Network Rail

Debate between Anne Main and Lord Walney

Thursday 2nd February 2012 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I add my congratulations on securing the debate to the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) and her colleagues. I echo the words of the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) in that, while it is always a delight to face the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), we hope that the Minister of State, Department for Transport, the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs Villiers), has a speedy recovery, hastened by not watching the debate and getting some rest.

The debate has been good and has included a number of powerful and well-informed contributions. I particularly enjoyed the Punch and Judy performance between the hon. Members for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) and for Northampton South (Mr Binley). On this occasion, I will resist the temptation to make another contribution about High Speed 2, leaving for another day the thuds that can be heard from the upper room of a home in the constituency of the hon. Member for Rugby.

The debate has rightly had a repeated focus on the performance and accountability of Network Rail. As hon. Members have pointed out, the debate is particularly timely given that, shortly before Christmas, the Office of Rail Regulation said that it considered Network Rail to be in breach of its licence for reliability in the freight sector and likely to be in breach for long-distance passenger services. In both sectors, performance is declining at a worrying rate. End-of-year targets for 2011 were missed and ORR remains to be convinced that Network Rail is doing all that it can to improve reliability. A striking fact that should be re-emphasised is that Network Rail has already admitted that it will not meet its 2012 target for punctuality, and yet we learn that that organisation believes that this is the right moment to put forward a fresh reward scheme worth up to 500% of salary over five years.

To state the blindingly obvious, the reliability of train service leaves a lot to be desired in so many parts of the country. The statistics are clear. In 2011, more than one in 10 long-distance services was more than 10 minutes late. Such underperformance is frustrating for passengers, damaging to business and, potentially, a real and significant drag on overall economic performance in the country and the regions. We need a railway that performs better, not least because hard-pressed passengers are being asked to pay fares that have recently risen by up to 13%.

The figures on the causes of delay are clear. A more reliable railway will require better performance from Network Rail. When our constituents complain to us about a delayed journey, the train operator as the shop front for the railway system tends to get it in the neck. Many operators, indeed, need to up their game, but month on month, year on year, the majority of delays are the responsibility of Network Rail. In the most recent period for which figures are available, the organisation was responsible for 646,000 minutes-worth of delays to trains, representing 59% of the overall total.

No one is pretending or should imagine that there is an easy solution. Network Rail, or whatever organisation or structure might be put in its place, is charged with operating a complex, extensive rail network that has seen differing levels of investment over many decades. There is more demand for rail travel now than in any peacetime period since the 1920s. Yes, some of the delays ascribed to Network Rail are largely outside its immediate control. In particular, as mentioned in the debate, cable theft has risen fast up the agenda in recent months. To dwell a moment on that, we now know that rising global metal prices have triggered an unprecedented level of theft of the more valuable metals, from the railways as from electricity suppliers, communications providers and, most despicably, churches and memorials. The theft of even a short stretch of signalling cabling from the railway can lead to the shutting down of huge sections of the network for hours on end, as we and our constituents have seen, causing immense disruption. In the current financial year, passengers are on course to suffer almost 7,000 hours-worth of delays because of cable theft, which would be a record.

[Mrs Main]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point. Such cases are deemed to involve force majeure, however, and something over which Network Rail has no control, unless it was derelict in its duty to police the railway line. As such, Network Rail would not be seen to be failing, but I believe that it is failing on things over which it has control.

[John Woodcock]

That is an interesting point. We should examine repeatedly how such incentive mechanisms work.

In the case of cable theft, increased action and a tougher regulatory system are needed to enable Network Rail to perform better. Of concern is that it took so many instances of main lines and major stations coming to a halt before the Government were spurred to what we hope is greater action. Even though Ministers now seem prepared to legislate for a ban on cash sales of scrap metal, at the moment their actions fall short of what is required to end the scourge of thefts. Cashless transactions alone may prove too easy to circumvent. We need a licensing system for scrap metal dealers, strengthened police powers to enter premises that they suspect of selling stolen metal and to close such premises down if necessary, and a requirement to show verifiable identification, recorded at the point of sale, for all transactions.

Ministers still have an opportunity to put more comprehensive measures in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. They would have cross-party support in doing so. I am talking about measures that would genuinely put an end to the spiral of delay, disruption and extra cost being experienced by passengers and freight customers across the network. I hope that the Minister will outline whether he is prepared, from a transport point of view, to put pressure on his Home Office colleagues to go further on the matter.

There is a need for improved performance from Network Rail in areas over which unquestionably it has control. Those areas include the reliability of signalling systems and better management of planned shutdowns to limit overruns having an impact on the next day’s passenger services. Performance is highly variable across the network. Far more needs to be done to ensure that good practice is learnt from by all Network Rail regions.

There is real scope to improve performance by reforming the artificial barrier between track and train—one legacy of the botched privatisation of the railways. However, there remains real confusion about where the Government are heading on that. Originally, Ministers proposed handing over infrastructure to the private sector, raising questions about whether they had truly learnt the lessons of the Hatfield crash. Will the Minister make it clear whether they have abandoned those plans? In the absence of the much-delayed Command Paper, the confusion drags on, so will the Minister tell us when we can expect to see that Command Paper?

We also have concerns about something that has so far not been brought to the House but on which newspapers have been briefed, which is the Minister’s new idea about creating single management companies out of Network Rail and train operating companies, starting with a potential partnership with South West Trains. The Minister needs to say how a level playing field will be ensured when such franchises come up for renewal. How will other train operators, both passenger and freight, that use that part of the network fit into the alliance? How does the balance between a for-profit train operator and the not-for-profit Network Rail work in that context?

Hon. Members are right to focus on the need to improve efficiency. As part of that, we need to make procuring and building improvements more efficient without compromising safety. I have spoken to train operating companies, and a number of them have expressed concerns that having to use Network Rail to procure improvements to the non-safety-critical parts of the railway system, such as station buildings and car parks, significantly pushes up the costs of and delivery timeframes for those improvements. Will the Minister expand in his winding-up speech on plans either to allow TOCs to procure such works independently, or to ensure that Network Rail improves its processes?

A number of hon. Members raised, quite rightly, the issue of investment in various parts of the rail network. However, the way in which we currently manage investment in the railway system and, indeed, across the transport network needs to change. We need longer-term thinking that goes beyond artificial five-year horizons. We have a reasonable idea of where the pinchpoints in the system will be in decades to come, the capacity challenges and the emerging markets for new or faster services. We have had, for example, welcome albeit piecemeal announcements of funding for electrification. So far, that applies mainly to schemes developed by the previous Government. However, the five-year horizon of planning means that the Government are hindered from creating greater certainty about a rolling programme of electrification, which, at its best, could guard against the resources and skills employed by schemes such as the Great Western and north-west wiring schemes being lost at the end of those programmes rather than being moved to the next area, such as the midland main line or the Great Western route through to Swansea.

Labour is not calling for extra spending on rail in this comprehensive spending review period, but we do want the five-yearly assessment of what is affordable to be part of a longer plan for what is desirable and likely, so that industry can plan and British manufacturing can have the best chance of winning contracts.