Payments to Train Operating Companies

Lord Walney Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I do not have that figure with me, but I will certainly write to the noble Lord with further details around Network Rail’s expectations for the coming years.

[Lord Walney (CB)]

Does the reduction in passengers, which the Minister says may well be structural, not further endanger the investment case for HS2?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I do not think that is the case. Obviously there are various scenarios which we consider when we look at HS2. It is a very long-term strategic system. It connects many of our major cities across the country and, provided that we get local transport integrated with that investment with HS2, it will be successful.

Electric Vehicles: Charging Points

Lord Walney Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I would have thought that the users would be paying for the electricity that they consume, but if people want to offer electricity for free, they are perfectly at liberty to do so.

[Lord Walney (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister recognise that the reliability of the charging points, particularly on the motorway network, is a real problem? Has she had a chance to consider the idea that I put forward a couple of months back about increasing the penalties on providers, so that they are properly punished and incentivised to provide a decent service to EV motorists?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

This links into the measures that we announced in December 2021, when we said we were looking at a mandate for new standards for reliability. Obviously, if there are new standards for reliability, there will have to be penalties if companies do not meet those standards.

Electric Vehicle Charge Points

Lord Walney Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The noble Lord is stretching my technical knowledge at this point. I am sure that those things are being considered. Obviously, the Government are working closely with the industry on the design of charging points, because we want to make sure that they are accessible and do not obstruct the pavement—and we have seen much innovation in the area.

[Lord Walney (CB)]

It is good that the Minister acknowledges the problem of reliability, which is a particular issue on the motorway network. Does the suite of her responses include increasing fines for companies when their charge points are out, which is all too common? They need a greater incentive to comply.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

That, of course, is a very serious consideration: we need to make sure that companies do not just stick up a charge point and then leave it there unmaintained and, therefore, unreliable. We will be considering all options as we respond to the consultation.

Integrated Rail Plan: North and Midlands

Lord Walney Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The work on Leeds mass transit will be driven by West Yorkshire Combined Authority. It will be its plan, but we will support it on that and ensure that we can get the best possible outcome for the people of Leeds in terms of getting mass transit in place. As the noble Baroness knows, West Yorkshire Combined Authority received a very good settlement from the CRSTS. As that extends for only five years and this will need longer development than that, we commit to continue working with the authority on the mass transit system.

The noble Baroness mentioned rail freight. She is right that this does not leap out of the pages of the IRP, but it is not really supposed to. Rail freight is absolutely a feature of the Williams-Shapps rail review and the work we are doing there. As we put in place Great British Railways, we will focus on national co-ordination of rail freight, again looking for projects to make sure that this can happen as easily as possible.

As I have mentioned numerous times, this is not the end and there are other projects that could be added to this to improve it. We will introduce a new, rules-based track access regime with a statutory underpinning for freight and open-access operators. Essentially, we want to maximise the usage of a very extensive and expensive national asset. Rail freight is at the core of much of what we are doing on the railways, as well as many of our wider discussions on freight.

[Lord Walney (CB)]

My Lords, as has been said, reduced passenger numbers are mentioned at a number of points in the document as justification for some of the changes. Can the Minister confirm whether changed modelling in predictions of journeys has been part of that? If that has not been locked into the numbers, or if there is so much uncertainty over those numbers, does that not mean that there is a grave risk that even the reduced expansion which was announced last week could be further reduced if hybrid working creates more of a structured change in passenger flows than previously thought?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The noble Lord raises a really important question. I have stood at this Dispatch Box and been asked many times how we will change capacity based on what has happened post Covid. We are confident that things will continue to change and that we will see greater usage. We are also quite sure that that usage may not look exactly the same as it did.

One of the biggest issues with the old plan was that it was not properly integrated with other local, regional and national transport networks. We think we can do that much better. Detailed modelling and up-to-date forecasting will happen whenever a business case goes through its various stages. I would not expect any wholesale changes, but this may lead us to think about what infill and other schemes we might consider in order to maximise our initial investment in the IRP. That might be something we should look at in light of future forecasts for demand.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Walney Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

6. What recent estimate he has made of the resources required to implement his Department’s cycling and walking investment strategy.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Ind)]

16. What recent estimate he has made of the resources required to implement his Department’s cycling and walking investment strategy.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Michael Ellis)]

Spending on cycling and walking in England has doubled from £3.50 per head to around £7 per head over the current spending review period. The Government estimate that around £2 billion will have been spent on measures to implement the strategy between 2016 to 2021 alone.

[Michael Ellis]

I am always very happy to meet the hon. Gentleman. I would point out, however, that as well as the doubling of investment in cycling and walking and the £2 billion, we channel money from the Department for Transport and the Government to local authorities such as his so that there is even more money for them to allocate to cycling and walking.

[John Woodcock]

But will the Minister publish the evidence his Department has commissioned? Surely that will show that the current levels of investment will not be sufficient to meet the target. When he recognises that, will he direct his attention to the disused railway that Highways England wants to turn into a cycle lane between Ulverston canal and Greenodd roundabout?

Rail Timetabling

Lord Walney Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

We will do that. I will ask the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), to sit down with my hon. Friend and go through this to make sure that we address some of the timetable anomalies that inevitably come out of a big change like this, which are not just short-term issues but actually structural issues in the timetable.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Ind)]

Yes, of course the timetable changes have been a total fiasco, but does the Secretary of State not understand that people in Furness in Cumbria have been begging him for months to get to grips with this appalling situation? Before Northern took on the full franchise, there were 103 cancellations in a year on the Furness line. Last year, there were 212. Then, in the financial year that has just finished, there were 517—and that was before the timetable changes. Will he stop treating my constituents as though they have got the fag end of what is a pretty horrendous deal right across the country and take this situation seriously, starting tonight?

Northern Rail Timetable Changes

Lord Walney Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Ind)]

Thank you for allowing me to speak briefly in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. I also thank the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) for letting me do so and congratulate him on securing the debate. I promise to be brief, as I did when securing the opportunity to speak. Let me try to distil how urgently we are calling on the Government to intervene on the issue of Northern rail. The timetable issue is very significant and the hon. Gentleman set it out cogently. It is simply not acceptable that Network Rail’s failure to deliver on time is causing such carnage right across the north of England, for his constituents and mine.

Let me briefly set out the situation we have seen this week as a result of the change in the timetables. This May was supposed to be the moment when, after the months of suffering that my constituents have been through because of totally inadequate services from Northern, all of the jam arrived. We were supposed to have new carriages and an improved timetable, and then it would all have been worth while.

Yesterday, however, constituents were getting in touch with me to show the situation at Ulverston station. At school leaving time, 3.15 pm to 3.20 pm, children who now have to leave school early to get on to these services because of the changed timetable—that damages their education—turned up to find a single-carriage train coming from Lancaster. It was already full, but there were an estimated 200 students at Ulverston station, at least 50 of whom were left behind. The following train was cancelled. There is a clear safeguarding issue here.

It is vital the Government take heed of the situation. We have been urging the Minister’s colleagues to take this up for months. There are finally signs that they are waking up to the travesty of Northern rail’s services, but will the Minister please take back the message that we are experiencing a truly dire situation on the Furness line, up the Cumbria coastline and on the Windermere line in Cumbria, all of which are now operated by Northern? Not only are schoolchildren affected, but passengers are absolutely at their wits’ end and local businesses are clearly being damaged by the lack of reliability.

I understand that the Secretary of State said this week that Northern rail’s failures were now his No. 1 priority—well, okay, after all this time we will take him at his word, but it is vital that he delivers on this. There are things that can be done, not least because the performance is so bad that it is surely time for the Department formally to investigate whether Northern is meeting its basic customer service obligations. What can be done to unlock this deadlock with Network Rail? How can we get back to the kind of service that people pay top whack for and are simply not getting?

Rail Update

Lord Walney Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We get caught up in the biggest projects, but sometimes the smaller ones—even a bit of track realignment in places—can make the biggest difference. I hope to do big things, such as the trans-Pennine upgrade, but also smaller things at, for instance, Ashford, where we are trying to improve the situation for passengers.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

As the Secretary of State will know, the Cumbria coastline and the Furness line are giving a dire performance at the moment. It is disappointing that Cumbria was not mentioned in the strategy. Will he ask the Rail Minister, the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), to meet us to discuss what can be done about the 50-year-old locomotives that are breaking down and annoying residents, the terrible state of the rolling stock, and the awful standard of reliability? There is an urgent need to fix all that, otherwise there will be significant damage to the economy.

[Chris Grayling]

I am delighted to be able to remind the hon. Gentleman that we are scrapping all those trains on that route and getting new ones. We are also introducing better services, including Sunday services. All that is being rolled out now. We have a partnership with the Labour leaderships in the councils of the north and Transport for the North, and we have been working side by side to shape the new franchise and the replacements for the rail fleets, for which the Government are paying. Those trains are on order, and the first new trains are now entering service in the northern networks and the trans-Pennine network. Every single train in the north of England on every single route is being replaced—either completely refurbished as new, or scrapped. The old Pacer trains on the Cumbrian coastline, which should have been scrapped years ago and were not under Labour, are being scrapped by us now.

Transport in the North

Lord Walney Excerpts

Monday 6th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) on securing this debate. It is a real pleasure and very worth while to follow not only my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson), but so many Members who are speaking from coastal areas in the north. Very often, this debate is characterised by the need for the main cities to be connected up, but of course there are many areas in urgent need of economic development.

As a Parliament, we have to decide what kind of country we want to represent. Is it one in which certain areas get more and more prosperous while others are left to wither, or is it one—I hope that everyone in the Chamber wants this—in which we value communities that are more cut-off from other areas and in which we want to invest in transport to change that? Other areas are obviously not as enticing and attractive as Barrow-in-Furness in my constituency. Nevertheless, they form part of an important economic case.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) for making the case for economic development. We urgently need the Government to change the way in which they make these calculations. We are not talking about a “Field of Dreams”, Kevin Costner-style, “If we build it, they will come” situation. There are already clear economic plans and potential in these areas, but that potential needs to be unlocked. If the Minister and the Government want to relieve congestion in overheated areas in the longer term, they should bring up the economic development of the north of England so that people have more economic opportunities to go elsewhere, rather than feeling that they must be sucked down into the overcrowded, over-congested hell holes that some Members in the south are unfortunate enough to have to represent.

I will confine the rest of my remarks to the need for transport infrastructure, development and investment in Barrow and Furness, and the south and west of Cumbria. I will take the unusual step of speaking on behalf of the hon. Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison), who has ironically not been able to get to this debate due to chronic delays in her journey getting down here. She and I are as one in advocating the need for road and rail improvements to connect what can be world-class civil nuclear jobs in the west of Cumbria, with Sellafield and its international decommissioning role, Moorside—the Minister knows from his previous role the importance of keeping the Moorside deal on track—and military nuclear in the submarine programme.

Going back to the Minister’s previous experience, I have met him on the way up to, I assumed, the Moorside and west Cumbria area, so he will know about the appalling transport links between what ought to be a global centre of nuclear excellence. I challenge any other Member to intervene and tell me a worse case than that between Sellafield and BAE Systems. It is ostensibly an A-road going through a farmyard—a single track connecting these two areas of global nuclear excellence. It has to be fixed. We need more clarity from the Government on the major road network, how it will add to the strategic road network and how we will be able to bid.

In my final 40 seconds, let me focus on rail and on the state of the Cumbrian coastal line and the Furness line. We are in utterly dire straits. I have tabled an official question today to deal with one aspect of the catastrophe of the terrible unreliability of the Furness line—the dire need for rolling stock. Almost daily, children are left unable to get home. We need bus services, and we need urgent investment in this line. I hope the Minister listens to us.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Lord Walney Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

It is my habit to be influenced by Members of the House during the course of debates. That may sound unconventional, but I actually take Members’ contributions in debates such as this extremely seriously, and I think that that is a very good point. I am happy to have discussions about that with my colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government. There are issues about the inconsistent provision of on-street charging. That is partly due to planning, and partly due to the fact that some local authorities are more willing than others to install charging points. It is a discretionary matter for planners at the moment, but it does seem to me to be entirely appropriate to consider some of the things that the hon. Lady has suggested, so I am more than happy to have such discussions.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

While the Minister is in an open frame of mind, will he look not simply at the lack of on-street provision, but at the unreliability of the network at the moment? If he has regularly driven in an electric car, he may well, like so many of us, have had the experience of coming into a motorway service station and finding that the charger is not working and that there is no 24-hour help, which for people whose battery is down to zero is a very significant problem. He may also have had experience of the fact that there are myriad different companies and that many of the providers’ systems are not interoperable and do not allow access when people arrive at a service station. A Government who are going to frame such a market could easily intervene and improve this situation.

[Mr Hayes]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has had early sight of my speech—if he did, he is even more remarkable than I regarded him previously—but I was about to come on to the principal reasons people cite for not buying electric cars. The first is the up-front cost, which will of course come down as volumes grow. As he will know, the Government already contribute considerable amounts of money—again, I will speak a bit more about that later—to offsetting some of that cost. The second is battery reliability, and people’s doubts about the technology that is driving electric vehicles. The third is the charging infrastructure, as he described, which is precisely why the Bill addresses that point. It is vital to put in place a charging infrastructure that is widely available and consistent, and that works. He described the circumstance in which someone who might otherwise have bought an electric vehicle is put off from doing so because they are not confident that the infrastructure is as good as it should be, and that is precisely why the Government are addressing this matter in the Bill. We have the chance to debate it tonight and beyond tonight during the Bill’s consideration.