Inter-City Rail Investment

Debate between Martin Vickers and Kelvin Hopkins

Thursday 9th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins), who always speaks so knowledgeably about railway matters.

I join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Ian Swales) on securing the debate. It has given us an opportunity to praise the Government for a remarkable and very welcome increase in funding for our rail network—a network which, since privatisation, has seen a staggering increase in passenger numbers and in the amount of freight carried. It has also given Members an opportunity to argue in favour of yet more investment in their constituencies, or, at the very least, the transfer of some of the existing resources to their own areas. I shall say more about that shortly.

My hon. Friend the Member for Redcar spoke of the importance of connections to London and, indeed, to other areas. My constituency suffers badly as a result of its lack of such connections. There was a time, in living memory, when it was possible to get on to a train in Cleethorpes and travel to other major cities such as Leeds, Birmingham and Leicester. I know that Ministers are fully aware of the importance of good transport links to the economic development of all parts of the country, but I must emphasise their importance to more peripheral areas such as northern Lincolnshire.

The Government have recognised the importance of northern Lincolnshire and the wider Humber region as a major centre for the renewable sector, and have demonstrated their commitment to the area by creating the largest enterprise zone in the country and providing support through the recently signed Humber city deal. More recently, the Department for Transport gave Able UK permission to go ahead with its South Humber energy park and associated developments, which should provide thousands of new jobs. That is all good news, but if we are to maximise the benefits to the area, we shall need improved rail connections.

The main passenger services to northern Lincolnshire are provided by First TransPennine Express. There is a good hourly service between Cleethorpes and Manchester airport in each direction, which, with stops at Doncaster and Sheffield, connects with the wider network, but changes are inconvenient and add to journey times. Let me give a couple of examples. Last autumn, I attended the annual dinner of the Grimsby and Immingham Chamber of Commerce and Shipping. One of the guests was the Finnish Ambassador, who expressed his surprise at how long it had taken him to travel to Grimsby from London. Another example can be found in an article in The Sunday Times on 29 December. The journalist A. A. Gill travelled to Cleethorpes last October and in his article he says that he could have flown from London to Moscow quicker than it took him to get from London to Cleethorpes.

The Grimsby-Cleethorpes area needs more direct train services, particularly to London, in order to achieve the full economic potential I mentioned. To give an historical perspective, until 1970 there were two direct trains between the Grimsby-Cleethorpes area and London via the then east Lincolnshire line through Louth, Boston and Spalding through to Peterborough and on to the main line. I remember travelling on the last service train on 4 October 1970. The service fell at long last after a seven-year fight; it was sacrificed to the Beeching plan.

For the following 22 years we retained direct services to London. They ran via Market Rasen and Lincoln. That remains one of the options for a new franchise-holder. Certainly improvements are needed on that line, which is the Cleethorpes to Lincoln line. Most of the services are provided by a single car unit.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Beeching, and there are still a large number of corridors that are unused. Does he agree that it is vital to protect those corridors for possible future use, when, hopefully, we invest in even more railways than we have now?

[Martin Vickers]

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman and I think that even people who were connected with producing the Beeching plan have since acknowledged that the closure of the east Lincolnshire line was a marginal decision at the time and certainly in today’s climate it would not have been closed. Unfortunately, however, at various points that line has now been blocked off and it would take billions of pounds to reinstate it.

I was mentioning the services on the Lincoln-Cleethorpes line provided by a single unit. When passengers get on the conductor says. “When we reach Market Rasen, passengers will have to stand. Please make sure that all seats are clear.” East Midlands Trains acknowledges that the service it provides with that single unit is inadequate, but apparently there is such a shortage of units that it is unable to improve on it.

The Government have an excellent record on electrification. Electrification of the route from Manchester to Sheffield is edging nearer and the possible extension through to Doncaster is being considered. If that becomes a reality, which it must, then completion of the final 50 miles into Immingham, Grimsby and Cleethorpes must surely be worthy of inclusion.

Immingham is a major centre for railways; indeed, it was the railways that built it. It was a creation of the Great Central Railway just over 100 years ago in 1912. Today, measured by tonnage, around 25% of the freight moved by rail starts or ends its journey in Immingham, much of it of strategic importance—oil, coal and the like. That, together with the growing potential for passenger traffic, must make a case for, at the very least, a feasibility study into the viability of electrification of the final section of the south Trent-TransPennine line, the Doncaster to Immingham and Cleethorpes section.

Despite considerable capital investment over recent years the main route from Cleethorpes to Doncaster, which covers just 50 miles, takes 70 minutes. We must do better than that, particularly since we describe the trains on that route as TransPennine Expresses.

In this afternoon’s earlier debate on rural communities I heard my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) refer to the Saturdays-only service from Sheffield through Gainsborough and Brigg to Cleethorpes. This line was the Great Central main line and yet it has come to this—a once-a-week service. It provides a shocking service not only for my hon. Friend’s rural community, as he said, but for the industrial centres around Immingham and Grimsby and for the east coast premier seaside resort of Cleethorpes.