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Network Rail

The Minister put it very nicely, but of course I have seen the high level outputs. I would not come to such a debate and do the House the discourtesy of not having read a little of the background material. The Minister outlines the first part of the process, but it is necessary to take the high level outputs and the five-year plan and turn them into something that relates to the half-yearly and annual reporting cycle of a proper company—the Government say that Network Rail is, but I say that it is not. That process has to take place at a more detailed level through the eyeballing of senior management in the ministerial office. When I was a middle-ranking Minister, one of the main things I did was to have annual corporate plan review meetings with the bodies that reported to me, and those were very serious meetings. I prepared very strenuously for them; I trust that the people on the other side did, too. They were rather foolish if they did not. I used those meetings to say, ““You'll be very pleased to hear from a Minister like me that you are going to get some money, but I really expect you to make that money work very hard. This is how I expect you to make it work hard. These are the rewards for success, and these are the penalties for failure.”” That has to be a ministerial function, and if the Minister is going to insist on doing it through a so-called independent remuneration committee, he will have to hand pick that committee and brief its members so that he knows they are in line with his wishes. As far as the top people are concerned, it is more important for Ministers to get involved. We need to see performance, and the Minister needs to see it in return for all this money. The money has to be limited. It is a huge task: we have a massive railway that needs injections of cash for growth and development. It is very clear that it is not being well run or managed at the moment. I want to see medium-term reform. Even with the improvements I have suggested, I am sceptical about how well a Network Rail monopoly would work. I have been honest with the House. I do not think that Railtrack was brilliant, either, but Railtrack and Network Rail are not very different. They have the same principal problem, which is that they are monopolies, and it is difficult to make them responsive. I have a slight preference for Railtrack because it had more of the disciplines of the market. It was driving efficiencies a bit better—decreasing subsidy and increasing investment. It had to respond to market disciplines on many of its borrowings and activities in a way in which Network Rail does not. The Government have relaxed the constraints on the railway track monopoly and that is why they have problems with overruns, delay, poor service and high costs. The costs have mushroomed massively since the Government took office. The Government tell us that they have been fighting a battle over the past two years to get them down again, but the costs took off in the early Network Rail period because the disciplines were relaxed. I would prefer a system whereby track and train were reunited and there was more contestability so that no one in the business felt they had a monopoly right in perpetuity. Of course, one has to give a regional train company, which also owns the tracks, a reasonable run at it or it will not make the necessary investment. One has to give such companies specific guarantees and they have to have a decent opportunity to make investing the capital worth while. However, they must also know that, at some point, they have to try again to maintain the franchise. The quid pro quo is that one has to tell them that they can sell on the capital that they have invested and the capital that they bought and inherited so that they know that, if they are unsuccessful, they will not wipe out their shareholders. There must be a penalty but it must not be so harsh that no one will take the risk or make the venture. Contestability is also required. The ability to run across other people's regions and to use the track more intelligently and better is necessary. An independent regulator or adjudicator, who can decide how the track can best be used, is also needed. At the beginning of my speech, I referred to the tragedy of having fabulous routes that are not used enough. If one flies over southern England in a light aircraft at peak hours in the morning, one sees completely jammed roads, with vehicles bumper to bumper as people try to use cars, buses and motorcycles to get to work, and practically empty train tracks. The way in which the railways are currently run means that few trains an hour can be operated on those tracks. Typically, only 24 trains an hour can run given the existing technology. We need to operate far more than that to deal with peak hour demand. The railway is better for that than for dealing with off-peak demand because frequent services are required to make rail travel attractive. The best green advantages and time advantages of using the railways are obtained at peak times because the roads are congested and therefore polluting more. We need much more peak time rail travel. How do we achieve that? There is an easy answer in the short term, before the technology and structure are fundamentally changed. If lighter weight trains are used, more of them can be run because they accelerate and brake more quickly. That happens on many networks abroad. In Britain, our system is over-engineered and heavy. Other hon. Members have referred to the complexity and absurdity of many of the rules for taking possession of the track for engineering works. I agree, but there is another set of rules for operating a railway that militates against using modern, state-of-the-art lighter weight trains, which are perfectly safe when used elsewhere and mean that more trains an hour can be operated. The current engineering director of Network Rail, with whom I have had conversations, accepts that lighter weight trains could make a difference. It would be a great prize, which Ministers might like, if one could run, for example, 40 rather than 24 trains an hour. I hope that they will take seriously the proposition that, if one used trains that can speed up and slow down more rapidly—of course, signalling changes would also be required to deal with that, but they could be made within the system budgets; it would be much cheaper than building new track—a big improvement in the railways could be achieved. My hon. Friends the Members for Rugby and Kenilworth and for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) pointed out that under this Government the railway is going in the opposite direction—unless one lives at a terminus or near a large principal station on a main line, all the expensive works may lead to a deterioration in the service because the fast trains may not stop in one's town or city. The fast trains occupy much track space and time because they need good clearances for a long time for safety reasons as they belt along the main line route. If there are not enough bypasses or additional railway track, they clutter the track and reduce the frequency of the more mundane commuter short-hop services, which may be more important to a good travel system. I hope that the Ministers will consider, in the investment programme, the balance between the glamorous, fast services to a few major cities and the important daily services that people in Rugby, Macclesfield, Wokingham and all the other places represented in the House this evening need. Those services are also needed to provide a greener and better alternative for people's travel plans. Our debate rightly focuses on the unacceptable events over Christmas and new year. Even Ministers agree that the delays were unacceptable and that a mistake was made. They say that they need a further period of reflection and inquiry to discover the mistake. Most of us believe that we know what the mistakes were from what we have read and seen. The statements and apologies made so far imply that the events were caused by a management failure by Network Rail. I do not believe in public hanging or crude prose, which some people might believe to be appropriate in the circumstances. Far from it. I believe that we get the best out of people through incentive and motivation. However, when errors are so big and their impact is so great, there must be a penalty. I believe that it should be a financial penalty on senior management rather than, ““There, there. Please make sure it doesn't happen again.”” The Government say so often—there are many examples in recent weeks—that they will learn the lessons. I have heard nothing in the debate so far, especially from the Secretary of State, that makes me believe that she has learned any lessons. She has learned no lessons about how to get value for huge sums of public money; how to control a so-called not-for-profit independent private company, which is a creature of the state; how to choose good people and persuade them to do a good job; or how to turn an incompetent Government into a competent one. I want to live in our great country and enjoy its facilities. I am afraid that so many facilities that the public sector owns are not well run. There is an aura of incompetence about them. When the Minister sums up, he will use all the buzzwords and buzz phrases that are on the pager or in the briefing, along with the civil service line to take, followed by—if ministerial briefings still contain it—““defensive””, for when a Minister is under pressure or things are getting bad and, over the page, ““Now you're on your own. Bad luck.”” We want to go beyond that. It would give me great pleasure if the Minister said, ““A lot of what you said is sensible and we will try to work out a better way of employing top managers at Network Rail.”” It would be wonderful if he said that the Government would work much harder to get discipline over spending £3 billion a year of Revenue subsidy and several billion of investment and break down the high level outputs into management units that make sense and can be built into people's incentive packages. It would be good if he said that the Government would reconsider the programme's balance because they did not want to end up with people in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London being happy but those in Rugby, Kenilworth, Wokingham, Macclesfield and so on were not being happy because their services had been worsened by the hugely expensive investment programme. My hon. Friends on the Front Bench tabled a fairly narrow motion because the anger of the country is currently focused on what went wrong at the weekend and over the long Christmas and new year holiday. However, there is also a strong feeling in the country that we would like to be greener—in some circumstances, travelling by train is greener than using other means—but the service needs to be accessible, friendly and feasible. We do not feel that the railway industry is ours, except when it needs someone to pay the bills, and we do not feel that, managed by the effectively nationalised monopoly of Network Rail, it is customer friendly. Apart from events over the Christmas period, it does not appear to look to a future of frequent services, lower fare packages and opportunities to use the trains that people want. I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to reflect a little more on the mismanagement, realise that it was not a one-off and that it will happen again unless there is some fundamental change in the Government's approach to railway management.