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Railways

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the debate today. For myself, I am interested in the long-term future. I do not intend to debate history. The Minister gave us a fair analysis of the history of our rail system. He also paints a picture of success, and he is right. When one looks at the graphs, they mysteriously start going in the right direction shortly after privatisation. Despite the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, something seems to have gone right at that point. The Minister mentioned the InterCity express project that will be dual powered. Is he not concerned about the extra dead weight that will have to be hauled around the country? Would it not be better to fill in the gaps in electrification, as proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and others? The Minister mentioned ticketing problems. I, too, have been caught in exactly the same way at exactly the same station. What can be done in the long term to obviate the antediluvian need to buy a ticket? Does the Minister see a future for greater coverage of the Oyster card system, or perhaps something even better? The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and many others raised the issue of the 1,300 carriages. Does the Minister accept that he urgently needs to place orders to industry? If he does not, the manufacturers’ subcontractors may not exist. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, made some extremely important points regarding revenue risks for the TOCs. If our worst fears were realised, something would have to be done. The TOCs are already competing on how much revenue risk they will take. If the Minister does not manage the downturn correctly, he will significantly increase the costs associated with revenue risk. I deeply regret the final comment of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, which I did not find particularly helpful. The nub of the problem is clear: our railway system does not have the capacity to carry even the number of passengers wishing to travel now, let alone the numbers expected in the future. The Government have accepted that demand for rail is set to grow, but seem to fail to appreciate that this trend is not only unavoidable but is welcome and is to be encouraged. When they issued the rail White Paper, the Government believed that it set out the strategic direction of the network. It was claimed: "““The White Paper looks at the potential future challenges for the railway over a 30-year horizon. It identifies three long-term agendas for Government and the rail industry working in partnership: increasing the capacity of the railway, delivering a quality service for passengers, and fulfilling rail’s environmental potential””." At the time, many commentators complained about the paper’s paucity of ideas and its aim, in effect, simply to manage growth and restrict demand and capacity, mainly through increased fares for passengers. I note the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, regarding the future and I wish him all the best for his work on his national network strategy group. Where we think that initiatives will make a real and positive difference, we will not hesitate to support them. We still see operational problems with Network Rail and we pray that the new year and Easter engineering fiascos are not repeated with this season’s maintenance programme. The Minister will have to pay close attention to that, and I think that he will do so. Many in my party believe that we need a fundamental review of the structure and governance of Network Rail to ensure that it is responsive to industry, customers and passengers. We need to encourage train operators and the private sector more generally to make long-term investments. To do that they need certainty, and to deliver it a Conservative Government would review the length of franchises. Common sense suggests that franchises deliver certainty and facilitate greater levels of investment as the costs can be recouped. It is not just a matter of the capital cost of setting up the franchise but of staff training costs and, in particular, bid costs, which are very high indeed. The new southern franchise is just five-and-a-half years. Does this really make sense? We will look at franchise length, and if a longer rail franchise makes sense in terms of what the operator needs to be able to deliver, we shall have no qualms in offering it. These types of arrangements would give operators the certainty they need to deliver the investment, capacity and performance for which passengers are crying out. However, with these longer franchises, with review periods built in, would come more effective remedies to deal with an operator that fails its customers. The Minister touched on some of the actions he has had to take with regard to a below standard TOC. The Conservative Party has a transport team down the Corridor led by Theresa Villiers, which has been considering all these matters very carefully. It has a vision. It does not think that it is good enough for our people to have to stand on intercity journeys, nor that it is right to use short-haul aviation when we could provide a far better rail alternative given that short-haul aviation incurs high embarkation and disembarkation costs and constitutes poor use of business users’ time. Air travel does not take travellers to the heart of the city, where they generally want to be, and worst of all, short-haul is relatively more polluting than long-haul aviation, and far more so than train by orders of magnitude. We understand the problems of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the rail freight industry. It is very hard to find extra train paths because our rail system is already running at over capacity. We do not think that it is enough to undertake some big projects, such as redeveloping Reading and Birmingham New Street stations, welcome though they are—the Minister touched on those projects in his opening comments—as we know that we will still run out of capacity if we succeed in increasing the GDP per capita in the long term. We want to bring millions of citizens in Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds closer to the centre of the UK and closer to Europe, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner.