations 2006

My Lords, I would like the Minister to clarify a couple of points. One is that health and safety are connected to the environment, but they are also connected to security. We had the events of last July in London, and there has been considerable discussion about how the Tube should operate in future and what steps should be taken to address safety and heating, which is an acute problem on the Tube. Will all this come under the order? How will it be sorted? There is, of course, an increasing problem with noise as trains go faster; we have come a long way from the old problems caused by steam to the environment. The effects of noise caused by very fast trains in certain areas are not well understood. There is the way in which noise moves. The noise is acute, for example, in some valleys but not in others. This is an under-regarded area of responsibility. Finally, I wonder whether the Minister can comment on how any taxation on railways as a result of the order will compare with that on aircraft. In debates in this House, noble Lords have commented that it is so much cheaper to fly to Paris than to go there by train because railways are bearing a tax that aircraft are not. I hope that the regulation will not make railways suffer further from higher tax than the egregiously low taxes on aircraft.