Lord Reid of Cardowan
Main Page: Lord Reid of Cardowan (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Reid of Cardowan's debates with the Department for Transport
(1 year, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberI am delighted to be able to tell the noble Lord that currently 90% of Avanti trains arrive within 15 minutes of their scheduled arrival time. That is up from 75% in early January. I am sure that noble Lords can see the trajectory. The dividend to which he refers related to a financial period to March 2021, well over two years ago now and not related to the current performance issues.
My Lords, I have been travelling on the west coast line for more than 40 years. Admittedly this is anecdotal, but my experience was that until Covid the service was actually quite good on Avanti. So was Virgin before Avanti. It was certainly better than the east coast line, quite apart from the fact that the east coast line went to Edinburgh whereas the west coast line went to the fair city of Glasgow.
Twice the Minister has mentioned infrastructure problems. Historically that was the problem with the east coast line, but there was sufficient investment to improve it. What is the nature of the infrastructure problems on the west coast line and why have they not been dealt with in the 13 years that the Government have been in charge?
The Government are putting record investment into our railway infrastructure. There are two issues around infrastructure. The first is the long-term plans that need to be put in place to upgrade it, but there are also short-term issues. For example, overnight there was cable theft at Wolverhampton. Cable theft is not Avanti’s fault, but it has caused some of its trains to be delayed this morning. We have to clamp down on the short-term problems but also continue to invest in the west coast main line, which is exactly what we are doing.