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Railways

My Lords, I think that it will be quite some time before we get to that position, but we can make changes, including better ticketing machines at stations to reduce the need to queue for tickets. However, I am anxious to ensure that, when passengers need to queue, they are not inconvenienced to an unacceptable degree. I intend to look at that further in the period ahead. Perhaps I may go to the heart of the issues that we face. I want to make two broad points. First, the current condition of the rail industry is reasonable. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, is generally speaking a fair-minded person and he does not seek to paint a bleaker picture where it is not justified. However, he did so in one significant regard. He said that the big increase in rail usership in recent years had nothing whatever to do with improvements in capacity and was all to do with improvements in the economy. That is simply not the case. Because the noble Lord is far too fair-minded not even to mention the evidence against him, he did, in passing, in an intriguing part of his speech, mention the National Audit Office’s recent report on the letting of rail franchises, which was extremely positive about the way in which government policy has changed. He dismissed the report as being far too optimistic. This was the most extensive independent inquiry into the rail franchising system that there has been in recent years. It was extremely positive about the system and the improvements that had been made to the benefit of passengers. I simply suggest that the report was correct in its findings and that it was right to highlight the improvements that there have been. There have been significant increases in the number of carriages; there are 11,150 carriages compared with 10,400 in 1995, which is a significant improvement in capacity. The noble Lord seemed to have forgotten that entirely when he said that there had been no improvements. The £8.8 billion of investment on the west coast main line, which has all taken place since 1997, is leading to the significant improvements in capacity that I set out in my speech, including the introduction of the new three-times-an-hour service between London and Birmingham and between London and Manchester. In historic terms, that is truly transformational. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, paying close attention to me. I know that she is a regular user of that line, as I have been to Bolton with her. Many people are not aware of how significant the improvement will be when the new timetable is fully implemented and at long last we move past the period of investment in the network, which, I well understand, has led to significant inconvenience to passengers in recent years. Perhaps I may quote the final conclusion of the National Audit Office’s report into the letting of rail franchises between 2005 and 2007. It concludes: "““The Department’s approach to rail franchising produces generally well thought through service specifications and generates keen bidding competition. This approach has resulted in better value for money for the taxpayer on the eight franchises let since the Department took over from the””," Strategic Rail Authority. "““The Department has been able to gain a commitment to some improvements in quality, reliability, accessibility, security and capacity at the same time as negotiating a sharp fall in subsidy. The combined contracted subsidy of £811 million in 2006-07 should turn into a payment to the Department of £326 million by 2011-12””." That is a very positive picture of improved services that are of direct benefit to passengers. We saw it again recently in the specification that my department issued for the new South Central franchise. This new franchise specification includes provision for: an extra 118 vehicle arrivals into central London, which is an 11 per cent increase; an additional eight arrivals into Brighton, which is a 24 per cent increase in the morning peak period; the lengthening of many suburban trains from eight to 10 carriages and some trains being lengthened to 12 carriages; increased services in the evenings and at weekends, with some later services on Friday and Saturday nights up to half-past midnight; new Sunday services, such as from Southampton to Brighton; regulated fare increases to continue to be capped at RPI plus 1; improved safety with new gating at around 30 stations and secure station accreditation to cover 95 per cent of footfall; around 1,000 additional car parking spaces and 1,500 additional cycle parking spaces; 30 additional ticket machines and help points to be installed at 20 additional stations, and station travel plans to be developed at 30 additional stations; and all trains—I repeat, all trains—to be fitted with CCTV. That is not for the medium and long-term future; it is the precise specification for the new South Central franchise and will lead to very early additional benefits for passengers over and above those that I have already described. Taking a fair view of the debate, in my opening remarks I fully accepted that there is a great deal more to be done. My noble friend Lord Berkeley rightly picked up on the remarks that I made about Network Rail and the fact that there is a need to see significant sustained improvements in its efficiency—not simply to save money for the taxpayer but also to ensure a much better deal for those who use the rail network, not least the freight operators, to which my noble friend referred and on whose behalf he does an excellent job in your Lordships’ House. Taking the position as it stands, I think that it is clear that things are improving. A number of specific points were raised. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked me three questions. He asked, first, whether we are committing now to a rolling programme of electrification. The whole purpose of setting up the National Networks Strategy Group is to work through what our commitments will be, and we will be in a position to make commitments next year. We would not have set up the group if we had intended to make commitments in advance of its work. However, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State made it clear that a rolling programme of electrification is one of the key issues that we will be addressing in the strategy group. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, will clearly detect from the tone that I have adopted throughout this debate that we are very positively minded about the case for further electrification. However, it is unlikely that any rolling programme of electrification will avoid the need for intercity diesel trains in the next generation. Therefore, the case for the Intercity Express project, which is intended to ensure that we have both diesel and electric traction capacity for the next generation, and the capacity to move between the two with minimum inconvenience to passengers, remains strong, and we will continue with that programme.