Lord Jordan debates involving the Department for Transport during the 2019 Parliament

West Coast Main Line

Lord Jordan Excerpts
Wednesday 2nd November 2022

(1 year, 4 months ago)

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Baroness Vere of Norbiton Portrait Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
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Yes, I know that the noble Viscount is a great champion of freight. The west coast main line is a key corridor for rail freight, particularly between the deep seaports and the distribution hubs both in the Midlands and across the country. Indeed, the industry estimates that about 90% of all intermodal trains use the west coast main line for part of their journey—that is, 90,000 trains a year—so that is also great for emissions reduction. We want to keep rail freight moving. We understand that this can be challenging when there are engineering works, and we take that into consideration. Where there is strike action, we do our best to communicate with the freight sector to ensure that it can plan accordingly.

Lord Jordan Portrait Lord Jordan (Lab)
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My Lords—

Lord Goddard of Stockport Portrait Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)
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It is the turn of this side; noble Lords from other parties have had three questions on the trot.

Can the Minister be brought back to the here and now? There should have been a national strike tomorrow; it has been transferred to next week, which is the run-up to Remembrance Sunday. On Monday, there is rail strike and a Tube strike; on Tuesday, there are no tickets for sale for the north on Avanti trains; and on Wednesday, there is a national strike. I spoke to the manager of the Union Jack Club this morning, who told me that this is going to have devasting effects on bookings by people trying to come down for Remembrance Sunday. So what can the Government do to stop this indiscriminate guerrilla strike action that is bringing misery to hundreds of thousands of people at the very time of remembrance? This is a time when people want to remember the freedoms we got from people who died in the First and Second World Wars and other conflicts throughout the world: freedom to move, freedom to associate with each other and freedom to come to remembrances. These union barons must be held to account for at a whim changing these strikes to make it more difficult for people to travel at times when they need to travel—it has to stop.

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Baroness Vere of Norbiton Portrait Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
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My noble friend is absolutely right: there are capacity constraints on the west coast main line that impact both passengers and freight. It is also the case that the west coast main line is fairly old, and therefore engineering works are necessary; that caused some disruption between 22 and 30 October. So he is absolutely right that we must continue to invest in our railways, and that is what the Government are doing.

Lord Jordan Portrait Lord Jordan (Lab)
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My Lords, is the Minister aware that the promises made by Avanti to run three trains an hour from London to Birmingham have not been honoured, and, worse still, that it is now running only one train an hour between two of the country’s largest cities? Could she tell us why—despite making surely the understatement of the year that the performance of Avanti trains was dreadful—its contract was extended?

Baroness Vere of Norbiton Portrait Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
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I am not entirely sure where the noble Lord gets those figures from, because my understanding is that on weekdays between 7 am and 9 am—for example, between Birmingham and London—the services are actually at pre-pandemic levels. Of course, there have been changes to the timetable at some other points, but that is very much down to changes in travel habits, such that the system needs to have a demand-led timetable so that we can ensure that people can travel when they need to.

Smart Motorways

Lord Jordan Excerpts
Thursday 13th February 2020

(4 years, 1 month ago)

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Lord Jordan Portrait Lord Jordan (Lab)
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My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, on the way in which she has introduced this subject. I declare an interest as deputy president of RoSPA. When the first smart motorway experiment opened on the M42 in 2006, it showed great potential for improving the situation caused by the growing congestion on Britain’s motorways. Using technology, new techniques were developed to better manage the increasing volumes of traffic. Warning systems eased and even averted traffic jams, alerted motorists to congestion points and proved invaluable in emergency situations.

These improvements led Sir Mike Penning, former government Minister and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Roadside Rescue and Recovery, to approve the 2010 rollout of the smart motorway programme. But the developers of the system allowed their quest for more speed and more capacity to eclipse the need for safety by giving the go-ahead to permanently converting the hard shoulder into running lanes on around 300 miles of motorway. The all-lane-running motorway had arrived.

The consequences of that ill-thought-out decision were vividly illustrated in the BBC’s recent “Panorama” programme, which revealed—as the noble Baroness has said—that 38 people have been killed in the past five years on the UK’s smart motorway network. The all-lane-running policy is the fatal flaw in the smart motorway system. The Minister will hear this theme running through many of the contributions. It has made the job of the emergency rescue services infinitely more difficult. It increases the risk of breaking down in a live lane and, as we have heard, even the police have branded the scheme a death-trap.

All motorists who have ever driven on a motorway fear the possibility of their vehicle suddenly losing power, but reassure themselves that they have a good chance of reaching the safe haven of the hard shoulder. Unfortunately, all four types of smart motorway that have been introduced have, in varying degrees, removed that haven of the hard shoulder for a motorist in distress. In an RAC survey last November, 68% of drivers in England thought removing the hard shoulder put people whose vehicle breaks down at greater risk. These fears are well founded, as a freedom of information request sent by “Panorama” to Highways England revealed that on one section of the M25 the number of near-misses has risen twentyfold since the hard shoulder was removed in April 2014.

While we in the safety industry think the Government’s decision not to open the M20 and other stretches of road as smart motorways is a step in the right direction, 38 avoidable deaths tell us that this is not enough. Regrettably, unless further remedial action is taken, more people will die. We are told by the Government that an imminent review is expected to recommend a major overhaul of the smart motorways scheme. That is welcome. In that exercise I ask the Government to reach out and embrace the expertise and experience of the road safety industry. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents can and will play its part. We should remember that lives are in danger on more than 200 miles of smart motorway in the UK now, so I ask the Minister to urge her colleagues in the Government to take time to bring in the things that will make our motorways safer and more effective, but to lose no time in removing the things that are making our motorways kill.