Speech in Lords

I agree with the Minister’s three main aims for railway improvement. He is right that punctuality is insufficient. Last year, under 85% of trains arrived within three minutes of timetable and over 4% of services were cancelled altogether. He is right that we need to improve the quality of the passenger experience. That will require innovation, new services geared to people’s lives and their travel demands, and delivering them a travel offer at an affordable price, an acceptable fare. The railway is too detached and is running far too many nearly empty trains around to fill a timetable. This is interspersed with, at popular times, too few popular trains, with 169,000 people standing in very cramped and unsafe conditions on a typical day. A lot of work needs to go into getting into the modern world and understanding travel patterns.

Above all, the Minister is right that there needs to be a revolution in value for money. We are paying far too much as taxpayers, in some cases far too much as fare payers, and in other cases travelling on heavily subsidised fares, in relation to the amount of work that the railway is able to do. Last year, taxpayers had to put in £21.6 billion to this railway system, and fare payers were persuaded to put in only £11.5 billion. So limited was the offer that was made available on this vast network that taxpayers were paying twice as much as fare payers—general taxpayers twice as much as the more limited number of people who were actually using the railway.

So we do need a revolution. I share some of my noble friend Lady May’s scepticism about whether the right revolution can come from nationalisation itself. The Government need to describe more accurately to the public the nature of the railway that they took responsibility for some two years ago. I am the first to confess that the Governments I supported did not get it all right and that there were many failings that needed to be corrected. But the Minister should be honest with the public and remind them that all the track, all the signals, all the structures and all the stations were taken into public ownership by a previous Labour Government in 2002. He should also point out that many of the problems, delays and interruptions of service have, in recent years, been created by failings in the nationalised part of the system, as well as some of them, as he will rightly point out, being created by the train operating companies which the predecessor Government were gradually getting rid of—and it is also his policy to complete that task.

However, this great, controlling mind they are going to find—I trust that this lady or gentleman exists—is going to need a lot of vision and drive to get value out of this extraordinary network. All these thousands of miles of track that go into the very hearts of our cities and towns are not being used properly and nearly enough. They are far too empty. If you see a bird’s eye view from a camera, or a plane with a camera, of our country at morning peak—there still is a bit of a morning peak on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, although Covid has made a bit of a difference on Monday and Friday—you see inadequate roads, increasingly reduced in scale and size by Liberal Democrat councils, with huge traffic jams and queues, making it very difficult for people to drive to work or to the shops or do what they want to do. You see largely empty, fabulous, straight trackways into the centres of our cities, with trains spaced out at two-mile intervals, or whatever it is, because the signalling is pretty primitive and for safety reasons they are very worried about running more trains on the same track, even though they are all going in the same direction on that bit of track. You would have thought that, with modern digital signalling, if we are going to get it, you could actually run more trains safely on that track to take more of the strain of travel.

The travel opportunity for the railway is enormous because its market share has sunk so far. If you look at trips in the last year, you see that only 2% of people’s trips were by train and 59% of their trips were by car, and then there was walking and cycling and so forth. Even if you take miles, where the railway does rather better because people tend to go on trains for rather longer journeys, people are still travelling seven times as much in a car as they are on a train. This is the business opportunity. So my suggestion to the Minister is that this piece of legislation needs some quite big tweaks in order to make it more likely that a controlling mind can come up with a way of selling all that empty rail and track space to enough people and organisations that can run trains to service the true travel needs of the public.

The first thing this controlling mind is going to need is access to private capital. If nationalisation means no more private capital then the railway is going to be even shorter of capital than it has been to date. I urge the Minister to allow for private capital, which must mean allowing challenger companies to offer services and facilities on the properties or the tracks to bring in the innovation and extra capital capacity that will be needed. Given that we are going to need a lot of innovation, a vital part of that package is open access. Once the Minister has completed his great train set under nationalised control, he must allow others to say, “I can do it better”, “I can do it differently”, or “I can make proper use of this track which the nationalised industry is not using properly”, in order to bring in the innovation and extra service quality that we will need.

I hope that a nationalised industry will want to take more pride in the railway than Network Rail has taken to date. When I go on a rail journey, I am often absolutely horrified when I look out of the window and see the rusty old rolling stock in the siding just wasting away, the old sleepers piled up as if nobody owns them, the brambles and the weeds growing out of the parallel track that is not used very much, and the uncared-for look of the whole place, with peeling paint on the stations and rusting iron on some of the very old stations. It is a mess, with graffiti over everything. I say innovate, allow contestability, bring in new services and clean the place up. Let us be proud of it, then the public might want to use it.

Andy Burnham looks well out of his depth. Avoiding any Parliamentary scrutiny and hiding from most journalists he looks thoroughly unprepared for becoming PM in less than  two  weeks.

He has already done several U turns. He has reversed his support for WASPI women, presumably on hearing  the cost He has flip flopped over the fiscal rules though revealed he did not know what they were. He has revised his view of the bond market, now thinking he needs to avoid angering them.

It’s a pity someone says he is not changing policy on the give away of the Chagos and the large sums promised to Mauritius. He needs to study this a bit more. As I set out here the ICJ has no legal power to make us give the islands away. Giving it away means breaking the US/UK  Treaty setting up the Diego Garcia base.

I and others raised this yesterday in the Lords. The  Minister confirmed they still have worries that Mauritius might not be able to maintain the high environmental standards of the marine protected area . There  was no timetable for reinstating this bad policy.

Why can’t Burnham see this is a dreadful waste of money, an undermining of a crucial defence base, a threat to our US allies and a major break in an  important Treaty? He should ask the Attorney General to step down for  his bad advice. He should uphold the 2024 Manifesto which promised to protect our Overseas territories.

As a couple of our water companies let us down again and struggle to supply many tell me the answer is nationalisation.   They wouldn ‘t like the big increase in tax bills it would take to buy them up and put in enough investment in new reservoirs and pipes. They should also ask how did it work when it was nationalised? The truth is it was dirtier and there was even less water available when it mattered.

People are currently  grappling  with a few hot days as if they were something exceptional. We have had  hot summers in the past. A maximum temperature of 36.7 was achieved in 1911. In 1976 there was prolonged heat from 23 June to 27 August with a 35.9 peak on July 3. This year we had a very cold start to May with  frosts which went without much media interest. This was  followed by a few hot days and now a few more this week before the temperature subsides again.

In 1976 the much longer hot period combined with a long drought, lasting sixteen months from the previous May. It was the water shortage that did the damage. Crops failed , moors caught light, people had to severely cut back their water use just when they wanted to water gardens, fill paddling pools and take more baths and showers. The main feature of the weather crisis was it revealed the disaster of our nationalised water industry. All those who today think nationalising will make a difference should read the history books on just how bad the nationalised industry was.

It had failed to build enough reservoirs and failed to mend leaky pipes. As a result the UK soon ran out of water in the summer of 1976. All hosepipe use  was banned. In several areas of the country mains water was cut off. People had to queue to fill buckets at a standpipe in the street. Water rationing was introduced. People were told to put bricks in their toilet cisterns and to only flush occasionally. They were told to reuse water within the household, keeping the dirty water from washing for toilet use or for gardens. Individual daily use of water halved from 190 litres to just 95.

Water rationing was imposed on industry so plants had to shut down or run well  below capacity to live within their reduced water allocations. That had knock on effects on employment and overtime. Farmers just had to watch as their crops withered without water to irrigate. The economy took a nasty knock. The government panicked and appointed a Minister for Drought, which was bit like employing someone to give us a rain dance. The Minister turned out to be lucky, as the rains came in September and October to refill the almost empty reservoirs.

The water industry kept pumping raw sewage into our seas from our coastal towns, giving us dirty beaches and dangerous sea bathing waters . The industry kept up pressure on governments to carry on with this practice until the Conservative government in 1989 brought in a Regulator. That led to reporting the dirty secret and to some clean up.  The nationalised  industry did  not have the money or the will to expand the pipe network to avoid the need  to discharge sewage into rivers, or to keep more of the clean water it put into the system before reaching households. Every pound of new investment counted as  public spending, and the needs of the NHS or schools were nearly always a more important priority than water spending.

We need a better regulator to allow more investment by our present water industry whilst preventing  excessive returns to management. The best way to do it would be to allow water competition. We have a competitive gas industry with a single pipe into every home, and could do the same for water.

250 years ago a group of English gentlemen living in the coastal colony on the eastern seaboard of America put words on their rebellion. The most famous part of their statement asserts that all men are equal and hold inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I share the joy at such sentiments. I know from history that governments and public attitudes have often prevented this from being true.

The men writing the declaration were careful to use the word men when asserting these rights. Many now read this with its broader meaning of humankind, but of course they did not think women were equal or deserved equal rights. That took longer to achieve on both sides of the Atlantic. Nor did these men propose the abolition of slavery, which took later battles on US soils and the worldwide intervention of the British navy to greatly reduce what was a common practice.Nor  did they envisage the servant classes of their day having the same participation in government as they as a landed and educated elite shared.

We see the importance of the US revolution to the development of democracy and equality before the law. We should not underplay the important English and British contribution to this as well . We tamed monarchs, broadened the franchise and asserted the powers of  the House of Commons to tax and legislate. Our journey like the US required a civil war, and too many external wars against the forces and faces of tyranny. The  US declaration was mainly a long list of the alleged transgressions of King George, personalising the policies of the UK Parliament to an alleged tyrant King who had usurped the liberties of English colonial gentlemen.

In a long list of complaints they included the great rallying cry of No taxation without representation.If our new PM thinks at all about these matters he should see that many in the UK today feel oppressed by ill judged taxation. This leads  to rebellion  in the ballot box or to people moving  to a freer lower tax country.

Most UK governments ignore our right to the pursuit of happiness.I know the current government wants me to be poorer, more controlled and less happy as I hear its endless lectures backed up by new laws  and taxes seeking to tell me how I should live. This government oppresses the many enterprising and hard working people in our country , disdaining our views and threatening removal of our liberties if we fall out of line. Thomas Jefferson would not be impressed.

Burnham’s idea of devolution contradicts the centralising measures the Labour government have been taking to drive through more housing, more accommodation for illegal arrivals, more wind arrays and solar farms, more grid pylons, less food growing. I bet he does not reverse those measures, as Labour struggles to impose more housing and net zero developments on a population that wants better control of our borders and fewer  unreliable energy installations gobbling up farmland. Indeed, with his passion to build 1.5m homes with more emphasis on Council housing he may well need to intensify the override of our local Councils in his futile attempt to reach this unrealistic target.

Many of us would like our local Councils to have the power to say No to the  conversion of military facilities into large open settlements for illegal arrivals.  We would like national government to obey our wishes to reduce substantially inward migration to cut the need for so many new housing estates. We would like our Councils to be free to decide how much housing  development and where.

It is true there would still be risk of disappointment with some Green and Lib Dem Councils, but if they defied local wishes on planning matters more people would see the need to vote to put in a Council that did reflect local views.

We would like local and national government to get out of the way in many decisions people and companies could take for themselves. Planning often gets in the way of people and businesses improving their existing properties, whilst imposing large new developments and changes of use of public sector property  that communities think go too far.

The UK steel sector is in collapse as I reported yesterday.Now the government is imposing 50 % swingeing tariffs on steel imports, doing grave damage to the steel using industries, claiming this will help domestic steel production.

If you look at what they are actually doing, it is geared to  helping EU exporters of steel to grab a bigger share of our market as well as putting up costs of UK steel users who will still need tariffed imports.

The decision to prolong the life of the 2 70 year old blast furnaces at British Steel by public subsidy taken in 2025  may still result in due course in closure and maybe some replacement electric arc capacity but the government declines to clarify its plans.It means low levels of UK steel output for the year ahead as we await new electric arc capacity.

This means the output of the steel producing sector maybe  around just £2bn whilst the imports may be running around £5bn. Meanwhile the government has decided to impose a tariff on a majority of imports of steel from non EU which is a large new tax on the costs of the steel using industries in the UK. Their latest publication (Department for Business and Trade   UK’s steel trade measure from 1 July 2026) reveals a very distorted tariff policy that is unlikely to protect Scunthorpe much, leaving it very vulnerable to EU  steel.

It is true that in accord with what seems to be their policy of trying to promote more EU exports to the UK to increase our trade dependence, they have allowed 3.2 m tonnes of imports to be tariff free, with 65% of this allocation going to EU steel producers. They have not extended similar treatment to members of the TPP or to India, where we also have tariff free trade deals which these tariffs override.The EU imports will displace dearer non EU imports up to the quota  limits. The EU tariff free imports will likely exceed UK steel output.

The main steel using industries other than construction are vehicle manufacture, mechanical engineering and steel products. The turnover at risk in  these industries is in  excess of £200 bn. The tariff could bring in over £1bn of extra tax, imposing over £1 bn of extra cost in industries that often have thin profit margins. The government has not given us an estimate of how many jobs and how much profits tax these new taxes will lose us.

It is strange indeed to impose a tariff to try to protect £2b of turnover at the risk to damage to £200 bn of other business turnover. It is also mad to allow tariff free to the EU which is already a large steel exporter to us, whilst taking out other world competitors who might sell  us better and cheaper product if they were also tariff free.

My Lords, these are indeed important amendments. It is a tragedy what has been happening to our steel industry in this country. It suffered considerable decline under the last Government thanks to very high energy prices and decarbonisation, which turned out to be disruptive. In the last full year of the Conservatives, we were down to 5.6 million tonnes of manufactured steel—around half our requirement.

There has now been a further very big collapse, such that our output last year was, I think, around half of that in 2023—around 2.5 million tonnes—and we are heading for an even smaller output this year unless the business plan is provided, kicks in and starts to do something to help the ailing Scunthorpe business that we are talking about. I think we are united in our belief that this is not what we want from our steel industry. It means that we have a chronic dependence—in the last year, 7.1 million tonnes—on imported steel and we are heading to a position where we import practically all our steel. I fear we will discover that, unless we do something about electricity prices, even when electric arc production starts to kick in on a bit of a bigger scale, it will be very difficult to sell that steel at a profit because the electricity costs are unrealistic and uncompetitive, as well as the general carbon taxes and carbon costs, which have been adversely affecting the blast furnaces.

Given our common interest in saving jobs and having a better steel sector, I again urge the Government to provide that plan and that thought-through work, which should be shared without the commercial secrets with the wider public and both Houses of Parliament. This would give us some confidence that there is a way out of this very deep tunnel that we are going down to producing less and less steel of our own.

The Government have clearly introduced very penal tariffs on importing steel from non-EU sources, with the 50% increase in tariff. They hope that that will change the situation but, because they have relaxed the quotas for the EU, I suspect that we are still extremely vulnerable to EU import competition at a time when our industry is not properly competitive. They will find that the tariffs will not protect the diminishing British steel industry, but that the much bigger and somewhat stronger steel-using industries in the United Kingdom will be very gravely affected, because more than half our imported steel may well have to come from sources that do attract tariffs. That will be very penal and, therefore, will reduce the amount of steel-using activity that we can undertake.

I urge the Government to take some of these points seriously. I am glad that two sensible amendments have been put forward to concentrate this debate.

As the country waits for its new unelected government to arrive and come up with a plan, the bills mount through the incompetent management of a bloated public sector.

British Steel is losing £1.3 m a day and its Chinese owners are demanding £1 bn compensation for the plant the government runs but does not own.

Great British Rail needs more money to cover its losses and to give it some more cash to invest in better trains and signals.Burnham’s people are talking of reviving a new line from Birmingham  to Manchester as HS 2 gobbles the cash to try to get to Birmingham more than ten years  late.

The Post Office got a  huge subsidy last year so it could show a profit and may well need another £500m this year to help it pay all the compensation for its grotesque mistreatment  employees in the past over false accusations of fraud.

Illegal migrants keep arriving by expensive Border Force boat needing housing and living costs. The surge in people qualifying for benefits continues. Unemployment rises most months. The benefits bill is out of control.

Remodelling government with  Number 10 in Manchester as well as in London will mean more staff, more office accommodation, more train fares and motorcades. More devolved government to an unloved city region level of artificial government will add pointless bureaucratic cost to the already high costs of Councils and Whitehall. Three or four  layers of government arguing over who does what means more staff, more lawyers, more oppression of people and companies with conflicting and cumulative government demands.

And how to pay for all this? So far it is let them pay tourist taxes if they dare to take a weekend break or a holiday. That will not prove enough to pay the hungry Mayors and cash gobbling nationalised industries.

Burnham’s wish to devolve more power and spend more money in the regions  will bring slower growth and less economic success.We know this from the 25 year experiment with devolved government, more public spending and borrowing in Wales and Scotland since 2000. The GDP results from ONS  show the following for 2000-2025

England GDP      plus 48.5%

Scotland.               plus 41.2%

Wales.                    plus 33.8%

These facts have been set out with good charts  to highlight the differences by Facts4eu.

These are huge divergencies showing there is a big prosperity cost to dear devolved government. Doubtless many Scottish and Welsh voters want to carry on with it, and that is their democratic right confirmed by referendum. Voters in England see from that that we do not want the economic harm even bigger government brings. In England voters voted down North Eastern government  when asked in a referendum and were right to do so.

Andy Burnham also needs to consider the contradiction in his policies. He both thinks more devolved power to regions help, and thinks more laws and taxes should be set  by the EU through the EU re set give aways. Both these propositions cannot be true as they contradict each other. Both can be wrong, and are wrong. You get faster growth, more jobs and more investment with less government, fewer laws and lower taxes. That is why you need to say No to EU re set and to bigger devolved government to city regions.