Clause 6 - Investigations
Railways and Transport Safety Bill
2:30 pm
Mrs Anne McIntosh (Vale of York, Conservative)
May I welcome you to the Committee and say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Hurst? I am sure that we will all get to know each other much better during the course of the Committee.
I shall be brief, as I would like a debate on clause 6 stand part. I thank the hon. Member for Bath for his amendment. I draw the attention of the Committee to comments made by the Secretary of State on Second Reading.
''No one branch could include the expertise necessary to consider every aspect of a train incident, for example. I am certain that, from time to time, the new branch will need to go to outside bodies to get the expertise that it needs, and that is what people would expect.''—[Official Report, 28 January 2003; Vol. 398, c. 767.]
The Secretary of State's comments and amendment No. 5 raise a question to which the Under-Secretary might respond. If the new branch is to be encouraged to get outside assistance, will the Under-Secretary clarify which bodies it might be expected to turn to and under what circumstances?
I have a problem with amendment No. 5. I can see where the hon. Member for Bath is coming from, as it harks back to previous times and perhaps to a body in which I declared an interest this morning. For your information, Mr. Hurst, I still have half my shares in Railtrack, having failed to sell them at their peak. I am still due a second instalment on them, although it is not a substantial amount of money, as we discussed this morning. Will the Under-Secretary confirm what the Minister for Transport said this morning? In circumstances in which the Secretary of State believes that there is a case for outside assistance, will there be a strong and direct chain of command and control back to the chief inspector? The Bill is silent about that.
Regrettably, the alliance is not dead in the water just yet, but on this issue we will wait for the Minister's comments.