Flexible Ticketing: Rail Transport

Debate between Alan Mak and James Cartlidge

Thursday 10th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. Towards the end of my remarks, I will come on to the question of how we pay for cheaper travel, because the rail operating companies obviously have to find the revenue from somewhere.

I represent a commuting constituency, although fine manufacturing industries are based there, as well as agriculture. I was brought up in Barnet in north London and moved first to Essex. When Emily and I moved our family out to South Suffolk, it was because we wanted to be able to afford a house that had some land and was in a beautiful part of the world so that we could have that quality of life, and because we wanted to move out of the London rush, so to speak.

This issue will become ever bigger. Partly because of London house prices, there will be a great exodus, particularly of professional families, to Suffolk, Kent and so on, right up to Newark. People will move out in search of a better quality of life. If that is their motive, will they still expect to travel five days a week when they face such a long journey? As my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) said, many of them will travel four days a week, and that is my experience. I have noticed a marked number of people on my local trains doing four or three days because the journey is so long.

[Mr Alan Mak (Havant) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate on an important subject. As in his constituency, many of my constituents have moved away from London for precisely the reasons as he articulated. They now travel from stations around the Solent region—Havant, Emsworth and Bedhampton —to London for work. Will my hon. Friend join me in calling on South West Trains and Southern to reflect changing living and working habits in their flexible fare arrangements?

[James Cartlidge]

I am more than happy to do that. The franchise in our area is Abellio Greater Anglia. My region is fortunate in at least one sense—I am not sure what the score is in my hon. Friend’s region—because the franchise is up. There are three bids going in for it.

Let me take a few of the key points from my constituents about why we should have part-time tickets and more flexible ticketing. Deborah from Sudbury said:

“It is very old-fashioned to think that workers go to their office every day and we should not be penalised for flexible working”—

I totally agree.

Some years ago, I went to a presentation about voting patterns by a leading American psephologist. He said there are three groups of voters in the country. I cannot remember two of them, but the other was symbolised by a grey cloud. That was not a political point; it was about character and how we appeal to different types of voter. The voters symbolised by the grey cloud had certain features, one of which was that they were moved by newspaper headlines about bad weather, which is quite interesting. However, the most common feature was that they ate their dinner at the same time every day—quite frankly, that describes my late grandad. However, the era of predictability, of nine to five and of everyone doing the same thing all the time is gone; it has been shattered and blown apart by liberalisation and globalisation. That might be a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a fact of life that we and our constituents all face, and our rail ticketing system should reflect that.