Transport Infrastructure: North of England
Lord Beith Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
I will of course join in the congratulations to the mayor, Ros Jones. The reopening of the airport is clearly important, locally and regionally. I am able to say that the department will support, as much as it can, the reinstatement of the airspace and the air traffic control needed to make the airport operational.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, why do the Government not recognise that the links between the cities of Newcastle upon Tyne and Edinburgh require an upgraded and safe A1, and that effective rail transport to northern cities from Newcastle depends on investment in the capacity of the east coast main line?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
When the Government were elected, they were faced with an unachievable list of infrastructure promises from the previous Government. Various schemes have not been able to be taken forward simply because there is not the money to achieve them—of which the A1 is one.
The east coast main line has had a considerable amount of investment. The struggle recently, because of the fragmentation of the railway, has been to achieve a railway timetable to take advantage of the £4 billion that has been spent on it. I hope that we have got there, but of course that is one of the reasons for rail reform: we should not be investing £4 billion in a railway only to find that we cannot construct a timetable to take advantage of the investment.
Avanti Trains
Lord Beith Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
That really is a matter for the operator; it is not for government to decide that particular issue.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, LNER generally performs significantly better than Avanti, but it is now proposing to reduce the hourly service from Berwick-upon-Tweed to a two-hourly service and lengthen journey times. How is that the improvement in passenger experience of which the Minister spoke?
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
I must confess that I am not aware of that, but it is something that I shall take back to the department and look into.
East Coast Main Line
Lord Beith Excerpts(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Beith
To ask His Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with train operators about changes to the East Coast Mainline timetable in December 2024.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Lord Davies of Gower) (Con)
My Lords, the department holds regular discussions with its operators to ensure that they continue to respond to changes in demand, balancing capacity and reliability with value for money for taxpayers. As part of the December 2023 timetable change, the department agreed that London North Eastern Railway should provide some additional Sunday services and the Rail North Partnership agreed some reductions to TransPennine Express services to stabilise the service while it completes its driver training programme.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, Berwick-upon-Tweed station, serving the Scottish borders and north Northumberland, normally has a quite good hourly train service on the east coast main line. However, now LNER has resurrected the previous abandoned plan to slash that service by half from December, so that the trains will be only every two hours and with longer journey times. Is the Minister prepared to challenge this—or is publicly owned LNER doing what the Government have told it to do?
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
The industry is currently close to finalising its response to the east coast main line major timetable change consultation that was undertaken in 2021. While it will not be possible to address every concern raised, I am confident that the industry proposal is an improvement over what was offered in consultation. The Rail Minister is in regular contact with Transport for the North, having met with the chair and chief executive in recent months.
Railway Stations: Ticket Office Closures
Lord Beith Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The Government have been consulting with various accessibility groups, alongside industry, over the period, and have taken their views into account. That has included invitations to the Royal National Institute of Blind People, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, the National Autistic Society and the Multiple Sclerosis Society— I have an entire list, which I will not read out right now. Accessibility is at the heart of what we are doing here. We are trying to improve passenger service. The ORR’s latest annual consumer report shows that passenger assistance bookings have increased significantly. I am delighted to say that disabled people are coming back to the railways.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, under these proposals, it will not be possible to buy a senior or disabled persons railcard at the vast majority of stations, whether there are staff there or not. Is that right?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I cannot say, because the consultation process is still going ahead. At this time, 43% of stations do not have any staff at all, so the noble Lord would not be able to get those railcards at those stations. All of those considerations are being taken into account. We want people to travel on the trains, and we need them to get their tickets and their railcards. All of those are very important considerations as we go through this consultation process.
West Coast Main Line
Lord Beith Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I will certainly take that back to the department. I think the noble Lord will also be aware that Avanti made some timetable changes over the summer. They were very short-term and over a fixed period. That was due to industrial action—sadly—and the annual leave burden.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, does the contract place any requirement on Avanti to close station booking offices or will it be expected to take proper account of the vast opposition raised in the consultation process?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
Avanti, like all train operating companies, is working with its stakeholders and Transport Focus and London TravelWatch on the responses to the consultation to its proposals. The results of that will be forthcoming soon.
Rail Services
Lord Beith Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, on the Scottish borders we have the absurdity that new stations are being opened—at Reston, for example, and East Linton—where the principal provider of trains is TransPennine. However, the service is so unreliable that it does not bother to publicise it, and it changes it at 10 pm anyway. The nationalised operator of LNER seems to be doing a not perfect but reasonable job in the circumstances. What confidence does the Minister have that the nationalised operator can tackle the problems that both sides of the House have talked about, which cannot be allowed to continue in their present state?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I agree that things cannot be allowed to continue in their present state. That is why we have brought in LNER, which will perform its duties and review every aspect, as I said earlier. Noble Lords should understand that this is not a silver bullet. I do not think we can expect a substantial change very soon, because we still have no rest-day working, as ASLEF will not allow it. Even if train drivers want to earn extra money, they cannot, because it is not being allowed. So it remains the case that only 80% of TPE’s drivers are fully trained, because there is a nearly 4,000-day backlog of training. Again, that cannot be done unless there is more flexibility within the train-driving community to allow that to be cleared, so it will take quite a long time, which is disappointing, but of course we hope to reset all relationships and move to a better future.
Bus Services: Covid-19 Emergency Funding
Lord Beith Excerpts(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The Government have committed to spend £3 billion over the course of this Parliament, so I suggest to the noble Lord that, when we get to the end of this Parliament, we do a totting up.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, are any funds for buses and trams on Tyneside being withheld until authorities north and south of the river agree to form a single authority?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
Yes, there is the question of that; the Government are not withholding the CRSTS funding per se, but we need the governance arrangements to be put into place, such that we are able to distribute that funding to them. We believe that discussions are continuing well.
Integrated Rail Plan: Northern Powerhouse Area
Lord Beith Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Lord Beith (LD)
I agree with the objectives of the integrated rail plan but, as far as the east and north-east of England are concerned, the plan fails to meet them. HS2 was never going to do much for the north-east and now, cut back, it will do virtually nothing for it. The plan leaves the east coast main line, in the words of the Railway Magazine, as the “withered arm” of the system.
In the plan, there are infrastructure improvements to the east coast line, but lack of capacity remains severely limiting to passenger and freight services for years to come. Why is there no commitment to reopening the Leamside line in County Durham? That would solve a significant capacity problem and allow for further development of local services. The report says that
“the case for re-opening the Leamside route would be best considered as part of any future city region settlement”.
What settlement? What city region? What plans do the Government have to bring this forward, and why would it not have been better to include this project in the integrated plan? In this respect, it is a disintegrated plan.
A further consequence of not doing enough to increase line capacity is that improvements to London services, and to cross-country and trans-Pennine ones, are dependent on robbing Peter to pay Paul—in other words, reducing services from some stations to speed up or accommodate more services from Edinburgh to London. The report says that journey times from London to York, the north-east and Edinburgh will be reduced by around 25 minutes “subject to stopping patterns”. We know what that means, because we saw it in LNER’s draft timetable, now delayed to 2023. It means reducing services and lengthening journey times from some stations, such as Berwick and Darlington—the very opposite of levelling up.
It appears that preparation for service reductions is already being made by LNER, with a major reduction in travel centre staffing hours and consequent redundancies. It is a very odd time to be doing this, not only in advance of decisions on the integrated rail plan but with the planned handover of responsibility for station staff from LNER to Great British Railways. They should surely leave decisions such as that until that transfer has taken place.
All the maps in the integrated rail plan show the east coast main line petering out north of Newcastle, ignoring the existence of Alnmouth and Berwick. That is a sad symbol for a serious weakness in the plan. In his introduction to the plan, Grant Shapps talks of a
“modern network for the whole country, benefiting small towns alongside big cities sooner than previous proposals”.
It does not look like that from the small town of Berwick, which is the real access point for the whole of the eastern borders, or from the cities of eastern England, especially Newcastle and Sunderland.
HS2, as planned, was primarily of benefit to Birmingham and the north-west, and that is even more the case since the eastern arm part of the plan was chopped back. While the north-west may benefit, on the eastern side of England we will still not even have adequate linkage to the area whose prosperity might well be improved by faster rail services. We will not be part of that, and this is not going to achieve levelling up.
Railways: East Coast Main Line
Lord Beith Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Beith
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with (1) Network Rail, and (2) Train Operating Companies, about the delay to the proposed East Coast Main Line timetable changes.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, the east coast main line is a crucial route for passengers and freight and is already playing a critical role in helping passengers return to rail, as well as leading the revenue recovery vital to restoring the financial health of the railway. The department holds weekly discussions with Network Rail and train operators, which are focused on modifying the original proposals in response to stakeholder feedback and mitigating outstanding risks to delivering the timetable reliably.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, the timetable was withdrawn by Network Rail because it could not be operated reliably on the existing infrastructure and because there was such a hostile public reaction from areas that faced fewer trains, longer journeys and no improvement in connectivity across the north. Now that there has been a welcome rethink, what guidance are Ministers giving in these meetings to the industry? Should the industry plan a simpler timetable, taking account of the limitations of the infrastructure, or should it assume that the limitations on the infrastructure will all be fixed?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, we are currently in the fairly early stages of the very complex discussions around the consultation. The noble Lord is quite right: when you ask the British public a question and for their feedback, they rightly give it. We have had over 10,000 responses to the consultation. While the feedback was balanced, views were polarised, and I am afraid that it is impossible to keep absolutely everybody happy. The discussions continue—as I said, they are on a weekly basis—and proposals will be coming to Ministers in due course.
Railways: East Coast Main Line
Lord Beith Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Beith
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with London North Eastern Railway about proposals to change the frequency of services north of Newcastle on the East Coast Main Line.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con) [V]
My Lords, my department has had regular discussions with London North Eastern Railway about the May 2022 timetable proposals for the east coast main line. LNER and the department are committed to improving services for passengers served by this important route, and I encourage all noble Lords with an interest to engage with LNER’s public consultation to ensure that their views are considered.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, the consultation document to which the Minister has referred says that the structure of the timetable for May 2022 is fixed, which leaves little opportunity for change to be made. Given that it involves halving Berwick-upon-Tweed’s hourly service to London to a train every two hours, with longer journey times, can she assure me that she will personally take steps to secure a proper review of these plans, which cannot be squared with the Government’s levelling-up agenda?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con) [V]
My Lords, the Rail Minister has challenged the department to investigate all options for increasing regional connectivity. It is the case that Berwick-upon-Tweed will retain its current level of service, but there will be a change to the balance of the services. Yes, there will be fewer fast trains to London, but there will be more services to the Midlands and the south-west on CrossCountry.