Laurence Turner MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Jun 2026 · Railways Bill · Hansard source

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  I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker, for being able to speak so early in this debate. I wish to focus on Government amendment 92, amendment 166 on devolution, which stands in my name, and the Transport Committee amendments on disability access. At the outset, I thank the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), for her leadership on this issue. Public ownership as a means to the end of improving passenger services has always implicitly been at the heart of this Bill, and Government amendment 92 makes that intent explicit. I warmly welcome its presence on the amendment paper. I hope the House will forgive a few words on the origins of this amendment. As the Minister said, a drafting issue was identified. In essence, although the requirement for public ownership was contained in other legislation, it was contingent on the circumstances of transition and on definitions set out in secondary legislation. I am sure that Members across the House will agree that, whatever their views on the merits of particular ownership models, such an important decision as public ownership or privatisation of the railways should be taken only by the majority consent of the whole House, and that is exactly what the amendment will achieve, safeguarding Great British Railways from the spectre of privatisation through the back door. I thank the Minister, the Minister of State the noble Lord Hendy and the Bill team for their constructive engagement on this issue. I am optimistic about the Bill’s devolution provisions and I hope that under them Birmingham and the west midlands can enjoy some of the improvements that passengers in London and Liverpool already benefit from. Great things were done in the past through the old section 20 agreements under the Transport Act 1968, not least the creation of the cross-city line which runs through my constituency, but such agreements proved impossible under the fragmented post-privatisation railway. I hope section 5 proves to be a worthy successor to Barbara Castle’s section 20. In the west midlands, we have a particular issue. We have a well-established devolved body, the West Midlands Railway Executive, which covers counties beyond the combined authority’s boundaries, such as Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire. Clause 5, as it stands, specifies that devolution agreements will cover services in the area of a combined authority. It is important that such devolution agreements reflect the natural railway geographies of those areas, so I hope that reassurance can be given from the Government Front Bench. Several amendments would take forward the Select Committee’s recommendations on disability access. We can judge our transport services on the ability of all passengers to use them and the Bill contains some welcome provisions. Clause 18 states that GBR must “in particular” advance the interests of disabled people. I believe this is the first time any such commitment requirement has been set out in railway legislation. GBR will be subject to the public sector equality duty, but new clause 39 would ensure that when the passengers’ council is constituted disabled people are represented on that body in accordance with the old commitment, “Nothing about us without us”. I hope Ministers will look carefully at that issue. We heard from the Opposition Front Bench and the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), that they wished to advance a passenger growth target. The hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage will know that that was the subject of some constructive disagreement on the Select Committee. Freight has historically been the poor relation on the railway network, in particular when it comes to pathing agreements. I fear that if a passenger growth target was in the Bill on the same basis and weight as the freight growth target, the advantages for the freight growth target in those decisions would be lost. That is an argument we heard in the Public Bill Committee’s evidence sessions from the Rail Freight Group.

• 10 Jun 2026 · Railways Bill · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills is, I say respectfully, wrong on this issue. When the Labour party first committed to the reintegration of track and train, under the then shadow Rail Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), I wrote the announcement—so I do bring some bearing to that question. It has been a privilege over these years to ride on the footplate of this reform journey. The Bill will end the national buck-passing game of “Whose Line is it Anyway?”. Most importantly, it will establish a rail network that is run by and for the nation. I look forward to voting against amendments that would undo that important journey of reform.

• 10 Jun 2026 · Railways Bill · Hansard source

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  I hear what the right hon. Lady says, but it is contradicted by the record and our own experience. She says that integration of track and train is an idea that came from that review, but we were advancing that idea for railway reform on the Labour Benches in 2011 and 2012. The Bill is the culmination of all that reform effort over many, many years.

• 10 Jun 2026 · Railways Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member describes the railway as it could be—and he tempts me to get on to Red Star Parcels, but that might be one for another day—but we must have regard to the railway as it is now and the fact is that the railway the Bill inherits sets up that binary choice all too often. I very much hope we can get more interaction between modes, as he describes. The right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) said—I hope I do not misrepresent her—that the Bill carries forward, in a different form, an idea created by the previous Conservative Government, but I think that is really too short a horizon.

• 10 Jun 2026 · Railways Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend will have heard representations for ensuring that, under clause 5, devolution agreements must not be unduly limited, either by the Bill or its implementation. Is he able to offer any reassurances to Transport for West Midlands and other bodies that they will continue to be part of the conversation about how the Bill is implemented?

• 9 Jun 2026 · Road Safety: West Midlands · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. It is striking how many of the issues she describes ring true for city constituencies as well. In Birmingham, the number of collisions has fallen over the past decade, but the number of people killed or seriously injured on the roads has remained remarkably stable, at around 500 a year. That indicates that if someone is unlucky enough to be in a smash, the risk is actually greater. Many of our roads were not designed for the wider and heavier vehicles that now use them. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need more adaptations for historic roads, and better and more up-to-date guidance on what interventions are effective in this age of wider and heavier vehicles?

• 3 Jun 2026 · Rail Freight · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. Rail freight moves everything from Tesco containers to Cornish clay on its way to Stoke through my constituency. I would like to raise the issue of the rail freight workforce, because drivers’ wages and employment conditions can be very variable in the sector. Will the hon. Lady join me in recognising the value of ASLEF’s “Rail Freight Future” campaign? It backs many of her calls and emphasises the need for proper sanitary, welfare and rest facilities for freight drivers.

• 3 Jun 2026 · General Strike Centenary Commemorations · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend has displayed his customary ingenuity in mentioning Harlow. I believe that, as a new town, it did not exist at the time of the general strike—but I will come on to the points he made. Ranged against Ramsay MacDonald was, of course, Stanley Baldwin, a Conservative party leader who convinced many of his natural critics of his sincere desire to bring about industrial reconciliation, summed up by his famous declaration in this Chamber a year earlier: “Give peace in our time, O Lord.” —[ Official Report , 6 March 1925; Vol. 181, c. 841.] That apparently heartfelt plea masked a hidden ruthlessness, and an extraordinarily singular capacity for political calculation. In 1926 the Government made, not altogether comfortably, common cause with the coal owners who, taken together, could have been the archetypes of Baldwin’s famous description of “hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war.” The British coal owners, unlike their counterparts in America and Europe, mostly represented small concerns that had failed to adapt, amalgamate and modernise, and they would go unmourned when Parliament obviated their role 20 years later. Opponents of organised labour sometimes claimed that union leaders sought national confrontation, or that they wished to supplant the authority of Parliament with that of the TUC general council, but those wild words had foundation only in the imagination of their accusers. As Jonathan Schneer’s brilliant and evocative new history of the strike shows, they spent the weeks before the strike exhaustively, even desperately, trying to prevent the breakdown of talks and searching for some compromise, some new formula, and a negotiated path through. The way in which they convinced themselves that settlement was possible, as they masked their private doubts of the likelihood of victory and tried to balance what were probably irreconcilable internal and external forces—often in the small hours, and often in rooms not far from this Chamber—as the clock ran down, will feel familiar to many who have had the privilege and responsibility of trade union office. But such doubts cannot have been at the forefront of the minds of the great majority of the nearly 3 million men and women who answered the stoppage call on 3 May. They did so at great personal risk to their livelihoods and pensions. In that hot spring, many of them wore their war medals as a conscious rebuke to those who charged them with a lack of patriotism, and even with falling under the influence of a foreign power. It is easy to see why so many strikers thought that victory was imminent and assured. In Birmingham—then, as now, inland transport’s great, interlocking heart—it was said that neither bus, tram nor train moved on that first day. “Every man in every union involved is out,” the city’s trades council enthusiastically, if somewhat improbably, reported to the TUC. That claim, incidentally, committed the sin of omission, because many women joined the strike. At the Joseph Lucas factory they were led by Jessie Eden, an imaginative version of whom was immortalised as a character in “Peaky Blinders”. Some officials actually had to coax members who had not been called out to remain at their work, with mixed success. Most strikers could see neither the depth of their opponents’ preparation nor the lack of their unions’ own. In truth, most union leaders and the members of their executives expected the Government to resume negotiations swiftly, and extend the subsidy until the mining industry could be reorganised along the lines of the Sankey and Samuel commissions. They did not perceive, until it was too late, the Government’s hidden determination to force not settlement but surrender. While the TUC and the newly constituted local committees attempted to resolve profound logistical problems on the fly and to adapt sometimes confused central instructions to local circumstances, the well-resourced and carefully attuned Government machine sprang into action. In Birmingham—the city of a thousand trades, where general unionism and the centralising and organising tendencies that it represented had long struggled to prosper—the response to the strike was uneven from the start.

• 3 Jun 2026 · General Strike Centenary Commemorations · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention and for sending me a copy of the documentary on the Cramlington train wreckers ahead of this debate. It was moving to see those men in their later years. It is telling that the general strike tends to be remembered as local history, and there will be much to say throughout this debate about the general strike in Birmingham and elsewhere.

• 20 Apr 2026 · Draft Train Driving Licences and Certificates (Amendment) Regulations 2026 · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister and the Government for bringing forward this secondary legislation. As he knows, there is a need to improve the diversity of the driving workforce and to address the challenges of an ageing workforce, so this is a much-welcomed change and a fantastic example of industry, Government and unions working together to deliver for workers and the travelling public. Will he join me in recognising the role that ASLEF, the train drivers’ union, played by working with industry and with the Labour party in opposition to help secure this important change?

• 5 Feb 2026 · Railways Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I think I agree with at least most of what the right hon. Gentleman says. The issue is whether actual payments are made, but we questioned the noble Lord Hendy in the Transport Committee on this matter, and he agreed that there needs to be some data accountability where there are delays. I am sorry to detain the Committee on this matter. As is sometimes said, man is born free and everywhere he is in trains—I just wanted to get that one on the record. I thank Committee members for their time.

• 5 Feb 2026 · Railways Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. As in previous sessions, I draw the Committee’s attention to my membership of Unite the union. I will speak briefly on the amendments. I welcome the opportunity to talk about an area of narrowly gauged interest of long-standing, although I hesitate to call it tunnel vision: schedule 4 and schedule 8 compensation for planned and unplanned disruption on the network. The delay attribution scheme has remained essentially unchanged since privatisation, and the clause is a welcome opportunity to look again at how it works in practice. Attention has been drawn to the fact that, under the present system, approximately 400 people are employed across the rail industry to attribute delays to either operators or Network Rail. That sometimes happens in ways that defy any common-sense interpretation of good value for money, and there have been eye-catching examples of expensive lawyers gathering in a room to argue about whether a dead pheasant or a dead peacock was a small bird or a large one, for the purpose of the scheme. Depending upon that determination, the costs may be picked up by the taxpayer or by private operators, and I think we can all agree that that is nonsense. I am glad that the Bill, as drafted, retains some degree of compensation scheme. My attention was drawn to the need for such measures recently in my constituency, where there has been a long-standing problem with road surface conditions, including what has become known, infamously, as “Northfield’s big pothole” under the railway bridge that connects Quarry Lane and Coleys Lane. Network Rail pointed out to me that a single bridge strike from a heavy goods vehicle would incur greater compensation costs for just one hour of disruption than the entire cost of resurfacing that stretch of road. Clearly, we need some degree of accountability in the system. However, the amounts paid out through schedule 8 compensation, which is for unplanned disruption in particular, have been enormous. In theory, these schemes should be self-financing, but for all the attention that is paid to dividend payments and profits in the current railway system, the money that leaves the public part of the railway through these compensation schemes has in some years been in excess of those payments. There is a very good case for these changes. I am not sure that amendment 85 is entirely necessary or desirable, on the basis that there may well be circumstances in which a private operator, whether freight or open access, is responsible for delays, for example if rolling stock had not been kept in the required condition. It is sensible for there to be some attribution in the system. As subsection (7) sets out, there is a right of appeal to the ORR. This is a sensible clause, and I am not sure that the amendments are necessary.

• 29 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I will speak briefly and specifically on the attempt to introduce a passenger growth target. I think we have had the substantive discussion before, but it is worth briefly repeating the key points. The railway, arguably, is already incentivised to prioritise passenger services. That is partly a financial matter, as the revenue coming in from passenger services is greater. However, I fear that the shadow Minister’s noble intent to move away from some current cultural practices is at odds with the clause. In the engineering culture, from a certain mindset, because freight trains are heavier and cause more damage to track, there is a convenience to allocating those rare paths to passengers services instead. The shadow Minister quoted evidence, and I wish to read into the record some other comments that we heard, from Maggie Simpson of the Rail Freight Group, someone of whom I think the shadow Minister and I share a high opinion. Of a passenger growth target, she said: “people think about the passenger railway all the time, so I do not see that that incentive effect is as necessary”. –– [ Official Report, Railways Public Bill Committee, 20 January 2026; c. 46, Q78.] I think she put it very well: there is a real risk that if we put into the Bill both a freight growth target and a passenger growth target, with no prioritisation between them written in, one will have the effect of neutralising the other.

• 29 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Could the shadow Minister advise me whether there is anything in his amendments or new clause that would exclude foreign state-owned railway enterprises from that definition of “private sector”?

• 29 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Seventh sitting) · Hansard source

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  The Transport Act 1981, which privatised British Rail’s ferry operations, including the Sea Link service to the Isle of Wight, contained no passenger interest provisions of the type contained in this Bill. Does the hon. Member agree that such an omission was an oversight and an historical missed opportunity?

• 27 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Sixth sitting) · Hansard source

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  On amendments 125 and 127, I have full sympathy with the ambition of reducing costs to the taxpayer wherever possible. However, the word “minimise” is important here, because a natural reading would be to bring that cost to a minimum. Each Government have recognised that there is a balance to be struck between the charges raised against the taxpayer, fare payers and other users of the railway. We heard evidence from Richard Bowker, the former chief executive of the Strategic Rail Authority, who has contributed what is sometimes known as Bowker’s law—there are only two sources of income to a railways: passengers and taxpayers. I fear that if these amendments were incorporated into the Bill, the natural outcome would be that fares would rise, as indeed may charges levied upon freight users of the railway. For that reason, I hope they are not supported.

• 27 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Sixth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The 1992 White Paper that preceded the Railways Act 1993 said that, at the time, British Rail had the second highest workforce productivity of any railway in Europe. What does the hon. Member think went wrong in all the years under privatisation that followed?

• 27 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Fifth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that progress has been made on the cultural issues and the micro-management that he describes? I note in passing that he dates that culture from 2012 onwards, which was, of course, entirely under the Government of which he was part. In the Transport Committee, we heard that until the election, Network Rail had to seek Treasury permission to do as much as put up a passenger footbridge. Is it not welcome that that has now come to an end?

• 22 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. At the outset, I wish to declare that I am a member of Unite. It is a privilege to speak at the start of these proceedings. I do so as a believer in public ownership of the railways not as an end, but as the best means of realising greater economies for taxpayers and improvements for all those who rely on the railways for livelihood and leisure. I am conscious that the Committee has much work ahead of it, so I will keep my explanation of the amendment brief. Public ownership is the ballast of the Bill, but its clauses make only limited reference to ownership, although the drafting logic for that may be good—the Bill must, after all, be read alongside the previous enabling legislation passed by Parliament, the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 and the now much amended Railways Act 1993. In 2024, Parliament’s decision and intent were clear: passenger services are to come under public ownership as franchises expire. I must admit, however, that I start our proceedings under the shadow of a doubt. On my reading, there is a risk that the requirements of public ownership that sit outside this Bill may be time-bound, designed for the specific circumstances of transition, and dependent on definitions in statutory instruments that are themselves at risk of amendment or repeal without full parliamentary scrutiny. I freely acknowledge that some members of the Committee may take a different view of the merits of the ownership question, and I am sure that we will have good and respectful debate on the Bill’s provisions in the weeks ahead, but surely we can all agree on one point: such an important decision as public or private ownership should be taken only through primary legislation. To put it another way, were a future Government to seek to return to a privatised model, they should be obliged to seek majority consent in the full House. That is what the amendment seeks to achieve. The amendment would require Great British Railways to be a wholly and nationally owned public sector entity. Indeed, it would cease to be GBR if it were sold in whole or in part. The amendment would also, I think, prevent a future Secretary of State from taking the extremely perverse step of removing GBR’s designation as a public sector body and transferring it to a private or semi-private entity. If the wording of the amendment seems familiar to hon. Members, it will be because they have been paying close attention to other legislation. Clause 1 of the Bill is effectively identical to section 1(1) of the Great British Energy Act 2025. The amendment is a near carbon copy—I am sorry to all members of the Committee, but we are only at the start of our descent; I cannot promise that the puns will improve as we go on—of the subsections that follow in section 1 of that Act. I note that in the equivalent Committee debate for that Act, the sponsoring Minister, the hon. Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks), said: “The clause protects the principle of public ownership by making explicit that the company would terminate if it ceased to be wholly owned by the Crown.” –– [ Official Report, Great British Energy Public Bill Committee, 10 October 2024; c. 91.] I accept that we are seeking to build on a complex body of legislation; the railways are the accumulation of two centuries of history, and so are the laws that govern them. If—I emphasise that word—a drafting issue has been identified, we also need to identify the right solution for this specific legislation. I am grateful to the Minister in the Commons and to the Minister of State, the noble Lord Hendy, for their thoughtful conversations on this matter. I am also grateful to the officials who have worked hard to prepare this commendable Bill. My motivation in tabling the amendment is to establish beyond doubt that the Bill will achieve its aim: that Great British Railways will be run by and for the nation. If we can assure ourselves of that, I believe that this legislation will set out a permanent way for reform. I will listen carefully when the Minister responds.

• 22 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman said a few moments ago that Trainline and other online retailers are not seeking to make ill use of their market position, but the Advertising Standards Authority has ordered Trainline to amend its adverts, and the ORR ordered it to amend its practice of not showing booking fees at the start of the booking process. In oral evidence to the Transport Committee, Trainline accepted that its market share was significantly above the 25% test that the Competition and Markets Authority applies for a potential monopoly position. Does that concern the hon. Gentleman at all?

• 22 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  I must start by slightly disagreeing with the Minister on his approach to railway puns. The shadow Minister referred to the discussion on amendment 257 as a dispute; I reassure him that this is not a case of pistons at dawn— [ Laughter. ] It is going to get so much worse. Before I come to the Minister’s substantive response, I will briefly respond to a few other comments that have been made in the debate. The shadow Minister spoke about changes in passenger numbers over the years, which is a good illustration of why it is important to look across a whole time series, and to bear in mind the old maxim that correlation is not causation. After all, passenger numbers were already falling by the time that we got to vesting day in 1948. The railways were exhausted after years of war—indeed, passenger numbers halved between 1920 and 1947. In fact, the actual nadir in passenger numbers was not in the early 1990s but in 1983. I thought that Opposition Members might have wanted to take pride in the successful sectorisation experiment under the Thatcher Government, perhaps aided by some benign neglect from that Administration, which was sadly not repeated by the subsequent Major Administration. We have some good explanations for why exactly passenger numbers rose so dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s. For a long time, I think we could have all substituted our political explanations for why that happened. However, in 2018, a very good study, led by eminent modellers and academics, was published by the Independent Transport Commission on precisely that question. It found that passenger growth was overwhelmingly driven by changes in the job market—the types of roles being created and the areas of the country in which they were being created. It was also aided by changes to tax incentives for company cars in the early 2000s, which led to an additional increase in rail traffic.

• 22 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I thank the shadow Minister for the constructive spirit of his intervention. Indeed, in the days of cross-party consensus on High Speed 2, I worked with members of his party exactly to address some of the capacity challenges on the network. I just say to him that the two are linked. As he was alluding to, the length of the trains is related to the signalling blocks and the safe distance between trains, so that they can be run together. If he is right, we should be looking to put on more carriages. When waiting for a CrossCountry train, I can certainly remember the collective groan on the platform when another short formation appeared. There is a hard limit, however, to what can be applied without providing more caps on the network. That is where the passenger versus freight dilemma comes in, because sometimes hard choices just have to be made. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point that this is not always either/or, but sometimes it is. Sometimes one has to be prioritised over the other, and freight has historically been the loser.

• 22 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Okay, perhaps we will come back to that. However, the hon. Member also mentioned the restoring the your railway fund, which he talked about as a success. When the last Conservative Rail Minister, Huw Merriman, appeared before the Transport Committee he said, of that programme, that “The challenge was that a lot of people had their expectations dashed. A lot of business cases were, “Let’s move it to this stage so we can keep the dream alive.” That just wastes money and expertise because you know that scheme is not going to get a return. I have mixed feelings on it as a result.” Does the hon. Gentleman share some sympathy with that perspective?

• 22 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  As in this morning’s sitting, I draw attention to the fact that I am a member of Unite. I did not intend to speak in this particular debate, but I wish to respond briefly to some of the things that have been said and to mount a perhaps limited defence of Network Rail and the importance of engineering in such organisations. The comparator, of course, was Railtrack, which outsourced its engineering functions, had only a single engineer on its board of directors and had only one non-executive director from an engineering background, with deadly consequences, which are well understood and do not need repeating. If there is sometimes caution in the organisation, I suggest that the long shadow cast by the events of the late 1990s and early 2000s is why. There is good and sound logic behind not running too many trains across congested track. The real reason why we do not run as many trains as is theoretically possible is that lack of capacity on the network. Birmingham New Street, for example, will be exhausted once the Camp Hill services start in the spring—any more services simply cannot be safely got in or out on the network. When path allocators have to make decisions on which services to prioritise, freight tends to be squeezed out. That is a long-standing problem.

• 20 Jan 2026 · Railways Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Does that data flow come through Rail Settlement Plan at the moment? John Davies: It does not. It comes from the Rail Delivery Group, through its provision of RAAS, which is the rail availability and reservation service.