---

Rail Reform

Obviously, I listened with interest to what the hon. Lady said and I hope that she would at least accept that the current situation, with a rail industry that Roy McNulty says costs £3.5 billion more than it needs to due to inefficiency, is something that we should tackle. I note that she says she is going to come forward with an alternative and it is important that she does that because if she is turning her face against this approach, she is saying that it is okay for fare payers and taxpayers to pay that £3.5 billion in perpetuity. I think that is broadly what she was saying, but I shall await with interest her alternative proposal, which she needs now to provide. The hon. Lady talks about the burden falling on the fare payer, but that is exactly what happens now. That is one reason why there has been so much pressure for fares to go up year on year. Let me remind her that her party also recognised that problem, which is why it commissioned Sir Roy McNulty to do that work and why it struggled with the issue too, itself overseeing years of above-inflation rail fare rises. What all of us in the House should be looking towards, with the strategy we have produced, is how to tackle these issues. We want fares to remain affordable. I have stressed on a number of occasions and at several points in the documents we have released today that it is absolutely key that we make sure that fares remain affordable. The underlying objective we are trying to achieve is the end of inflation-busting fares. We also want to cut down on the level of public subsidy, as we would prefer that money to go towards reducing the deficit or into investment in other areas. I am pleased that the hon. Lady welcomes the flexible season tickets. If we are able to push forward on smart ticketing across the country, people will be able to use that sort of ticketing not only on the railways but potentially on buses too. The Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), who has responsibility for buses, will be producing a strategy that includes all those opportunities in the coming weeks. The hon. Lady mentioned ticket offices. I understand that many passengers strongly value the face-to-face channel that a ticket office provides, as can be seen in the documents. However, I remind her that when her party was in office there were large-scale reductions in ticket office opening hours. In 2009, Labour Ministers approved cuts to opening hours at 70% of South West Trains ticket offices. The Command Paper has a section on how we want stations to improve, including by having crèches at stations where that is a sensible idea. Face-to-face channels are important for people buying tickets, which is why one of the ideas in the paper is to investigate whether people could buy tickets at their local post office, library or shop, as people can with Oyster in London. All those things should mean that people have more, rather than fewer, opportunities to buy tickets face to face. In the rest of the fares and ticketing consultation—and I stress that it is a consultation—there are some really good ideas for moving ticketing into the 21st century, including on how we can make sure that the approach to ticketing reflects working practices today and the fact that people work flexibly and part-time, rather than expecting them to fit into a ticketing approach that would be better placed in the 1980s. I am pleased that the hon. Lady asked about devolution and decentralisation because that is possibly one of the most exciting parts of all this in the long term for local communities. It opens up an important debate about how franchises might be more spec'd up in the long term and controlled by local communities. I assure her that this is about giving local communities opportunities, not about passing on some underlying problem. Indeed, the Government are absolutely clear that we need to tackle the underlying problem of inefficiency in our railways. That is what the document is all about. The hon. Lady raised concerns about alliancing. I think that getting the industry to work together is a common-sense approach to tackling some of the inefficiencies that exist, which are directly funded in the end by fare payers and taxpayers. Today, when asked, she was not able to rule out her party wanting to renationalise the railways, but I think that we need to make the pieces of the jigsaw fit together better. Simply throwing them up in the air again would only waste time and make it harder for the industry to take the responsibility that we want it to, and I do not think that that would be the right way forward. Finally, I understand the hon. Lady's concerns about freight and we are absolutely committed to making sure it is a core part of the network going forward. One of the underlying reasons for high-speed rail is to make sure we have capacity on the core network for freight. We need to make sure there are safeguards in place regarding any of these changes so that the freight industry can continue to do what we want it to, which is to re-mode on to trains.