Amendment 78A moved by Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
78A: Schedule 2, page 79, line 2, at end insert—
“(b) protect or improve the environment or mitigating or adapting to climate change, or(c) secure, maintain or improve the accessibility of railway passenger services, station services, railway infrastructure or rolling stock for disabled persons.”
Member’s explanatory statement: This amendment broadens the exclusion from subsidy control rules to include financial assistance with the primary purpose of environmental protection or accessibility.
My speech: I am not going to speak briefly. I am probably going to compete with Lord Moylan and Lord Harper, in the length of my comments and the thoroughness with which I cover the amendments. I have put my name on all amendments in this group, and I care very much that they are properly debated and understood.
The aim of Amendment 78A is to broaden the exclusions from the subsidy control rules. The Subsidy Control Act 2022 has created a fundamental split in the Bill which translates directly into how policy will be made and what can be done with public money. As I understand it, only funding for the primary purpose of infrastructure under Clause 3(1)(a) is excluded from the subsidy control rules. The implication is that everything else will be subject to them. I think that helps to explain the split between the different budgets, with infrastructure funded through the funding period review while operations and other areas, including capital projects and enhancements, come through the spending review, with a close eye being kept on cross-subsidy. That seems to run against the long-standing aim of GBR, going back to 2021, of bringing infrastructure and operations together. The Rail Industry Association warned last year that if track and train integration is to be achieved both need to be covered by the same funding process.
However, my specific concern with this amendment is public interest policy-making, particularly accessibility and climate. For accessibility, will these rules make it harder to reform and integrate funding programmes and plan investment in a rational way so that we can make progress as quickly as possible? On climate, the issue is even more complicated. Many of the things we have been talking about, and will talk about later today, are vital to increasing passenger numbers and shifting people from cars to rail. These could potentially be subject to subsidy control rules, which include things such as electrification and other capital investment. Environmental measures are also subject to additional requirements under the Subsidy Control Act—so this is a complicated and underdiscussed area, and I would like the Minister to explain the practical impact of these rules on accessibility, climate funding and policymaking.
This amendment would create exclusions for both, when the primary purpose of the financial assistance is to protect or improve the environment, mitigate or adapt to climate change, or secure and improve accessibility for disabled people. I hope that the Minister can give us some reassurance about how these subsidy control rules will work in practice and whether the Government would be prepared to look at exclusions of this kind.
My Amendment 130A builds on Amendment 129 from the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, which I support, but I want to ask whether we could be a bit more ambitious. We are legislating for a new Great BritishRailways at a time when we face both a climate emergency and a biodiversity crisis. We should be asking what this new body can actively do to address those challenges, rather than simply ensuring that it does not make them worse. The railway estate gives us an extraordinary opportunity. Network Rail is one of the largest landowners in Britain, with around 52,000 hectares of land. Its own description of the railway estate is as a “green corridor”, recognising that railway land can connect fragmented habitats across the country. I suggest that we find a way to put that opportunity into the Bill. Imagine a continuous green corridor running from Penzance to John O’ Groats, following the railway where possible—not necessarily a continuous strip of woodland or one uniform habitat, but a connected network of grasslands, wetlands, scrub, woodlands, ponds and other habitats joined together by the railway estate.
The railway already provides the basis for that network. Network Rail itself recognises this and acknowledges that the railway estate “provides a habitat” for a wide range of species, so that is a vital starting point, but the targets that Network Rail has set itself are rather vague. Its 2035 targets talk about managing biodiversity
“in a way that protects and enhances”
it and says that it will
“lead the way in land management”.
Now, those are good ambitions, but they do not tell us what success looks like. That is why this amendment asks for
“measurable targets for biodiversity recovery, habitat creation and restoration … connectivity and renewable electricity generation”.
I would like us to imagine what it would mean if, every time a railway line passes through a fragmented landscape, we ask whether the railway estate could help to reconnect it. If we did that across the whole network, we could begin to create something really significant: a national nature recovery network, running alongside our national railway network. It seems to me exactly the sort of long-term thinking that we should be building into GBR from the beginning.
The amendment would require GBR to manage its land as part of a connected national network for nature recovery. That means working with local nature recovery strategies, restoring habitats, improving ecological connectivity and creating wildlife corridors “wherever reasonably practical”. We are not asking railway engineers to become conservationists or putting nature ahead of railway safety. The amendment is deliberately framed around what is practical, but we have a chance to recognise that the railway estate is not just an operational asset—it is also land running through some of the most fragmented and depleted landscapes in the country, and GBR will have the responsibility for managing it.
We are asking GBR to maximise renewable electricity generation from its own infrastructure, from station rooms to depots, car parks and other suitable sites, and, where it can, to use that electricity to power railway operations. Where the railway has suitable land or infrastructure for generating clean electricity, it should make the most of it. The amendment also asks for “measurable targets” and a published plan, with progress reported annually. That is important, because we have seen environmental commitments before. Network Railalready has biodiversity commitments and has recognised the role that its estate can play in nature recovery. The question is whether we want to give those ambitions a statutory footing in the creation of Great British Railways, and the Bill gives us a rare opportunity to do that. The railway is a national network; its land should be part of a national network for nature recovery.
Amendment 130B, on nature’s rights, takes the same principle a little further. I support the idea that GBR should actively contribute to nature recovery, but could we go beyond saying that nature is something GBR should take into account and instead recognise that healthy ecosystems are fundamental to our own well-being and to the economy on which we all depend? The amendment would require GBR to recognise the intrinsic value of nature and to protect, restore and enhance nature when exercising its functions. It would also require GBR to consider cumulative and indirect harm, the needs of future generations and the possibility of restoration and regeneration.
That is an important shift in how we think about infrastructure. We tend to ask whether a railway project is technically possible and financially viable. Those questions obviously matter, but we should also be asking what the project means for the living systems around it and whether there is a way of achieving the same objective while causing less harm. There is of course a wider debate about this already taking place in the House. The Nature’s Rights Bill, introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is currently making its way through our House, and takes a much bigger step of recognising nature as a legal subject and establishing an integrated framework for protecting its rights.
I am not suggesting that we try to put the whole of that Bill into the Railways Bill, but it is an opportunity to take some of its thinking and apply it to GBR. We are creating a new organisation with enormous responsibility for land, infrastructure and investment decisions across the country. We should build into that organisation from the beginning the principle that nature is not simply an externality to be considered after the economic and engineering decisions have already been made; it should be part of the overriding decision itself. I saw the Minister smiling there; I hope that means he is in total agreement with what I am saying.
I support Amendments 93, 111 and 129. Amendment 93, on climate resilience, needs to be central to the railway strategy. We know that extreme heat, flooding, drought and soil moisture changes are already disrupting the railway. I know there are some hot weather procedures in place, but we need to ask whether we are testing and designing the railway for the climate we actually face rather than the climate we used to have. The Minister said some quite supportive things about this yesterday, and I hope he feels free to repeat them today.
The regulator has previously found that climate adaptation planning was not keeping pace with the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather. We have seen the consequences during heatwaves, with speed restrictions and failures affecting services. Some overhead line equipment, for example, was designed around operating temperatures of up to 38 degrees, yet we are increasingly seeing temperatures approaching that level. I recognise that Network Rail is already doing a lot of work on climate adaptation, and there are good examples, but that work is not necessarily consistent. Responsibilities have historically been divided between different organisations and different owners of track, stations and land, and the creation of GBR obviously gives us the opportunity to change that. We cannot keep treating these events as exceptional and simply responding when they happen—we actually have to design, test and maintain our railway on the basis that extreme weather is now a serious and growing threat to the network.
I strongly support Amendment 313, tabled by Lord Russell. It is an important amendment, because we are in a climate emergency, yet England has had virtually no new electrification for quite a number of years. There are two sides to this. We need to make the railway resilient to the climate change that is already happening, but we also need to reduce the railway’s own emissions. We cannot just adapt to a changing climate while continuing to build and operate infrastructure in ways that add to the problem.
I welcome the proposal for a framework looking at both climate resilience and decarbonisation, but I have tabled Amendment 330J because we need to go further. A framework is a good starting point, but I want to see a plan with binding targets, timescales, funding and a clear programme of delivery. Scotland gives us a useful example of what that can look like. Scotland has a rail services decarbonisation action plan, and it is continuing with the rolling programme of electrification. Three-quarters of passenger journeys are already made on electric trains, and the Scottish Government say they remain committed to further electrification. Of course, you have to remember that Britain lags behind much of Europe: 60% of passenger services run on electric trains here, compared to 74% in Germany and 85% in France.
Electrification is not just about emissions. Those trains can be faster, quieter and more efficient. They can increase capacity and reduce reliance on diesel. A railway powered by electricity can increasingly benefit from the move towards renewable energy. We should not talk about rail decarbonisation as though it is some additional environmental project that we might get round to if there is enough money left; it has to happen as soon as possible.
Every year, we delay decisions on infrastructure that can last for decades, which makes it harder and more expensive to decarbonise the railways. The same applies to resilience: we know that some parts of the network are vulnerable to flooding, extreme heat, landslides, drought or coastal erosion, so we should identify those risks now and have a funded programme for dealing with them. New infrastructure should be designed for the climate we expect over its lifetime, not simply the climate we have experienced in the past.
We need binding targets for reducing emissions, a comprehensive assessment of climate risks, a prioritised programme of infrastructure improvements, funding arrangements, whole-life carbon assessment and annual reporting. GBR would also be required to operateconsistently within the plan. I support Amendment 313 because it moves us in the right direction. We need to move from identifying what needs to be done to committing ourselves to doing it. This is the opportunity—let us all go green and build climate resilience and decarbonisation into the railway from the beginning, rather than leaving it for somebody else to do.
I intervened again later: I thank all noble Lords who have spoken and the Minister and his team for their response. I will just make a comment or two. I am in such awe of the Minister’s extensiveknowledge of railways that I always find his replies in these meetings very comforting. It is only when I walk away and start rereading them that I think, “Hold on”. I will be coming back to these issues on Report. That is a warning, not a threat.
Lord Russell, used a word that I had not used but will incorporate into my thinking: “vulnerability”. I think that that is what we are talking about with all these things. He is so environmentally aware that it is fantastic. It was good to hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, said about corridors in other countries. It comes back to what the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, said, that none of this is new. We can do this. We have examples that we can take from other countries and even other railways.
Prince Philip once said to me—quite unkindly, I thought—that the problem with us Greens was that we never gave anyone else any credit for what they did. I took that to heart, because we do not. We think that other people never go far enough. It is never enough. We always want more. Lady Willis, was absolutely right to say that Network Rail has been doing stuff—I really should accept that. The fire risks and the flooding are things that we really need to keep down.
To the point made by Lord Hampton, of course this all should have started 10 years ago—or 20, or 30, or 40. We have known about the climate crisis and its approach for well over 50 years. We should have been thinking ahead then, but we were not. This goes back to what the noble Lord, Lord Harper, was saying. Yes, the Tories were better in some ways, but they are regressing now. Had they listened to the Green Party, HS2 would not have started where it started and we would not have had the bat tunnel fiasco. Please remember that the Greens were right back then and we are right now.
I intervened again: I will speak to my stand part notice opposing Clause 20. A duty is being placed on the Office of Rail and Road that I do not understand, which is about promoting competition. I am trying to probe exactly what the Government mean by the ORR’s duty to “promote competition”. I am concerned that there is a lack of clarity here between promoting competition and regulating competition. The ORR already has a role in regulating competition under the Railways Act 1993, but Clause 20 appears to give it a separate duty to promote competition. I would like to understand what exactly that means in practice and why it is necessary.
This is not an issue that I will bring back on Report, because I cannot quite put enough passion into it, but we see that there is potential tension here because the ORR has a number of other responsibilities, including safety, access and economic regulation. The areas in which it is required to promote competition include important parts of the railway’s network services. I would like the Minister to explain how this new duty will interact with those other responsibilities. In particular, if there is a conflict between promoting competition and another statutory duty or the Government’s rail strategy, which takes precedence? I am not convinced that we need a general duty on the regulator to promote competition in the Bill.
I intervened again: Passengers’ journeys are very rarely just a train journey—there might be a bus to a station, a train and then another bus, or tram, or whatever—and if those parts of the journey do not connect properly, the whole journey becomes more difficult. I know this from personal experience. A missed connection, a long wait, separate tickets or poor passenger information can all make public transport less attractive. The National Transport Survey found that for England in 2023, 50% of public transport trips were across more than one type of public transport. That is why integration is one of the strongest levers we have for getting more people to choose public transport.
The Railways Act 1993 included a duty on the Secretary of State and the regulator to contribute to the development of an integrated transport system, and that duty has now been dropped. Amendment 128 would put some of that principle back into the Bill, by requiring the Secretary of State and GBR
“to promote the integration of railway passenger services with—(a) bus and coach services, (b) tram and light rail, and (c) micromobility.”
I also support Amendment 105 from the noble Lord, Lord Beith, which approaches the same issue from within the railway strategy. It specifically talks about improving connections and co-ordinating timetables, ticketing and passenger information, and includes ferry services. The two amendments complement each other rather well. One establishes integration as a duty, while the other sets out some of the practical things integration should mean for passengers. This is not just about making journeys more convenient; if we want people to make more journeys by public transport, the whole journey needs to work.
I ask the Minister why this duty to integrate transport has been removed from the Bill, and what will replace it. Will GBR have a clear responsibility to work with local and regional transport authorities to improve connections between different modes? Will the Government consider putting some of the practical elements in Amendment 10 —timetables, ticketing and passenger information—into the statutory framework? We have an opportunity here to create a railway that works as part of a wider public transport network, rather than as a system operating on its own. That should be one of the purposes of GBR from the very start.
Hansard record here: Railways Bill – Hansard – UK Parliament
