The stewardship of public assets is very important. As someone who believes in public enterprise and public endeavour, I have to concede that the London Passenger Transport Board was established under a Tory Government in 1933. Lord Ashfield was its first chairman and he did a fine job in promoting its development. So even then, in the depths of the recession in the 1930s, there was a consensus that the public ownership of assets mattered, and he stood up against a lot of private interests to achieve that. Let us preserve what we have got, and recognise that the future inevitably is very unpredictable.
I came into parliamentary politics at a time when London’s population was falling and bus and tube use was falling. I remember the then director of London Underground telling me how there were going to be fewer trains and fewer passengers and how LU was thinking about which assets it could get rid of because it did not need them. I cautioned against that, saying that it was a counsel of despair. I said that we needed more people on trains and buses and that fewer people in cars would lead to less congestion. That big public debate happened in London, and we moved into an era not of road building but of rail development and other improvements. London became the first capital city in which public transport usage started to go up; others have now followed.
I ask the Bill’s promoters to think more carefully about what they are doing and to think more carefully about the precious asset that they have and about how they can develop and protect it. I thank the Minister again for his preparedness to engage on the issues that I have raised tonight. I am really grateful to him for that, and I hope that we can make some progress. That is the kind of engagement that we would like to see on the Bill, instead of this peremptory refusal even to discuss the serious concerns that have been raised by a number of Members this evening.