(Lab): My Lords,
I remind the House of my interest as chairman of the Great
Western Railway stakeholder board. It is a privilege to follow
the noble Lord, , who in the view of many of
us was the most outstanding and successful Secretary of State for
Transport in the past 12 years. The very good sense with which he
spoke in this debate is an indication of why he is regarded with
such respect.
The noble Lord was absolutely right in all his points. I do not
intend to repeat them, but I would like to address the Minister,
for whom I feel enormous sympathy because she has defended High
Speed 2 day after day from that Dispatch Box and has not been
supported by everyone in the House—and certainly not by everyone
on the Benches behind her. She has now come along to defend a
decision that is, frankly, absolutely indefensible because of the
damage it does to the future prospects of the great cities of
this country, as the noble Lord, , said.
I have one question, which occurred to me when I heard the Prime
Minister’s statement and read the documents today: what has
happened to Great British
Railways Has it now been completely junked? If so,
would it not be honest of the Government to say so? It is not a
question of waiting for parliamentary time or using other means
of establishing Great British
Railways about which I have written to the
Minister. Is it still the Government’s intention that there will
be a guiding mind and that the decisions about the future of
British railways will at last be taken by people who understand
how they work?
(Con): I reassure
the noble Lord that it is still the Government’s intention that
there will be Great British
Railways As I have said previously, it will depend
on parliamentary time, but an enormous amount of work is of
course going on in the meantime to establish an interim guiding
mind to get as many things as we can. There are matters to work
through as we develop the guiding mind principle—industrial
action obviously being one of them—to give the senior leadership
the head space they need to make some significant changes to
establish a guiding mind.
