The point I will come to is that the Opposition and I, as shadow Secretary of State for Transport, do not choose to take an ideological approach. The important thing is what works. If the hon. Gentleman will hold on for a moment and listen to what I am coming to, he will understand my argument.
I confess I may be a little jealous if the Secretary of State is too young to remember life under British Rail: the dusty carriages, the worn seats, the clonk and rattle of the carriage doors, and hours spent waiting on deserted platforms wondering if, let alone when, the trains would ever arrive, without any information available. Even the sandwiches were tired. It is no wonder that in British Rail’s nearly 50-year history, passenger numbers across the network actually went down. There was a reason why private provision was introduced into the rail network and why the previous Labour Government stuck with it throughout the 13 years they were in power: it worked.
Today’s railway is unrecognisable from that under British Rail, not despite privatisation but because of it. In the first 20 years, passenger numbers doubled, a point that Labour’s own Rail Minister, who now sits in the other place, made in his 2015 report as the head of Network Rail. The majority of that growth is attributable to the private sector’s involvement, and it was achieved while operating one of the safest railways in Europe. Billions of pounds of private capital has been invested in rolling stock; there is now live real-time information on services; and, instead of British Rail catering, passengers can now choose between the likes of M&S and Greggs.
The railway went from costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds a year to generating an operating surplus for much of the 2010s. It was not just taxpayers and passengers that benefited. To quote the general secretary of ASLEF, Lew Adams, back in 2004:
“All the time it was in the public sector, all we got were cuts, cuts, cuts. And today there are more members in the trade union, more train drivers, and more trains running. The reality is that it worked”.
We often hear it said in this country that our rail system should be more like those in Europe, where under a utopian system of public ownership, the trains always run on time and every journey costs less than a pint of beer. However, that is not how the European see it. In fact, in terms of the growth in passenger numbers and the controls on costs that privatisation delivered, our network is envied by Europe. [Laughter.] I knew Government Members would laugh, so listen to what I have to say.