Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 22 September 2021
I welcome the chance to take part in this debate.
There is no doubt that we face some challenging decisions around travel in general and rail travel in particular. On one hand, we want a world-class rail service, which carries passengers and freight everywhere they want to go. On the other, we need to think about the environment. Many of us were perhaps travelling too much before Covid and have now learned to travel less.
I travel each week by train from Glasgow, via Bathgate, to Edinburgh and have seen a remarkable reduction in the number of passengers getting off at Edinburgh Park station. Will those people ever return to previous work patterns? I do not think that anyone knows, to echo what Mark Ruskell just said.
The other side to all this, of course, is the financial aspect. As with all parts of the budget, we have to live within our means. I strongly support having the railways under public ownership—for that matter, I did not like seeing gas and electricity privatised—but they will still have to operate within a budget. Broadly speaking, if there is to be a pay increase above inflation, there will need to be a matching increase in fares above inflation, or, if fares are to be held down, wages will have to be held down too.
I have to say that, when rail was previously in public hands, the public did not always get a good deal—the awful British Rail sandwiches were a standing joke. This time round, the passengers and other users have to be at the centre. From that perspective, I agree with the point in the Conservative amendment that
“any operating model must put delivering a reliable and affordable service for passengers at the heart of its aim”.
I am not sure whether that is good English, but never mind.
As we move towards new ownership of the railways, we need to remember that the railways are not there to serve us as politicians and neither are they there to serve the RMT or the railways staff, much as we appreciate them, especially for the work that they did during the pandemic. The railways are there to serve the public, and both we as politicians and the staff who work on the railways are there to serve the public too. If fewer people are travelling by train because of home working or nervousness about being in a busy public place or for any other reasons, the railway system will have less income than it did pre-Covid.
That shortfall will have to be made up in some way. For example, we could increase fares, increase the public subsidy by cutting the national health service budget or trim services to better match demand. I think that those are the three main options that we have. I hope that Labour, in particular, will seriously engage in that debate. It is easy to say that we want more services, increased pay and reduced fares, but, sadly, the numbers have to stack up.