Queen’s Speech

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, in my speech this afternoon I intend to concentrate on transport, with particular reference to the gracious Speech’s very welcome confirmation that the Government are proceeding with a paving Bill to allow work to proceed on plans for the construction of High Speed 2. I wish them well with that and with the hybrid Bill, which I hope may pass before the end of this Parliament.

I should remind the House of my relevant interests. I serve as an unpaid member of First Great Western’s stakeholder advisory board. I am president of the Cotswold Line Promotion Group and the Heritage Railway Association. I am also the co-author of a recently published book called Holding The Line: How Britain’s Railways Were Saved, which contains a political and social history of the railways, particularly since the publication of the Beeching report 50 years ago.

Perhaps I may start by picking up a theme that runs through that book. It is sometimes hard to recall how massive the turnaround in the public’s attitude to rail travel and the fortunes of the industry has been. In the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, the railways appeared to be in terminal decline. The process of retrenchment and cost-cutting, which had started at the time of Beeching, appeared remorseless and inexorable. Numerous plans were hatched to reduce the size of the network further by line closures, cuts in services and fare increases.

Governments of both parties encouraged plans to substitute buses for rail services, particularly in rural areas. Weird enthusiasts for the Railway Conversion League were listened to as they put forward plans to concrete over the railways and turn them into busways. Thirty years ago, it looked as though the lobbyists for the road industry, road haulage and motorway construction might achieve their final victory. Back in 1960, the Road Haulage Association felt able to say in its journal, The World’s Carriers:

“We should build more roads, and we should have fewer railways … We must exchange the ‘permanent way’ of life for the ‘motorway’ of life ... road transport is the future, the railways are the past”.

Happily, it did not get its way because the public decided that they liked their railways and did not want them closed. By 2001, the distinguished City correspondent, Christopher Fildes, who served on the Railway Heritage Committee with me and was a journalistic colleague of the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, was able to write in the Spectator:

“Railways are a growth industry. Their most sustained attempts to drive away their customers have not succeeded”.

Twelve years on, the growth continues. In 2012, the total number of rail passengers exceeded 1.5 billion, compared with 630 million in 1982. Numbers grew by 5.5% in 2012, 7.2% in 2011 and 7.9% in 2010. The number of those travelling in the last quarter of 2012 was the highest for any quarter since the 1920s. It will not have escaped the attention of your Lordships that much of this has been achieved at a time of recession and in the face of fare increases above the rate of inflation, as my noble friend Lady Hayter pointed out. On 11 March, Sir David Higgins, chief executive of Network Rail, said in a speech at the Campaign for Better Transport conference in the Science Museum that,

“utilities such as airports and power have seen annual compound growth rates of no more than 1 per cent on average, yet rail has grown by 5 per cent compound every year”.

As people’s experiences of travelling by rail and the reliability of services improve, this growth is likely to continue. The West Midlands Regional Rail Forum says that Network Rail’s growth forecast for 2021-22 has already been achieved eight years early and it is a similar story elsewhere. Both the west coast main line and the east coast main line will reach capacity before the end of this decade. In the case of the west coast main line, that will be less than 15 years after the completion of one of the most disruptive and expensive upgrades of all time.

I do not understand how anyone can seriously argue that spending another £20 billion-plus on upgrading these two Victorian railways and disrupting services for years at a time, and in the end producing infrastructure that cannot support line speeds that are commonplace throughout Europe and the Far East, stands any sort of comparison with the benefits that will flow from building High Speed 2. To argue, as the HS2 opponents do, that the new line is only about reductions in journey time between London and Birmingham is completely wrong and misses the point. It is about revitalising the economies of towns and cities in the Midlands and the north of England, and narrowing the north-south divide. It is about giving the railway the opportunity to satisfy the ever-growing demand for passenger travel. It is about reducing the number of car journeys and short-haul air passenger flights, both of which will have significant environmental benefits.

Perhaps equally important, High Speed 2 will—according to the WSP engineering consultancy—lead to 500,000 fewer heavy goods vehicle journeys on the M1, the M40 and the M6, which is the equivalent of 65,000 tonnes of CO₂. The new railway will produce environmental benefits worth £1.3 billion over 60 years. For all those reasons, I am happy to reaffirm my unqualified support for High Speed 2, which is a rare example of a brilliant idea conceived by one Administration—thanks to my noble friend Lord Adonis—and then picked up and developed by their successor.

Before I conclude, there is one other matter that I wish to bring to the attention of the Minister. I have already given her notice of my intention to raise it in this debate. This is also a non-party issue in the sense that the previous Government took the initial decision and this one are sticking with it. I am talking about the western terminus of Crossrail, which is a hugely important and valuable project capable of transforming the travel-to-work experience of hundreds of thousands of commuters, as the noble Lord, Lord Deighton, said in his opening speech.

On 5 March, a number of Members of the other place and of this House, including the noble Earl, Lord Attlee—who I am very pleased to see in his place—and I visited the site of the new Crossrail station at Bond Street. The following week, I was taken by First Great Western on a tour of the new station at Reading. I was particularly interested to see included in the new arrangements a platform designed to accommodate four Crossrail trains an hour, should it be decided at some stage that Reading should be the western terminus, rather than Maidenhead. To me, and to almost everyone in the industry and outside it who understands these issues, it is intuitively self-evident that, following the Government’s welcome decision to authorise electrification of the Great Western main line, it is to Reading that the Crossrail trains should run.

I also learnt that we are within days of starting work in Maidenhead to construct the turnback facilities, taking around 18 months and costing as much as £35 million. I wrote to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, on 18 March, making the point that if the decision was to be taken later to extend Crossrail to Reading, much of the new infrastructure at Maidenhead would not be needed and the Government and Transport for London would be criticised for wasting money. The Minister replied to me last week and I thank him for his letter. It contained the sentence:

“Officials will continue to work with Network Rail and the train operators on the timetabling issues presented by the introduction of Crossrail services on the Great Western Mainline”.

It did not, unfortunately, state that there would be any pause in the work at Maidenhead.

I raise this issue today because we are at the point where a decision must be made to prevent money being wasted at Maidenhead and to deliver a far better arrangement in its place. I understand that various discussions are going on behind the scenes involving Transport for London, Network Rail, the train operators and the Crossrail team. I ask that DfT Ministers get directly involved and help deliver a solution that makes best sense all round. I hope the noble Baroness will have an answer to that when she replies.