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Mr. Knight: On the basis of what the Minister has said, I am satisfied, particularly as he said that he was with the amendment in spirit. I take it that if the ORR
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ceases to be as open as he and I feel it should be, he will be on the case, and on that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Mr. Knight: Before we leave the part of the Bill that deals with closures, I should just mention a concern that exists in Wales over the Bill's provisions. I note that in the clause, the ORR has a duty to deal with the National Assembly for Wales. This morning, I read one or two newspaper reports concerning the Bill and its likely effect and scope. I came across a copy of the Western Mail dated 17 December, and under a headline ''Bill signals alert over rural rail'', an article stated:
''Fears have been raised over the future of rural rail services in Wales as it appears that Westminster will retain the power to close them even though the Assembly is to take control of their funding.
The Railways Bill is being fast-tracked through Parliament to ensure it is passed before the next general election. It has been flagged up as giving the Assembly control over railways in Wales, but Plaid Cymru MP, Simon Thomas says some of the most important powers will remain with the Transport Secretary in London.''
Intriguingly, this report goes on to refer to
''Mr. Thomas, one of the MPs scrutinising the Bill''.
It was at this stage in reading the report that I became rather concerned because we have not seen much of the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr. Thomas). Indeed, on Tuesday, when a raft of amendments were on the amendment paper in his name and I referred to his absence, some hon. Members quite rightly cautioned me on what I was saying in case the hon. Gentleman had met with an unfortunate accident. On reflection I thought that I had been a little hard on him. However, when we finished our deliberations, I happened to go into the Tea Room and there he was, as large as life, eating a sandwich. If he is putting himself forward in Wales as one of the MPs scrutinising the Bill, he ought to spend less time eating sandwiches in the Tea Room and more time attending the Committee.
Mr. Tom Harris (Glasgow, Cathcart) (Lab): I hesitate to interrupt the hon. Gentleman's flow but, in the defence of the hon. Member for Ceredigion, at least he is a member of the Committee. The Scottish National Party did not even bother to apply for membership.
Mr. Knight: That is a very good point. After those who determine the membership of these Committees have read the Hansard report of our deliberations, I hope that they will hesitate in future before appointing a Member of one of those minority parties to Committees. It is far better that they appoint a Member who is going to attend and play a full part in our proceedings.
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Some of my Conservative colleagues in Wales are concerned that the Bill may not set out a funding formula that ensures the Assembly has enough money to keep the existing network running. The Barnett formula may leave the Assembly with too little cash to sustain the present services on rural lines. Can the Minister reassure me that, as far as Wales is concerned, the Welsh Assembly is not going to be forced into making closure decisions against its will? I raise this as a former shadow Minister for Wales, and the only person on this side of the Committee who appears to have taken any interest in Wales during our proceedings.
Mr. McNulty: The right hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not get involved in unnecessary partisan attacks on anyone on this Committee, save to say that I endorse everything that he has said about the absence of Plaid Cymru. I was going to be more partisan than that, but I shall not.
My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Harris) should know that Plaid Cymru and the SNP determine who should represent them on the Committee. Not only do we have a situation in which there are hugely significant elements of Scottish business here, which the SNP has decided is none of its business, and not only do we have a Plaid Cymru Member who does not bother turning up, but we have a Plaid Cymru Member who does not bother turning up even though he purportedly also represents the Scottish dimension from the nationalist perspective. Given the history, I think that he has represented the nationalist perspective rather well by not being here during our deliberations in Committee.
Mr. Harris: Would my hon. Friend give the Committee an example of some of the language he might use were he being partisan?
The Chairman: Order. At that point, I will ask the Minister to concentrate now on the clause.
Mr. McNulty: Thank you for saving me, Mr. Amess. I was going to say to the Committee that I would love to provide examples, but we have only got two and a half hours left. There would not be sufficient time.
The right hon. Gentleman raises a half-reasonable point. He will know that there are specific functions in the Bill afforded to the National Assembly for Wales, not least because of this rather inconsiderate notion that there are not only discrete rail services in Wales, but those that go to and from Wales across the border. Therefore, there are Secretary of State rights enshrined in the Bill that look after that English and Welsh perspective, and the National Assembly for Wales is afforded rights given that there are Welsh-only services and, in particular, the Wales and Borders franchise. It is for the National Assembly and the Secretary of State, as the two parties involved in Wales, to come to an arrangement and work that through. That is only right and proper. We will come to an amenable arrangement with the National Assembly of Wales in due course about what transfer of resources there
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should be, given the allocation of responsibilities for Wales-only and cross-border railways once the Bill is secured. That is right and proper, too.
I understand the right hon. Gentleman's direct and substantive comments, hooked, rather ingeniously, on this clause, rather than on clause 50 where we talk about wider resources. I accept his comments, but I think that I have addressed them. I heartily endorse his comments about what we might call Plaid Cymru's phantom, rather than shadow, transport spokesperson.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 33 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 34
Minor modifications
Amendment made: No. 110, in page 36, line 9, leave out
'all the funding is provided by'
and insert
'no funding is provided by a railway funding authority other than'.—[Mr. McNulty.]
Mr. McNulty: I beg to move amendment No. 111, in page 36, line 11, leave out second 'or'.
Mr. Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendments Nos. 112, 115 and 116.
Mr. McNulty: As I said earlier, all the Government amendments tabled thus far are technical in nature. They address elements that we thought were in the Bill but were found not to be so on Second Reading.
Amendments Nos. 111 and 112 are minor modifications to get to the stage at which Scottish Ministers can deal with the same matters as UK Ministers and the Secretary of State. Amendments Nos. 115 and 116 are, in essence, about including stations wholly within Scotland in the list of closures in respect of which a clause 34(6) order may be made. In all cases, the amendments reflect what we seek to do throughout the Bill, which is to ensure that the powers of Scottish Ministers to make an order are equivalent to those of the Secretary of State.
The amendments deal with simple oversights in drafting. I commend these utterly non-contentious, non-partisan and very delicately and eloquently phrased amendments to the Committee.
Amendment agreed to.
Amendment made: No. 112, in page 36, line 13, at end insert
(e) the discontinuance of a station or part of a station that is wholly in Scotland.'.—[Mr. McNulty.]
Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.
Mr. Chope: I shall make just a short contribution. As the Minister said, or certainly implied, the proposals in clauses 34 and 35 mirror those contained
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in the Railways Act 1993. However, there is one distinct difference, and that is the language that is used. In the 1993 Act, the equivalent clauses refer to minor closures and thereby clearly indicate to the reader or observer what the subject matter concerns. Unfortunately, this Government do not want to call a closure a closure, so instead of minor closures, we now have minor modifications, although the explanatory notes in paragraph 133 state:
''The concept of 'minor modifications' is very similar to that of 'minor closures' in the 1993 Act.''
Why is the whole of this part of the Bill, which is about closure and discontinuance, as it is called, not actually called ''closure and discontinuance''? Why have the Government resorted to phraseology such as ''network modifications'' or, in the case of clause 34, ''minor modifications''? They talk a great deal about transparency, clarity, the need for plain words and all the rest of it. Today we have news that a GCSE in cake decoration counts for the same as a GCSE in English language. Perhaps that is an indication that the Government are keen to reduce the emphasis on the importance of proper precision in the use of the English language in our education system.
What justification can there be for resorting to euphemisms in legislation, and using the expression ''modification'' for closure? Why is it, after all these years, that the new Labour lexicon of obfuscation continues to get larger?
Mr. McNulty: The real culprit is not the language in this Bill but the relaxed and ill-informed language of the 1993 Act, in which everything from the minor modifications that these clauses refer to all the way up to closure were included under the heading of closures. I know that the legalese within which we have to operate for legislation can be difficult, but services are not closed, they are stopped, and networks are not closed, they are discontinued.
3 pm
Stations are certainly closed; I give the hon. Gentleman that. The clauses specifically relate, however, to minor modifications that close part or some of the facilities available at a station. Any statement that a station was being closed if only a part of it were actually being closed would be made entirely in error. If an order were given to close a waiting room, one might possibly deduce that the end result would be closure—I give him that much—but if a station and the facilities that it offered were modified to the extent that it no longer had a waiting room, it could not be said that the station had closed. However, that is the logic of using closure as the catch-all rather than network modification.
The provisions are not obfuscation or some new Labour lexicon designed to distort things. If nothing else, such an approach would be entirely arrogant. I also think that it might be acknowledged that if a station had been closed, Labour councillors and MPs would not be running around saying, ''It's okay, I know you can't use it any more, but it's not closed, we have just modified it.'' If the public cannot use a station, it has clearly been closed.
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The serious point is that, however things might appear, this part of the Bill is about all the elements of the 1993 Act, such as services, franchised or otherwise, stations and networks, and that it is about not only closures per se, but modifications, too. It is therefore more appropriate to use the term ''modifications'', as there will be modifications, than to use ''closure'', as there will not be closures in all circumstances as a result of the process.
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