East Anglia Rail Franchise

Lord Haselhurst Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Haselhurst (Saffron Walden) (Con)]

I join in the congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) on giving us the opportunity to emphasise the rail needs of our region and on our having had the good fortune of the extended time for debate. A clear demonstration is being made in the House by the presence of her colleagues, and we are all united in understanding how badly we feel we have been let down over the years.

I do not want to be too hard on Department for Transport Ministers, because we have moved on considerably from a situation where the then Government took a dumbed-down approach during a previous franchise. In effect, they said to applicants, “We want you to do it cheaply.” As my hon. Friend said, new rolling stock is key, and although it is not made mandatory in the invitation to tender, it has been made clear that that is what is expected of bidders. In response to my question the other day about whether the bounty being received by two franchises in the north was a signal to what our bidders should be doing, the Secretary of State said emphatically and in a single word, “Yes.” We therefore have some cause to be hopeful and it will be appalling if we are let down on that, because the time has come.

Strictly speaking, if we are talking of a franchise, we should be majoring on the rolling stock, because that is what the operating company is going to be primarily concerned with. My interest in the Great Eastern line is not as extensive or as long-standing as that of some other colleagues, because until boundary changes took place in 2010 I did not have a significant number of constituents who used the line—but I do now.

We must not forget the West Anglia line, which of course serves the region’s major airport, which is described as the third London airport. It is amazing to think that even after the decision in 1985 to establish that airport on the scale that has been achieved, nothing has been done to improve the railway line. When that decision on the airport was taken, it was necessary then to build a spur track to the airport to allow some kind of service to be delivered.

A private Bill had to be promoted by British Rail, as it was then, in order for that to happen. I followed the normal procedure in such circumstances of tabling a blocking motion. As one does, I hoped that such a motion would cause the promoter of the Bill to come to talk about what might appease me. I said that new rolling stock would, and I was told, “Fine, done.” I therefore had great expectations. That rolling stock was to have been the type 321, which now comprise a substantial part of the rolling stock on the Great Eastern line. We were deprived of it because DFT officials, and, I suspect, the Treasury behind them, had gone over things with a tape measure to see how many people could be crammed into this tube of metal. The result was that the design interior was worse in the first-class compartments than in the standard class. That became an outrage, and the whole lot had to be taken away and re-engineered. It then reappeared on the Great Eastern line, but these trains, too, are tired now.

The rolling stock that came on the West Anglia line after that fiasco was the type 317. Type 317s do not have fitted to them what are politely called “container tanks”, and use of the lavatory on those trains is pretty crude so far as disposal is concerned. Their reliability is terrible, and the acceleration capacity of the type 321 trains is inadequate for the sort of track improvements that we can hope to get. We will not get the extra track that we need and that we would like on both rail lines—that will not come soon—so the new trains, which are needed for comfort and capacity reasons, must be able to use the advantage of crossings being taken out to take minutes off their various journeys. That is what we are looking for, and that is what the bidders must come up with.

We can take some comfort from the fact that Crossrail 1 will come into operation in a year or two’s time, which will bring some relief to passengers on the southern end of the Great Eastern line, and there is a glimmer of hope that Crossrail 2 might also feature to build the business case for the West Anglia main line.

As we know from experience and from what our constituents tell us, we cannot run fast trains and slow trains on a two-track system, so the relationship between the successful bidder for this franchise and the infrastructure company is crucial. One hopes that the Department will try to ensure that the relationship works better than it has done in the past. We do not want to hear, “Well, the trains were all right, but it was the points, the signals or the overhead wires that went.” Both things have to be right, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds was right to emphasise that.

Understandably, we are promoting the case for expenditure for the benefit of our constituents, but what is important is that improvements benefit the whole line—whether we are talking about the short journey to Shenfield, the fast journey to Chelmsford, or the journeys to Ipswich, Norwich, Stansted airport or Cambridge. Even the intervening stations need a better service. What struck me quite recently was that the sector of London through which our lines pass has been the most neglected part of the city, so it too would benefit from investment in this line and the whole new service approach.

I hope that the demonstrable unity we have shown tonight—there is no difference in view on party lines or on whether we represent inner London, mid-London, outer London or the coast—proves that we speak with a united voice, which I hope is heard very clearly in the Department.