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Channel Tunnel Rail Link (Supplementary Provisions) Bill

I am grateful to my noble friend for his response but I would like a little more clarification on a number of points. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, has identified some clear problems. Article 8 of directive 2001/14 makes it quite clear that there must be no discrimination in access charges between operators. A French operator—by French I mean, say, SNCF—a German operator and a British operator all have to be charged the same amount under these regulations for the same type of train. Whether they are subsidised or not does not really matter. I suspect that they have to be charged the same as for a domestic train of the same capability. The noble Lord has raised an interesting issue which I shall come on to from the other side of the coin in responding to my noble friend. The Minister said that the Secretary of State needs the ability to give financial assistance to this link and to the train operators through Section 6 of the Railways Act 2005. Of course he could do it that way, but the Secretary of State gives a lot of money to the existing railways, to Network Rail and in subsidising some of the TOCs in a way that does not need special legislation. I am confused about what my noble friend said about the financial situation of Eurostar. I thought the requirement was to have open access on this network. Leaving freight aside—I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group and I will talk about freight later—Eurostar surely cannot have any more priority for access onto this line than any new operator that may come in. In other words, Eurostar cannot reserve capacity to the detriment of other operators and should be charged the same amount. If there is a financial problem with Eurostar that has not yet been sorted out, it could perfectly well be done by lowering the track access charges and reducing the subsidy to Eurotunnel. There are many ways of doing it. Can my noble friend say whether or not there is going to be open access on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link? If there is not, that would be illegal on my understanding. Of course, the rail regulator has a role in regulating some parts of the CTRL, and no doubt we will talk about that later. My point—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and some of his colleagues share this view—is that there is no reason why the regulator should not have the same responsibilities as apply to the rest of the network. I am afraid that my noble friend has not persuaded me that the differences between the 1996 Act and this latest Bill cannot be resolved by turning this line into a small part of the rest of the UK network. Finally, my noble friend says that many regulators in Europe are not independent of government. That is something that the Commission is working very hard to avoid and I think he will find that some regulations come forward from Brussels this year that make it a legal requirement for all regulators to be not only independent of government but independent of train operators and infrastructure managers. Therefore, we may as well draft our legislation in a way that complies with that. I shall be glad to hear his comments.