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Railways

My Lords, I have always made it a principle of action in my time in politics not to exaggerate differences or to pretend that there are differences where they do not exist. I pay tribute to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and his party for their marked change of tone on rail over recent months. They have become a great deal more positive about the industry and I strongly welcome that. I hope that over the months ahead it will be possible to build a consensus on a programme of improvement in the rail industry over the next 15, 20 and 25 years with the party opposite and with colleagues in the Liberal Democrats. I sense that we are converging. My noble friend Lord Faulkner was absolutely right to say that this is a great time to be associated with the railways. He was also right to point out that we had some pretty close shaves in the 1980s with policies that would have significantly harmed the rail network to an even greater extent than happened with the changes that did take place. I remember the Alfred Sherman report, which, as my noble friend will recall, proposed concreting over the entire rail network and running buses and coaches over it. This proposal was taken seriously by so-called free-marketeers in the 1980s, even though it seemed to be from the wild west. However, a perfectly sensible report was published, commissioned, I think, by the Department of Transport and possibly British Rail. This was the Serpell report, although it, too, proposed options that could have led to significant network cutbacks in the 1980s. I told the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in our informal conversation before the debate, that I remember Sir David Steel—now the noble Lord, Lord Steel—making a brilliant speech after the publication of the Serpell report regarding the options that it proposed. The inquiry had put passenger usage numbers through a computer and had worked out that the West Highland line could stop at Crianlarich. As the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, is clearly aware, Crianlarich is not a great centre of population but a junction. The computer had worked out that if you stopped the line there, you might get the benefits of the traffic flows from both lines going onwards, without the expense of maintaining them. That was the kind of ludicrous planning that took place in the 1980s in some areas, which could have led to significant further cutbacks in the rail network. As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, we have a more sensible approach to transport planning. I can assure the House that not only is there a commitment in England to no network closures over the five-year period ahead—a commitment given in the rail White Paper last year—but the Scots have no intention whatever of closing the line north of Crianlarich.