Speeches by Smith.

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I completely appreciate what the Minister is saying. However, I suppose that the outstanding question is this: how will the general public come to understand what GBR is going to mean for them if it is not going to be established for 12 months and if ther…”

“Does my hon. Friend agree that paragraph (e) and some of the other provisions will support what I am particularly keen to see: the growth of the entire railway, not just the areas that happen to have a mayor or are part of Scotland or Wales?”

“The point I want to come back to is about value for money for the taxpayer. I want some reassurance that GBR will not go right back to the beginning of the journey of creating a ticketing app and website, which would effectively cost the general public an inordinate amount of money, when we already have a lot of platfo…”

“I thank the Minister for the clarity on the code of practice, which has also been echoed in some written answers I recently received from him. While we are talking about open access, what thoughts have the Minister and the Department given to working with independent retailers who have probably spent billions of pounds…”

“I will briefly make a few comments about each of the new clauses, though obviously I have already intervened on my hon. Friend. I support wholeheartedly what we have proposed in new clause 1, which is no surprise given that I am sitting next to my hon. Friend the shadow Minister. I want to pick up on what he said about…”

“I thank the Minister for the further detail that he has provided. A lot of these regions feed into London and the big cities. If local councils are holding their local business units to account, how does that connect with services going from those regions to big cities such as London or Birmingham?”

“I will touch briefly on two points that are not necessarily related, but overlap. First, let me build on what my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland and Fakenham said about the word “may” in clause 5(1). Anyone who was at the oral evidence session earlier this week would have heard the Manchester and west midlands may…”

“The Minister’s point speaks directly to something else I am concerned about: how the business units relate to local government areas. His explanation still uses language that makes it sound like the authorities will be much smaller, granulated local authorities rather than larger strategic ones. Can the Minister help m…”

“Knowing the hon. Member’s enthusiasm for all forms of transport as I do, I would like to build on the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland and Fakenham made about amendment 214 in respect of district councils, and ask whether it would have been better to use the term “a transport authority”, which may wel…”

“The hon. Member is making a very powerful speech for an area of the country that is still two tier. However, having been a representative in a unitary council and lived in one for a number of years, it is worth putting on the record that being part of a unitary authority does not mean that potholes or SEND provision ar…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford) for securing this debate. I have made no secret of my views, unlike some Members who have kept their views to themselves on the outcome they would like. That is because I have a deep convic…”

“Q As I understand it, one of the ways that a lot of it will be delivered—the detail of what GBR has to provide—is through the licence. Do you think it is a problem that the Committee has not had sight of the draft GBR licence yet, setting out what we expect accessibility to look like in the Bill versus the reality of w…”

“Q One of the things that has been touched on in that conversation, particularly around universal design and the Bill’s aims to improve accessibility, is that we already have huge discrepancies around the country on each individual line. It is worth asking, for the record, whether you agree that there will be a signific…”

“Q I want to go back to the accountability piece. You said to the Minister that there are adequate checks and balances in the system. I have spent quite a lot of time looking at this on the Transport Committee, and the closest thing I can relate GBR to is the NHS. It is not necessarily run by the Department of Health an…”

“It is more the fact that there are not going to be any more in certain parts of the country for this Parliament. Andy Burnham: For us, though, we are moving to a situation where Cheshire and Warrington are going to have a mayor soon, and I believe Lancashire will too—hopefully, Sarah. That would mean an all-devolved no…”

“Q I was going to ask more about devolution. I will just make the point that I was going to make, and then I will ask you a very quick question. The application of the term “devolution and local leadership” to this Bill is quite distracting, because ultimately, unless you are a mayoral combined authority, you do not get…”

“Q Will you get that with GBR, though? It is great that those relationships exist across the network and the region, but the point in the Bill is specifically that you will be consulted by GBR, but you will not necessarily get to make the decision. You are saying you would like to make the decisions, or at least— Andy B…”

“Q But the responsibility for the delivery of services will be theirs. Going back to my original question about how we hold it to account, are you effectively saying that when it comes down to the individual railway lines and the services, we as MPs will be going to that chief exec and then having to figure out how we e…”

“Q Can I just come back to you on that? One of the other things that came out when we had the Rail Minister in front of us was the devolution aspect, and my understanding is that each of these individual railway lines will still be run as an individual line. It will be like we have it now; they are just going to be publ…”

“Or at least make them jointly. Is that what you are after—that joint decision making? Andy Burnham: Yes, I think that would be what we would want. The risk would be that GBR is too remote and not responsive—everything that Lloyd was saying about slow decision making. That is not what we would want. From our point of vi…”