Scotland Bill — House of Lords, 2016-02-24
Topic: Transportation
Anthony Gueterbock (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Faulkner’s Amendments 41 and 42. I certainly will not repeat the excellent speeches made in support of these and the other amendments this evening. I will emphasise one or two things: first, how different policing the railways is nowadays. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, mentioned Waverley station, which brings me to crowd control of, for example, football crowds. The British Transport Police has an enormous and excellent reputation in ensuring safety of passengers on the Underground and ways into the Underground, and has ways of keeping them safe on the platforms themselves so that the train does not run into them and they do not get pushed on to the track. There is, sadly, the ongoing issue of terrorism and people trying to do nasty things to the trains, which can be very dangerous. There was an incident last Friday in Belgium where somebody put some concrete blocks on the track of a high-speed line. Luckily, the train did not derail, but that can happen anywhere. Again, having the local police going along and dealing with that might be all right, but there is a good chance that it would not be all right. We have to ensure that this specialism is retained and preserved in whatever happens My noble friend Lord McAvoy seemed to be saying that we should give the Scots everything they want in this legislation. That is an argument I do not have particular views on, except on the railways. If we want to give them British Transport Police separated from the rest of the UK, why not give them the railway completely? Why not give them Network Rail? There is nothing in the Bill that says Network Rail is going to be owned in Scotland, or separated from the UK. It probably does not particularly matter who owns the railway, but there is the matter of timetabling I spent many years in various discussions across Europe trying to encourage passenger and freight trains to move across frontiers without stopping for hours, minutes or sometimes days because the timetable is not co-ordinated. Of course, that could happen here if the Government give the responsibility to Scotland for having a separate timetable. I am sure it would not happen, because we are not that stupid, but it seems to me that if we are going to keep the railways as an integrated whole, and not make all the Virgin trains stop at Carlisle for everybody to get out and get on to a different train, why separate the police The other issue of which we ought perhaps to remind ourselves, also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, is the question of who pays. We all know that Network Rail at the moment pays 50% of the cost of the British Transport Police and the train operators, passenger and freight, pay the other 50%—I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. If I were a train operator in Scotland and I found that the BTP did not exist there and any policing on the railways was being done by the local bobby, I would say to myself, and to the politicians, "Why do I, operating a train in Scotland, have to pay for policing the railway, such as it is, but if I operate a bus, a car or a lorry in Scotland, I do not have to pay?". And I would not pay, because it is very out of balance between road and rail—I would probably get nothing for it either At some stage, someone is going to have to work out who is going to pay for the policing in Scotland that will no longer be done by the BTP. There is absolutely no reason why the rail passenger or freight customer should have to pay for whatever policing they get and the main competitor, which is road, should not have to pay. Maybe the Minister already has an answer to that.