Speeches by Alexander.

“We are making good progress with Great British Railways. We obviously had the Railways Bill pass its Commons stages last week, and it now goes to the Lords. You will be aware that this gives me the powers to set up GBR. We anticipate that GBR will be established probably about 12 months after the Act gets Royal Assent,…”

“I am frustrated by that as well.”

“We want to provide more information on the indicative funding allocations for both phase 1 and phase 2 by the end of this year, and that may stretch into the end of the financial year. Phase 1 is obviously the Yorkshire package of improvements and phase 2 is the new line between Manchester and Liverpool. There is work …”

“In answer to your general point, the two things do not need to be mutually exclusive. We can support people when there are very significant cost of living pressures, which is what households have experienced this summer with prices at the petrol pumps. We can also make sure that from a policy perspective we are taking …”

“No, there is not a contradiction. We are in danger of confusing two separate things. You use the example of not setting a passenger growth target on the railways and somehow suggest that that is in contradiction to an estimate of where traffic may go in the future. The reason we have not set a passenger growth target i…”

“Laura Shoaf, who was appointed as the Shadow GBR chair, did a really important piece of work for us. We have now closed down Shadow GBR, but Laura has joined the board of the DFT Operator, the publicly owned holding company into which all the TOCs are transferred when they come into public ownership. It was important t…”

“What is different about me being before you today compared with six months ago is obviously the impact of the conflict in the Middle East and the pressure that has put on prices associated with fuel. If I was not focused on what that meant for drivers and operators of public transport—buses, rail and the airlines—then …”

“I understand that your likelihood of owning a car increases with your income. We have also made money available to bus operators to support them with the rising price of diesel. Back at the end of May, the Chancellor announced a £100 million package, which would support the free bus travel for children in the summer of…”

“We have not set out to measure modal shift. We are working on the way in which we monitor progress towards achieving those 40 commitments that are set out there. If we make good progress towards achieving those 40 commitments, then the result will be more people using public transport and more people choosing to walk o…”

“I can understand why it is hard for people to get their head around but the way that Mark Wild has described this to me is that the civil engineering project has taken four years longer than it was originally predicted to do and then the original project team underestimated how long work on putting the systems in, test…”

“The economic costs of congestion are a consideration for the Treasury.”

“Jo may know more detail.”

“It might be helpful if I provide a little of context on all this. Last year, having done a consultation, we announced some changes in April to the ZEV mandate, which gave manufacturers greater flexibilities to comply. We also confirmed the 2030 phase-out date for the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, and we confirmed…”

“Jo, I do not know whether you have detail on that? No. I might have to write to you on that, Alex, to be honest.”

“It is all too early to say, and I do not want to get into the world of conjecture on this. When you do business planning, you need to look at what revenue you are getting in. The fact that we have still seen good growth in passenger numbers is a positive thing. The consideration about the £3 bus fare cap was a very liv…”

“We are in discussion with Network Rail, and we have shared some work and analysis on what might happen to supply and therefore cost in the future. About 70% of passenger trains rely on electricity for traction and not diesel, and I know that Network Rail has basically forward purchased the vast majority of that. There …”

“It was the right thing to do to extend the 5p cut for another three months to the end of this year, given what has happened to petrol and diesel prices following the crisis in the Middle East. When people are going to the petrol station to fill up, and the vast majority of cars that are on our roads at the moment—rough…”

“Thank you to you and the Committee for all the work you have done to support the many changes we are making to the transport system, particularly on the Railways Bill. Your recommendations were very helpful in that respect. We are making good progress on improving public transport, investing in our roads, and enabling …”

“Investing in the public transport network, which is what we are doing, is actually more likely to yield outcomes. If you take what the previous Government did on their cycling and walking investment strategy, for example, they had targets galore but did not hit them. The reason they did not hit them was that they took …”

“If I take the example of the Lower Thames Crossing, which is a strategic freight route with lorries that come over into the port of Dover and need to make a journey up to the Midlands and the north, we need additional capacity there. It is right that we make that investment, working with the private sector to relieve t…”