I was perfectly clear at the beginning of my speech that we agree that reform is needed. That is why we commissioned a review and set out ambitious plans for reform, including the Great British Railways. I welcome that the new Government intend to introduce that.
I am not here to make an ideological argument. To respond to the point made by the hon. Member for Runcorn and Helsby (Mike Amesbury), sometimes, like with our plan for Great British Railways, the public sector is the right vehicle to solve a problem. At other times, a competitive, private model will lead to better results. The point is, if the Government are going to change things in the first piece of legislation they bring before this House, they need some pretty clear evidence as to why, so I have some questions for the Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Wakefield and Rothwell (Simon Lightwood), who will be summing up.
How exactly will bringing train operating companies into public ownership benefit passengers? Unfortunately, the Government’s impact assessment does not tell us, for sure. What improvements can passengers expect? Who is the Secretary of State going to get to run these companies? Where are all these different, better train operating experts going to come from? If they are out there, twiddling their thumbs in the hope that this day would arrive, would the Department for Transport not have brought them on board already to help with the running of Northern Trains or Southeastern?
It is the same question across the network. Will she be sacking everyone currently working for the train operating companies and replacing them with a horde
of superior, yet currently out-of-work, staff? Or, as I suspect, will passengers simply encounter the same group of people in a different colour shirt? What we need to hear is what tangible difference this going to make for passengers, because if the answer is nil, then there are lots of other things she could be doing with her time, such as prioritising the railways Bill.
The railways Bill is the legislation that will actually make a difference to how passengers experience our railways, with simpler tickets, joined-up decision making and efficiency savings that can be passed on to passengers. She could be modernising working practices, instead of bending over backwards to the unions, as reports suggest she has already done. How does she think that creating a single employer and, in the process, uplifting every rail worker’s terms and conditions to the least favourable for passengers, will benefit the network?
She could start by saving the train manufacturer, Hitachi—something that, when in Opposition, she said she could do with the stroke of a pen. I notice that it has been three weeks and that pen is yet to materialise. Perhaps she no longer takes for granted the work her predecessor did saving the Alstom factory in Derby. Or she could prioritise investment in the network, like the £100 billion we spent improving the railways since 2010.
On that point, I feel for her because I know what it is like to argue with a Chancellor for investment in something and not win that argument. It is clear from the Chancellor’s statement earlier that the Secretary of State for Transport lost the argument pretty catastrophically. Rather than setting out to reform welfare or control public spending, the Chancellor opted to slash a host of transport infrastructure projects. She will now review all transport infrastructure plans, putting the entire transport pipeline into chaos, letting down communities across the country and letting down a fair few of her new colleagues, too. Those new colleagues will be dismayed to find that they campaigned on false promises to the electorate, and that their pledges to invest in economic growth and not to raise taxes were not even worth the glossy paper on which their leaflets were written.
Although I know what it is like to lose an argument with the Chancellor, I do not share the experience that the Secretary of State and many of her colleagues will now be going through: of changing their tune just three weeks after they were given a mandate by the electorate and less than two weeks after their party leader had said that trust was the new battleground of politics. It seems as if he has given up on that battle already.
All the same, I welcome the right hon. Lady to her post, and I do genuinely wish her well. I will gladly offer my support to anything that she does to make our railways more reliable and more affordable. This Bill will not do that. It is a rushed piece of left-wing ideology. The evidence, both here in the UK and across Europe, shows that an effective public/private model, where the incentives are properly aligned, delivers more choice, more passengers and greater efficiency.
Over the next few weeks of recess, the Secretary of State and her team will have some time to reflect and reconsider. I hope that they will return in the autumn with a Bill that jettisons the baggage of ideology and takes up the mantle of evidence—a Bill that will have more prospect of improving the rail service for passengers,
because, as I said, I have no interest in opposing for opposition’s sake, but this Bill as it stands will not be receiving the support of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.