Public Transport: North Staffordshire

Aaron Bell Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Westminster Hall

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour, the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), on having secured this important debate. He is right to say that our public transport in north Staffordshire is simply not good enough.

The market town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, which I have the privilege to represent, is not part of Stoke-on-Trent. Stoke-on-Trent has a unitary council, whereas we are administered by our borough council and Staffordshire County Council. However, the market town is very much part of the wider conurbation. We have the A500—or, as the locals call it, the D road—to separate us from the city centre, but many of the same issues that my hon. Friend has raised about bus services in Stoke-on-Trent apply equally to my constituency, and us all working together to press for the improvements we need is clearly the right approach.

On top of the similar issues we face with our bus network in Newcastle, we do not have a railway station of our own. Newcastle-under-Lyme station, which was on the old line to Market Drayton, was closed in 1964 as part of the Beeching axe. I believe that makes us the third-largest town in the country without a railway station of our own. Most of my constituents therefore rely on Stoke-on-Trent station for their connections to the main line rail network, but their having to do so is itself a contributor to the congestion that has been mentioned—particularly on the roads that link Newcastle and Stoke, one of which I will speak about shortly.

A number of my constituents in the northern parts of my constituency—the areas of Bradwell, Porthill and Wolstanton—use Longport station, which my hon. Friend referred to. That station is just on the other side of the D road. If Northern Rail would consider stopping its Stoke to Manchester services at Longport station, or if West Midlands Trains would consider stopping its Crewe to Birmingham, or even its Crewe to London, services there—both already stop at a number of similarly sized stations—that would be a major boon to those constituents, and encourage more use of Longport station.

Turning to buses—the primary topic of this debate—I was struck during the general election campaign by how often the issue of poor service was raised both on the doorstep and in correspondence. A particular concern is that a number of services simply do not run at all when constituents want to use them. For example, the last bus back up to Wolstanton from the town centre leaves at 6.25 pm and the Sunday service has recently been cancelled altogether. That is not the best way to support our Government’s agenda to revitalise our high streets and our town centres, and I fear it leads to a vicious circle. People stop using the buses because they are not sufficiently convenient or reliable, which in turn leads the bus companies to make further cuts to services, all of which leads to some very heavily congested roads in and around Newcastle.

I draw hon. Members’ attention to one road in particular, the A53 between Stoke and Newcastle—Etruria Road, known locally as Basford Bank. That road marks another edge of my constituency, and my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon) is responsible for the other side of the road, which takes people into Newcastle. The traffic jams on that road are legendary and the local newspaper The Sentinel highlighted just the other day its impact on air quality for local residents in my constituency and that of my hon. Friend and neighbour.

Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council has been asked to address the poor air quality on Basford Bank. Neither the council nor I believe that a chargeable clean air zone is the right approach, as it will simply shift the congestion and the problem elsewhere. The right way to improve our congestion problems and our air quality issues in north Staffordshire is through improvements to the pinch points on our roads and through cleaner and better public transport.

On pinch points, I welcome the proposed Etruria Valley link road—it is in the pipeline—which will connect my constituency better with that of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis). That link road was secured by our two councils, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Stoke-on-Trent, working together, along with the Department for Transport and the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire local enterprise partnership. That cross-authority co-operation shows that the various local authorities in the area can and will work together to deliver infrastructure investment.

Another pinch point is junction 15 of the M6, on which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South has been campaigning in this House. Following my election, I look forward to joining him. The cramped design of the junction and nearby roundabouts contribute greatly to congestion on the A500 and on Clayton Road, my constituents’ main road out from Newcastle town centre to the south. Fixing that will go some way to addressing the concerns of my residents along Northwood Lane in Westbury Park ward, who have unfortunately experienced their road being used as a rat run because of all the congestion on the other roads.

Fixing our local road network is a major part of delivering better bus services. It will enable them to run to timetable and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South has said, to run through from one side of the town to the other. It will facilitate introducing the potentially all-electric super-bus network, as outlined by my hon. Friend. I particularly welcome the proposed line C that would link Keele University in the west of my constituency all the way through to Stoke-on-Trent station and Staffordshire University.

I am wholeheartedly behind the agenda outlined by my hon. Friend for a genuinely radical transformation of public transport across north Staffordshire, particularly in our conurbation. I look forward to working with him, other new colleagues and the Department to deliver on that.

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Sir Christopher. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) on securing this important and timely debate. It is wonderful to be able to have this debate with all Members from north Staffordshire on this side of the Chamber. It has to be said that that is a first.

My constituents in Staffordshire Moorlands face similar issues to those that have already been described, but we have some additional issues that are down to the rurality of the constituency. It is one of the most beautiful constituencies in the country. A third of the seat by geography is in the Peak District national park. The constituency includes the highest village in the country, Flash, where the local pub, the New Inn, is 1,518 feet above sea level. There are many villages and hamlets in the constituency and only two towns, Leek and Biddulph.

Connectivity between those villages and towns is hampered by the topography of the area. As the name suggests, Staffordshire Moorlands is quite hilly. We do not have the kind of infrastructure that many of my colleagues have. There is no dual carriageway anywhere in the constituency. There is no train station; there is no main line that runs through the constituency. We have a heritage line, but we have no main train line in the constituency. Access to our towns and villages is very important and is a matter that is often raised by my constituents.

As I mentioned, a third of my seat is within the boundaries of the Peak District national park, and tourism is one of our major economic generators. We are home to Alton Towers, which is the most visited tourist attraction outside London. Everybody who goes to Alton Towers arrives by some form of road transport—a few by bus from Stoke-on-Trent station, but the vast majority by private car. The congestion on the roads at opening and closing time is a challenge for people living in the villages of Alton and Farley. I am sure many people in this room have been to Alton Towers and have wondered what exactly is happening, as they come off the dual carriageway of the A50 and go up a nice road past JCB World headquarters at Rocester, and then suddenly find themselves on tiny little windy roads going through villages. That is because Alton Towers is located in the beautiful village of Alton. It is the former home of the Earls of Shrewsbury, and it was designed by Pugin, so it is very reminiscent of where we are today. It is now a major tourist attraction that happens to be located in a very beautiful part of the country, and we therefore have some really specific concerns.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) touched on the A53. Between Leek and Buxton, it is one of the most dangerous roads in the country. It is frequently in the top 10 or 20 roads in the country for fatalities and road traffic accidents.

I have described the situation with rail. Our bus network is woeful. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South talked about the new number 18 bus. It is a great thing to have a wi-fi enabled bus with USB points and everything else—a lovely green bus—but it runs only once an hour. It is not exactly frequent, and we have very few other buses in the constituency. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) pointed out, we have the Moorlands Connect service. It is very good to have that dial-a-ride service, but the fact is that these villages and hamlets are not served by public transport, and that is contributing to rural loneliness and social isolation. It is contributing to people not being able to go and enjoy days out at our fantastic market in Leek and our monthly artisan market in Biddulph. People simply cannot get to these places, because there are no bus routes. A frequency of one bus every 10 minutes would be a dream come true; we are lucky if we have a bus twice a day sometimes.

Bus routes are being cancelled far too often, and there is a point at which somebody has to take responsibility. I have met the bus companies and they explain to me perfectly rationally why they cannot continue running the bus services—there simply is not the money to do it. I sit down with the county council and the city council and they explain to me perfectly rationally that the money is simply not there and they have to prioritise those services that are best value for money. The problem with those two rational bits of behaviour is that they have led to an irrational situation in which we simply do not have buses. Then we have buses, for example, that serve the village of Alton, but they are full of people going to Alton Towers, so nobody in the village of Alton can get on the bus to go where they want to get to, because it is full of tourists visiting Alton Towers.

Will the Minister ensure that some rationality is applied on bus routes overall and that we start looking at the strategy for buses in a holistic way across the whole of north Staffordshire, reflecting the fact that we have these incredibly rural areas that desperately need a way for people to get to the post office and the local market, to see their friends and live the kinds of lives that people in London would just think absolutely normal? They would think anything else unacceptable.

Reference was made to proposals for bus routes to Biddulph. I welcome those proposals, but while they are welcome, somebody needs to look at the road layout in Biddulph, because the redevelopment of the town centre when the new Sainsbury’s supermarket came to town just under 10 years ago means that getting buses round corners is not proving to be all that easy. We have speed humps and other things on the high street that make it very uncomfortable for people, and I hope the Government will examine that.

I will make a final point on buses before I move on to discuss trains. It is about school transport. The Minister will know that I have had meetings with our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and Baroness Vere on disability-compliant buses in school transport provision. The problem is that a court case last year found that if any child travelling on the buses was a paying passenger, the buses had to be disability compliant; otherwise, they were no longer insured. These are the public service vehicle accessibility regulations, or PSVAR. The issue has been resolved with a temporary fix to exempt buses on which no more than 20% of children are paying passengers. As I have described, a lot of people have to travel a significant distance to get to school, and they do not all qualify for free school transport, for a variety of reasons. On the buses on which the free school transport is run, children who do not qualify for free transport are charged.

The exemption is very welcome. We have had to get a further exemption for buses for faith schools, because the rules around faith schools and free school transport are more complicated, which meant that more of the children on the buses were paying. We have a further exemption for that, and I visited Boydons Coaches in my constituency last week to discuss this issue, but we need a long-term fix. Small operators such as Boydons simply cannot afford to buy a brand new disability-compliant bus. It does not fit with their business model; they need to buy second-hand coaches. They have very smart and nice coaches, but there are no second-hand disability-compliant coaches on the market at the moment. The large coach firms simply did not invest in them at the time they needed to, and I would be very happy to sit down with the Minister and explain the detail of it. It is complicated, but we need a long-term fix so that bus operators can continue in business.

I have said that we do not have a main railway line running through Staffordshire Moorlands, but we do have a line. It was closed during the Beeching era, but it still exists, and many attempts have been made to try to reopen the line. There are a few problems with it. The station in Leek is now a supermarket, so there would need to be investment in a new station. The line unfortunately ends at Longton and does not go on to the main station at Stoke. This is one of the issues facing a city made up of six towns: sometimes the connectivity between those six towns has not been all that good. The line that was closed in the ’60s did not require, at that point, connectivity to the west coast main line, but reinstating a line that did not have connectivity to the west coast main line would be nonsensical. Investment, and probably another platform at Stoke station, would be needed to get a connection and allow the line to work. The line continues from Leek into the countryside and goes as far as Alton, so it could service Alton Towers if it were reinstated.

I want to express a new idea. Instead of thinking, “Well, we have a line. Let’s put some trains on it,” why do we not think about a different form of rail—maybe light rail, or even a tram service? If we could get a quieter electric tram service that operated perhaps as far as Alton Towers, but definitely between Leek and Stoke-on-Trent, it would benefit many of my colleagues’ constituencies. My constituency borders Stoke-on-Trent North, Stoke-on-Trent South and Stoke-on-Trent Central, all of which would benefit from a tram line. I wonder whether we north Staffordshire MPs could put on our thinking caps and work out what a light rail service might look like. We have all seen what a difference the Metrolink has made to Manchester.

[Aaron Bell]

My right hon. Friend mentioned that her constituency borders all three Stoke-on-Trent constituencies, as does Newcastle-under-Lyme. The tram line could run to Keele University on the same line that was axed in the Beeching era, and then we would have connectivity all the way through from her constituency to mine.

[Karen Bradley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. With vision, we could make something really exciting happen for the whole of Stoke-on-Trent and north Staffordshire: we could see connectivity. My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) is another constituency neighbour of mine and was unable to attend the debate, but he is also very keen for work to be done to address the bus routes. I am sure we could benefit his constituency, too, with some form of electric tram that is clean and quiet and delivers the connectivity that my constituents would greatly value.

I will finish with two more points on transport that are more general to the area. The first is about HS2, which is not really an issue in my constituency because, as I have said, the name “Moorlands” suggests it is hilly. It also means that people do not tend to want to build railway lines through it. However, we need to ensure that connectivity to the west coast main line, Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield station is maintained. We benefit from having two trains an hour from Stoke to London Euston, and one train an hour from Macclesfield. Those are really important services that we need to ensure we keep. It takes an hour and 24 minutes from Stoke-on-Trent station to London Euston, although it may take my constituents another 40 or 50 minutes to get home from Stoke-on-Trent station, because there is no bus service that runs from Stoke-on-Trent station to anywhere other than Hanley bus station, and then they have to change—that is another story. In any work that is done on HS2, I hope we can ensure that connectivity to Stoke-on-Trent is maintained.

My final point is on the M6, which is our nearest motorway, and on the pinch points at junction 15 that my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) spoke about. The stretch between junctions 15 and 16 is an issue that needs to be examined. If anybody listens to any travel report at any time of the day, they will almost certainly hear that there are problems on the M6 in Staffordshire around junctions 15 and 16. We cannot widen the motorway at that point, because there are issues with the topography of the area. We cannot make it a smart motorway, because the hard shoulder is not wide enough. When we have smart motorways south from junction 15 and potentially north from junction 16, the stretch between 15 and 16 will just be worse. I ask the Minister to look carefully at what could be done to alleviate the problems, which would benefit all of us in north Staffordshire.