Jerome Mayhew: The Government’s Railways Bill is coming down, and potentially off, the tracks

Jerome Mayhew is Shadow Rail Minister and MP for Broadland and Fakenham.

Labour are botching the rollout of their Railways Bill, no matter whichever way you come at it.

Instead of siding with passengers to break down barriers to competition, they have backed their union paymasters with wholesale nationalisation. Labour should be reshaping rail to encourage private investment into improved infrastructure and rolling stock in order to refine competition and improve services for passengers.

Sadly for Labour, it doesn’t matter that there isn’t a single nationalised industry that is known for management dynamism (you try it); it doesn’t matter that privatisation has increased passenger numbers from 735m journeys a year to 1.75bn and counting; it doesn’t matter that privatisation has poured £6 billion since 2015 into upgraded rolling stock and improved services. What matters to this Labour government is the triumph of socialist dogma and union backscratching over passengers, and we will all pay the price.

The problems don’t stop with nationalisation. The Railways Bill creates Great British Railways, lumping Network Rail and nationalised train operating companies together. As a part of this Great British Railways will also take on much of the role of the independent regulator as well, marking its own homework and creating a massive conflict of interest.

GBR will be the decision maker for all applications for access to the network – from rail freight companies or other Open Access operators. In effect, GBR will be asked to decide if it wants competition. And get this, there will be no right of appeal against its decision. A blatant conflict of interest.

It’s the same with independent retailers, like Trainline, GBR is planning to go head-to-head with ticketing services, but Labour are set to prevent a level playing field for competition by restricting access to service data.

The wider rail industry is, rightly, deeply concerned about the government’s approach. Freight operators have stated, “We are really concerned about the scope and definition of the appeals function as proposed in the Bill”. Trainline has told the Government, “There is a need to be certain that the retail part of GBR will compete in the market in the same way as everybody else”.

And what about passengers? The government is making a song and dance about a new Passenger Council, which will monitor the performance of GBR. You might ask, so what? If it finds fault in GBR this Passenger Council has no enforcement powers. All it can do is provide a report to the, much diminished, Office of Rail and Road, which can ignore it or start another investigation of its own, creating confusion and delay – trademarks of this Government, this time by design. The Transport Select Committee has published a report listing its concerns about the Bill, recommending several amendments including increasing the bite of the Passenger Council.

Even disadvantaged groups are being ignored.

Whilst fare discounts for children, the elderly and the disabled are protected, Labour voted ten times against Conservative proposals for similar protection for Veterans’ and Armed Forces Family railcards as well as the Young Persons’ railcard. The minister said they have ‘no plans’ to reduce the discounts, and yet that is what they said about raising taxes before the general election. It’s what they said about the family farm tax and business property relief. It’s what they said about winter fuel payments.

Amendments to rectify these glaring errors? All voted down by Labour. In fact, the Conservative team tabled more than 180 amendments to the Bill to stand up for passengers, to give the Passenger Council proper enforcement powers, to protect the independence of the economic regulator, to give a genuine right of appeal against self-service GBR decisions, and many, many more.

The government is paralysed by chaos at the top, with a Prime Minister without the backbone to stand up to the rail unions and fight for consumers rather than the producer interest. Nationalisation is already making things worse, with discount fares already being removed in the name of “ticket simplification” and delay-repay compensation mooted to be reduced in the name of “standardisation”. Passengers get what they’re given with nationalisation, whilst train drivers get 15 per cent pay rises with no strings attached.

There is still time for genuine change to this bill, both in the Commons and then in the Lords. But the Government needs to stop and listen to the concerns of the industry. So far, we have seen no sign that they are listening at all.