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McNulty Report and West Coast Rail

The hon. Lady has obviously read the RMT press release from this morning. Of course there are additional frictional costs—interfaces—in the operation of the railway that we currently have, with franchisees and an overall network operator. However, there are also a lot of unnecessary costs that are caused by the adversarial relationship between Network Rail and the train operators. As I said earlier, I do not believe that the answer is some massive revolution that requires primary legislation and will take the rest of this Parliament to deliver. Instead, this is about getting people working together differently. Let us get to a railway that is different from the one that we have now. In the railway that we have now, the brightest and the best people in all train operating companies are the ones who spend their lives allocating responsibility for failure and collecting money from each other. Hundreds of people are literally spending their days trying to decide whether each delayed train is the responsibility of Network Rail or of this or that operator. That is not productive. Getting the industry to work together, looking at industry-wide costs and focusing on solving the problems, rather than allocating blame for them, is the way forward.