Transport Connectivity: Merseyside

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) on securing this debate, which is much needed and very timely, as the number of speakers shows.

I agree with all that has been said about the IRP and the comments of Mayor Steve Rotheram. This issue gets to the heart of the problem with the Government’s transport policy, because we have been promised for more than a decade that the transport issues in the north will be dealt with. I am old enough to remember when the northern powerhouse was championed by the Conservative party; not any more, it seems. We were promised even by the current resident of No. 10 that we would see levelling up, but those promises ring absolutely hollow every time a constituent of mine tries to get a bus.

I will make just a few brief points. In Merseyside and right across the north of England, public transport is straightforwardly an equality issue, because it is people without cars, parents and older people who really struggle. If we are to improve productivity in this country and see a growing economy, dealing with the challenges of our public transport will be at the heart of the solution.

First, buses are massively important. We talk a lot about trains in this country, but the vast majority of people who are at the bottom end of things when it comes to wages get on buses; they have less access to cars, and in Merseyside they live further from train stations. I sound like an old woman today, but I remember when this Tory Government took away the bus support grant; it had a massive impact on the availability of buses in Merseyside and we are still feeling it today. Other hon. Members have talked about what a big deal it is when a bus gets taken away from a community. We have the possibility of some reform now in Merseyside, but what conversations has the Minister had with colleagues in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the Department for Work and Pensions and other Departments about the impact of poor bus services on the employment prospects for people in Merseyside and other parts of the north?

Secondly, our social housing areas in Merseyside are often very poorly served by public transport because of how the rail network was historically built to support a growing economy during the Victorian era. That means that, as many hon. Members have said, we need to go much further to address the imbalance. We need to look at the interconnections between areas of housing that need to grow, particularly for people who are struggling, and put the transport links in. My neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) mentioned the Wrexham-Bidston line; I feel like when the world ends I will still be saying we need better services on the Wrexham-Bidston line, so I implore the Minister to look at it.

Thirdly, people without cars need better transport because they need to be able to get to work and have better chances. We all need people to get out of their cars, because we all need to do something about climate change and we know that it will most affect those who have least. It is a matter of our environmental future and a matter of equality. I ask the Minister what conversations he has had with the Liverpool city region about its plans, because we need to supercharge them.

Finally, when devolution came about for Merseyside, we wanted it because we wanted to demonstrate that we could run ourselves—that we could improve life prospects for people in Merseyside right where we are, instead of having to come begging all the time to people in Whitehall, asking them to help us. So far, it is working. I simply ask the Minister to get behind us and let us show what we can do.