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Mr. Wilson: I shall give way to the Minister, and I shall give way to the hon. Member for Hendon, South later.
Mr. Norris: I wish to say what I imagine my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall) wishes to say. The hon. Gentleman may be right to make that observation, but he will not have heard either of the two contractors say that they are not dedicated to bringing about substantial service improvements. Mr. Brian Souter and those who manage Great Western Trains are quite clear that, even within the seven-year contract period, they can deliver substantial service enhancements which, so far at least, British Rail has failed to deliver.
Mr. Wilson: I do not accept that. In the Great Western Trains and South West Trains areas, British Rail has delivered rather good services. I will let the Minister's comment pass because I do not want to start a general debate about privatisation. But I notice a rapid shift in ground. I picked up the hon. Member for Hendon, South specifically on the subject of investment, because he referred to investment. I thought the Minister might say that there would be no new trains on the underground if it were privatised, but that there will be investment in tracks, tunnels, bridges and the infrastructure. If he had said that, I would have said that, with many fanfares of trumpets, Railtrack has produced a 10-year investment plan that actually envisages less investment than has been provided in the past 10 years. However, I will leave that point for another time.
Mr. John Marshall: I met Mr. Brian Souter of South West Trains at the Confederation of Passenger Transport dinner and I spoke to him about investment and how privatisation was going. He said that when he took over the franchise, he was told that a relatively modest investment would improve the reliability of service.He asked how much it would cost and he told the individuals concerned to go ahead. They said that they had been trying to get the investment for 18 months under British Rail and they had got it in less than 18 days from South West Trains. Mr. Brian Souter has invested in improving the quality of the service, and the hon. Gentleman is wrong to denigrate him as he does.
Mr. Wilson: That sounds like a rather partisan account of the conversation between the hon. Gentleman andMr. Souter. The hon. Gentleman extolled the virtues of privatising London Underground on the specific ground that it would bring investment in rolling stock. I pointed out, inconveniently for the hon. Gentleman, that the franchisees in rail privatisation have gone on record as saying that they will not invest in rolling stock. Incidentally, The Independent today reports that, after the first month's operation of South West Trains and Great Western Trains, there has already been a decline in time
keeping. That will not matter to Conservative Members because they are interested not in time keeping or the effects on passengers, but in the dogma of privatisation.
Ms Glenda Jackson: My hon. Friend will be aware that a Conservative think tank--in 1994, I believe--floated the idea of the privatisation of London Underground. The improvement in services for Londoners contained in that document was a reduction in the network of almost two thirds. The document also suggested that one way to raise the necessary funding for investment would be to offer for sale the names of existing London Underground stations. For example, it was suggested that perhaps Harrods would like to bid to change the name of Knightsbridge station to Harrods. Although the Minister has argued fairly forcefully that the Government are not attempting to privatise London Underground, the idea has been floating around in the Conservative party for some years.
Mr. Wilson: My hon. Friend is right. I always think that "Conservative think tank" is a contradiction in terms, but her general point is perfectly accurate.
I accept the spirit of the Minister's assurances today, but I must point out that he is an old lag. He has made comments on the subject before that were not in line with what he has said today. The Evening Standard article, to which I referred earlier, states:
in the context of London Underground--
One does not have to be paranoid--having read those quotations, considered the history and, indeed, listened to the comments from Tory Members this afternoon--to suspect that even in this apparently innocuous or constructive Bill all might not be quite as it seems. The not very cleverly hidden agenda is the privatisation of London Underground.
I would have thought that by now even the tiny band of zealots assembled on the Tory Benches this afternoon might show some restraint in so uncritically singing the praises of the railway franchising concept, because it is certainly not proving very popular in public opinion.The Minister is on the record as supporting the principle of franchising London Underground services and privatising the whole system. Even more importantly--if that is possible--the Deputy Prime Minister has come straight out and said that he wants to see the privatisation of London Underground in the next Tory manifesto. The gaggle of Tory Members of Parliament from whom we have heard today are all clearly committed to the privatisation of London Underground. So we are entitled to inspect the Bill closely and we will do that this afternoon and again in Committee.
I might as well lay down a marker. We will resist and we will prevent the privatisation of London Underground this side of a general election. The Minister, voluntarily, will not be in the House thereafter, but the people who want to privatise everything that provides a worthwhile public service in this society will not be in government to fulfil those ambitions.
I do not want to get into a general argument about privatisation, but I despise the way in which public service is denigrated in the House. The Tories can make some
claims on behalf of some privatisations. They can point to British Airways as a success story and to the success of British Telecom, although it would have been successful anyway and it probably would not have shed so many jobs in the process. But the idea, which Conservative Members propagate, that everything in the public sector was a failure and a burden on the taxpayer is so mendacious as to require correction. For example, British Airways is now a profitable and successful airline, but when it was in the public sector it was also profitable. The electricity industry has never paid as much to the Exchequer in tax as it did prior to privatisation in profits. In the gas industry, the price of domestic gas has not yet returned to 1979 levels in spite of the fact that we are now self-sufficient in gas. In all these industries, the public sector did a good job for the country. It would behove Tory Members to recognise that, instead of getting caught up in their ideological obsession with denigrating everything in the public sector.
Mr. Norris:
In 1979, the nationalised industries consumed just over £2 billion in public support; in 1994, they cumulatively paid more than £2.5 billion in corporation tax to the taxpayer. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that unarguable proposition?
Secondly, whatever the hon. Gentleman's view of the merits of British Airways, and of whether it would have made a profit if allowed to continue in the public sector, it was his colleagues who claimed that that privatisation would be a disaster. It has palpably not been a disaster, which is why we would claim the same success for the railways and other privatisations. That, surely, is the hon. Gentleman's real logical difficulty.
Mr. Wilson:
If we were going to debate this in more detail, I would accept some of what the Minister says about British Airways. But I do not accept his more general point. What he says about what the public industries cost and now produce is straight out of the Conservative central office crib sheet. In fact, there were two heavy loss makers in the public sector: the coal and steel industries--
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. I have allowed hon. Members to stray rather wide with their examples, but now we should get back to the Bill.
Mr. Wilson:
The public utilities used to put more money into the Treasury than they do now--that fact should not be forgotten. The analogy between British Airways and the railways, or London Underground, is false. British Airways was a profitable transport business. In this country as in every other, however, the railways require public subsidy. So the question of the railways is qualitatively different from any question attaching to previous privatisations. The only question is whether the public subsidies provided anyway by the taxpayer, in the private or public sector, are better spent on developing the industry and maximising the quality of public service or on funding the private profits of the operators.
Mr. Keith Hill:
Is my hon. Friend aware of the findings of the Transport Select Committee, of which I am a member, that the consequences of the franchising system for the British taxpayer are an annual extra cost of £600 million? Does he agree that there is every reason to
"Just over two years ago Steven Norris, London's minister for transport, in an interview with the Evening Standard, described franchises"--
"as 'just pure common sense.' At the time Mr. Norris said: 'Franchises could be offered on line-by-line basis. That is a concept we have clearly got to examine.'"
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