North of England: Transport

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the Minister to his new role. I am sure that we will be having many debates; I look forward to some wonderful answers, backed up by the occasional letter if he cannot answer at the time. This debate is really good; it has shown that all the local authorities between Liverpool and Humber—all the places in between and round about—have got together, which must be a first. That is fantastic. Maybe it will be the driver for rebalancing investment in transport, particularly in rail. As my noble friend Lord Beecham said, the ratio is probably 100:1 against the north in favour of the south-east at the moment, which is just crazy.

Looking at infrastructure and connectivity both within the regions and to them, the first issue that we have to remember is that it will not happen without any great economic growth in this area, which of course we hope for. I think that the Department for Transport forecast is that rail growth, passenger and freight, will double in 20 years. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. With all the ideas that noble Lords have come up with today, together with the congestion that we already see both on the network and within the coaches, which are too short and there are not enough of them, we have to remember that this congestion will double and therefore be twice as bad in 20 years unless something is done.

On the infrastructure, my experience is that the main lines to and from London have been upgraded over the years and are not bad but most of the other ones are in different states of maintenance, or sometimes decay, and the speed restrictions are sometimes pretty slow. There are capacity constraints on those lines already. When it comes to more trains, you are going to get longer trains and you will probably want more trains to different places, so even before we start talking about HS3 there is an awful lot of work to be done. I hope that the Minister can tell us how that is going to be done by Network Rail, what the timing and costs will be and who is planning it.

Then of course there is the question of electrification, which several noble Lords have mentioned. That may be being delayed but the problem with electrification, which is a good thing, is that when you reach the end of it, either you have to change trains, which people do not like, or there is a new idea of a passenger train with what I am told is 2 million AA batteries in one end that drive it for the last stretch from Manningtree into Harwich. It is working; I do not know whether or not it is value for money or whether it would not be cheaper to put the wires up, but we have to think about all these things in looking at the rolling stock.

The other important issue that has been touched on is connectivity. It seems that some of the HS2 stations in phase 3 are being built in the middle of nowhere in the hope that there will be lots of economic regeneration there. That might be the case but we have to think about whether it is better for the trains to go into the existing station so that you get better connectivity, even if they are not going quite so fast and have a diversion around the side, which is what happens in most other European countries. You do not usually have stations on the edge to encourage people to drive there; the whole point of this is probably to reduce the car mileage that is used.

On the question of rolling stock, I share my noble friend Lord Snape’s view that Pacers should be brought south to the Uckfield-Victoria line. I have said that before and I will say it again. More seriously, we have a problem. If electrification is late Members of Parliament and your Lordships will say that we were going to get new trains next year or before the next election and we will not be now. The only solution is more diesel multiple units. It would be very helpful if the Minister would tell us whether it is possible to build them within the new emissions limits. I do not blame Europe for this, because the emissions limits for rail diesel locomotives or diesel multiple units are still one notch lower than what most HGVs comply with. The industry has to comply; it says that it is very difficult to get the exhaust scrubbers to comply, but for whatever reason we need to know that new diesel multiple units can be ordered and built at a reasonable cost and comply with the latest rules. I hope the Minister can tell us something about that, because it is a very important element of people being able to have a reasonable journey—I hope sitting down, be it in a Pacer, the new District line trains with diesel engines that the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, mentioned, or whatever.

This will not happen overnight; we will not get new infrastructure overnight. It will take a long time, as my noble friend Lord Smith said in relation to HS2. We had the same argument when I was building the Channel Tunnel, because the French got permission in six weeks and we took three years. My colleague in France said, “If you want to build things quickly, don’t consult the Frogs”. There we are. It will take time and we will need more rolling stock in the process.

I will say just a word or two on freight. I am very pleased that the people running northern powerhouse transport are looking very carefully at rail freight. I hope that that is a precedent that can be used elsewhere if this comes to any other areas. However, we need to think about its demands for capacity, for gauge to take containers and resilience for passenger and freight. It is very easy to say, “There’s a track there; what happens if the thing goes wrong? You get on a bus”. I do not think that that is acceptable now. It certainly is not possible for freight. Immingham is, I think, the biggest port in the country. There is only one rail track into it. Another one could resolve the problem, because they had a derailment there about a year ago and the port was nearly closed for a week. That is not good for our import/export traffic. It really does need looking at.

The east-west traffic mentioned by my noble friend Lord Prescott is a really good growing potential if there is capacity. Biomass is coming into Liverpool now to go to Drax, which will partly substitute the reduction in coal that we all know about. In looking at emissions generally and the need to take more freight by rail, new ideas are starting now for more deliveries to city centres by rail into passenger stations—that started in a trial into Euston—and also for putting freight on to passenger trains in what we used to call guard’s vans on the 125s. It is already happening on the Midland Mainline between some of the cities in the north and central London for surprisingly new cargos such as medical samples—research into new drugs and everything—which they say is saving about three months in a year’s trial before these drugs are allowed on to the market.

It would be good to look at putting in a rail service that could take piggyback traffic across the Pennines, rather than have them grinding up on a motorway over a hill, or, probably worse still, going into a long tunnel, with all the pollution that that causes. All those things need to be built into a logistics plan. I was pleased that the Minister talked about a logistics plan, which I hope will look at all these things in the round.

I welcome this structure very much and hope that it happens reasonably quickly. That leads me on to other structures. Last week, the Chancellor said that the Midlands was the “engine for growth”. I do not know whether the engine is driving the northern powerhouse or the other way round; that was not quite clear to me. However, it does not really matter: the Chancellor has nailed his colours to the Midlands for, presumably, a similar project to the one we are talking about today in respect of the north. Therefore, I do not know whether we can have similar projects for other regions.

It occurred to me that one very important region which could do with a bit of help is Cornwall, where I live. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, comes from there as well. The economy there is not good. The expenditure on rail is only £41 per head, which is probably even lower than everywhere else. Passenger rail traffic is growing but we are still faced with a lack of resilience on the Dawlish section of the railway. It is a very beautiful section but it gets closed occasionally. Network Rail did a very good job in reinstating it but it will never have the resilience of the rest of the network due to the presence of a very high hillside there, and it is structurally unstable. Given that more than 2 million people rely on one non-resilient railway line, something needs to be done. What is the Government’s position on this? Network Rail came up with options for a tunnel or reopening the Okehampton-Tavistock line, which would open up access to the railway for much of the population of Devon and north Cornwall. In fact, this week the CPRE has argued a persuasive case for “un-Beeching” the south-west railway line. I do not think the relevant report was drawn up for our debate, as it concerns the wrong end of the country for the purposes of this debate, but it is worth reading. I hope Ministers will take it seriously.

I wonder whether the Prime Minister would be keen to improve the connectivity of the south-west because he goes to Cornwall quite often. Indeed, his wife had a baby there. He clearly loves Cornwall and did a lot of campaigning there before the election, with very good results for him. He is so keen on Cornwall that last year, when he was in a café eating a sandwich and a seagull is reported to have removed it, he immediately offered a quarter of a million pounds to initiate a programme of seagull genocide. If he can do that, he really must love Cornwall. Perhaps it is time for the Government to make Cornwall the second or third hub—that is, a south-western hub—as everybody else seems to be getting one.